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Underground eXperts United File 568
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Underground eXperts United
Presents...
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[ At A Trailer In The Woods ] [ By Eric Chaet ]
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
AT A TRAILER IN THE WOODS
by Eric Chaet
"I was with my father when he died. It was weird," Gust Helsing said, as he
carried a portable gas heater out to the small trailer, where he set me up,
about 50 feet from his house in the clearing in the woods. He connected the
heater to a pipe, turned a valve - bending over to do it - and lit the blue
pilot light.
I was acutely aware that, without his doing so, I would freeze that
night.
Gust and his wife - he'd married since he'd been my most enthusiastic
student - and their 2 wide-eyed young sons, and Ruth, a teenage daughter
from a boyhood fling in Minneapolis - lived in the frame house on the
property Gust's father bought the last few years of his life, then left to
Gust, I now learned.
"I was cleaning a chimney in Manitou - nobody knew where I was," Gust
said. "My brother drove by. I knew my father was sick - but that's all. I
went right away. I sat down by the bed. I FELT HIM PASS THRU ME. I said,
'He's gone.' Then the line on the screen went flat, and there was a
sickening, like, dial-tone.
"He was on his own since he was 13. He worked on a farm 14 hours a day.
He didn't just do one thing, like people do now. He had all sorts of
responsibilities. And he never had to spend any of his money. He said he
always had a dollar in his pocket. That would be like 100 dollars now.
"The only time I didn't get along with him was when he started drinking
too much. After he bought the land, with the house on it, he used to come
here to be away from the family, and to drink.
"I came after him.
"'Don't get mad at me, Gust,' he said. 'I've had enough of this life.
I'd put a bullet thru my head - but I wasn't raised that way. I keep
remembering: be a man, have a drink.'
"He was in the infantry, in the Philippines, during World War II. He
said he was 24, the oldest. They kept sending young lieutenants from West
Point.
"'You're going in there!' they'd say, pointing into the mouths of caves.
But he knew what was IN there.
"'Oh, no, we're not,' he'd say.
"When he came home, he got a job exterminating wolves. Then he got the
job with the police force."
WHEN I TAUGHT at Frozen Fish Community College, Gust signed up for one of my
classes after another, and sat in on some he wasn't signed up for - and
absorbed the ideas, which were a revelation to him - with great delight, but
very selectively. Tho I corrected him many times, he continued to write
sentences contemptuous of grammar and spelling. But he cheerfully read
William James' PRAGMATISM and Buckminster Fuller - "Do more with less" - and
Plato's REPUBLIC and the BHAGAVAD-GITA - and understood, and remembered, and
USED - what he had read.
Tall and lanky, he had run several miles a day, on all but the coldest
days - and nights! - of winter. And he had greater skill than anyone I had
ever met, at hatha yoga, once he learned that there was such a thing - so
that he was limber as well as strong from a childhood of lifting and moving
soil, ice, snow, wood, water, potatoes, steel tools, and machine parts.
I was living on the older, shabbier side of Manitou - East-Town - near
the old iron-ore docks. I used to run along the shore, where the rusting old
loading apparatus was set up, and up and down the sand dunes.
But I couldn't keep up with Gust. He ran too far and fast for me. He
would frequently run the ten miles home from Manitou.
He was red-headed, blue-eyed, freckled. On becoming a chimney sweep, he
switched from flannel shirts, jeans, and chook - to black top-hat and worn
but well-mended tuxedo with tails.
He would run in that outfit. Tho he was more often to be seen behind the
wheel of the shining red pick-up, with no sign of rust - unusual in those
parts, where the roads are heavily salted - except for late-model cars
lawyers, doctors, and pulp-mill executives drove - with HELSING
CHIMNEY-SWEEPING 421-3687, in crisp white letters, on the sides - or
straddling peaks of roofs of houses, poking his long-handled brush down the
chimney.
Gust started his business shortly before his father died.
I had quit teaching, and was holed up in a 100-year-old rented house -
my tiny landlady Mrs. DuHamel's, and her deceased husband's, home for 50
years. She now lived next door with a son and granddaughter, and, at a table
covered with cups, plates, and papers, over coffee and newspaper, in the
dark kitchen, wheezed, "God save North America!" years before I'd heard of
ecology. I think she was reacted, morally, to the political and cultural
news, tho.
I paid only $85 a month rent.
The winter wind blew right thru the house - and thru me!
