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.

01/08/01

Orange County is certainly not East Coast Wisconsin anymore. There’s not much of a farm community left to dick around in anymore outside onion country in the Black Dirt. In the hills east of Goshen there’s nothing but a handful of dairy farmers left on the land, and they seem just as bankrupt and as desperate as the next one. You’re certainly not getting paid any better for your milk than you did a generation ago, and of course your taxes and expenses are probably three times what they were. Your best effort nowadays might result in you breaking even or being able to pay half your bills. You better have a wife who can work as a nurse or a school teacher or something. Otherwise you have to resort to some form of hustling just to keep going.

Much as I hate to admit it, if Phebe didn’t have her career at the Newburgh Hospital, we would have probably folded long ago. She calls herself my patron and chronic enabler. That’s surely what she was to Rocky. Me? I don’t know. For a time Starvin Marvin resorted to growing Marijuana between his corn, or so says Stash Skim. Honest man has to know dairying now is like a cruel vice, unhealthy, hardly wholesome to the soul. Shit, I see more farm folk now at the probation office on reporting day than I do at Agway (well, just about all the Agway stores around here went out of business last year).You couldn’t really say they’re family farms that are left unless you counted the dogs and cats on the places. A lot of these guys left prefer to be loners, or women won’t have them. Call it husbandry without actual husbands. If you found more than a handful of farms in the area still in the business of actually producing milk you’d be lucky. That’s all they ever did in these parts years ago. Our milk products were once the gold standard for the country at large. Goshen butter was famous. But you wouldn’t know it today from the look of the place with all these fucking McMansions going up on every knoll and hillside. The milk industry has been abandoned, just like the iron industry, railroad industry, trotter horse industry, knife industry and any other good thing we once had. You know what we have now? Fucking warehouses. We got fucking large square buildings the size of farms plopped down anywhere they can put ‘em. They can park all those Chinese widgets and doo-dads there for a spell before they get sent out to all the retail stores--- which we also have in abundance.

What kills me are these guys like Taciturn Vern or even Stash Skimington who have no equity left to fall back on. Both have little more left on the deed than a rundown farmhouse and an old barn or two. In reality they’re working their asses off for mere beans. Meanwhile these faceless real estate holding companies they’re in partnership with, they’re just waiting for the right day to cash in, and are using the farmers rental of their land to save a fortune in taxes every year. If you could find a more feudalistic arrangement, I’ve never heard it. . .

All those years getting to this point though of retiring. . . boy, I guess you could say it was like being enslaved or something. I can’t get over now how much wondrous shit there is in the world to wrap your mind around when you don’t have to spend your every waking hour concerned about the many and varied needs of 3 dozen lactating bovines. Maybe that’s why people are so quick to judge farmers as an ignorant lot---because smart or not, it’s so damn apparent they can’t afford to put their minds to fucking anything beyond the rigorous demands of their business. Farming’s got to be one of the loneliest, most isolating occupations there is, and I’d say it’s the same here in the shadow of New York City as on the plains of Nebraska. If anything it’s worse in the suburban areas like this one if you go on the idea that the farmer becomes more and more at odds with the neighbors as the farm culture dwindles from existence.

01/07/01

Phebe and I made the mistake of signing over the Colonial to our son Rocky back in ‘98. He had pestered us like hell to sign it over to him with 5 acres of ground and then he turned around and sold the fucking place to cover a huge drug and gambling debt he racked up. Should have known he was up to something. I guess you could say we were conned. What the hell did we know? He had a dry wall business back then and it looked like he was doing pretty well for himself. Some Mafia guys in Newburgh were looking to crush his balls. Rocky said he tried to do what he could to settle his debt without selling the place, but unfortunately this involved a lot of burglary on his part and a lot of stolen copper. Rocky got the shortest sentence of the crew. He testified against the others and helped bring down a mob boss. They’ll probably kill him when he gets out. One of the things he testified about was going around with a couple of buddies offering home repairs to old people who live alone. One of the guys would get the homeowner to follow them outside and the other would sneak inside and grab whatever cash and jewelry they could. Some fucking model citizen I raised. We all got screwed pretty good. Now we got a family of New Yawkas living 100 feet away, their damn Shetland Pony got out last October about a week after they moved in and barely survived a fall through our rusted septic tank. I guess you could say the pony almost did a Mexican Mike. Someday when I have the courage, I’ll have to recount that one with a little more gusto. Let’s just say I earned my Eagle Scout badge that day wading in the remnants of the last 25 Christmas dinners putting a strap underneath it to hoist it out and save the damn runt thing. What else could I do? Those little kids of Tommy’s were hysterical crying.

Devil got his due, I guess.

Yeah, I’ll get my price one day, and then I’ll be on to my next adventure, you can be sure of it!

Maybe the Old Moa will make his escape to New Zealand after all! In grand style!

01/06/01

You can laugh all you want about my old head to head stanchion barn and weathered wooden silos— I don’t have a lien against a thing. And at least I can say I kept the two ancestral houses up fairly well. Not that I own the Colonial I grew up in anymore, or not that I’m welcome anymore in the Victorian where Phebe grew up, but still. Ol’ Porch Rot is up to his eyes in debt right now after the roof of his big modern barn collapsed in a heavy snow and he had to lower himself to using his old barn same as me. The fucker. What’s left of his pole barn lays out there like a half-rotted dinosaur laying down on its back with it’s rib cage exposed. He’s not been quick to do anything about rebuilding it or tearing the vestiges down.

