The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Nobody talks about the lulls. It’s the lulls that screw everything up. You got a girlfriend and you’re happy one day and the next the lulls come in like some kind of fog and take her away from you or take you away from her. One thing the lulls are good at doing is taking people away from each other for no good reasons. I hate the lulls.
I’ve got em now, though. Moxy is in town with Minnie, and Albert is off somewhere. I can see out in the yard a few chickens pecking away. My guitar’s with me here in the corner, but I’ve got too much of the lulls to pick it up. I’ve stopped doing marijuana because of Minnie. I don’t want her to go in that direction. I’ve got to be more careful than that. So I sit here at 38 looking out the window in my home state of Tennessee thinking about nothing, how nothing always creeps up on you slow and from the inside and makes you do things because, well, it’s like a noise, like a thudding you can’t hear, but as if your ears had emotions you could hear, and your emotional ears are just about blown out because of the noise, but you can hear the dog barking up the way and a few birds and you wonder whether some bastard child of fate is on its way to tell you that you’ve lost out on love or happiness as you expected you’d have it when you were young and dream-filled. I guess I’m a little down.

Moxy told me the other night that she wanted to go home to her parents for a little while. She’s going in a month or so, maybe earlier. It makes me feel like there’s something in my throat whenever Moxy hints that maybe she ain’t cut out for living on this mountain. I’m not done here. I can’t go back east. Those ghosts are too scary, and talk about emotional ears, out there I’ve got ears, emotional eyes, emotional nose for smell and a lot of fear which means a lot of crap that I just can’t handle. Moxy thinks Minnie needs to spend time with her grandparents, “let them turn her a little bit Jewish” she says. I say to her she and Minnie should go, but the fear in me, the same kind I had when my father passed away arises a little bit even though I know they’re coming back. This feeling is weird.
I’ve been alone my whole life, but this one is weird in that, one, I’m not stoned so it matters and, two, I don’t feel strong like I did. Don’t have that meanness or vitality that I had when I was younger. Don’t feel like Superman anymore. Feel like there’s cryptonite hidden somewhere on the ranch and I don’t know where it is and whenever I think I want to go find it to go get rid of it I stop because I know it will make me even weaker to go that way. So I figure the cryptonite is just the other side of the cliff, hung up on a bush, not too far and not too close, making me tired, but not too tired, but also making it so that I can’t reach out to nothing. I can’t reach out to Moxy in town by driving down there. I can’t reach out to my mama or my brother whose always ready to talk to me about Petals, but since I’m on Coconut Jerk Chicken, a happy song full of dancing teenage girls who work at a margarita bar in California, which was the same place I once ended up in an emergency ward for shooting too much smack into my arms, I find that I’m hiding even from him just like that hamster of his whose cage just gets bigger and bigger and bigger thanks to Habitrail and a brother who truly believes, as does Minnie, that life is just a hamster cage. Seems Albert’s making his as comfortable as possible too. I tell Moxy I want to get a hamster and she just looks at me like I’m crazy and that just makes me sadder because I think she doesn’t understand me anymore.
I’m not like Albert though. I don’t know how to fantasize my way out of the hamster cage. When I look outside I see nothing but wind in the trees and earth. I’m stuck on this mountain, rooted you might say and it seems that that’s okay. There’s a lot to think about. There are a lot of memories to re-hash, things to think about that I did a long time ago that might still somehow have lingering effects, long fingers picking at my family life today. I don’t know what a relationship with my mama would have been like today if I hadn’t gotten so fucked up back then. We have a pretty good one. She likes that I’m back and I do too. She loves Minnie. Loves her. You can’t help but love Minnie, with those brown eyes of her and that cap Moxy gave her that makes her look so cute. But there hasn’t been that spark in my mama’s eye that I wished I could return to it. Sometimes life makes you old and when you’re old others see you and if they’re old then they recognize the one thing they don’t want to see, so they stop wanting to see you, getting it all mixed up in their heads.