But I was able to save almost all my salary, and, after just 2 years of
teaching - following 5 years of homeless drifting, alternating with odd jobs
and hospitality of a month or 2 in someone's den or garage - was able to get
back to my main work, which was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a
guitar, pencil, and paper - writing songs with seriously useful ideas - at
least in my estimation - but in the rhythms and styles of the songs played
day after day, year after year, on thousands of rock and country radio
stations across the USA - and, like them, 3 minutes long.
Gust had used all HIS money - he'd been a machinist of recognized
excellence for years before and during the time he was my student -
equipping himself with a vacuum, hoses, set of ladders, brushes, hooks, the
good used truck, and the top-hat and tails. But he had no customers.
He came to me in a panic, on the verge of tears. I don't say this
derisively. He'd done something bold to improve his position - something
everyone would admit was a sensible, good risk, IF IT SUCCEEDED - and he
wasn't able to control everything, and things weren't working out for him,
at least not fast enough. He was honestly afraid.
I get like that, a lot.
What - should you never take a risk? And if you take a risk, mightn't
it fail? And if no risk is taken, won't that which is unsatisfactory
continue to prevail? Don't we benefit, every day, from the results of such
risks taken in the past?
We sat on the floor of the biggest room of my house. There was no rug
or furniture. I had duct-taped a many-colored patchwork of 25 cent carpet
patches - the store on Main Street where I found them called them "remnants"
- to the windows, to keep out some of the cold. Unfortunately, they kept
out the sun-light as well.
He asked, What could he do to get customers?
I asked him how much money he had left.
He said, "Twenty dollars."
I said, "Give me ten," and went to the WROX-radio studio, played a
simple guitar progression - C, F, G7 - 4/4 finger-roll - and sang:
Fire is real, winter is cold -
Creosote builds in your chimney hole!
Brush it yourself, or call Gust Helsing -
Vacuum-equipped, for thorough cleaning!
Then I leaned into the microphone, and said, softly, "Call 421-3687."
The advertising director at WROX was Cheryl L'Emissaire - an energetic,
shapely young woman, with long lustrous black hair, who made sure - lifting
her eye-brows - that I noticed the engaging sparkle in her green eyes - and
that there was no ring sparkling on her finger, which she pulled and wiggled
and glanced at significantly - all the while checking to be sure I noticed.
She wasn't the only beautiful or otherwise interesting woman of the
non-traditional, ready-to-go-to-it sort to make me aware of her candidacy -
after my years of living without a place to take anyone to - but what was I
going to do with whichever of them I stopped resisting, if - as seemed very
likely - the money ran out again?
I was getting nothing but BETTER LUCK ON ANOTHER PLANET letters - they
weren't quite that blunt - from the record companies on both coasts, that
I'd sent cassettes and sheet music to.
Cheryl loved the ad, she said, yearning into my eyes - hers green,
clear, excited, arms limp at her side - vulnerable.
Not only did the 30 second ad run 10 times a day for a week, but she
kept the disk-jockies talking about Gust all the time.
And, of course, Gust - a strikingly handsome young man anyway - was seen
all around Manitou in his outlandish top-hat and tails, and driving his
bright red truck.
He never lacked for customers after that.
Then his father died, and left him the land and the house.
THERE FOLLOWED ABOUT 10 YEARS, of what other people considered ups (that is,
"good jobs" they were shocked when I walked away from) and downs (my work
was rejected, and my resume didn't qualify me to contribute and thrive,
otherwise).
GUST SAID HIS WIFE, Jolene - a serious, short-haired blond woman, with
black-framed glasses - was studying computers. "I'm willing to support
her," he told me, "for the time being."
He, F.G. Graske, and I were sharing Graske's schnapps, the evening I
hiked in - over a little table built into the end of the trailer, opposite
the bunks. The little gas heater roared quietly at our feet, where, too,
F.G.'s spotted dog, Nosey, was curled up.
"I went to town looking for a wife," Gust said. "There was a dance, at
the O-Zone."
"That disco place?" I asked.
"Yeah. Jolene came over right away, and said, 'Hi.' She was looking for
me. We lived together for a couple of months. It was going good. I went to
her father, and asked him to give her hand to me. He said, 'Go ahead.'
"I said to her: 'I'm not looking for a BITCH - but if you're willing
to COOPERATE....'
"Her father is a mechanic. He's saved me thousands of dollars on the
truck. I give him wood."
