A Philosophical Cat

 

During my life I’ve had about twenty cats,

some cherished, some endured as a martyrdom,

but one cat above all I recall with surpassing love—

Pascal, named after the discoverer of the vacuum.

 

Named because of his quizzical, diffident curiosity

that appreciated music, dialectic, and nuance.

Yet it was his calm accepting joy in life

in which I found delight and comfort.

 

I could stroke him electric without his biting me,

yet he was never demanding of attention.

His only flaw was that he played with victims

before cracking their skulls with toothsome yawn.

 

Enticing a mouse (okay) or chipmunk (not okay),

he would fondly play catch and let go for ten minutes or so,

then the poor chipmunk would discover too late

that the game ended with splattered brains.

 

Pascal lived a long life, seventeen years.

He was good at avoiding road vehicles,

liked to prance on the roof of the house,

though sometimes cried for help to get down.

 

Later, at the end, he disappeared for several days.

He returned bloated with white writhing maggots.

Sandy bathed him and attempted to give him medicine,

but he refused it, laying immobile on the kitchen floor,

 

drinking only water, reclining in his toweled box,

sleeping, but making the occasional farewell mewl

when a member of the family passed by.

Pascal opened his eyes at the sound of my tread.

 

Not a whimper escaped his throat at all

until I stopped to give a long, pitying look.

He opened his eyes, hooked me hard in the eye,

me-owed why, why, and expired like a god.

 

—Kevin T. McEneaney

The Automobile Snob

The Automobile Snob

Everybody knows an auto snob. There’s always some guy down the block or two blocks away who has a Sunday Corvette stashed in his garage, or the weekend lady who drives her antique Duesenberg Roadster, the “ultimate car,” with the top down in spring as flowering hyacinth whips by her reddening ears. There’s the slim, dapper retiree who babies his polished Porsche with advanced stereo system to show off to five weekend guests a year. There’s the nostalgic rockabilly who drives to the dry-cleaners in his white Ford Fairlane convertible with red leather interior and slipping transmission. Despite the phenomenal repair bills, there are those who regularly drive a Jaguar with a rusty chassis or a sporty car suffering a terminal engine illness like the white Mitsubishi convertible with its paper-thin plastic Lego-like fenders. A couple of lucky nags at Belmont once bought my father a gleaming Model-T Ford that he drove around the neighborhood with me honking the big rubber-ball horn before he had to sell it to avoid foreclosure on the house after having a couple of bad weekends at the race track.

   Some opt for sound upscale brand names like Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, or Cadillac. Advertisers remain well-aware that people purchase cars on the basis of status fantasies, the moving-on-up thing, or that for a man his car is his legitimate, legal, and safe-sex mistress. Teenagers and those in their seventies jump for the acceleration stats for different reasons—the former for the rush or casual stop-light drag-racing, the latter because they fear their reaction time has slowed down to a Bingo-night rhythm. Women are usually hooked by the safety angle, as well as the easy drivability that will cause some drivers to nod off at the wheel and smash into an historic oak tree. Occasionally, a car model becomes famous for its longevity and people are willing to purchase such a model at an inflated price just before the pistons blow. I know from experience because I once kept a 1997 Honda Accord much too long when I could have sold it for a profit.

   But I’m the kind of man who doesn’t care what he drives as long as the car travels from point A to B, even if the suspension is shot, yet preferably with not unreasonable gas mileage or outrageous upkeep. So you see, I’m not at all a car snob. Yes, there are some of us still out there running around with jumper cables who just want to get to work and have a pocket litany of car woes at hand in order to avoid driving to one’s father-in-law’s house or the friend who’s addicted to a vile brand of Scotch I’d only offer to an enemy. So I pride myself in not being a snob and look down upon everyone who passes me on the left, reserving special epithets for those who pass me on the right.

   In my humble opinion the only antique car you can own without being a snob is a blue Hotchkiss. That’s because F. Scott Fitzgerald bought one. Scotty was a good fellow and not a snob. When the car pistons blew up after twenty-thousand miles, Scotty was in shock. How could such a well-made car die so quickly? Scotty was amazed when a wealthy neighbor explained to him that a car burned oil and you had to put more oil in every so-many thousand miles. Poor Scotty—he had to spend another ten months churning out marvelous short stories, red-eyed and sleepless, crumpling page after page into the waste basket until the break of dawn, so that he could buy another car. But Scotty learned his lesson. When his wife Zelda crashed and went into a lunatic asylum, he didn’t go out and buy a new wife or new car. He never even drove again. In sober moments he fiddled with film scripts which drove him to drink and in the evenings he wrote maudlin letters to his only daughter on whom he doted.

   But Scotty had written The Great Gatsby, that melancholy jazz serenade to ruthless love in such gorgeously sculpted prose. Why hasn’t Millbrook produced its own Gatsby masterpiece? I completely understand why the rest of the country has not been up to it, yet I know Millbrook has all the qualities and qualifications for that project. I keep asking myself why? Why not? Why? As my Hotchkiss sans seatbelt speeds by Stissing Lake….

