From Jim Rose

very cool advice and informative info, thanks to Jim Rose ! XXX JIM ROSE OF THE JIM ROSE CIRCUS PRESS KIT This is a unique press kit in that Jim's assistant came up with over 30 questions and had Jim answer them. Of course he is available for interviews as well but almost every question imaginable has been answered in this format. Change the wording of the questions to fit your publication's style if you wish or use it as it is. Let's just have fun with it. To contact Jim please send email to: jimrosecircus@jimrosecircus.com For 300 dpi glossy magazine quality photos please click this link ---- http://s1295.photobucket.com/user/jimrosefan1/library/JIM%20ROSE?sort=2&page=1 For background about Jim Rose, his tours, books he has written, appearances on television shows, the X-Files and the Simpsons, along with his weekly TV show on the Travel Channel “The Jim Rose Twisted Tour”, click this link for Wikipedia, bio and Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jim-Rose-Circus/73911349699 And now the questions and answers for your article: SO YOUR BOOK SNAKE OIL HAS JUST BEEN RE-RELEASED ON KINDLE BY BARTLEBY PRESS. FOR THOSE THAT ARE NOT AWARE, WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT? Snake Oil is an eclectic encyclopedia of all things scam, fraud, rip off, con and con artists, the tricks behind the tricks including bar bets, brain washing, hypnotism, illusions and crazy stunts. The book's purpose is to explain the psychology of having a streeet education so that the core motivators of action (why people do what they do) can be used in legal ways for DIY marketing. It is a collection of all things street wise. WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF? JR: one day I had an epiphany.." give punk a new tentacle...do it with sideshow..the old ways weren't working for that genre anyways so force this stuff in to rock clubs..most of these stunts haven't been seen in 20 years..there is a lost generation..fuck it i'm going to try this..sure beats a cubicle"...best decision I've ever made. Now there are 100s of troupes all over the world doing it..every time I see new performers or shows I get a tingle..half of them don't even know about my show..that's cool too...together we brought a slice of lost art back on our own youthful terms. YOUR DESCRIPTION OF THE JIM ROSE CIRCUS If I was a complete virgin to the Jim Rose Circus and had never heard of you, what would be your description of it to me? JR: You'll see the unexpected. Thrills, chills and doctor bills. A ticket's good for a seat but you'll only use the edge. It's over-the top high-flying bone-jarring excitement. Not since Christians were fed to the lions has there been a show this hysterical. But I bet if I told you that there was an episode of the SIMPSONS where Homer ran away to the join my circus as the human cannonball, you would in fact realize that you are familiar with me. Or if I told you that I was in one of the most popular episodes of the XFILES or had my own weekly tv show on the TRAVEL CHANNEL, you may go "oh, okay, I do know him." But if you don't have any of that reference to help you along, just expect the unexpected. YOUR EARLY YEARS The best place to start would be your beginnings, what was the family life like with your parents? JR: Christian. So there was a heavy dose of moral dogma? JR: Yeah, and it was always fluid, the doctrine was never set in concrete. It changed as the selfish needs of my parents needed them to. So what applied to the good book one day, didn't necessarily the next; they were hypocrites but aren't we all? Tell us about your early years. Where did you grow up, and how did you end up honing your skills in Europe before coming to national prominence in 1992? JR: I was born premature and cross eyed. My father was an amateur magician and mentalist. After birth I was so small I had to stay at the hospital in an incubator for 2 weeks. Standard cribs were too big so when I was brought home my parents fitted me in a shoe box to serve as my first bed. My mother used to joke that she didn't remember how much I weighed but she did know I was a women's size 7. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona as something of a freak myself, not getting corrective surgery for my crossed-eyes until the age of eight. I lived across the street from the fairgrounds and went to all the traditional circuses, monster truck shows, motorcycle daredevils, freak shows and legitimate theater that came to town. My first job was at the fairgrounds, doing odd jobs like going around selling soft drinks. I fetched soft drinks and cigarettes for the Lobster Boy, the Penguin Boy, the Frog Boy. I was doing that for awhile and then learned to do the human blockhead and learned how to be a motorcycle daredevil. That was my first real job, but I had a little motorcycle accident. I attempted to jump 27 cows and must have landed on some spent cud. I went a bit wobbly, I cleared the cows but still managed to crash. I hurt my back so that's why when I speak to you today I have the posture of a jumbo shrimp. I kind of gave up on entertaining for a while: I attended the University of Arizona and studied political science, moved to Washington DC and dabbled in spoken word performances, played in punk bands and the like while working on fundraising events for social causes (as well as a stint in car sales). I used to perform at a place called D.C. Space that was back in the day of Henry Rollins and Fugazi, this was right about 1984-85. I was there when that happened, I didn't break because I was not very good at that time, I only got started. At one of my shows I ran into a little French girl named Bebe who comes from a circus family in France. She has been my beloved wife for over 25 spectacular years. She took me to France and I began working with her family circus. She introduced me to the European tradition of circus spectacle, which inspired me to research it thoroughly. Her brother is the director of the Royal De Luxe, the largest circus in Europe; one sister and her German husband have the Randalini circus, and I used to travel with them, going around the Lake of Constance. So I learned a great deal about circus stuff and freak shows at that time, I didn't know too much about how to run a freak show. It was hard to find anything about it in the US because it had disappeared for about fifteen years. So I brought some of the American stunts over there and I picked up some Euro stunts, brought them back to the US. I then went to Venice beach where I worked as Jimmy the Geek Rubber Man, I got my presentation skills up doing seven shows a day, seven days a week as a street performer. That is how I made my money - fucking with tourists... Then I started the Jim Rose Circus and reintroduced American audiences to freak-show attractions in Seattle and it seemed like likeminded monsters sat up in their crypts and started auditioning. Things went so well in Seattle that we went down to Portland,OR and that sold out, and soon we were asked to tour Canada. We became so well known in Canada that we started getting calls to do TV shows and then things exploded. It all happened in about a 6 month period. Considering the circus was put together before the age of Facebook and Craigslist, how did you manage to pull together all the people involved? JR: Yeah, like I said, like minded people sat up in their crypts and started to audition. There was a little click of people that were interested in it and there was no place really to perform this stuff. I would go around the clubs in Seattle and talk to the owners about it and they would look at me like I killed the Lindberg kid. I found this little Middle Eastern restaurant that was across the street from my house called Ali Baba's, which on Thursday nights they had belly dancers. So I talked to the owners Ali and Baba, whatever I don't remember their names, and I ended up doing a gig. I put up some posters and I thought that I would get about twenty of my friends; instead I got there two hours early and the place was packed with a line outside. Since everyone had gotten in early so they didn't have to pay, I had to start the show going around getting money from everyone. There was this group of people outside who refused to pay and pressed their faces against the window of the restaurant. I was just winging it at the time, didn't even know what my show was going to be since I thought no one was would show up; so I started the show off talking to those people staring through the window. In that melee of people were individuals like Kurt Cobain and a few other names that escape my mind, so I went outside with a plastic bat and told the people they had to pay a dollar or I would hit them over the head with the bat. The people on the inside who had already paid the 6 dollars to be inside got to watch. I turned the people outside INTO the show. Everyone inside was looking outside at me going around collecting those dollars, if they didn't have a dollar I would bop them on the head with the plastic bat. That is pretty much how the show got started, I got back in and did my shit, it was pretty punk. I guess that is why I get some kind of weird credibility, because before that show punk pretty much meant rock and roll, and I pretty much expanded it to include performance type art that wasn't musical. LOLLAPALOOZA In '92 your show saw its breakthrough point with Lollapalooza, how did you end up getting recruited for the festival? JR: I'd done a sold out tour of Canada and I'd done some national television in the US. Perry Farrell saw the Sally Jessie Raphael show and he asked me to join up. We did and we've not looked back since. At the time I had no idea who his band was. Hell the first day of Lollapalooza someone pointed out this band to me and said “look it is Jane's Addiction!” I said “well I hope she gets treatment.” The festival itself was so beyond anything given to the public at that time, what did you think of the whole event? Any crazy stories that come to mind? JR: That is true because most of them were stationary at the time. As for the crazy stories, that time was really a spunk incrusted blur..Yeah it is pretty blurry. A lot of alcohol fueled nights? JR: No a lot of complete stress. I was on MTV everyday, so it was very hard to go out in public and the first time I ever had to deal with anything like that. Of course as soon as it stopped airing on TV everyone stopped recognizing me. TOURING WITH NINE INCH NAILS From what I understand the festival was when you first began to be friends with Trent Reznor, what brought you guys together and how did that lead up to you touring with him for the Downward Spiral Tour? JR: Actually that is not true. I had gotten a phone call, I had heard that he had come to a few of my shows and watched it. I was a bit clueless...I was about ten years older than everyone on that tour. I get on Lollapalooza and go oh boy! So I picked up a copy of Spin Magazine and watched about twenty minutes of MTV and I said oh I see they have this new edit thing going on, where you see everything quick quick quick, these days you see it on every network but it was a new edit style back then. These audience wanted it fast with the F word. I was the first to do an MTV type of a live show, I made it feel like you needed a swivel on your neck with how fast we were doing the performance, it felt like Biblical times, there were miracles happening everywhere. That was the type of feeling I was going for but with a little more of a growl as a character. X-FILES AND THE SIMPSONS You've appeared in a few culturally significant television shows, such as acting in the X-Files and being immortalized in The Simpsons. How did the X-Files gig come about? JR: Chris Carter, the producer, read my book (FREAK LIKE ME), he was a fan and so was David Duchovny. They originally got in touch with me to see if I could do something on the show. I'd never heard of the X-Files I was touring Europe at the time and I said no, and they came back again and again, they were very adamant and I said no. Then my agent called me up one day and said, you know this is a pretty big show, and said they will let me help write the script if I decide to be in it. Which I replied “now I definitely don't want to be in it because that sounds like too much work”. They called back with a good offer, so I said okay, I won't help write it; Darin Morgan wrote it and he did a really good job. The episode was Humbug from the second season of the X-Files and I was featured as Dr Blockhead. Trivia fans may be curious to know that Gillian Anderson ate a live cricket after a dare from me during the filming. It was the first real curve ball episode, I was the lead murder suspect in it, they do fan favorite voting and that episode comes in at number one or number two all the time. And then The Simpsons, well they got a hold of me, they wanted to do a Homer-palooza. They knew that my show was pretty much the vibe of that festival for many years. My wife Bebe is the Human Cannonball in the Jim Rose Circus, so Homer basically took her place in that episode. That's quite some swap. JR:Yeah, I swapped my wife for a cartoon. After The X-Files and The Simpsons, things changed for us. People perceived us differently. We got the rock-and-roll tour buses and nice hotels. It was like some kind of pop-culture thing going on. Did the X-Files give you a taste for acting? Can we expect to see you in the movies? JR: There's this movie out with Ben Affleck who I just beat in poker for a bit of money. His production company, Project