LAST TIME I'D HAD ANY ALCOHOL was one Christmas Eve about 5 years previous,
when a professor lent me an apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd just hitched
thru a blinding blizzard out of Colorado. Professor Emily Sneed was about to
leave town, to take in some shows in New York between terms. I drank half a
bottle of rye, finally stopped shivering, and read about Elijah hiding out
from the persecutions of Ahab and Jezebel, then confronting the prophets of
Ba'al - in the Old Testament, in a wonderful black-leather covered Bible.
Then I laid my sleeping bag down on the thick rug on the floor of the
study - African masks and Aboriginal dream-drawings all around - and slept
til noon.
Now, I stopped drinking, realizing my attention was beginning to spiral
down into another dimension.
Gust was yawning, across the table.
F.G. showed no signs of weariness. He kept pouring schnapps from the
bottle into his coffee cup, and from the coffee cup thru his huge blond
strainer of a mustache.
He was slight, with little metal-rimmed glasses, and pale gray eyes that
gleamed when fueled by alcohol.
It emerged that he had been a fireman in Bunyan. He got vaccinated,
along with the other firemen, for the Shanghai Flu. Immediately he - and
only he - came down with the disease. He lost all muscle control and
strength - and his job.
After a long period of wrangling - during which he gradually recovered
about 90 per cent of his ability to control his movements - tho he'd lost
the muscle strength he'd counted on for decades - there was a $30,000
insurance settlement. It seemed like a lot - at first.
F.G. still had a house in Bunyan, and friends - and some hangers-on -
who helped him dribble away the money in a number of bar-rooms, in small
towns along the two-lane highway that runs thru the woods between Gust's
place and Bunyan, which is half-way to Minnesota.
F.G. and Gust had always been hunting buddies. F.G. used to pay Gust's
father a small fee for the privilege of hunting on his land, for deer and
bear.
Gust set F.G. up in a trailer, put him to work fixing up the place, and
building a sauna - and the first of a series of cleverly welded-together
wood-burning stoves that F.G. was becoming locally famous for.
F.G. GOT TO TALKING about when he was in the Navy, in the 60's. He'd fallen
asleep sitting on a suitcase under the George Washington Bridge. He woke up
with a car honking at him.
The driver drove him right to his base in Rhode Island: "You're too
sleepy to hitch any more, Swabbie."
Now Gust told how he had hitchhiked to Houston, Texas, wearing his
top-hat and tails, stayed in a fancy hotel in downtown Houston, then hitched
back north. He had got a ride into the ghetto in Chicago, where the car he
was in was surrounded by a group of black youths, who questioned his
presence.
"I'm just a poor chimney-sweep from Lake Superior!" he had said.
They laughed. They loved it.
And Gust proceeded home.
"DID YOU EVER GO SOUTH?" Gust asked me.
"You know who James Meredith was?" I asked him.
"No."
"First Black to enter the University of Mississippi."
"What about him?"
"Later on, he said he'd walk THRU Mississippi, from north to south.
First day out, he got his legs shot out from under him. I was with CORE
then."
"What's that?"
"Congress of Racial Equality."
"Oh."
"I was in a group that went south to march along the path he'd said he
was going to follow. People came from all over the country - thousands."
"Hundreds of thousands?" F.G. asked, sarcastically.
"No," I said, carefully. "Maybe 2 or 3 thousand.
"Dozens of State Patrol cars passed the car I went down there in, with
4 other students, black and white - and the faces of those patrolmen said
that they were NOT friendly.
"My group slept on the floor of a church in Jackson the night we got
there.
"I remember, in the morning, we went thru a line, and got Spam and
creamed corn and Kool-aid. Then we rode in the back of a pick-up truck, to
join the rest of the marchers, who were already walking down the middle of
the highway.
"We marched about 20 miles that day. The highway was so hot, it seemed
to WAVER.
"I was walking alongside an elderly man, short, dark brown skin, with a
little gray beard. He said he lived in New York, now, but he'd left
Mississippi 30 years ago - and he'd never expected to live to see THIS.
"A medic came by, and gave me some white cream to put on - against
sun-burn - and I offered some to this old guy.
"'Don't you know Blacks don't need that!' he said.
"I was embarrassed, and stopped talking with him. I think I was 19.
"Toward the end of the day, Stokely Carmichael - you know who he was?"
"No," Gust said.
