03/08/01

I worked up the nerve this morning to ask Percy about his former roommate Gary. He said he had a falling out with him after Gary cut him from his cricket team. I told Percy I would give someone thanks for that, but apparently he was in no mood to deal with my humor. Yeah, hit a real nerve there.

I spent months learning that frickin game for that lame brain! Percy protests, once the warmer weather hits I’m going to get Dr. Hardik and your relative Fauntleroy and their cricket-playing friends together with my own team and I’m going to crush that lame brain!

Lame brain. It was also weird hearing Percy characterize Fauntleroy as my relative. I had to think about it until I could see it that way. Funny, I’m also starting to see how Percy’s Mythopoetic Men’s Group may be code for: Percy’s diabolical plan for revenge on Gary, the Lame Brain.

Percy then asks me if I had any money to help out with groceries. I stammered for a few seconds said I’d get him some money by the end of the day. Next thing I know Phebe’s on the phone saying she’s been cleared by the police, hounding me to come home. And then Cupcake’s at the door asking me to go back to the mountains with her to work on her Winnebago. Suddenly I start to wonder whether I might be better off like the man known as the Wandering Leatherman who lived across the river in the 1800‘s. According to Percy’s book they say he was a Frenchman who had his heart broken badly, became a hermit, hardly spoke, was always on the move. He was so named because he wore a stiff, homemade suit of leather year round. He traveled a 365 mile circuitous route between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers throughout the year so he was never much of a burden to anyone for long as he relied on begging for survival. He showed up like clockwork at the same towns on the same day each year. If he was treated badly somewhere, he changed his route and would not return there, found a new rock shelter at another spot.

So I went to the farm, got my overalls from the barn---spared any more of Percy’s borrowed clothes from getting ruined---took a couple of loads of scrap metal to Middletown in the truck. All the money went into Percy’s hands or into the gas tank.

Now Cupcake is offering now to pay me $500 to get her camper running again. It won’t be an easy task getting that thing on the road, but I think I’m gonna have to take the job simply for the money.

Percy let Phebe in while I was asleep just before . She woke me up and said she needed to change my bandages. She was plenty miffed, said if you keep letting that little vixen next door doctor you, you’ll end up with gangrene.

I said, maybe I’ll have gangrene as my goal for St. Patrick’s Day.

03/07/01

Started the day explaining to Cupcake what happened to me that led to me living there with Percy. When she saw that my bandages on my burns had gone more than a day without being changed she insisted on helping me. She said she noticed I was moving funny the first time she met me but wasn’t figuring it to be from being burned. I just thought it was from you being old, she says. I told her while she worked doctoring me the basic account on things. When she heard about the dog being missing, she insisted on going over to the farm right away with me to look for him. Before I know it I’m in her car riding to the farm. Then we’re hiking together all over the place. Me and Cupcake on a search and rescue mission.

I just think to myself, I sure hope Phebe’s at work. She sees me walking around the farm with this girl, who knows what she’ll think?

Then I think, who cares?

I show Cupcake the burnt out trailer and she says, Dude, I don’t know how you got out of there!

Then she tells me she has an old Winnebago she inherited that needs to be removed from her uncle’s property up in the Catskills. If you let me keep it here, I’d let you use it to live in until your insurance comes through.

I don’t know what compelled me to say this, but I say to Cupcake with a wink, I don’t know about that idea, Sweetheart---if I ever got inside your Winnebago, I may never want to leave.

Just then Phebe showed up, killing the whole buzz. She sure looked pissed. She didn’t give Cupcake an ounce of consideration.

This is Percy’s neighbor, I say, she came to help me look for the dog.

Tommy didn’t call you? Phebe asks, cold as ice. The dog is dead.

Well now the buzz is really gone. I’m looking all kinds of hot to Cupcake now with quivering lips and tears streaking down my cheeks.

Talked a bit with Tommy‘s son. He showed Cupcake and I where he buried the dog. I looked over and Cupcake has got tears streaking down her face and a quivering lip too. We started back to the duplex when Cupcake proposed taking a drive up to Phoenicia just then to look at the Winnebago.

You don’t have to agree to anything, but maybe you can tell me if it’s road-worthy. I have to get that thing ready to move somewhere.

So we drive up to Phoencia to look the Winnebago over. She spends at least a half hour of the ride discussing in precise detail the varied nasty looks Phebe shot her and each of their meaning. You know, I really think she could be a murderer, she says. At one point at the camp Cupcake pops a squat and takes a piss. I’m not more that 15 feet away looking over the Winnebago’s radiator, which apparently leaks pretty good too.

I thought of that bed inside the Winnebago and then I thought how much an old fool I’d seem to Cupcake to mention it.

That bed inside sure looks like a comfortable place for an old guy to take a nap , I manage somehow to say.

Oh my God! Cupcake exclaims as she looks at her watch, My date! I forgot all about the date Percy set up!