Greenlight, did this thing in the US, called Outing Riley, and I'm a priest in it, and I actually play it straight. On the topic of film productions, there was a series on HBO called Carnivale which centered on a traveling freak show circus. Have you seen it and do you think it would have been better done with you and your crew? JR: Actually I was asked to be in it, but I was too busy. I had a really big career in Europe and Australia so I was not in the US as often as I would like to be. THE BOOK SNAKE OIL Are you a debunker, like Penn and Teller or James Randi? Or do you just leave them to get on with their own thing? JR: Well, in my book Snake Oil, there's a lot of debunking! Do you think other performer and magicians are going to get upset because you're revealing the trade secrets? JR: No, you know, I don't care! Some of that stuff, like how to train a bear to ride a bicycle, or how to hypnotize different animals, is going to get lost forever, and one of the reasons to put out Snake Oil was to make sure that the information was preserved. Although there's a caveat at the beginning, warning that many of the tricks are dangerous, do you think that there's a danger people will use this book as a manual and try some of the more dangerous tricks like being run over by a car? JR: Yeah, that's a concern of mine, and I hope they don't, and I hope they have somebody that's right there on the spot that can help with it. A lot of the stuff in the book could land you in jail; it's not exactly illegal, it's a sort of psychological manipulation, calculations, misdirections that take place in every day life. So I hope people don't use it to, uh, become a pimp and turn girls into prostitutes, and I'm hoping people will use this book in a positive way. Its goal really is to show what's out there so that you don't get taken. Snake Oil had some hysterical bar tricks, including the old pick up the $10 bill trick where did you gather these pranks from? JR: You know what? I had so much stuff in my head that I just didn't want it to get lost. This is stuff you would only know if you had hung around hustlers in the 70s and 80s, and that is what I did. I just didn't want it to be lost, since I was one of the few old guys left who could get it published. My motivation was what does a street education mean? You hear about it all the time, now to get that degree you have to go through a ton of hard knocks. So I figured I would give people their street education without the hard knocks. The second tier of the reason why I decided to write the book was, for example: brain washing! You can read a 200 page book on brainwashing and at the end of the book you know about as much about it as when you started. Then it dawns on you, wow I could have distilled that into about two paragraphs and I would have understood it! So why did the author need to write 200 pages? Because that is what a fucking book is. And that really frustrated me. I just came from the position that everything in the book could be summed up in a few paragraphs, this is what it is so here it is. The third motivation behind the book was to allow people after reading it to be dumped off into a country that they didn't know the language and still be able to make a living and survive. I wanted to chock that book full of different kinds of information: how to scam people, how to change your identity, how to disguise yourself, how to win a fight if cornered, how to do easy jail time if you have to go to jail, how to win free pints at a pub, different magic tricks, circus stunts, how to get even with people... it's an eclectic encyclopedia on all things“shysterish”. I thought that'd be fun to put that out.But the most important point for the book came one day when I had an epiphany."What if all the street psychology I've learned was used in a legal way as part of a DIY marketing strategy?" I tried it with a show I was barely able to perform, it was all a bunch of made up on the spot BS. I called it the Jim Rose Circus. Due to my marketing angles that very first show sold out and I never looked back.I ended up on the covers of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL,FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE and was the featured example of advertising acumen in the best selling business book THE DEVIANTS ADVANTAGE. The problem with getting a real street education is that you have to go through a lot of hard knocks and pain for the degree. In 2005 I remedied that dilemma for the masses. I wrote the most complete book ever offered on all things scam fraud and con artist. What did I name the book? "SNAKE OIL". That was pretty much what I wanted to accomplish with the book, and a few other topics that fit into those categories that I could pull off. It is about a 200 page book but you get about 700-800 scams from it. The response has been huge by the way; on Amazon.com they've really been selling a ton of 'em! Out of curiosity, have you seen the 1932 cult classic movie Freaks? What are your thoughts on it? JR: Of course, but I hadn't seen it until I already had a career...well I wouldn't say had a career, but I was already doing it. I was still punkin it in Seattle...without a Mohawk, I had really long hair. I had hair in places that monkeys don't. VIDEO GAMES Any video games? JR: EA sports SSX Tricky. I am Psymon. And they liked that game so much I am also Psymon on the new one - Sled Storm II. THE NAME You've relocated for a while from Portland, OR to Las Vegas. So what was once the "Jim Rose Circus Sideshow" is now an act in Vegas? JR: Yeah, we knocked off the "Sideshow" part in 1994 after we sold out three straight nights in Madison Square Garden. We're the Jim Rose Circus now, not really much of a sideshow after that point. YOUR AUDIENCE Is there a typical audience member you guys tend to attract? JR: There is no such thing anymore. I have been around too long. You will see a biker next to a cowboy, next to a punk rocker, next to a University artist, next to a lesbian. And they are all pointing at the stage, laughing, and slapping each other on the back. I pretty much bring communities together. God's work. BEING A PRECURSOR You were a precursor for much of the grunge performance art and circus sideshows, and things like Jackass, and Dirty Sanchez in the UK. Do you feel like you're the grandaddy of this stuff? JR: Well, a lot of the Jackass guys have said publicly that I am. I knew 'em back when they were little mules. They are good guys. Dirty Sanchez, not very familiar, but I've been around since they were clean! I know in the United States and I don't necessarily agree with this but publications like Time, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal give me credit for starting a fashion trend for piercing and tattooing: the circus brought it to national consciousness, prior to other entities. There are other reasons why that took off, but they do call me “the God of Bod Mod”! which is as close to hip as Newsweek can get! You have seen so many people jump on the band wagon how have you stayed ahead of your own curve to keep up? JR: Yeah, twenty years ago I started with a guy with a few tattoos and one piercing. Now, that guy's your next door neighbor. But with Jim Rose Circus, I have a brand. I was on the covers of the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company... I'm not this trained business guy but I have an idea about what it takes to convince people that their life is incomplete if they don't buy a ticket, plan an evening, get in their car and see something that their better nature tells them not to. YOUR SHOW ELEMENTS Tell the bile beer story. JR:We do an act that has a performer thread 7 feet of tubing into his stomach via the nose and we use a huge cylinder and pump all kinds of stuff into the stomach (mostly beer and Pepto Bismol) then we do a reversal and pump the stomach contents back into the cylinder and pour the concoction into a cup and the performer drinks it.The joke with that stunt went "It's the after after taste he worries about". One night Chris Cornell of SOUNDGARDEN walked on stage and drank it. Eddie Vedder of PEARL JAM saw this and came up the next night, then Al Jourgansen, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gibby from the Butthole Surfers, all came up the next night to partake. It made MTV. After that we needed extra security because at shows the audience would rush the stage to drink the vomit. Do you still do that stunt? JR: We still do the act, but it's done in a more scientific and explanatory way. And audience participation is not encouraged. We're not really doing a gross and disgusting show anymore; it's more of a thrill show. It's like P.T. Barnum meets John Waters. It's a much, much bigger show now. In your circus, there seems to be an element of returning to an almost Victorian sense of the macabre. Are you a fan of those old-style touring freak shows and carnivals? JR: You know I used to be, but I gotta tell ya, there were so many people that were I guess we could say inspired, other people would say imitating, my 1992 and 1993 act, word for word. It was my original inspiration but then I got into power tools and lawnmowers and chainsaws, the different things you can do with stuff like that, twenty-first century phobias like Super-Glue, etcetera. And then I morphed into kind of a big wrestling show for a few years like women Sumo wrestling, Mexican Transvestite Wrestling, etc.. It is an amazing thing though, I took out women Sumo wrestling and Mexican transvestite wrestling back in '97. That was my biggest selling show, I did 17,000 $35 tickets in just about every city doing theatre runs. Tell me about Mexican transvestites wrestling. JR: Yeah! The transvestite wrestling, with the face masks! I was just smoking pot one day and I thought to myself “Mexican transvestite wrestling? Now that would be cool.” First of all they wear dildos, and the rules of the contest are simple: the first sissy who can force into the other one's mouth for a one-two-three count wins. Slapping is allowed, but fisting, kicking and biting is illegal. No holes barred. There will be no chickens at this cock-fight, all the action takes place below the belt, and it's a fudge-packin' grudge match. It is the Mexican Transvestite Wrestling Panty Weight Division Championship Bout. The belt is on the line, and the bras are gonna fly when these mix it up. We have Low Blow Ventura, Trailer Trash Guerrero, Pickles Valdez and Billy Martinez "The Barrio Bottom." He is every man's woman and every woman's man, you will always find him at the bottom of the pile. I am not sure that he even wants to win. He will be going up against, probably the sexiest man alive, Tickles Valdez - now these two are former Fag Team partners, and they hate each other with a pansy passion because Tickles stole Martinez's lover. Billy Martinez is probably the favorite, because he/she studied Filipino slap-fighting. Tickles Valdez, on the other hand, can take a good bitch-slap, and is known for breaking the rules. They've got a bone to pick, and they settle it all across the country! That is some of the patter. I know I didn't want it to be like regular wrestling. The wrestlers were all contortionists and the audience didn't know it, so when they started ripping each other's arms and legs back, it looked very violent. And what about women Sumo wrestling? JR: I've got one young lady whose measurements are 36-24-36 and that's just one leg. You'll feel the earth shake when over 800 pounds of female flesh collide. We've got Tundra, Large Marge, Judy "The Bull Moose" Jenkins and Katie "The Pile Driver" Wilson tipping the scale at a dainty six hundred pounds.. We're also looking for full-figured ladies to challenge our world champions. I pay them by the pound. Their diet is pretty impressive, with lots and lots of hamburgers and rice. Mmmm... That's some patter as well. Do you look for something particular in your performers, as in their history or presentation? How do you find the people you feature in your circus? JR: Actually, I come up with weird ideas and then I find people. It can be tough, like with women's Sumo wrestlers. How do you recruit women Sumo wrestlers? JR: That was tough. You don't just go up to a large woman and ask what she weights or if she wants to be a sumo wrestler because she will knock you into next week. The ad I wrote up in the Seattle Times saying "seeking full-bodied women willing to travel around the world" led to mixed results. Aside from the people calling back saying "'full bodied' is a wine, you mean full figured” or girls calling up at 120 pounds thinking of themselves as big, or when a qualified applicant would call up, the phrase "women's sumo wrestling" would get them to immediately hang up. If I approached a large woman on the streets, I'd get slapped. What did it was putting an ad out that said "seeking women, 250 pounds plus to tour the world with performance show." Then they started calling in, all the right ones, and I would just start small-talking them about the Jim Rose Circus, and every year it is a different theme. This year the theme is wrestling and we will have all kinds of different wrestling; sumo, midget, Mexican, etc. and I'd ask “By the way how tall are you? How much do you weight? How long have you lived in Seattle? Do you like it?etc” Then I would close the conversation with "hey, I have a meeting, let me think about it and call you back tomorrow." Then I would call back the next day and say "we had a great talk last night, I think we'd work well together, but there's only one