"Well, he was a young black guy - a leader of the sit-ins in, I think,
North Carolina. He wasn't as diplomatic as Martin Luther King, so he didn't
get as much or as good publicity. Later I heard he was living in west
Africa. He gave a speech, standing on the bed of a pick-up parked along the
highway. He said that the Whites should go home, and work among the Whites -
that's where the trouble was. He said that the Blacks needed to lead the
Blacks, here.
"That night, on a stage in an athletic stadium at Tupelo College, Marlon
Brando - the movie star - gave a speech. I don't remember what he said. And
James Brown sang, 'This Is a Man's World.' Scared me to death - he was
dressed so - outrageous - pastel blue, frilly stuff men don't wear - and
prancing - a kind of strip-tease, singing so...provocative - real high
tones - falsetto - into the microphone - so that it must have carried
half-way back to Jackson.
"I was scared before he started, anyway. I thought the police or Ku Klux
Klan would attack any minute - and that he was just INVITING them.
"My group went back to college, next morning."
"Well - and now there's integration," F.G. said, flatly.
"Yeah - but what about justice?" I said.
"For the Blacks?" Gust asked.
"For everybody."
NEXT MORNING, I WALKED ALONG RUSTED RAILS - ore-pellets still trickle in, in
hopper cars, from the Mesabi Range, to the docks in Frozen Fish. I walked a
couple of miles, to Beaver Hat - a few dozen buildings clustered on either
side of the road, in the woods - to visit Phil Berra, proprietor of Berra's
Market.
The canned goods on the shelves were dusty, and there was nothing I'd go
out of my way to feed on there - but when it's cold enough, there's enough
snow, the road's glare-ice, and you can't get to Manitou - where the produce
is a bad joke, too - the store means survival til a day when you can get
better.
Ten years ago, Mr. Berra had been my oldest student in an evening Great
Books class, loving KING LEAR. I would assign the members of the class
different roles to read aloud. We all had to shout, because Mr. Berra
couldn't hear very well.
"Lyle Aaron!" he greeted me, with a grin. "Truth must to its kennel!"
he declaimed - the fool's line from LEAR. "Ach, I'm just treading water,"
he said, quickly sobering. "Sorry I ever came here. You used to teach
Socrates - you still believe that stuff?"
"Yes."
"You know what you remind me of? A holy man going up the - what is it?
- Ganges. Why did you stop teaching at the college?"
"Well - I have a mission."
"You're the only person I know with a mission."
"Didn't you tell me that you had a mission behind Japanese lines, in
Xinjiang, during the Second World War?'
"That's ancient history - they called it Sinkiang, then."
I SPENT MOST OF THE DAY ALONE IN THE TRAILER, drawing five-line staffs
across sheets of paper, practicing chord progressions, toughening the
callouses on my fingertips, recalling the arrangements of the songs that,
despite my efforts - 5 years in L.A. - weren't about to be recorded.
After supper, Gust, one of Gust's sisters (another bright young blond),
F.G., and I quickly gathered in the crop of potatoes from Gust's huge
garden, in a cold drizzle building to a storm.
"Give me some help with this, will you?" I said, straining to pick up a
huge pail of potatoes.
The sister gave me a look of contempt, and came over to pick it up,
herself. But, when she couldn't lift it, either, we carried it together, to
the root cellar - where hundreds of huge onions were also stored.
I was washing up, after, in a huge room in Gust's house, in the corner
of which were a shower, toilet, and sink, when Ruth, the voluptuous blond 16
year old - Gust's daughter from the long-ago affair - raised by her mother,
til so insubordinate she'd been shipped to Gust in hopes some discipline
could be effected - sauntered in, wearing only a little shiny slip. Putting
her long hair up over her head, then letting it drop halfway down her back,
she asked me, poking out a hip and a lip, and purring, whether I liked it
better this way, of THIS way?
"Ruth, you look very nice, either way. If you were 10 years older, and I
was 10 years younger, and I had the time and resources, I'd want to get to
know you."
She retreated, confused. I gripped the sink, and sighed.
JACK PINE, WHITE and BLACK SPRUCE, TAMARACK. Broad leaves, quaking aspen,
white birch, balsam, poplar. Gravel trails.
When the down-pour ended, Gust killed a partridge for the breast. I
walked in the woods with him, quietly, without a gun. He shot its head off,
clean, swiveling in a smooth, instinctive half-circle, from the hip,
apparently without aiming.
Soft woods cut for pulp.
When the colors drained from the sky, you could see the planets and
stars clear as bulbs.
