04/16/01

I reported to probation today expecting Cupid Boy would rake me over the coals for one thing or another, but I guess the shithead was out sick or something. I signed in, but then after a short while I was told I was OK to leave--- that I didn’t need to see anyone today. I felt like I was let off the hook or something. I thought about reporting to work digging at Swami Hard Salami’s archeology site, but then I thought about Swami laughing at me the other day for wanting to see Joe Dirt and I thought, screw that fucking bastard. So I hung around the farm all day. Talked to Tommy New Yawka next door for a while. He asked me if I could plow him up a garden. He gave me a big can of gas to fill the tank. So I put the plow on the tractor, plowed up Tommy’s yard for a garden, helped fork the pony shit from the Winter onto the soil. Tommy said one of the boys had his First Holy Communion coming up. He asked me if me, Phebe and Mookie could make it to the barbecue afterward. I didn’t know what to say. I said maybe if we were around that day. After that I went out to one of the hay fields and started plowing, don’t really know why. Phebe asked me about it later and seemed to get all pissed off that I had plowed a field without a plan what to do with it.

Funny you would care to do anything with the land you hope to sell soon.

I had the gas in the tank and the time to plow, what else do you want me to say?

I called Percy to ask him if he might hold onto my guns for me---said that I didn’t like that Phebe gave the guns over to Stash Skimington--- but Percy didn’t want anything to do with the idea.

I don’t need your guns. And it’s not like you’ll ever be free to have them again, he reminds me. What’s wrong with Stash making use of them?

For all I know that fucker tried to kill me!

Percy scoffed at that idea. Fucker.

Were you supposed to work for Dr. Hardik today or something? He started to tell me at the movie theater that you stood him up at one of his properties, but then he got all weird and denied all of a sudden that was the case.

What are you talking about, Percy?

At some point in the call I made the mistake of commenting on the Luis Gomez house in Newburgh. I admitted that it was surprising to me that one of the very first settlers here was openly Jewish. Percy said that the Dutch wanted nothing to do with the land that Gomez settled because it was near Danskammer, a place on Hudson the Indian’s performed what was perceived to be devilish ceremonies, now the site of the power plant.

Percy emailed me a bunch of Luis Gomez shit after the call, including this old verse that was once spoken of the Danskammer site published in a book by Marc Newman:

For none that visit the Indian's den
Return again to the haunts of men,
The knife is their doom, oh sad is their lot,
Beware! Beware of the bloodstained spot!

And then there was this excerpt by Benson Lossing from his 1866 book The Hudson:

From the gravelly height the Highlands, the village of Newburgh, and a large portion of the lower part of the "Long Reach" from Newburgh to Crom Elbow, are seen; with the flat rock in the river, at the head of Newburgh Bay and near its western shore, known as Den Duyvel's Dans Kamer, or the Devil's Dance Chamber. This rock has a level surface of about half an acre (now covered with beautiful Arbor Vitæ shrubs), and is separated from the main-land by a marsh. On this rock the Indians performed their peculiar semi-religious rites, called pow-wows, before going upon hunting and fishing expeditions, or the war-path. They painted themselves grotesquely, built a large fire upon this rock, and danced around it with songs and yells, making strange contortions of face and limbs, under the direction of their conjurors or "medicine men." They would tumble, leap, run, and yell, when, as they said, the Devil, or Evil Spirit, would appear in the shape of a beast of prey, or a harmless animal; the former apparition betokened evil to their proposed undertaking, and the latter prophesied of good. For at least a century after the Europeans discovered the river, these hideous rites were performed upon this spot, and the Dutch skippers who navigated the Hudson, called the rock Den Duyvel's Dans Kamer. Here it was that Peter Stuyvesant's crew were "most horribly frightened by roistering devils," according to the veracious Knickerbocker.

Percy said Gomez was not taken in with superstition about Danskammer the same way the Dutch were and he worked to learn the Indian languages and build strong trading partnerships with them. Percy said a lot of Rabbis back then encouraged respect for the Indians because it was thought they might be one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.