position open and it's women sumo wrestling... I don't think you'd really qualify but I'd be willing to give you a shot. Could you gain a few pounds?" As soon as I said gain a few pounds, they were all fine with it! "Sure! I'll eat ten hamburgers a day!" That approach seemed to work. Chainsaw football? You refer to that as if it's something that has made its way into common vernacular. JR: Oh yeah, that's a whole new meaning for "halfback." It's just like football, but instead of a ball we use a chainsaw. The blades are on, we touch stuff with them to demonstrate before we play the game. You've always been a performer as well as a ringleader, are you having as much of a hands-on experience with the show as you once did? JR: Yes, I come up with the concepts, write the stuff. I try to stay funny. Lately I've had a girl who comes out nude. I tell her to put her clothes on and she pulls her top out of her butt, her bottoms out of her vagina and then puts them on. And a girl that blows blue paint out of her butt. She's a real, uhh... artist. Her rearenderings are a mixed media. Seeing someone squirting blue paint out of their ass isn't exactly something you see every week at the Saturday market... ... She's a Pablo Picasshole. They sell her paintings on eBay. You'd be surprised how many people want that painting when she finishes it. She basically takes an enema before she steps onstage, so it comes out all Grateful Dead tie-die-shirt-ish. THE PERFORMERS You've had some extremely interesting performers get their starts and learn their stunts from you, including pierced weight lifters (a man who is capable of lifting more than the average bodybuilder... with his dick), Enigma and the Lizard Man (tattooed head to toe) and The Human Pincushion. What has changed or evolved since 1994? JR: The show looks nothing like that anymore. It was a very imitated type of show, one that you could probably see on any corner anywhere today, but back then it was pretty hot. Tell me about the pierced weight lifter. JR: He's actually changed his act now. He's lifting a 17-pound car battery while receiving an electrical shock with his tongue. He also lifts the concrete block with the nipples and the irons with the ears, and he lifts 'em all at the same time, all three. Of course, he still does his famous lift with the part of him that's most a mister. That thing has gotten huge! It's got an elbow! It gets its own lunch money! He's looking for a significant other who can house his manhood. He may have to go to a Realtor. I heard rumors about his penis falling off. JR: Oh yes..we were in a shopping cart - the whole circus for a photo shoot, and he had the cart attached to his man hammer through a chain to pull us. He leans back, takes the cart to the precipice. The shopping cart didn't move like it was supposed to, and I look down at the end of the chain, and his best friend is hanging on the floor. Thank god cooler heads prevailed, and we managed to get that head in the cooler. In his surgery, they did not add any length girth. They took skin off of his butt and grafted it to his shaft. He says that now when he scratches his ass he gets an erection. It is what it is - it looks like a dogs chew toy. Now that he has fully recovered from the John Wayne Bobbit-style operation it is now bigger, harder and meaner than the Alaskan Pipeline, and it carries more spew. It will freeze your seed before it hits the restroom tile. It has a heart, a lung, and a mind all its own. It is like a baby's arm holding an apple. Any new favorites? JR: This year I've been really proud of The World's Fattest Contortionist, we've been taking him out, along with this new kid who's been featured on my TV show. ACCIDENTS Any more accidents to report? JR: Oh sure. I mean if you could see me right now, you would say "Jim - next to you, the Elephant Man just looks a little puffy." We do this thing in each show where we come up with challenges for the others to do. And we know each other pretty well, so we know what each other hates. So I pulled out "Spray yourself in the face with bear repellent." I have been sprayed with pepper spray. Lots of times. Pepper spray is a no-brainer, double entendre intended. Now pepper spray is the premature little sister of bear repellent. I mean - I know it sounds cool to spray yourself in the fact with bear repellent, but I want the readers to know that it is not a good idea. We also had a performer lose a little toe in a chainsaw football game. That's a very underrated toe. You'd be surprised how much a little toe helps with balance. You don't realize it until you lose it. BLOOD For all your fame for presenting human oddities is there anything that you wouldn't do in your show, or let one of your performers do? JR: Well, anytime there are stunts done successfully and it still creates blood, or if it has to do with mutilation, I won't do it. If I put my face in broken glass and let people stomp on the back of my head and I come out looking like a hamburger, that's not success. I mean, there is no blood or any of that in the show. I can't seem to get away from the myths of '91 and '92. And at this point the legend around those shows is so skewed, it's nowhere near reality. There has never been live mutilation or blood in The Jim Rose Circus. But I'll be damned if you ask some kids out there who think they knew what happened back in the old days, they are going to tell you all kinds of stuff... I had a guy one time who said 'Look Jim, here's what I can do: Audience members can hold my eyes open while other audience members dump buckets of dirt in them." And I knew he was wearing the thick contacts, and I knew he was microwaving the dirt to keep a lot of the potential for infection away. Still, I was noticing that the weight of dumping that dirt all at the same time was letting dirt get through the contacts and scratch the retina. And I just thought that it wasn't foolproof enough to be in a professional circus. The Jim Rose Circus has always relied heavily on a bizarre kind of comedy and that's what the audience expects, and the stunts are not secondary but they are vehicles to spin comedy around. FAINTING Has anyone fainted in your shows? JR: The Human Dartboard is the first human marvel act that made my jaw drop. The Dartboard's response is something I haven't forgotten. Hundreds of people have fainted during that act over the years. You only get a lot of people to faint if you tell them they might ahead of time. It's all the power of suggestion. It's an instruction I have used well in my own exploits as freak-show provocateur. We used to have a fainters' corner during the Human Dartboard act where significant others with a rag would be patting down the foreheads and wiping the bubbles from their lovers' noses. MAINSTREAM Do you think such gruesome fair still isn't acceptable to the masses? JR: Just turn on your TV set and take a gander at Guinness World Records or most of the FOX schedule. Today you see acts on prime time television that I was being thrown in jail for in '91 and '92. TOURING Is it better going out with just the circus instead of opening for a band and not being the center of attention? JR: Well, I had some of the most fun I've ever had touring with Trent [Reznor, Nine Inch Nails]. We've been good friends for a long time. But I've got more freedom and time when we headline. Is the ability to do what you do easier or harder when touring the United States compared to other areas? JR: We do a lot of touring outside of the U.S. We do Europe, South Africa, all over. One of the biggest draws is in Australia. Our following is really strange, and I can't explain why. I just did Houston, a comedy club for a week, and sold it out. Two-thousand people that came that week, they were all mainstream and my older crowd. Then, in the same city at a rock club, I did eleven hundred younger people who would never have gone to the comedy club, and vice versa. It's an odd demographic. I do best in the theaters, but because I'm "rock and roll" or "comedy" according to the United States, mostly because I did one tour with Nine Inch Nails and a younger Marilyn Manson in addition to a few other shows. I have a hard time booking a theatre in the United States, but it's where we do best. When you're in a theatre, it's art. They let you do everything, it's accepted. It's what the artist intended, it's what's ascertained and then accepted based on its merits. Which country loves your circus the most? JR: It's pretty similar, but I have to give a nod to Australia. What do you do when you're not touring? JR: I play poker professionally. CHARACTERS YOU MET ON THE ROAD Have you met some shady characters on your travels around the globe? JR: Luckily yeah. Luckily because that really fascinates me. Can you give me any examples? Do you come across people who go “Jim Rose? I'll try and outsmart him!” JR: I had a guy one time in the live show who absolutely would not participate in any way shape or form during my hypnotist act. He wouldn't look me in the eyes, he wouldn't follow any of my instructions when I tried to put him under hypnosis, and I was under a lot of pressure because there were a couple of thousand people in the audience. Off the microphone so the crowd couldn't hear, I whispered into his ear, “just play along and I'll give you a hundred dollars”. As soon as I said it, he rolled around the floor like a pig in mud and completely humiliated himself. At the end I said, "stand up, before I count to three to bring you out of hypnosis I want to leave you with a powerful thought: for the rest of your life you will believe and you'll tell your friends that Jim Rose owes you money, one, two, three, you are out of hypnosis, ladies and gentlemen give him a big hand!" He walked back into the crowd saying, "he said he'd give me a hundred dollars!" and nobody believed him! Hahaha! Gimme your greatest freak show groupie story. JR: We were in Holland once, and we had this girl come up to us before the show and she says "I am the Candle Lady. I stick a candle in my vagina, flip my legs back over my head, light the candle, take a sip of gasoline, and blow a huge fire ball between my legs." And we thought "Ok - cool." We didn't have anything else to do at the time. So she takes off her clothes, lays on her back, sticks the cuntle in her cant, flips her legs back, takes the sip of gas, and blows a huge fire ball - creating much more heat than a candle is used to. So it melts the candle, and the wax ran down and created a pool in her anus. Now, she pulls the candle out, and we all applauded. When she stood up she bowed, and I heard this ping on the floor it was the clump of wax that had been in her butt - it was an exact replica of her sphincter. I could have made a key. You've met William S. Burroughs right? JR: I have met a lot of famous people in my time, but the coolest moment was when William Burroughs came to my show. Al Jourgensen was the one who brought him to my show in Lawrence, KS. He had a cane but he didn't need it, he basically used it to bat people away as he walked by. I knew that he loved Ferdinand Celine (French writer), I believe his favorite of his books was Journey to the Edge of Night but I could be wrong. Anyways I meet Burroughs for the first time, and I had no idea what to say to him. So I said “hey Mr. Burroughs what do you think about Ferdinand Celine?” And he replied “he's dead”. So now when people ask me about Burroughs I say “he's dead”. Figured I would carry it on. BOOKS In the realm of books, you have written three yourself ( Freak Like Me, Snake Oil & Your Lucky Book) how different was it to make this leap from performer to writer? JR: About as easy as it was to make a leap into an actor. If you want a green suit I have a green suit, if you want a blue suit I have a blue suit. I was a writer before I was anything and then it was spoken word which was basically telling stories. My book Freak Like Me was sold as a movie. They've got the script now, and they're going to start trying to cast it. That ought to be an interesting project. But I'm not going to act in it. There's also a documentary being done on us. Both of them will go to theaters. What would people be surprised to learn about you that they won't glean from the books and documentaries? JR: In Freak Like Me, I guess I pretty much give it up. I don't think there are many surprises, really, because I was pretty open. But I guess people who haven't read it would be surprised how much I love my wife, and how I spend my down time with her, taking long walks with her and playing pinball. JAKE THE SNAKE ROBERTS Recently you just went on tour with Jake The Snake Roberts how did this crazy idea come about? Are you actually stepping in the ring with him? JR: Yes . You know the movie The Wrestler was based on the documentary called Beyond the Mat which featured Jake The Snake Roberts who has had some ups and downs as we all have and I was always a big fan. I would like one of my last stories to be touring with Jake The Snake Roberts. I wrote the show. It is basically pretty girls, amazing circus stunts, pro wrestling, and a fist fight. Who could ask for more? The story line is that I bring Jake out and talk about how great he is, and ask him some questions like what was it like to slam Andre the Giant. He will answer it, which you never know what Jake will say on any given night. So at some point in the evening he has to get the people to turn, which he is really good at, so to upset the audience and create the need for a fight he tells me that he appreciates my comments but he