01/12/01

Percy researched my family’s genealogy pretty thoroughly and put it all on a computer disk. I’m pretty sure he would have made a big fuss if he found we were descendants of someone like Joseph Smith.

Genealogy for me is hard to take, so I haven’t studied Percy’s work but lightly.

Mom and Dad were second cousins to one another through the Roosa family and more distant cousins through more than a dozen other local Dutch and Huguenot families tracing back to the days of New Amsterdam and the early days of the New Paltz patent. If you ever brought that shit out in conversation with Dad he’d all but take a stick to you to get you to shut up about it. It was the truth. There was no way around it really, but he didn’t want that kind of stink getting out in the world. I guess if you’re not prepared to abide by a taboo, you better be prepared to stay forever quiet about it’s violation.

I remember Mom saying once: Franklin and Eleanor were cousins to one another. They even grew up with the same last name. No one seemed to fuss much. That kind of thing happens all the time in high society and Royalty doesn’t it?

I remember Dad grumbling in response: We’re not Roosevelts. . . and I don’t want to utter that filthy name again in my house.

In fact, according to Percy’s research, both Mom and Dad’s Roosa ancestors descend from the children of Heyman Aldertse Roosa (1643-1708) and Anna Margariet Roosevelt (1654-1706). We are indeed Roosevelts as true as they come. . . with Roosevelt lineages to spare it seems. . .

If the hay baler hadn’t thrashed Dad to a bloody pulp I’m quite sure internet genealogy would have eventually gone on to do the same had he been able to hang around that long.

01/11/01

I should explain that late in ‘98 I asked Porch Rot if I could help track down Phil when he went missing again, but he at first declined. He said he was certain Phil would find his way home again in time once his adventure played itself out, just like all the times before. Months went by, though, and Winter set in, and Phil remained at large. By that point, I was a lot more insistent, and asked Hiram if I could take a look in Phil’s room and poke around in his shit to see if there were any clues to be found regarding where he may have wandered off to.

After seeing the inside of Porch Rot’s house, I can understand why he didn’t want my half Irish and half Huguenot ass poking around in there. The place is a fucking pig sty--- clutter the whole fucking house through! Phil’s room hasn’t seen the hand of a woman, I suppose, since ‘82, when his mother was killed. It was a damn scene to behold, I tell you— strewn with books of every kind imaginable befitting a paranoid, addled mind. The walls of the room were covered in strange obsessive writing and riddled with bullet holes. Porch Rot explained that Phil had little tolerance for rats in the walls and would often shoot wherever the slightest scurrying sound could be heard within them. It’s called D-Con people! I asked Porch Rot if he was ever worried Phil might shoot him accidentally this way, but he said Phil used 22 shorts for the purpose and by the time the bullets passed through the two sides of lath and plaster in the old walls, the bullets barely packed a sting.

I took inventory of all the books, journals and reading materials I found laying around in Phil’s bedroom, thinking they might provide some clue to his most recent obsessions, and therefore provide clues regarding this latest disappearance. From what I could gather from his shit, it appeared his latest interests were all somehow connected to the new millennium, space aliens, religion, and the end of the world. It was apparent he was obsessed with anything to do with guns, Joseph Smith— whom he claimed direct ancestry somehow— and anything to do with UFO visitations, which he wrote explained the Angel Moroni’s appearance to the Mormon prophet as well as a host of other biblical shit, including the burning bush, the immaculate conception of Mary—A.I. by aliens wouldn’t you know— and the star of Bethlehem, a hovering mother ship.

Heaven’s Gate cult eat your heart out.

Good fucking gracious.