They say there’s no fool like an old fool. Surely indeed.

So we rush back on the Thruway. Cupcake’s a half-hour late when we arrive. Cupid Boy is standing outside her door looking all kinds of bewildered. Cupcake introduces me to him assuming we’re strangers. He plays along. Nice to meet you, he says.

Don‘t I know you from somewhere? I ask.

No, he replies nervously, no, I don’t believe you do.

03/06/01

I was reading one of Percy’s books on Walt Whitman in the middle of the night trying to take my mind off the note left for Phebe on Stash Skimington‘s door. I became inspired, I guess. Got this poem inside my head. I jotted it down:

A MAN’S POEM

A poem won’t do if a poem don’t rhyme
like a clock won’t do if it can’t keep time
markin’ every hour with a ringin’ or a chime
You might just forget it if it ain’t the easiest thing to say
and poems are awfully funny with nothin’ funny much to say
Momma’ll be up all night, worried her son is gay
Man ain’t made to sit with flowery things to knit
Still, Cowboys anguish too, they just can’t write for shit.

I wasn’t done writing my poem a minute when my probation officer, Cupid Boy shows up at the door. I think he was hoping to catch me in the act of cooking up crack cocaine on Percy‘s kitchen stove. He said he heard about my fire, knew I had been burned, and wanted to stop by the new place, see if I needed anything. I felt like saying some privacy and a few more hours sleep.

Percy is asleep up until that point, but he gets up and moving in a hurry, wants to serve the fucker breakfast. Starts chatting it up with Cupid Boy while he cooks a little something for the fucker, wants to know where he’s from, where he grew up and all that. It’s then I realize I knew the kid’s parents---they both grew up on farms out in Minisink country.

Your people were farmers! I say exuberantly, mortifying the shit out of him.

You mean, stockmen? He corrects me.

Then he zings me with this: Well, you two seem to be settled in well here---like an old couple or something.

That’s what the girl next door thinks too, I say, fake-laughing.

Yeah, I think you’d like her, Percy says to the kid, Linda’s very pretty, and has such a wonderful personality.

Great, watch it turn out I play a role in matchmaking Cupid Boy and Cupcake, I say to myself.

Spoke to the investigators later on. They seem settled at this point on Hiram Palfrey being the person responsible for the fire. They also seemed inclined to believe he did himself in afterward by jumping off the bridge. They said if they recover Hiram’s body in the Hudson the case may be put to rest at that point.

What about Stash Skimington being the culprit? I ask.

We’ve talked to him. We’ll likely talk to him again. But right now he’s not our main suspect. You have to keep in mind Joe: not everyone out to screw your wife is gonna be out to kill you too.

Good fucking gracious.

03/05/01

Phebe stopped by late last night after work and checked over my burns and changed the bandages. She didn’t really say anything about having me return home. We didn’t really talk about anything really.

I didn’t sleep much at all, got up and read a few books in Percy’s library. He’s got a whole bunch on the artists of the Hudson River School from the 1800‘s. Another book that caught my eye was this mangled book explaining String Theory that Percy’s friend Gary gave to him. I know this because there’s an inscription inside the cover from him:

Percy, I almost died rescuing this book from the center lane of the parkway after the day in Asbury Park. I wish I could say I think of you every time I read this book, but I‘ve only looked at it once. I don’t get this shit! Which is funny, isn’t it, because that’s what you’re always saying about me!
Gary.

Linda, the pretty college student next door---Cupcake, I have to call her--- says to me as I was heading out from Percy’s this morning: if you see dock workers and construction workers coming in and out of my place throughout the day, it’s not what it looks like. I’m not running a bordello. I have a certificate in Reiki massage therapy. It pays the bills right now. Just stay quiet about it, OK, or they’ll kill me with the zoning ordinances.

So I say to Cupcake, you know, I’m an old farmer with a creaky old back, maybe I ought to get some of that Reiki message therapy too.

So what does she say to that? Get it from Percy. I taught him everything I know. Gary preferred Percy’s messages to mine after awhile.

I bet he did, I say.

I didn’t get the sense Linda had much time to talk just then, so I held back from explaining to her that Percy was just a relative I was forced to stay with because my dwelling place was mysteriously firebombed, and it wasn’t certain if the wife had anything to do with it--- that I really wasn’t gay!

Too late for first impressions. Still, I’ll have to have that talk soon.

After I checked over the farm without finding the dog again, I decided to go right to Stash Skimington’s place and talk to him man to man. I figured if he had anything at all to do with what happened with the fire I could get some sense of it from the way he behaved towards me. I also wanted to see what he had to say about reading the shit I been writing when he went into my trailer that time. I wanted to see if he would acknowledge telling people around town what Hiram said to me about Phil Palfrey being buried in the old well. But he wasn’t home. There was a note on the door though:

Phebe, I had to leave town for a few days. We’ll talk when I get back.