—Gonzo Lorenzo, a pen name for Kevin T. McEnenaey

Gonzo Lorenzo’s columns are inspired by William Thackeray’s humor columns on the gentle art of snobbery that appeared in mid-nineteenth century Punch.    

The Sandwich Snob

The sandwich snob is all around us, invading the most delightful conversations with the braggadocio of trivial snobbery. This fault is particularly acute with truck drivers and construction workers, but you find it among lawyers and news reporters as well as anybody in any occupation. The sandwich snob will stake the claim that there are only two or three deli emporiums in the state that know how to make an edible sandwich, but these two delis are located, say, in Brooklyn or Buffalo, somewhere that is nowhere near at hand. The claim can not be easily checked. It might be that these remote delis, which may as well be in Mexico, are owned by the claimant’s brother-in-law or ex-girlfriend. Or that they offer a special sandwich that you would find disgusting to eat. Or there is the common claim that a simple ham sandwich can be made to taste better than the best beluga caviar if only so-and-so would slap the special home-made mustard on the bread. I can’t say that I’ve met all the sandwich snobs of the county, but I assure you they are legion. It’s difficult to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Town Hall without bumping into one. 

As a result of this epidemic, I have arrived at a new policy. I never bring up the subject of sandwiches or even mention where I would prefer to have them made, lest some sandwich snob launch into a tirade about every sandwich they have consumed in towns and cities that I have never heard of. There is too much information out there and I must shelter my brain from some of it, or else I won’t be able to recall the colleges that baseball, basketball, and football players attended before they made their mark in pro leagues. I keep forgetting some important information that I need at home, such as what plant my wife has sunk into the clay and I often find myself trampling down a nascent lily or destroying a dahlia on my way to the mucked-up driveway, then being unable to shunt off my feeling of guilt until the evening diner reveals her astonished outrage, to which I can only shrug my shoulders and recall some of the favorite sandwiches I have consumed in Manhattan, Millbrook, and Millerton.

While I love sandwiches and remain grateful to the great Earl of Sandwich who sponsored the colonial depravities of Captain Cook while bestowing his lordly name and fame upon the unseemly custom of eating that had been adopted by midnight card sharks in eighteenth century England before it became the rage as a late-night snack among the noble aristocracy of the nineteenth century. The very fact that the great earl allowed his name to be tagged onto such an unseemly way of consuming food was in no way an act of snobbery, but a gesture of populist posturing. A quick perusal of the most common high school textbook reveals that earls were never snobs and that their only fault lay in their misdirected desire to exterminate native populations around the globe, all those who had never heard of a proper English sandwich laden Coleman’s mustard.

—Gonzo Lorenzo

Gonzo Lorenzo’s columns are inspired by William Thackeray’s humor columns on the gentle art of snobbery that appeared in mid-nineteenth century Punch. 

you can read some of my recent articles here: http://themillbrookindependent.com/search/node/McEneaney

Learning to Compute

Just turned two and attempting to walk,

I loved crawling fast up my grandfather’s stairs,

the red rug tightly bound to the steps,

the landing above a joyous goal.

He would shout, “Take it easy,”

repeating it thrice in haste.

But I paid no attention

for I so enjoyed the speed,

the excitement of an ambling gait.

Forbidden to enter his room

where the shades were always drawn,

even in the summer heat,

there glowed a strange object,

a thing of wonder in the dark:

a radioactive clock,

its illuminated numbers

a wondrous mystery

closeted in the dark.

The glowing clock hand

imparted an aura of death.

All my life I have been

afraid of numbers:

their immensity,

their finality,

their eloquence

that makes me feel insignificant,

a two-eyed digit

facing a Medusa,

my heart turning to stone.

Yet when I look up

at a dark night sky

away from city glow,

I’m comfortable

with an overwhelming

number of stars and galaxies,

and feel fearless—

like I’m floating

and suckling mother’s milk

in the Milky Way,

exhaling filaments of joy

with nothing to say.

When the Gates Open

Gordon, Jaimy. Lord of
Misrule. McPherson and Company, 2010.

At the race track Lady Luck is
never good enough. You need divine intervention to stand on the winner’s line
with a smile. Or, as Gordon says in the words of old Medicine Ed, “I tell you a
secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science,
with the drugs and chemicals and that, but ma’fact it’s more like a religion.
It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It come down to a person’s
beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It’s like
the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see
what I’m trying to say? Nobody exactly knows.”

The ritual bugle call at a racetrack brings blood to the ears; one’s
heart pumps faster. But what goes on before the race, behind the pageant? What
is life like among the trainers and stable help in the stalls amid the hay and
muck? Jaimy Gordon will let you experience not only the breath steaming from
the nostril of a walking horse but the weather-lined characters who lead a
horse through the morning mist before dawn: “in a silver fog that beaded up the
cobwebs and the horses’ eyelashes.”