takes real offense by circus people. So we try to impress him, and Jake makes fun of every thing that we do and finally the circus attacks him and he beats the hell out of everybody; except me. So him and I finish off the show with a fight. When I booked the Jake The Snake show all these wrestlers started calling up from across the country getting in touch saying “I'll bring a table, I'll bring a trash can, I'll bring anything as long as Jake The Snake throws me through it!” TV SHOW JIM ROSE TWISTED TOUR Do you have final say on how the episodes of TV show The Jim Rose Twisted Tour turn out? JR: Oh, God no, that wouldn't have been fair. There are a lot of really creative people involved. I've got as much input as an idiot deserves. There's really good, savvy, smart TV people. I'm just a circus goof. But in the stage show, you have final say on what goes up there. Was it tough to give up control for the TV show? JR: Not really. During my live shows, there is a microphone on the left-hand side of the stage where any one of the performers can go say whatever they want whenever they want. Control freaks don't let that happen. You guys are all performers. Do things change when the reality show cameras are on you? JR: Well, I think everybody is aware there are cameras the first couple of days. But then you just get used to them. We're all crammed into a bus, which is a giant test tube on wheels. I know none of the footage where we were aware made it to the final shows, so you're getting a pretty true depiction of elements of what it's like. LEGAL LIMITS What legal limits most frustrate you? Would we get a better performance if there were no rules? JR: Well, in all other parts of the world, complete nudity is not offensive. I mean, I go all through Europe, Australia, Japan and Brazil, and nobody really cares. My women Sumo wrestlers wrestle all over the world topless. In some cities, they have to wear little pasties. And they're not topless for sexploitation purposes; it's because they're athletes, and they don't want to be hindered by extra clothing. ARRESTS Have you ever been arrested? JR: Yes I got arrested for Mexican Transvestite Wrestling in Lubbock, Texas. Of course, that's the buckle on the Bible Belt. The cops said we were simulating a sex act. If so, then they are fucking weirder than we are. The best compliment I could give my arresting officer was: "nice tooth." HISTORICAL FIGURES If you could be any one person from history, who would it be and why? JR: Winston Churchill. I hear Ron Jeremy picked Churchill, too...Great minds think alike. One time Winston was taking some journalists around his pig farm, and one of the journalists asked him why he liked pigs so much. And he said "Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, and pigs treat you as an equal." I always liked that. WHAT'S NEXT? Do you ever find yourself assimilating into popular society, or do you just say "fuck you, I'm Jim Rose, I do what I do." JR: I have a lot of assimilation issues. Lots of anxiety problems. I know I'm this guy that looks larger than life onstage, but I'm just this geeky individual. I'm not certain how to handle stuff in social situations real well, I'm not too good at it. I don't go out much. Could you imagine a parallel universe where you ended up working in an office? JR: I gave it a really good try in my youth, but it just wasn't working out for me. So I can't imagine a parallel universe at this stage of my career and life. I don't need to work really, I'd rather go fishing, it'd be impossible to get me into an office at this point. When I was younger I tried politics, but the attrition rate, the way they use people, was just something I couldn't stomach. Aside from all of this madness and debauchery, what dreams are left to achieve? JR: You know what, it's like an AA meeting, I take it one day at a time. I honestly just don't know and to tell you the truth never have known. I never put any stress into it. I did Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and Jerry Falwell, I smoked pot right in front of John Kennedy Jr., back before he got his pilot license. Trent Reznor used to be my roommate, I know David Bowie, I did Ozzy Osbourne's retirement party, and Sharon made the kids leave the room, William S. Burroughs used to come to my shows before he died, I was on the X-files, Homer ran away and joined The Jim Rose Circus on The Simpsons as a human cannonball. My only dream was a pop-out couch and a toaster, so I have to pinch myself daily to believe that all this is possible. Is there anything too freaky for the Jim Rose Circus? JR: Yeah - lunch with a lawyer. Do you have any advice for any young, aspiring freaks out there? JR: Try to stay away from bear repellent.

Buggin’ Out/two: American Plague Transducer

The house at 218 Glasgow speaks to me. It is one of Portsmouth’s many famously haunted houses. I lay upon her all day and she whispers the sickness to me. Sickness is a strange effect. Last night, as I pulled the Ford into Kitty Hawk again and made for the beer aisle that strange, effective teacher began to tighten my low back and needle my gut, like any old friend would. Her story is a fine one and I will tell you about it, but today is a little more pressing on my foreword memory. Naples and I had spent the last hour or so swapping stories of shitting one’s pants as we cleaned up the lead chips and spattered grey drop cloths. I don’t remember what got us on the subject, not as much as I remember that it is always a funny swap; good old fashioned stories of temporary incontinence. We have all had them. If you haven’t then you will; and if you don’t someday have the balls to tell them with friends you have known for life then you are living in a pretty sick nothing world. I stood next to the van, admiring the autographed picture of Dick Dale as I smoked some marijuana from a small metal pipe and felt what I thought might be a fart coming on, but stopped short, grabbing my stomach as I felt the pressure that was not the wind. I thought about heading up the block, to Portside to hit the crapper before heading home…standing there; momentarily silent and then decided against it. I hit the road, no problems. On the way down the coastal plain my stomach started in on me, and again with the low back pressure. It wasn’t like good gas pressure; it was like chewing gum stuck in your eye pressure. It was like something you would only remember from childhood; most likely something you would remember being of your own doing, something dumb. It felt pesky and inevitable. It was familiar and innocent. It was looming as frequency, and building behind stilled thoughts; hushed visions. Cold and hot, blinding and wet, an annoyance, but one for the examiners. It just felt like the start of something. It was the heat, the no food and the ladders. It was the ghosts of Yellow Fever and a widower sea captain and sick daughter. Once down again I walked into the grocer. I made my selection and my electronic self purchase. I was fighting with all that I had the feverish humidity that was enveloping my neck and mine alone. I squeezed hard at every below waist muscle and nevertheless found myself with mustard in my ass. Even straining, no release I felt a leak burst forth. I asked the attendant at the electronic self checkout if I might leave my purchase there a moment while I used their facilities. He agreed and I began the slow walk of a man trying to hold a glass of water between two hams; no glass for the water and the hams, well, the hams. It is that certain walk; the one you resort to when you have nothing left, and anyone who happens to be paying attention will notice. It looks like the walk of a cripple; slow and plodding-areas of the lower torso and legs contorted as if holding something. It is funny as hell to anyone but you, well, maybe even you if you are me and you just had this talk an hour and a half before. There was an ironic and justified understanding of this slight suffrage. I went into the grocer’s bathroom and made for the cleanest safety net in there, but standards drop in my position. I found a nice seat and the bottom of me fell out. There was a spraying, yellow, saline, jaundiced purpose about the explosion. I checked my shorts while seated there for any moist damage and lucky I was that I had not soiled them. I just cleaned up and walked out again, with the confident walk of a sane and sound man. I picked up my beer and made it back to the Ford. I popped one of the beers and knocked back about a third of it as I was driving back north on 12 for the last curl of that familiar track. When I got home I needed to rinse my brush and strip from the lead contaminated clothes I was in. My oldest daughter had been vomiting for the last few hours and the youngest had gone through about eighteen hours of it the day before. I began to unload my tools from the front floor board and a quick, short cough caught me unaware, and I puked up the beer I’d just taken. A cold cloud came over me like on a hot oceanfront day when a temperature inversion brings some otherworldly fog out of the deep and sprinkles salt tears all slowly over the pricking heat exhausted skin which lay spread upon the sand. I rushed to clean and spin my brush and then stripped down and made for the decontamination tank. After having been unleaded I threw on some clean shorts and a tee shirt. The wife and babes were lying on the couch under a thick, soft blanket and I wanted to lie down too! There was nowhere but the bed really, so I slid under the sheets and started my sweating. In just the past fifteen minutes I had become a shaking hell. My teeth chattered. My vertebrae felt fused. Every muscle convulsed as I lay still, eyes closed beneath the sheets in my cool, dank dungeon. That’s when the visuals hit me. That’s when I realized a whole new definition of illness, or rather, a different way to observe it; perceive it. It was not unlike a very strong mushroom trip. I just began the laying down and waiting for it to be over. I was convinced now that the sickness had burrowed inside of me too. I saw pictures but like holograms while unclear as well of the character of the virus, there were spirals and bright yellow colonial hatchings against the tarot card black rag woven scarf; like chess pieces posed and unmoving; bright, negative and supine on a borderless velvet battlefield…the watching of parading imagery was all that there was; it taught me in five minutes or five hours something that is revolutionary to me. I have been taught a new way to see. I thought of my daughters and I thought of that eighteenth century seaman with his. Closing my eyes I scrape the windows outside of the attic where his daughter drew last breath, and I tell him to myself, go away to light again, your daughter is waiting and well, again. You need to be with her, the sea is endless and entirely empty for you now. Only gales and whitecaps roll in the grey and the warm sunshine will never come back for you. Go, and be with her at home. I lie in bed and shake and my daughter brings me a penny; “Daddy, I found you this penny…were you looking all over for it?” Yes baby…thank you, I was looking all over for it. I love you. I would walk those steps I thought. I was now convicted; daydreams covered in toil get the best and I felt at that moment like a bona fide American Plague Transducer. 218 Glasgow Street was a known infirmary during the breakout of Yellow Fever in Portsmouth in 1855. It was owned by a doctor and he converted the house into a hospital during the epidemic. Damn, I thought, I have lain upon her for too long. Never mind the lead poisoning, the painter’s colic. While all of this headway strikes me as completely unbelievable it also reminds me that I have known in my life of things which I could have no knowledge of. I am no master; I have no practice, study nor plan. I watch and sometimes in the watching I mix worlds. I smash panes, folding the spaces and times and I talk to the no voice. It’s about the scraping known lead based substances from an historical and sick building while holding thin cotton to your breathing and navigation and all the while having a proper respirator in the front seat maybe seventeen steps away round trip. It’s about that forced knowing that there is danger when there is and that there is not danger when there is not. It’s the sitting on the not perfect toilet seat in the grocery store, the gas station when you really have one other public choice; a fool’s choice and so you make the move, you pick your seat and you suck on your sick. It is how I define poetry as it has revealed itself to me in eyes, wind, dead beach animals, wild flowers and burns; in structure, practice, form and rule: i force a clean soul against the filth and the dirty edges, the inevitability of a human world and record what it feels like. That, there about adds me up; Portsmouth, Virginia again. I know that I couldn’t possibly have the lead poisoning, not the Yellow Fever, but being next to that and the feeling there bred inside my sick mind leaves the beard feeling on fire –just slightly, and the lips, the taste in the mouth and the cold drink…I tend to get overly concerned for no good reason. There is enough sickness, poverty, spare change beggars, sign holders, old men walking dogs, city workers, perfumed walking women and bankers holding Thursday money until Friday and plenty of malignant and benign repute to fill our sand wagons for a hundred lifetimes; for some reason though, a crooked toilet seat, where was I? Damn these sick, sick dreams of mine.

