01/22/01

There was a time when I called Percy the Attractive Nuissance. I have to say the first part of that bill doesn’t really fit anymore, but the second part is as apt as ever. When Percy was young, he looked a bit like Jim Morrison. Nowadays he looks more like Meatloaf after a full frontal lobotomy. Clara ran away with Percy when she was 16. Mom and Dad were pretty much done with her. She was always a wild child bent on getting her way at all cost. Fiery as all hell. She could drink most men under the table. . .when she was like 15! She started spouting off that Dad had--- well, done something, shall we say --- next thing she knew she found all her stuff piled out in the front yard. Percy was a couple of years older than her. They both fell in with the Hippie crowd and had all kinds of stories to tell about using hallucinogens, going to Woodstock, traveling back and forth across the country in an old bus, and whatever the hell else. Both ended up in California for some time. After they got some college credits they made their way back to New York, where they both found high-powered careers in marketing, whatever the fuck that is. They were also big into the art scene. Never had any children. Clara died in ‘87 of ass cancer. Now I have to have that camera shoved up there every year or two to make sure I don’t get it there either. Percy started having panic attacks in ‘93 after the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. He was working in the building at the time and got a hell of a scare. He became a neurotic mess. Said he felt like New York City had become just one big terrorist target that was due to be hit again at any moment. He couldn’t get that thought of danger out of his mind. He couldn’t cope much with urban life anymore and had a couple of visits to Bellevue and Dr. Swami Hard Salami up here.

Back in ‘94, I let Percy put the trailer on the place for a weekend retreat. Town made a big stink about the trailer, of course. I made Percy a farm employee and invoked the Ag and Markets law, hauled the trailer out of view to the back end of the farm at the edge of Purgatory Swamp. Town was thrilled to get the thing out of view from the road and they eventually left me alone. Spent a fortune stringing phone and electric lines out here for him though. I’m grateful now to have the trailer or else I’d have no where else to go. It’s hard to keep warm lately though and I’ve had the pipes freeze on me a couple of times since Thanksgiving night. Anyway, it always seemed to do Percy some good to get out of the city for a while to calm his nerves. Eventually it became too hard for him to keep a job and he came back to Orange County to live full-time. At some point Swami Hard Salami told him the trailer was no good for him because it was too socially isolating. Percy got qualified for some kind of housing program for the mentally ill and ended up in the duplex in Maybrook where he’s been working on a novel for years. It’s about as thick as a phone book these days. He lent me a copy to proof read for him last year. I don’t think I’ve gotten past the 4th page yet. From what I understand of it it’s Percy’s idea of a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s all the same characters and setting in Dublin only it’s no longer June 16, 1904, rather June 17, 1904. Because like people really need to know what happened to that Bloom guy the next day too.