Gordon’s narrative, which imitates the traditional four pacing quarters
of a race, runs with dirt flying and flaky nags burdened with personalities
more complex than their owners. Reviewers have compared her work to Nathaniel
West’s or William Faulkner’s (he died of a fall from a horse) because of its
deep lyricism and energetic syntax, but the narrative voice and turf is her own
inimitable creation—quirky, dense, and electric. Gordon’s plot revolves around low-down
claiming races, where scheming, performance, rivalry, speculation, and revenge
enhance the drama at rural pokeweed track races.

In terms of literary genealogy the novel’s ancestors consist of Jim
Tully’s Circus Parade (1927), John Steinbeck’s
1938 short story “Chrysanthemums,” and especially John Hawkes’s novel about horse
racing in England,
The Lime Twig (1961). While not as elliptical as Hawkes, Gordon’s
crafted narrative offers an accessible grittiness and spunk. Her poetic
realism, with an optimistic strain, comes from the best down-home roustabout
stable in American literature—writers like John Fante, Eudora Welty, and
William Kennedy, all of whom have the capacity to delineate characters with
vivid strokes of the pen.

Gordon possesses a subtle irony and laconic edge that makes you think
about, and care for, characters who reveal a different world, a world in which we
are hypnotized to dwell with wrenching emotion, that cathartic thing Aristotle
appreciated. She displays an acute ear for the subtle rhythms of spoken conversation,
replete with the eloquence of racy, demotic speech yet with the ability to paint
the darker, more suggestive, and ambiguous inner hues of self-deception, revealing
layers of anxiety as well as oddball charm.

Set in about 1970, the novel is organized as a quartet. Four braided stories
cover four claiming races, each race featuring an equine protagonist with
personality that is nearly human: Mr. Boll Weevil, a folkloric hero; Little
Spinoza, the feckless wonder; Pelter, the dignified, old-forgotten champion,
whose surprising victory produces a backwoods dénouement where the horse
witnesses the hysterical farce of obsessed men; Lord of Misrule provides a
stretch-run chaotic reversal.

The novel sports a stable core of three narrating characters, an interlocking
network of secrets: a 72-year-old black groom possessed of life’s hard-earned
wisdom, an ambitious Irish trainer out for a big score (whose narrative occurs
in the second person), and a young Jewish drifter tomboy smitten by him. She is
the principal protagonist—in danger from predatory, insensitive, nearly idiotic
men.

Any quartet presents a musical
structure of mood: the first story explores the flirtatious and dangerous shadows
of youthful erotic sadomasochism (an element found in Hawkes); the second story
highlights the mutual plotting and camaraderie of the three narrators with
momentary triumphant success (like a Eudora Welty story); the third engages the
reader with a desperate web of intrigue that involves small-time seedy gangsters
(like William Kennedy’s Albany novels); the fourth story unravels everything
topsy-turvy—as Lord of Misrule’s name indicates—in apocalyptic climax (like
West’s Day of the Locust or Fante’s Ask the Dust). Allusions to folklore and
myth flit through this cycle of stories like wispy anthropomorphic clouds, but
it’s the carnival dust of the loser’s racetrack that lingers. An elegiac epilogue
sums up the varied threads with effective near-closure.

If you are looking for a superlative read that rings clear and true like
a hammer striking a horseshoe, Gordon will take you to the wire, yet before
that she will take your breath away with mud-slinging lyrical slang. Every book
Gordon writes offers a new map of American grit and off-beat humor.

As a youth, the author once worked for three years at race tracks in Vermont and West
Virginia where the novel is set. That this 2010
National Book Award winner has the local backing of a small press in the Hudson Valley,
in Kingston, N.Y., remains exciting as it is astonishing.
—Kevin T. McEneaney is the author of the award-winning Tom Wolfe’s America: Heroes, Pranksters, and
Fools.

All Fracked Up!


Fracking, fracking, fracking…

They’re fracking under your
house
terrorizing deer and mouse,
pouring poison into earth.
What is it, what is it worth?

Fracking, fracking, fracking…

We live in a great madhouse,
a grand corporate whorehouse,
but I’d like to drink water,
keep alive lilt of laughter.

Water, water, water…

Who needs the fracking water
or the ten-acre farmer?
We can drink champagne or
beer
any time of the f-year!

Fracking, fracking, fracking…

There’s nothing like a filter
when you’re drinking water
that tastes like a cocktail
made from chem-poisoned
shale.

Water, water, water…

If our water turns poison,
Daddy state can chip in,
tax the poor little ____
(guitar strum instead of word)
20-billion bucks.

Fracking, fracking, fracking…

If the dug well runs dry
and the ten-ton truck grinds
by,
I can go buy Poland Spring
to cook my potatoes in.

Water, water, water…
fracking, fracking, fracking…

Frack me, baby!

…I’m all fracked up… (spoken)


--Kevin T. McEneaney