Buggin' Out/One

Buggin’ Out One I spent last week at home. I wasn’t with my wife, my kids, my cat or my beach. I was in Portsmouth with my junkies, beggars, half-wits, holy men, rock stars, histories, lead based paint, ladders, marijuana and my grandmother’s ghost. Ever since mom went into the hospital there about a month ago, I have been spending lots of time in Portsmouth. Three to five days a week I will fire up the old Ford and push it in that direction. Dad wasn’t too thrilled when he heard I had quit the job here at the toy factory to drive the hundred miles each way to make more money and be near mom. He is a responsible man, always has been. He looks beyond my moment to moment justification of bare minimums and bottom lines, opting for the longer, well thought out options. He is certain that while in the short term I may be making more money, if I continue to drive so much the car will fall apart. I understand his point of view, but I have a bond with the machine. We have both agreed not to give up on one another. So we drive. There may also be some deep seeded issues of scruples and legality when it comes to my new employer and the residents of his and my childhood neighborhood. Now isn’t the time for that. My new boss is an old friend of mine, Chris Naples. He and his partner Santiago “Santa” Leon own a painting business called Buggin’ Out. Chris drives the main van which is plain white. Its chalky white really, an old Ford Econoline with everything extra torn out. The damned thing should be on the cover of a punk rock record. Inside there are tons of stickers ranging from “Jesus is my homeboy” to American flags…old bags of Mexican corn nuts taped to the wall, POW-MIA flags duct taped to the ceiling, various stickers from low end rock and roll labels and bands from across the U.S. and right on the front console area, below the radio and all that stuff an autographed picture of Dick Dale. The van itself is a character, documentation, a valid history lesson or timeline. The people that work or have worked with Chris and Santa make up a who’s who of friends, rockers, ne’er do wells and dead folks who each, in one way or another have touched my life, if only briefly. The most recent casualty was an old friend from childhood, Alex Brand. Alex was the most loveable dude on the planet. He could roll with anybody. Being from Portsmouth one must develop very early a sort of innate sense of humor and learn how to take insults and quickly dish them out. This is what we call love. Alex definitely had that ability. When I describe anyone in this crew, the prerequisite of love and the sense of humor of a whore are constants. This ability to roll with the punches and keep one’s head afloat gave us all the ability to shrug off any low end attempt to rile us when away from our hometown, in the game of life, but also equipped us with a short fuse. If we happened to be in Ghent, or Virginia Beach or Brooklyn or Williamsburg or Nags Head it didn’t matter; if someone wanted to start in with some form of mockery or incite a reaction from one of us we would generally exchange a couple of jokes amongst ourselves and then, with the explosive and unpredictable dance of a pack of hyenas, reduce the non-Portsmouth aggressors to a literal or figurative bloody carcass. We got kicked out of a lot of places for this, but so what. Being from Portsmouth was an albatross around the neck when I was nineteen, buy my early thirties it became something I joked about to tourists before taking them up into the plastic villages north of Corolla where a hundred or so horses run dying. Portsmouth seemed to carry with it a stigma. Tales of heroin, guns, habits, nuns, overdoses, d.o.a.’s, lawyers getting their peckers super glued to their stomachs while sleeping by their disgruntled wives, hustlers, shipyard workers and peanut butter factories were the claims to fame of that little highway town. Aside from Alex the other fatality in the crew was my brother and kindred soul Michael Poulos. Mike was in a band with Santa and another Buggin’ Out alum by the name of Barry Kay. Barry was born in Maryview Hospital the same day as Chris’ brother, so they say they have known each other all of their lives. Mike, like a few from Portsmouth do, had developed a habit. He liked the heroin. Chris would never put up with anyone working while using, and to hear him tell it, Mike was actually doing well right before the last shot. We talked about it the other day. Mike had died five years ago, overdosed, but a few hours before he had talked to Chris. Chris told me that he hadn’t been using; that he had just had one of the busiest weeks of his life and gotten one of the biggest paychecks. I won’t speculate on the rest of the night, I loved Mike, and I wasn’t there. He was at the height of his career and the band was getting play all over the world. He had been named the best punk rock guitarist in the world by Guitar magazine and to respect the feelings of the band mates that were left behind and all of his friends and family I will sum it up thusly; “that night some shit hole club was minus their thunder.” I was lucky enough to play in a band with him before the big one and one night he clocked a guy in the face with a pay telephone receiver. He was one of a kind. That band with Mike, Barry, Santa and Billy was a force, nothing like that will ever again rise from the haze that blankets that waterfront shipping hell we all call Tidewater. To be in the van now is just a reminder of how truly experienced we all are, to have just survived the aging process, the bronzing, the years and years and fucking years of painting and repainting things all the same color to maintain an historical appearance, or a Navy issue one…I have returned to Portsmouth, half full. This must have been the third day at it, and I had just left the van. I hid the metal cigarette that gave me a hint of spectacular and walked back over to my ladder. Scaling the thirty feet or so; slowly…carefully, I began scraping away at the layers of grey paint and rot on the two hundred eighteen year old monument to Portsmouth’s glory days. As chips and flakes of lead, color and rock and roll passed by my mouth and eyes, settling on my arms and clothes I thought about the silly significance of just how far back I had come. I was not living in Portsmouth, no. I wasn’t even there for a visit in the traditional sense, but as I hung on that ladder hugging the house I realized what I was in effect doing. Chris, you see, works for the City of Portsmouth’s Historical Preservation Department, and this house is on their little map of famous houses. Here I was coming full circle. I wasn’t just working with a cool old friend whom many other friends and legends had worked for; I was taking part as a steward for my city, restoring the vibrancy; the life to an old wooden hull. I was once again feeling the tug of an umbilical cord, and I felt like one of the millions of ghosts of the carpenters, freemasons, sailors and slaves that had come to do this work before me.

the "Had"

I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in a blizzard. The hospital where I was delivered was blanketed in ice and snow and as my mother Mary labored to pass me my father Joseph and my grandma Jordan watched the doctors with eyes like an eagles. The birth was a terribly difficult one for mother. As I emerged there were pipes bursting from the freeze and a flood inside the old Naval Hospital as somewhere in New York Jimi Hendrix was recording Stepping Stone. It was 9:28 in the evening when I finally emerged and began screaming as his guitar wailed along and he sang “I’m a man…at least I try to be, I’ve lived before; the other half of me, I heard before that you loved, me but I ain’t gonna search for nothing desperately…and I’ll try, try not to be a fool…” It was January 7th, 1970 and in another two hundred fifty one days Jimi Hendrix would be dead and the world would hardly even know the cries of a young Peter Butler. I like to think we had a connection, Jimi and me. Portsmouth was an old highway town. In 1620, the future site of Portsmouth was recognized as a suitable shipbuilding location by John Wood, a shipbuilder, who petitioned King James I of England for a land grant. The surrounding area was soon settled as a plantation community and was later founded by Colonel William Crawford, a wealthy merchant and ship owner, who dedicated the four corners of High and Court streets for a church, a market, a courthouse, and a jail. It was established as a town in 1752 by an act of the Virginia General Assembly and was named for Portsmouth, England. The Portsmouth I was born into was a far cry of that early colonial heritage. All that remained was an atrophied downtown and the humble beginnings of suburban sprawl that had begun to crop up where the old plantation land once yielded food and held humans in slavery; Highway 17 and the waning business of a seaside shipping town and The Norfolk Naval Shipyard. My father worked at that shipyard. My mother quit traditional work when I was born and took up the honorable work of motherhood. When I was born mom had a brand new ’69 Camaro, burgundy and dad had a ’65 Bonnevile drop top. They decided that now that we were a family that mom would give up her Camaro. She told me when I was a young boy that she had traded it in for me. I could never figure why she would have done that. I had seen pictures of it. It was a sweet looking ride. During my early days we lived in the Portsmouth Garden Apartments off of High Street and when I was nearly a year old we moved into a rental home, the downstairs of a duplex at the corner of Constitution Avenue and Leckie Street. Grandma Jordan lived right around the corner in my father’s childhood home on McDaniel in a modest waterfront house built in the 1940’s beside a small tributary of the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River known even as far back as the American Revolution as Scott’s Creek. At low tide we would trudge through the black mud in search of old bottles and Fiddler Crabs, and when the creek was full we would crab and skip smooth stones. Grandma’s driveway would be freshly paved with oyster shells every summer and the smell of the creek mud and creosote were always noticeable from the constant maintenance of the neighboring resident’s piers and bulk heading. It was a great place to grow up. The expansive roots of large oaks cracked the sidewalks and dropped acorns for us to crunch with our bikes in the summer and the frigid Tidewater winter’s would cause the creek to freeze over but never solid enough to support us. I remember throwing bricks and large stones into the thin ice to break holes and expose the different layers and the changing tides. The water was dark and brown and supported nothing but Blue Crabs and Bull Gudgeons. In 1975 my father had managed to save enough money to move us to the other side of town to a neighborhood in Churchland called Westwood. We lived at 4716 Haywood Drive. There was a large yard in the front and back with towering pines and red, white and pink Azaleas. I remember racing through the new house with my two little brothers, Francis and Saul and sliding on the new carpet like we were sliding into home plate. We didn’t have carpet in the old rental. None of us except mom and dad knew that we were buying this house and had been renting the other; we were just thrilled to have carpet to slide on in every room and plenty of pine cones to throw. There were a few other children my age in the new neighborhood but I have long since lost touch with them, and their names don’t matter to me anymore, friends can turn to strangers as the world turns children into adolescents and the ideals of youth into points of debate and argument. I left that neighborhood in 1988 just after graduating high school and have seldom gone back. Dad retired from the Navy yard in 1999 and they moved out into an old house in Suffolk, just farther North on 17, off of Bennett’s Pasture Road. With all of the children grown, graduated and gone to start their own families, dad took to gardening and mom took to sitting on the couch and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. It has always been my opinion that once we were gone mom felt as if she had completed her career. She began feeling the stresses of Rheumatoid Arthritis a few years before but was allergic to any medical treatment, so she would sit, read the Bible and pray away the pain. The long and painful process of dying from an attacking, systemic illness had begun, and she refused to discuss it. She just looked forward to being a grandma.  