Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost tailed me home
Charles Wilder Oakes"Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost tailed me home" (From the series: My Port Clyde)
Oil on driftwood 2007
11" x 21"
(With 3rd degree copious notes and equations on the reverse side )
"In the springtime when I was a teenager and things were letting go from winter and the whole village was in the absolute dregs of it, I'd walk the streets of Port Clyde at night, breathing in the town, because I knew it wasn't always going to be like this. (I'd read Thoreau's book "On Walden Pond" by then, and made the pilgrimage down in a "field trip". THAT Walden, didn't much resemble Thoreau's take on it, let me tell you -- and if THAT could happen to WALDEN POND, I knew the sad truth it was going to play out in the cards for my Port Clyde, too).
But this time we are talkin' now is at the ass-end of junior-year in high-school, lest we forget.
I'd have a swig off the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer out of my blue denim jacket pocket, where I could quickly and easily tuck it back in if need be, and it would be just another teenage bulge no one wants to talk about if some adult happened along. It was night anyway, and my eyes were sharp like a hawk then, and my hearing just as good. The Pabst beer I'd either gotten off Uncle Walt by hook or by crook, or I'd otherwise kif't off someone else's stash.
You're not picky about where the booze ("boos"! -- as Uncle Walt's ghost would croak out ) comes from when you've got that fledgling teenage alkie wantin' wanton HUSSEY BLOOD thing revin' up inside of ya! Damn the torpedoes -- and pass me one! I'm here to tell you, I was plenty resourceful, to get my "boos" and when push came to shove, I might not have been first in line, (I didn't need to be) but I knew all about scuttlin' 'round the places like a wharf rat, where I could get my share! You bet-ya! God be with the days now long gone. Under-age drinkin'? Whass that?? Didn't mean a thing. That it eventually caught up to me as bloodless and bled dry as a cod fish filleted, or Uncle Walt's ghost pawing over-n-across the veil from the realms of the unseen -- "the here-after and evermore" -- well that's simply written in the HUSSEY BLOODLINE. In blood, and bloodlessness alike. I got the genes right in me like the rest of 'em that makes me another chip off the old block...uh. . .head.
Uh. . .block. . .uh. . .head was about the size of it too: I was just another drunk for a long time completely set up, until I got straight.
But back then on that particular Port Clyde night I'm talkin' 'bout right here and right now, and sooooo many others just like it (most vividly) my junior year in high school with my whole life out in front of me, catchin' a buzz didn't matter a lick. It was what we did, and the way it was. I had no idea about twenty, or thirty, much less what it would be like to be forty or fifty years old. My "future self" was as much a ghost to me as were my HUSSEY ancestors. "Pass me ovah a cold-one, bubby" could have been written as the family motto underneath the HUSSEY flag-crest, or what to hell, it would make a grand tattoo for all the rest of us descendants.
So that spring night I trod down "Cony's road". . . the one they call the co-op road now, where Cony's fish-shack still sat derelict by the water and I'd have a swill, listening along to the sounds of the familiar ocean, and the sound that one culvert underneath the road made as it drained the spring run-off into the cove right in front of Cony's fish-shack. Everything was a-stir. And even though Cony was stone cold dead by then out underneath the "Ridge church stars", and Uncle Walt was very much alive those nights, it was Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost that tailed me home with every breath I'd take."
c.w. o.
Abbreviated (or otherwise kif't) from my journal as a recovering alcoholic.
"In the springtime when I was a teenager and things were letting go from winter and the whole village was in the absolute dregs of it, I'd walk the streets of Port Clyde at night, breathing in the town, because I knew it wasn't always going to be like this. (I'd read Thoreau's book "On Walden Pond" by then, and made the pilgrimage down in a "field trip". THAT Walden, didn't much resemble Thoreau's take on it, let me tell you -- and if THAT could happen to WALDEN POND, I knew the sad truth it was going to play out in the cards for my Port Clyde, too).
But this time we are talkin' now is at the ass-end of junior-year in high-school, lest we forget.
I'd have a swig off the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer out of my blue denim jacket pocket, where I could quickly and easily tuck it back in if need be, and it would be just another teenage bulge no one wants to talk about if some adult happened along. It was night anyway, and my eyes were sharp like a hawk then, and my hearing just as good. The Pabst beer I'd either gotten off Uncle Walt by hook or by crook, or I'd otherwise kif't off someone else's stash.
You're not picky about where the booze ("boos"! -- as Uncle Walt's ghost would croak out ) comes from when you've got that fledgling teenage alkie wantin' wanton HUSSEY BLOOD thing revin' up inside of ya! Damn the torpedoes -- and pass me one! I'm here to tell you, I was plenty resourceful, to get my "boos" and when push came to shove, I might not have been first in line, (I didn't need to be) but I knew all about scuttlin' 'round the places like a wharf rat, where I could get my share! You bet-ya! God be with the days now long gone. Under-age drinkin'? Whass that?? Didn't mean a thing. That it eventually caught up to me as bloodless and bled dry as a cod fish filleted, or Uncle Walt's ghost pawing over-n-across the veil from the realms of the unseen -- "the here-after and evermore" -- well that's simply written in the HUSSEY BLOODLINE. In blood, and bloodlessness alike. I got the genes right in me like the rest of 'em that makes me another chip off the old block...uh. . .head.
Uh. . .block. . .uh. . .head was about the size of it too: I was just another drunk for a long time completely set up, until I got straight.
But back then on that particular Port Clyde night I'm talkin' 'bout right here and right now, and sooooo many others just like it (most vividly) my junior year in high school with my whole life out in front of me, catchin' a buzz didn't matter a lick. It was what we did, and the way it was. I had no idea about twenty, or thirty, much less what it would be like to be forty or fifty years old. My "future self" was as much a ghost to me as were my HUSSEY ancestors. "Pass me ovah a cold-one, bubby" could have been written as the family motto underneath the HUSSEY flag-crest, or what to hell, it would make a grand tattoo for all the rest of us descendants.
So that spring night I trod down "Cony's road". . . the one they call the co-op road now, where Cony's fish-shack still sat derelict by the water and I'd have a swill, listening along to the sounds of the familiar ocean, and the sound that one culvert underneath the road made as it drained the spring run-off into the cove right in front of Cony's fish-shack. Everything was a-stir. And even though Cony was stone cold dead by then out underneath the "Ridge church stars", and Uncle Walt was very much alive those nights, it was Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost that tailed me home with every breath I'd take."
c.w. o.
Abbreviated (or otherwise kif't) from my journal as a recovering alcoholic.