But the fact of the matter is that old is all a matter of the mind to hash out. Thirty-eight ain’t nothing to eighty-three, but don’t tell that to a 38 year old watching his hairline fall back into oblivion. We don’t any of us really know what we’re doing here on this earth. Some of us, like Albert, get caught up in the idea that we can know the unknowable. But there’s always a little black space of shadow there where we can’t see nothing good.
So when Albert saves the world for all the love he wants there to be, thinking that’s something worthy of shooting for, just after I say “he’s right,” I’ll say take a break Albert there’s more wars coming that you’ll never ever know about. But I’d rather go out of this world thinking that I was saying something good instead of something bad. Because if there is a heaven then I’d like to go. If there’s not I don’t want to be sitting around down here telling people there isn’t even if there isn’t because one or two of those people might really need to believe that there is. And who am I to say?
We’ve all got our endeavors. We all got the times we get pissed off at the ones we love most or we get tired of them and we look around at the world and everything we see suddenly is something we wish we were having, but don’t. Sometimes I want to run away with one of them little girls down there in town, maybe a nice 20-year-old blonde or something, thinking that Moxy isn’t doing it for me anymore. But then I take a break, used to light up some Bob Hope, now I just go for walks and listen to the streams.
I heard a story out here when I was a kid, some other kid named Bobby something or other told it. He said that there were three old witches that lived in a cabin not far from here, right by Brierson Brook. One night his elders, because this happened a long time ago, while out shooting for quail, heard something. They all stopped what they were doing and listened and just over the sound of the water of the brook you could hear it, a distinct and chaotic cackling. This cackling was unlike anything any of them had ever heard and they brought their weapons close to their bodies while they slowly investigated. They came around a corner and just over a little cliff was a house, the ladies house where three sisters lived, all three of which were, supposedly, bona fide witches.
I only tell this story because It always reminded me a little bit about what I thought was inside every woman I ever knew and that made me scared of ’em a little bit. Women to me always seemed like they had that something in their eye which would allow them to protect themselves in a way that I can’t even begin to fathom. The closest I can come to describe it is by calling it witchcraft, but even a young girl has got it somehow, even Minnie has got it. It’s a way of looking at you and not saying nothing, but letting you know that the answer is there and obvious, but only a woman can see it.
To this day I don’t know what it means that these women can see things I can’t. I do believe, though, that it has something to do with their protection. It’s the truest image of woman I’ve ever conceived. Moxy Priestess is the epitome, but the Priestess, even though she sounds witchy, wasn’t all that witchy. The only hocus pocus we ever tried was mixing narcotics. Don’t believe we ever chanted anything out of the way of pass this or pass that category of pill or blow or whatever. But let me finish the story. These guys went up to the door because they were curious. The door was one of those glass kinds where you can see in through a little bit of a rainbow shaped window. The witches were howling now as though they knew these men were out there. If it had been me I would have been out of there a long time ago which is another reason I think this story was made up. But anyway, this kid told us that these witches were in their kitchen cackling and cackling and sitting up in a pot plain as day on the table was a little girl without any clothes waiting to get cooked. The kid said they said they all ran away thinking they ate that kid. I just think this is the funniest thing I ever heard.
Annabelle was always running off said the reports down at the museum. She had light brown hair and loved animals and people and they even say that she would put on a little civil war era rock and roll show for everybody if her mother asked her to. If there was a little girl I have no doubt that little girl was Annabelle. She’d probably strolled into their yard all dirty and they took her in and cleaned her up and fed her before taking her home. I don’t imagine anybody up here back then wouldn’t have known their neighbor to some degree.
But the story is that the witches ate her, that she was in a steaming pot and the witches danced around her. That’s a good one to keep going for awhile longer because it lends something else to the power, the same power that the Priestess had, namely, the power of the woman to do the most atrocious thing imaginable or, to be more concise, to let the world think she’s capable of it when she’s really no more capable than me or any other man I’ve ever met. I think we’re all equally capable of good or evil and what you’ve got between your legs don’t matter. I just find this little mechanism for protection the Lord gives to the women of the world ingenious.