I just got back from a 96 hour stay in the old home town. Mom and dad have since moved to Suffolk, where my middle brother Francis works as the Deputy City Manager. Saul lives in West Friendship, Maryland. Saul and his wife both graduated from Virginia tech with engineering degrees. Saul’s wife Gloria works for a big telephone company and Frank’s wife is a dentist. They both have two daughters, just like Holly and me. Holly waits tables at a couple of seasonably busy restaurants here in Kitty Hawk while I work as a reservationist at a large, semi-corporate adventure and retail outfitter. My job is seasonal as well. I started in the warehouse and moved up a month later, about two weeks ago. The pay is the same but the cerebral component is much greater. I liked it pretty much until the last four days, well, today really. Four days ago I rose at four a.m. and left Kitty Hawk for Portsmouth to stand and hold space as my mom underwent cancer surgery. Today I drove home exhausted. Mom seems to be on the mend after a touch and go ordeal that lasted just under eight hours. The surgeon says she was happy with the results they got, or rather; they got all that they wanted to get out. There is nothing left for us to do now except wait for the pathology report on the margins of the removed flesh and tumor while mom lies in the bed awaiting physical therapy. I may have slept a total of ten hours in the last ninety six. On the morning I left, everything was draped in a cool mist from the Atlantic which covered the Eastern Coastal Plain as I drove from first light northward and westward from my barrier island home towards the dirty metropolitan Tidewater and Maryview Hospital. Just after my quick breakfast I passed an accident on the road. It appeared as if a body was lying in the highway as I approached. As I got close enough to take a full gaze I realized a tourist had just collided with a young Black Bear. A harbinger, I thought? Soon after I watched my brother the Red Tailed hawk taking off from a fresh kill of squirrel on the roadside into the rapidly brightening sky. It was reassuring that all was as it should be. As for me, I was decked out in full talisman and supernatural girding. I was wearing a light blue shirt, mom’s favorite and boot cut Levi’s to keep me warm in the hospital. Under the shirt along with my regular prayer beads I had a necklace given to me on my graduation day by Grandma Jordan; a gold necklace I haven’t worn in twenty five years, but it served as a nice retainer for the first ring my mother’s dad had ever given her and her high school class ring. I also carried an antique charm bracelet from her childhood which now had charms for all of us brothers, my father and her other siblings. I carried in my pocket a printed transcript of Psalm 116, her favorite. I got to the hospital as she was being wheeled into the operating room. Dad and Saul were already in the waiting room. I asked them where the free coffee was and after making myself a styro foam cup full I sat and joined them. It was seven a.m. and the anesthetist was on reserve until two. I was prepared for a long wait. There was a large television screen full of colored boxes with numbers. Each color meant something and each number was a patient scheduled for surgery. Yellow meant pre-op prep, lavender meant recovery and green meant the person was in surgery. As the day wore on many different numbers appeared on the board, but my mother’s 344311 remained green throughout. The families of the other patients came and went as we sat, as still as the potted plants. There was a silver lining to this otherwise overcast day of waiting and nervous hope. Our ninth grade geography teacher Mr. Franks was now retired and serving as a volunteer in an adjacent waiting room. He was one of my favorite teachers. He was a round man, short in stature and with thin but not thinning hair. He would get excited and animated, mixing humor, often risqué in nature with lesson plans and always held our attention. He would sweat through his shirt by mid-morning in the hot summer months and the front of his shirt was often dusted with colored chalk from his brushing against the blackboard while he wrote and then erased the many lessons he taught us. We all loved him very dearly. When I went in to speak with him he rushed back over to me and Saul. “Okay” he said “I have two geography questions for you; one is easy and one is hard.” I smiled while Saul stood nervous. We had no idea what to expect but I knew it would be golden. “Alright, the first one is easy” he started in, “How do you spell Mississippi with one “I?” I covered my one of my eyes with my hand and started “m.i.s.s.i.s.s.i…” “You got it” he continued and quickly came with the next one. “Okay, now for the hard one…if you’re an American when you go into the bathroom and an American when you come out; what are you while you’re in there?” he asked in that old familiar accent that none of us could ever place. His cadence was on par with Robin Williams’ as was his passion, but with a tender but firm southern drawl, like from savannah, which buffered his confident delivery; it was as if, in between words, and canvases of the visions he would invoke, held themselves suspended, singularly in mid air, strung lightly together as if by an almost dripping wire of amber nectar connecting each thought…each phrase. Saul and I looked at each other and then at him bewildered as he began the punch line “ you’re a’ peein’…” he giggled as we laughed, and just like that he continued without giving us a chance to catch our breath or catch up to his wit and train of thought, “unless you are in a hurry…” he continued “ then you’re a’ rushin’” while we laughed even harder and bang, bang, bang like that he continued “and if you’re done than you’re finnish;.” He laughed along with us as we not only enjoyed the joke but the flash back to a familiar soul and mentor and one of the best teachers any kid could have ever known. He left as quickly as he laid us out to go and tend to sick people and nervous folks. He hadn’t changed one bit. Later as he escorted us up to ICU after mom’s procedure was done Saul asked him about when he had retired and whether or not he missed teaching or the students and I interrupted; “I bet you don’t miss the smart asses.” I joked, to which he replied “exactly, I was always worried another Butler boy would come along, mhh hmmmm hummmmmm…” he tossed back, no latency…just professionalism and a tack sharp mind. That inherent and ever present laugh of joy we’re a gift as school children and was gift on this day. He showed us into the Intensive Care Unit and then disappeared back downstairs to the ones still in limbo. Before we left for ICU, Saul had gone out and left me there with my dad. I haven’t always been proud of the kind of son I turned out to be and we had some rocky years a long, long time ago. He doesn’t like to get into those details so I usually leave it alone. That day however as we sat waiting for our escort to the Intensive Care floor, I looked up at him and said “dad, you’re the strongest and best man I have ever known.” He looked up and asked me what I had said and I repeated myself. “I’m not that…” he replied softly, looking down again. “Well, you are to me.” That was the end of it.  Once inside the unit we got our first glimpse of mother. She looked still and quiet but the nurse assured us that she was coherent. We entered the room and she did a mental check of who was there. “Well,” she said “you two have one up on Francis this time.” We knew she was joking as Frank would have been there if he could have, but he was traveling with the Mayor and City Manager on a very important business trip to New York. He would be in the next day we thought. We knew it was killing him to not be there. Mom motioned me to come in close and asked me, “Did you read 116?” I told her I had and that it was in my breast pocket, right next to my heart. She was thankful. She was in a great deal of pain and still weary from the anesthesia. She had multiple incisions with one running down the center line of her abdomen and two others, one on each side. One incision was for a colostomy bag and the other was a drain. The last incision which was over her anus had been sewn shut. This one, we were told, would probably take the longest time to heal, possibly six to eight weeks. The surgeon did brief us however and as I said before, she was happy with the results of the very “technically difficult” procedure. She was also a bit of a condescending witch. She stared at the floor as she talked in five and ten dollar words and only looked up to explain the difference between the rectum and colon. I had already grown tired of her due to her slow approach to surgery. Here we were in late June and mom had finished chemo and radiation treatments back around Christmas. I had to hold my tongue when she stated that they like to do the surgery no more than eight weeks after those treatments but due to mom’s lack of cooperation on one matter or another it had been delayed. My father was in charge and had already dealt with enough stress so I remained silent when I really wanted to bite her. There was really no point in it anyhow. Mom had survived and we were now with her in the Intensive Care Unit. The arrogant surgeon was in the rear view mirror for now. On the second morning mom looked much better. The doctors had removed the tube from her nose that stretched into her stomach to keep it empty so she wouldn’t throw up. She was more like mom; opinionated, particular and to the point. Mobility was a prime concern as she has severe rheumatoid arthritis and has a problem getting around on any given good day. Now that she has had this mega surgery, there was a valid concern that if she did not quickly get with the program and try hard to regain mobility she may never walk again; maybe get transferred to another facility. She was not a happy person when it came to the discussion of this fact. She is dignified, set in her ways, and doesn’t like to feel as if she is burdening anyone with her condition. Saul has gotten on her over the last twenty years as her condition has deteriorated, but I never have. She is and always will be my mom. She lives by her rules and I respect that. Saul has more of a proactive agenda. Perhaps the difference in our views on life and mortality differ such that I appear cold when it comes to mom’s potential end. I can assure you however I am not, not on the inside, I am a scared and emotional wreck, I just don’t show it in public, especially around her. Not much happened that second day, Mom just laid in the bed and eventually conceded to the morphine pump. She was at first saying that with her arthritis she has been in pain for so long that she feels like its normal to be in pain. The nurses and I told her to take a “pain vacation” and use it for its intended purpose. Mom reluctantly complied, eventually getting some rest. We left her that night to return to Frank’s house a few miles down the road. I didn’t sleep well either night. Saul had a few beers, and I had none. I wanted smokes, but Saul was a good little brother, he wouldn’t let me buy them. That second night before hitting Frank’s house we stopped at a neighborhood Thai restaurant. I half believe it is because Saul wanted me to identify a dish he liked; tell him how to make it. So I was game, and we had a great dinner. I had Som Tum or green papaya salad. It is a wonderful rollercoaster of sweet, spicy, cool and crisp. Saul had the basil rolls, kind of like a fresh rice paper roll, but heavy on basil. Next I had Lad Na, which my brother chef Jojo describes as a Thai version of chicken and dumplings, very home-style. First a very wide and thick rice noodle is stir fried with oyster sauce and transferred to a serving vessel. Next, chicken and broccoli are cooked with oyster sauce and sweet soy sauce and thickened with corn starch to make gravy and then poured over the “dumplings.” It is extremely savory and filling. Saul ordered his garlic pepper chicken. This is the dish he wanted me to identify and formulate a recipe for. As a former chef I am pretty good at figuring out what is in something. I took a small spoonful of the sauce alone at first and slowly swished it around my mouth. Next I took a bite with the chicken, closed my eyes, and chewed very slowly, thinking, savoring and cross referencing my known ingredients. I opened my eyes and said “oyster sauce, sweet soy sauce and soy sauce.” After we had nearly finished eating I asked our server if I might speak with the chef, informing her that I was also a chef and wanted to ask about the dish if I may, and I was certain as well to compliment it heavily. A young man appeared and I bowed in the traditional fashion and greeted him. I told him I had an idea what was in the dish and wanted to guess and he agreed to help. I told him what I thought and all I missed was a bit of sugar. We discussed a few other things and I complimented him, expressed my thanks and he returned to his duties while Saul and I finished up and waited for the bill. Saul bought dinner and I thanked him. As we left I walked over to the young chef and handed him a ten dollar bill, bowed again and said thank you in Thai. He replied and we were gone. Saul was impressed with my knowledge and I felt like a winner. It was a good meal. We headed over to Frank’s. His wife Kathy was up and greeted us. She put a movie on the set and we watched as I grew weary. I walked up the stairs and closed my eyes but sleep was not there, only a restless darkness. I laid there in and out for the next few hours and eventually got up and waited for the rest of the crew to wake up before heading back over to the hospital.  