F.G. CAME BACK TO THE TRAILER from painting a relative's porch. He'd had a
run of good luck. Painted 16 hours in 2 days, told to quit, paid for 20, fed
a shrimp dinner - "All I could eat!" - and told to come back for the same
deal, next week.
He began pouring from a bottle of schnapps, first into the coffee cup,
then into his liquid reflections concerning what had happened to his old,
fireman's life - trying to develop a smooth transition into his current
life, whatever it was - dredging up, from the back of the mind, some kind of
integration of disparate elements - plans, being thwarted, accidents,
pleasant surprises, and random, unpreventable events....
"I found out everyone can be replaced," he told me.
"I can't be."
"I hear you saying you do everything different from everybody."
"Not everything. But SOME things. Those are the ones I mention. The
rest, I don't."
"You're not arrogant, or anything."
If F.G. and I were going to share the trailer even one more night, I
would have to resist replying.
I WOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN, ANYWAY, HOW TO ARTICULATE that I was aware that it
was possible that I was trying to do what I could NOT do.
That it might be wiser to give up, to try to survive and thrive with as
much grace as possible, causing as little trouble as the next person.
But maybe I COULD do what I had begun trying to do, since - after being
overwhelmed by despair all my youth - it occurred to me that I MIGHT,
POSSIBLY transform the situation, IF I RISKED ATTEMPTING IT TO THE BEST OF
MY ABILITY - in spite of the general lack of comprehension, cooperation,
respect, and resources available for the purpose - and approximately
everyone else's enthusiastic or reluctant pouring of their commitment,
their wills - into the success of the way things were.
NEXT MORNING, F.G. HEADED OUT to visit some friends and relatives, and to
see what kind of work he could turn up. After fighting off my fear of the
immediate future sufficiently, I practiced my guitar-work a while, then
began fitting the various elements of my gear into the back-pack.
F.G. showed up, showered, dressed. A couple of his hunting friends were
coming. First, tho, he and I were invited for supper, with Gust and his
family.
In the house, Ruth called from another room, that she wasn't hungry.
"So many people in that bar," F.G. was saying, "you had to go outside to
change your mind!' (I've heard many people in the Great Lakes and North
Woods region tell this particular joke, with great relish. Jokes are at a
premium where work is mainly silent and solo.)
The two hunting friends showed up, and off they went, with F.G., rifles
in hand. Shots, silences, shots. Then - we were still at the table - the
hunters returned, soaked. They'd killed a big stag. It was a week before
legal hunting season. Gust went to help them set up the skinning in the
shed.
"Join the gang!" he said, returning, and pulling up a chair.
F.G. came in, sat, and cleaned his rifle, teasing the children: "Turkey
turds and rainwater for supper!"
I went to the trailer, and fell asleep for a little while. When I woke,
I stood among the pines, in the rain - by two bloody deer forelegs and an
overturned pail.
"You've got to get along with other people!" Gust, a little liquored-up,
came out to advise me.
F.G. WAS SLEEPING IN THE UPPER BUNK. He had a roof to repair - at the friend
of an uncle's - next morning, he had said.
I considered a hand-lettered sign he had taped to a half-length mirror
on the door of the tiny shower and toilet closet:
THE ONLY WAY TO GET
BACK ON YOUR FEET
IS TO GET OFF YOUR ASS
Tho he wasn't going to let me like him, I admired the way he had come
back from tragedy.
WHEN MY BACK-PACK WAS MORE OR LESS PACKED, and I was trying to figure out
what I had forgotten, and how to handle the leave-taking, I picked and ate a
small sweet apple.
In the trailer, I finished writing out the music - as detailed as
possible - as well as the lyrics of the songs I was afraid would be lost in
the turmoil and struggle for survival ahead.
My beard was growing back.
I ate the last of the roasted soy beans I'd bought at the health food
store, walking to the highway ramp, in Los Angeles.
Little twisted apple trees, on a hill, in cold wind, under gray sky.
The drone of an airplaine disturbed some ducks, who flapped into a quacking
flight. Others have places, families, jobs - I thought. People ask them
what they do. They can tell them, in just a word or two - to their own, and
to the others' satisfaction.
Meadows, forest, creeks fast with high water. Water on the long
driveway, and on the road. The leaves of trees turning yellow. Green-needled
pines and green-scaled cedars.
F.G.'s dog, Nosey, was sick in the trailer, where I had gone to get my
pack and guitar. I cleaned up the mess.
As I was walking to the highway, Nosey tried to follow me. I shooed her
away.
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