01/10/01

At that point in time around the Manfred and Gladiola episode, Clean Phil appeared to be pretty well through with his Michael Stipe days and his Joseph Smith days (or so one would think) and appeared outwardly like any other woodchuck left around here— content to remain covered in cow shit most of the time, living in squalor, shunned by the neighborhood, hardly venturing beyond the confines of Porch Rot’s acreage. Just a few years earlier Phil had been bedecked like a girl in makeup and traveling all over the freaking country with a REM cover band he named Spanking Time For Frankenstein. He even had a girlfriend back in those years, some crazy anorexic chick from Long Island who dropped out of Vassar to travel around with him, leading to her being disowned by her parents. Nowadays she’s a published poet, for whatever that’s worth. Plumped up pretty nicely though. Still a little Goth though. She came around looking for Phil a couple of times now since ‘98. Last time she stopped by she told me she had managed to get published a collection of things Phil had written. From what I understand she went missing too. Maybe the same mothership that snatched up Clean Phil snatched her up too. I guess Phil met her--- Delia was her name --- at a Karaoke bar outside the campus of New Paltz College back around ‘91. Phil showed up there one night out of nowhere, began blowing people away with his renditions of It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Losing My Religion. He had no social skills, of course. He was never a college guy--- had no connections with the college lifestyle--- but somehow music and his clever, obsessive mind bridged some gaps for him. His perfect mimicry of Stipe's voice and mannerisms caught the attention of a group of student musicians, who were willing to overlook his other-worldly freakishness and barn odor to form a band around his talent. And so it was that he got swept away from the farm for awhile into a new reality of artistic expression and notoriety. What a fucking trip.

Phil’s Stipe obsession gave way suddenly to religious fanaticism, from what I understand, one day in early ‘93. The band was traveling from a show at Oswego College to another one at Buffalo and some time was taken to smoke pot and visit the Joseph Smith museum at Palmyra. Where the other band members ridiculed the museum displays, Phil was completely transfixed by the story of the Mormon prophet and his early travails in Upstate New York. Phil’s brain suddenly reprogrammed, I guess you could say, and suddenly he couldn’t be bothered with imitating Michael Stipe, covering REM, or singing in a traveling band from that point. Porch Rot said when Phil came home after that tour he took all his band stuff out back and started a bonfire. The only evidence I found in his room of his earlier REM obsession was a CD of the album Document which had slipped down the wall behind a dresser into a gap between the wall and the baseboard.

I’m rather fond of The Finest Work Song, the first track of that album. I’d still like to know what this line might entail for me though:

The time has been engaged
To Throw Thoreau and rearrange

By March of that year, Phil was camped outside the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas holding a protest vigil during the government siege there. Whether he bought a tee-shirt there from Timothy McVeigh, another upstate New York boy drawn obsessively to the tragic site, is anybody’s guess.

I have my worries though.

01/09/01

My first case, if you want to call it that, actually involved the mystery of another dead Holstein belonging to ol’ Porch Rot---it was a two year old heifer found sprawled out and bloated in the pasture. That was in ‘98, not long after I sold my milking herd to Cornelius Kuykendall (my gender-confused, likely soon to be ex-son-in-law from Texas) and found myself in need of something to do with myself. Well, it was more than that really---I needed something to keep myself occupied as I underwent chemotherapy and a chestectomy to stave off the hand of death from male chest cancer. (I‘m fine now. Had my chests fixed up and have been given a clean bill of health, so you‘d never know I was ever sick, thank fucking goodness.) It was also just before Clean Phil went missing this latest time. Seems a wedding balloon had landed on the Palfrey place from afar which soon suffocated the animal when the snack became lodged in its airway. After the balloon was recovered from the carcass by Cadaver Dog, it was found that it— the bovine death agent— had been custom printed for the nuptials of two apparent freaks named Manfred and Gladiola, who were quickly identified in an internet search at the Goshen library — due in no small part to the uniqueness of their fucked up names— as residents of Reistertown, Maryland. After they received a picture of Porch Rot’s poor pathetic heifer, sprawled and bloated in the field with an explanation that their wedding balloon had wrought the calamity, Manfred and Gladiola--- flush with wedding cash--- were quick to send out a check for $1,500 to Porch Rot for restitution. Here it is the 21st century and I’m not sure the bastard has any comprehension, even now, of the power of the World Wide Web. If only he had shown the same kind of awe for a Mars rock landing at his feet as he did for that little shitty bit of information the library’s computer cranked out for me just by typing in the names Manfred and Gladiola into a search engine.

Good fucking gracious.