Day three came early and we headed out through the streets of Churchland and over the Churchland Bridge to the hospital again. Mom was doing much better and they decided to move her to another floor, out of ICU and into recovery. This came as wonderful news to us all. She had to be lifted by strong men from the bed to a recliner and then she and all of her hoses and wires needed to be transported up to the fifth floor. The nurse told her to go ahead and take a couple of extra pulls of Morphine. Mom was reluctant so I said I would have two of those and one nicotine patch please. The nurses laughed, but I got nothing. The new room was older and a bit musty, like an old motel room where smoking was allowed. There were a host of new nurses and mom went about the business of choosing her favorite and putting her to work. About mid-day we were all sitting there discussing various topics and mom got tired of the voices. When her meds kicked in she wanted to be still and quiet. She told Saul and I to leave and have lunch. We went to another favorite spot of his; a greasy spoon on County Street called Pop’s Country Cookin’. It was in the first floor of an old row house and the fraternal order of police was on the second floor so needless to say there were cops everywhere. The menu featured a regional oddity, the square dog, which consists of two hot dogs split and fried and then laid on a large bun and topped with ham, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. It looked good, and dad used to make them for us as kids but it was the first time I had ever seen one on a menu. I was intrigued and snapped a picture. I ended up ordering the special which was hamburger steak with mashed potatoes and green beans, a chili dog with mustard and onions and a large sweet tea. As I began Saul said that there was no way I would eat it all. It was quite large. I took it as a challenge though and did finish every last bite. I have never been so full. After lunch we decided to take a drive down memory lane. We passed the first house on Leckie where we lived until I was five, and Grandma Jordan’s house right around the corner, dad’s childhood home. There was a foreclosure notice on the door and Saul pointed out that the mailbox on the porch was the same one from our childhood days. I talked of stealing it, but again, Saul talked me out of it. He has always had more sense than me. From there we drove past dad’s elementary school which is now condos. We took London Boulevard downtown to West Park View and looked at our Great Aunt Virgie’s old house. She passed away in 1997 but the house looked the same whereas all of the others looked smaller for some reason. Perspective is a strange thing from youth to middle age. Along the way I took snapshots on my new age Polaroid camera to later post on a large blue wall located in the center of the universe for all to see. I chose no physical contact on this journey, and no correspondence other than that of a human leopard, scratching at various areas and then leaving my mark in the form of the photographs on the wall to document my journey through time and space in downtown Portsmouth. We passed mom’s childhood house, and that of our Nanny, mom’s grandmother Pauline. I remember a Crabapple Tree from childhood and it had grown to the sky it seems. All I could see was trunk, but it still stood firm after all these years. We finally ended up at the old boat rental place in Port Norfolk, another constant from childhood, even from dad’s. We stopped and talked a bit with a man we had never met but who knew mom and dad. While we stood there talking, the biggest Osprey I had ever seen dove into what I would call three feet of water and snagged a fish. We thought she had a big one as she had trouble with the take off. She was really struggling. After a couple of tries she made it out and the fish was less than spectacular, a Croaker it looked like, maybe six or seven inches, but with a hook in its gut and a bottom rig attached to the hook and a three ounce sinker. The mighty bird flew off and as she made her way skyward we saw the silhouette of the bottom rig and sinker trailing her as she went. This was Portsmouth in a nutshell. Saul and I returned to the hospital after that and mom gave us a load of mess about how late we were. She didn’t care that we had fun and walked down memory lane, she had other issues. The drain in her side had come loose somehow and she was being moistened by her own fluids, and this made her very concerned about infection. That could end her quickly. She had tried to call the nurses but to no avail so she had gotten really worked up. When we all returned she chastised us for not knowing the meaning of shift work and leaving her all alone. Never mind the fact that she had sent us home, she was scared and that changed everything. As it turned out the bandage securing the drain had come loose and caused some seepage. The nurses fixed it but mom needed a new gown and we had to step out for a moment. Her tome turned to that of a scathing lunatic for a while thereafter. She was afraid, and we had abandoned her. She couldn’t help herself and we were not there. As we sat, soon there would be another leak and she got very nervous. She asked dad to recline the bed and he did so in such a way that it stretched her belly and caused her great pain. Things were not going her way. By this time Saul had left to return to Maryland and I was scheduled to stay at Frank and Kathy’s, but as the situation was not fixing itself I felt inclined to stand watch. Mom and I got into a mild argument over my disrespect of Kathy’s work schedule and staying out too late and I told her I had decided to stay with dad, but by this point I was thinking of old friends to stay with, where I could drink some beers and play guitar. Before we left mom turned an erie sort of quiet; observant, inward and still. She asked dad to come close so she could hold his hand. She asked him not to squeeze it, but just to give her something of home to hold. They sat there like that for maybe five minutes. All was silent. I feared everything at that moment. Was my mother dying? I didn’t know anything. I know now that she was just scared and needed to ground herself. I also know now that she is dying, just like we all die. There was one hell of a storm brewing and mom kicked me and dad out for the night, she wanted to press her pain button and go to sleep. The day had taxed her and she was done. As dad and I left I told him that I was going to hit a burger joint in Churchland and maybe stay with a friend. He wasn’t keen on it at first but I explained that the last few hours had freaked me out to the point of needing a different comfort zone. I told him I would call him in a half hour. I called my buddy Santos and he said to come over, so I went and bought a six pack and did just that. We sat around in his garage for a while as I went over the events of the previous days. I called dad and told him that I was freaked and needed a break. He tried to reassure me that it was fine to stay with him, that he had made a bed and all, but I just told him that I had reached my limit and although I didn’t take mom’s attitude personally, I had done all I could for three days to remain calm and steady, a rock, but I was now genuinely freaked out. I admitted that it was a product of my own stupid sensitivity and he agreed but I told him that whatever the case, I would be five minutes from the hospital, and I just needed to drink a few beers with a friend and play some guitar. He realized it wasn’t worth fighting and just said “okay, that’s cool.” I was a runaway at seventeen, so he knows I have limits. Once I got to Santos’ house I spent a few moments talking with his mom and then she went up to bed. As I said we hit the garage and listened to some great Hendrix outtakes and bootlegs. We listened to Stepping Stone and I told him I was being born while it was being recorded. He said that was nuts. After a few beers each we went upstairs to jam. He was playing a new old Fender Strat and I was on an even older Mustang, a ’62 I think. It sounded sweet and felt even better. We just jammed over a few chords I had scratched down and a half hour in we were both done. I bid him goodnight and headed to the guest room to crash. This time I slept. It may have been three in the morning and I needed to be up at six, but I crashed hard. I had a very strange dream that actually made all the sense in the world. My dream only had a few characters. There was me, my father in law and a really great bass player and idol of mine Mike Volt. Mike was born in Portsmouth but moved to San Pedro very shortly thereafter where he grew up and resides today. We were all in Norfolk near the old Boathouse venue. My father in law for one reason or another opted to take a kite he had into an old warehouse to fly it and disappeared. I stumbled over to the Boathouse, mobile phone in hand as I had been in the waking life for quite a while, ready for anything. As I neared the front entrance the load in was going on. I was supposed to be home soon but I noticed a familiar face, Mike Volt’s. I had interviewed him before. He started very enthusiastically pushing the show which I knew was hours away and to attend it meant to not get home on time and miss another day of work. I sent a digital message to my boss to cover work and now all I was worried about was the wife. I was also flat broke. It was lucid, everything seemed so real. I walked up to Volt and he went into his pitch. “Aww man it’s gonna be a great show, as an opener we have…wait for it now…the Had!” I played it off as if I knew what he was talking about but had no clue. He seemed pumped on it so I went along. After a few minutes I knew I wasn’t getting in without a little love so I walked up to Volt and extended my hand and said simply “Peter Butler.” He went nuts. He hadn’t really seen me in a couple decades and the interview I did was over the phone. I said “yeah man, it’s been a long time, I haven’t seen you face to face since a gig at Lewis’ in Norfolk with your old band Firehouse, and then I saw you once again opening up for Sonic Youth here, at the boathouse, you had two drummers and an ass kicker on guitar, it was HEAVY!” He noted that he remembered that boathouse show and then he saw what looked like a recording device in my hand and said “man I can answer any questions you have.” I told him I didn’t need any of that, but asked if he has any room on the guest list and he told me no. He said that he was maxed out, and they were worried about getting thirty nine minutes worth of material out after “the Had” finished their set. Dreams are crazy, the thirty nine minutes thing made sense then, but not now, not as I recall it for all of you. Nevertheless I was bummed, and all of a sudden it seemed as if hours had passed, a feeling that I had missed my ride came over me and I felt like I wouldn’t get home to see Holly. I was inside now, staring at a bunch of guitars on stage and my eyes traced over them and to his old bass guitar; “Fucking Mike VOLT!” I thought to myself, smiling. Almost instantaneously I woke up in the guest bed at Santos’. It was 7:44. I got dressed and got my shit together and talked to his mom a bit before I split for the hospital. I felt crusty and beaten, but I had to chew some gum and get ready to see mom, hide the smell of freedom from the night before and put on my mourning clothes again.  