The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

It seems like I should give a little bit about the history of Annabelle Mountain. The people who lived here first were the _____ Indians, of course. But since I’m no story teller I’ll tell you only what I know. It got its name from a man who’d lost everything ultimately in a bad business dealing during the Civil War, Henry Mills. There was no real sense of who he was by anybody around here. He didn’t seem to have any heroic qualities that I can tell, but he did once own half of the county. The story goes that his wife Mary and his daughter Annabelle lived on a hill not nearly so far up as we did and one day Annabelle, only about five or six, not much older if at all older than Minnie, walked outside one night and ended up lying on top of boulder dead. Nobody knows how she got out or why she went. After that the man supposedly spent all of his time looking for reasons that weren’t there until it made his wife go crazy and he had to put her in a sanitarium. It was about then that he lost all his land, mostly in poker games and some say died a drunk sitting at a bar in Millsville that he used to be part owner of. As far as history goes that’s all I know about Annabelle Mountain.

I like to think there is something of Annabelle’s spirit still on the mountain and when I think about how Teardrop made it up the hill I tend to think that maybe Annabelle helped him out a little bit, was there with a helping hand, was a night wind that blew warm for just that second that would allow Teardrop to stop shivering, was a rough patch of rock instead of slick mossy one that allowed Teardrop to gain that next step that he eventually did or else he never would have made it home. So I thank that little girl for the blessing of Teardrop’s return and I like to think that if someday Minnie takes a walk she’ll be there for her too.
We’re lucky, we can afford to keep Minnie at home with us. Sometimes I think it unfair that the biggest screw ups in life sometimes become the richest. While I was shooting my portion of rock and roll earnings into my veins, Helen Capowitz was stuffing hers into the same bank that her parents The Capowitz’s of Stony Brook, Long Island did business through. Moxy bought the house on Annabelle Mountain. I haven’t felt like working for over ten years. It sort of boggles my mind and makes me feel like a loser. Mmmmm. But I’ve got Albert’s rock opera on my lap right now and every time I see it I think about the music that I used to play. It’s funny, but the music in my head is coming back to me, but it’s not pressing me, not killing me like it used to, not making me need to understand it, to decipher it so that I need to go out and have a shot so I can just get it all first hand. First hand heaven which eventually became my first hand hell. How can I hate the world anymore or rant at it when the author is my brother and all that I had foisted on him was a need for more love since not only did his father leave, but so did his brother. I made Albert an only child.
Let me quote directly from the play. This is Trevor Rees-Jones, the only one in the car to survive the wreck: “I think Diana would want us to love. Love. Love everybody. Everybody. Love Everybody. Love. Everybody love. Love. Can’t we just do that now, at least, for her? We must to make it through the storm…”

A friend of mine who I knew a long time ago in L.A. who was of the Bahai faith told me that all you need is one scripture to last you through a lifetime. That thing that Albert wrote seemed to me to be a scripture. It was enough to last me a lifetime since I’d spent a lifetime already not doing it. So I took it on. It’s not easy. Albert expects a lot from me and I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes. I’m no classical musician, I’m just a rocker, but that’s what he really wants. He wants a rocker with heart, but even more, a rocker with soul because he wants to play the role of Trevor Rees-Jones himself and at the end of the play when Diana is dead and Dodi is dead and Henri is on top of his flying saucer all whacked out like I was on dope, he wants to sit there in a wheelchair in the mayhem of lights and lasers and smoke and God personified and cry like a baby. I think just the thought is admirable enough for me to say yes to the play.
We’ve decided we’re going to self-educate Minnie, at least for a few years. Moxy takes her into town and she’s decided to join the local Methodist church so Minnie will have little friends. Moxy doesn’t care if Minnie becomes Methodist or Jewish or Muslim or Gay. Moxy already knows the kind of person that Minnie will become and that is simply this: a woman with heart and soul, the kind of person Albert wants to compose the music for his play and the kind of person that he’s forcing me to become by doing it. I never thought I’d be working for my brother though. Yet I owe it to him. I think I’ve already said that.