Guess now Hiram’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy trying to stave off Chapter 7. Hard to believe with 150 acres some 65 miles north of midtown Manhattan you could owe as much as the land is worth in today’s day, but that’s apparently what’s being argued. These attorneys and bankers see a depressed man all alone sitting on a piece of distressed real estate like that, they start circling around him like vultures. Judge could force the place to be sold off. Someone said if Hiram had been able to keep the number of cows up the barn was built for the barn would have withstood the storm as there would have been enough warmth to keep the roof clean of snow. Earlier that Winter he lost a whole shit load of cows to bad silage. Talk about cursed. It sure is hard to keep those big barns stocked, turnover can get so high. Anyway, Porch Rot can keep his foul manure management system and massive machinery with the price tag of a house. I was never envious of that stuff, but he always acted like I should have been. Bigger really isn’t better in this business, just makes for more stench and more headaches as far as I’m concerned. Big debt kills too. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Orange County has seen it all before for generations now---all the attempts to farm livestock on a large scale, whether it be horses or cows, have all failed. All the big fancy Orange County stock farms have all gone the way of the mastodon by now. Hardly any trace left of them.

Now Mexican Mike’s family is suing Porch Rot for wrongful death to heap on more trouble.

The nerve of those people, Porch Rot says, he wasn’t even in this country legally.

Yeah, but you fucking hired him---you stole him from my employment, in fact---and he slipped into an open manhole to your manure management system in the pitch darkness and drowned in foul ungodliness. Why wouldn’t you get fucking sued? People sue nowadays for hurt feelings!

I am not Miguel, I am Mike. Please call me Mike. He says to me the day I first met him.

That’s fantastic! I say to him exuberantly. You hear all these stories about these little Mexican fellas who come and work in the USA for 15 - 20 years and don’t learn a lick of English, and here you are taking on the English language right off the bat! That’s wonderful that you want to go by the name Mike. What better way to show your commitment to learning the English language!

I no understan’, Senor. He says back to me after all that.

Hiram wasn’t sure what to do with Mike’s widow, Milady at first, thinking she might turn around and sue him or something. Turns out Milady wasn’t even Mike’s wife. She was just a consort, I guess you would say. Nineteen years old she says she is. The real wife is back in Mexico. Real Wife got an attorney here somehow to take on the case for her. Hiram must be on the lawyer’s shit list really. He’s the same attorney who represented the young couple who bought raw milk from Hiram straight out of the bulk tank a few years ago, thinking that would be the healthiest milk for their baby.

By law I have to tell you you can only use this raw milk to feed your dog, Hiram was quoted in the case as saying, but this is the best milk meant for dogs you can give to a new baby.

Baby got sick and died from e .coli infection. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but I understand they were whopping.

Two weeks after Mike is dead, Hiram’s going to Town Hall to marry Milady. Hiram says it’s nothing sexual---the only way to keep her from being deported she had to be married to a citizen. Don’t know if that so true, but that’s what he said. And then almost in the same breath he says it wouldn’t be so bad to make another son to help out with the place.

Break out that fabled turkey baster I guess.

Can hardly imagine what their conversations at dinner would be like. Probably would become pros at charades. Then again, maybe Porch Rot’s on to something. Maybe his way makes for a peaceful home. Come to think of it, maybe I’d get along a lot better with Phebe if we didn’t have language in common. . .

When you really get down to it, for all his advancements, Porch Rot’s prospects in farming right now are worse than mine, and I‘m doing nothing more than selling orchard grass hay at this point. And what does Hiram live in but a rotted shit hole of a house. Maybe it’s par with this trailer, I don’t know. Maybe Milady’s picked it up some by now.

I expect Phebe will try to grab everything that she can from me. Been in a standoff with her for almost two months now. Our only truce was at Christmas when we took Moo-Shoo up to Wallkill prison to visit Rocky. If things were up to Phebe she’d have every bit of the place signed over to the land trust or something. Like I said, she’s taken over the Victorian, and I’m down in the wilderness along the edge of Purgatory Swamp freezing my ass in Mexican Mike’s old trailer. Well, I should say it was originally Percy’s trailer. Call us empty nesters in the throes of mid-life crisis acting out our life’s disappointments and resentments while a banjo is strummed in the background. No divorce lawyers have been called in yet. You know once that happens it’ll be like Armageddon, or, as Clean Phil wrote in one of his songs: A Coup D’etat in Shangri La.

Paradise lost at the edge of Purgatory Swamp.

Yeah, as far as this Thoreau is concerned, Fuck Walden Pond.

01/04/01

Dad was as conservative as they come, hated FDR as much as Stalin or Adolf Hitler. Probably wouldn’t have Social Security or welfare if it were up to Dad. Might still have black people riding in the backs of buses and women staying at home in the kitchen too. At one point in my life I thought I knew everything. I had all the answers too. Then you find yourself in a Cold War with your wife, retreated to the trailer out back in Winter freezing your fucking ass. You find your son serving hard time in the Wallkill Correctional Facility, the Umbria Crime family still waiting for the day to crush his balls. Your one and only grandchild--- Moo-Shoo--- is a mixture of every nationality imaginable, born in a toilet on Lander Street in Newburgh addicted to crack cocaine. You find your daughter’s husband, Cornelius -—the best candidate you had to pass the farm on to—- has got some freaky obsession to do away with his manliness and own a vagina and boobs. You find yourself driven out of the fire department where you’ve been a volunteer for some 30 fucking years. You look up one day and realize you haven’t set foot in church for most of a decade. You find yourself a convicted felon, not even supposed to keep guns anymore. Even the dog doesn’t seem to want anything to do with you, keeps running off and getting lost. God damn beagle!

Yeah, I’m one fine one to point to as a fucking Paragon of Conservatism.