I called dad and he said that mom had had a good night and I told him I would be right there. We hung up. I chewed that gum to cover the abuse of the hours before, rubbed my eyes, drove over and went up to room 512. Mom was complaining to dad that he had let her teeth dry out and she couldn’t get them in. She was really letting him have it. “Bring me a full cup of water Joseph, not two ounces!” she snapped “I can’t do ANYTHING with that!” I just sat there for probably three minutes. She turned towards me. “So what are you doing?” “I was just stopping in on my way home to say bye and I love you…” “Well, BYE!” she snorted. “Okay then, I will call later, have a good day, I’m only a phone call away…” and “BYE!” she repeated. “Bye” I replied, “I love you” and headed out the door to “Joseph…you let them DRY OUT! That’s why they won’t hook in, they have to stay moist!” She’s doing okay I thought to myself. I hit the nearest gas station and bought twenty bucks worth of low grade and a Coke and headed for the downtown tunnel. Along the way I snapped a few more shots of famous landmarks to post on the big blue board. I turned onto Effingham Street and found myself in a five way “hopper” of sorts. There was a continual but carefully orchestrated and technical five part merge going on. It took me maybe ten minutes to get from the street to the entrance of the tunnel. Once inside it was bumper to bumper. When I reached the other side my exit for Chesapeake and 664 South was an easy hit. As I pulled onto the exit I notice that I was the only car all of a sudden, it was surreal and peaceful. Nobody was going my way. I hit the expressway but opted for the old road, the toll bypass, figured I would save three bucks. I passed rows of corn looking uniform and green, head high, and dotted every so often with sunflowers. I smelled the Mimosa, Honeysuckle and Hemlock again. In the winter this road smelled of fields of onion, but it was hot outside now, summer was really here to stay a while this time. Soon I would be back in Carolina. I thought of all that had transpired in the past ninety six hours, give or take…. I felt a sense of relief and also unsettled, nevertheless I kept the radio off as the story in my head was rapidly unfolding. I passed the farmer’s market as I got closer to home and read all the signs painted on hayseed characters. There were cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydews, boiled peanuts, fresh corn, pickles and sauces, tomatoes, plums, squash, peanut brittle, fudge, hayrides, snap beans and crabs. I love being back in Carolina I thought to myself. As I approached the Wright memorial bridge Holly called. We talked briefly about me just getting home to rest and write, and about how the past four days had really changed my perspective on everything. A person doesn’t come as close as I did to the death of a mother and not change from it, not if you are walking the path I have chosen. It doesn’t make me any better or worse than anyone, but it makes a person tend to not sweat the little things quite as much. I thought of how glad I was that the Ford had made another haul. When I was sitting in traffic back on Effingham an hour and a half before in the gridlock of downtown Portsmouth I had to turn on the heat as the broken radiator was low on fluid and threatening to blow, but once I hit the open road and cruising speed she cooled right down; sucking at that sweet southern breeze. Holly and I talked all the way across the bridge and through the US158/Route 12 interchange as I pulled her onto Duck Road. I started to feel a familiar rumble and hear a suspicious sound. I told Holly I had better get off the phone as I thought a tire was going flat. It turns out I was right. By the time I was a mile from the house I had a decision to make. Should I pull over and leave her and walk it, or limp on the rim all the way to my driveway. I chose to limp, so I turned on the hazards and drove about 15 along the shoulder until I got home. The rubber was shredded but the rim was alright. I was as careful as one could be when doing something very extraordinarily stupid by conventional common sense standards. But I had made it home. It was high noon. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to write. But instead I picked up the phone and called the big boss of my company. A week ago I applied for a position in the top ranks, Human Resources Director. I hadn’t heard anything in a week and I was growing tired of all of the emails and protocol that comes with my eight dollar an hour job. I asked the main man if I had a chance for consideration or if it was a fool’s errand. “Well, nothing is a fool’s errand” she said. “I saw the letter you wrote but not the application or the resume…hang on.” “Yes ma’am.” I replied and waited as she perused my documents. I was sure she would tell me that I hadn’t the educational requirements for such a position, but she didn’t. She asked if I could meet with her Saturday to discuss it, and surprised I answered her “Yes ma’am!” and “Thank you!” You never know really what will happen. I had called my old boss as well in a pre-emptive strike just in case I decided to drop the reservations job. The reason I quit in the first place was because of arthritis and pains. I was really just laying out, looking for pain meds and being lazy. But something snapped in my brain after leaving mom. I realized that if I went back to doing kayak tours, doing what I loved I could make the equivalent of a week’s salary in two days from tips alone, not to mention the twelve bucks an hour. They assured me that I was always welcome back. So I left it with the plan of searching my options and the souls of my current taskmasters on Saturday to see if I may get security and a year round position in exchange for the low wage, and if they couldn’t promise me that, then I will serve notice at the end of that interview and go back to work for big tips. I will grow a pair as they say, put my pains in my pocket and do what I need to get paid. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I guess the next forty eight hours will tell the next story. I feel strong; indestructible now, and I refuse to let any job take that spirit away. I guess I am “the Had.” Everyone has had a piece of me and for cheap. Maybe it’s time I started setting the rules and the prices. Who knows?

Wha???

This is a blog where I will post and store several short stories for an upcoming collection called "To Live and Die Of Portsmouth, Virginia" The stories will cover a range of subjects from humor to the darkest of days. Most of these stories will be true. It is all about a little shipyard town with the history of plantations, racism and mundane labor. It is also a toen full of American families, wonderful wildlife, parks, firehouses and churches. I was born there. I hope to die somewhere else. many do not.

Abandoned Hipster Chickens

In the city of Portsmouth it is illegal to keep hens in your yard for egg production. Many refer to these as “backyard chickens.” In many other parts of the country it is legal to keep them and that is not going so well for the chickens. In fact, the new trend of raising these backyard birds has become fashion among a group of counter culture that has become known as “hipsters”. I woke this morning to an article on some form of news media stating in the title stating; “Chickens Increasingly Abandoned At Animal Shelters By Hipster Farmers”. I found this to be amusing and horrific at the same time. I was amused by the fact that these orphaned fowl are being rendered as such by hipsters and appalled by the cruelty of taking on “egg laying pets” as a short sighted statement of coolness which is now ultimately leading to the wholesale euthanization of what were once soft, cuddly creatures. Many arguments have been made about the lack of humanity in chicken industry slaughterhouses, and I will not echo that argument or attempt to draw any likeness to this new threat. I will however try and get to the marrow of why a human would think it chic to take a chic as a pet, and why, once that little fuzz ball turns into a lace-less, low top shoe-pecking pest, one might feel justified in simply boxing them up and carting them off to a local animal shelter. Most of these kids would treat their mobile telephones with a higher respect. In examining this phenomenon I must first get to the bottom of what a hipster is. I looked in several dictionaries and periodicals to try and find a definition, and I have found some very interesting observations. For example: Wikipedia refers to “hipster” as “a culture of young, urban middle-class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990’s”. They associate this subculture with “independent music, a varied, non-mainstream fashion sensibility, progressive or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism/agnosticism, and alternative lifestyles”. Douglass Haddow referred to these folks in “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” as a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior(s).” While in “Time Out New York” Christian Lorentzen asserts that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” characteristics of most “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge”, and borrows from the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity”, and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.” Another contemporary columnist Mark Greif wrote in a New York Times editorial entitled “The Sociology of the Hipster”, that the term” ‘hipster’ is often used by youth from disparate backgrounds to jockey for social position”, while questioning the contradictory nature of that label and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: “Paradoxically, those who used the insult were often themselves said to resemble hipsters – they wore the skinny jeans and big eye glasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashion and ‘tourists’” Greif is said to believe that the difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety since it “calls everyone’s bluff”. In his conclusion, he draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste”. He writes: “You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as ‘liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands’; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the ‘creative professions’. These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy – but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural ‘cool’”. He continues: “They, in turn, may malign the ‘trust fund hipsters’. This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into ‘cultural capital’ (as Bourdieu calls it), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in a trucker hat.) Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious—the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be ‘superior’: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.” In other words, as Wikipedia touts, “Greif’s efforts put the term ‘hipster’ into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status.” And the “cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.” Well, that is quite a bit on a little word now isn’t it? What about the chickens? Why would these disenfranchised and wanna-be upwardly mobile spawn of Hunter S. Thompson’s “doomed generation” be so interested in raising chickens? I live in North Carolina now, and I can assure you that having a dozen fresh eggs with which to make a luscious crème brulee, or Sunday French toast is a wonderful thing; but backyard chickens are legal down here. We have the space. So I ask myself again; why would some ultra-cool-kid bartender in Portsmouth’s Olde Towne district get the urge to suddenly drive out to Airline Blvd to the feed and seed, or out to the country to some chicken hatchery and scoop up a few of those little peckers and build a coop? When I was just a young hipster, I was content with the co-op, or the availability of those farm fresh eggs on the side of the road on a Thursday tailgate sale. I loved the fresh eggs sure, but I wasn’t rushing to get how-to directions from some internet site on building a better henhouse. What are these kids of today thinking? I guess, as I have said many times, it can be attributed to what I call “upper level shit”, or that which is above our heads. It is a general term I use to refer to questions for which I have no real answer. Example: why is it raining but all of the bushes are covered in ice? (upper level shit) Why have so many friends of mine from Portsmouth died in the past year from either natural or drug related causes? (upper level shit) Why can’t three hundred million pissed off people overthrow five hundred and forty five little minds who continually run our lives and living into the ground after they told us that they loved us and wouldn’t do that to us? The answer once again is simply upper level shit. I think I first got the term from watching a weather forecast and subsequently training myself to determine the tracks of hurricanes instead of always opting to be prepared. Wait! That must be the answer to all of the questions I have posed about hipsters, economic uncertainty and chicken rearing; stupid human laziness. There is an organization called Chicken Run Rescue in Minneapolis where the owner Mary Britton Clouse cites that in 2001 only fifty chickens were dropped off at area shelters and by 2012 that number had grown to five hundred. In an article Clouse said “it comes down to people not wanting to invest the time or the energy to raise the chickens.” Better yet, Clouse explained it like this; “People don’t know what they’re doing. And you’ve got this whole culture of people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing teaching every other idiot out there.” So I guess that’s it in a nutshell. When you have a whole generation of “winning participants” ready to change the world through their music, fashion, politics and even chicken regulations, somehow, everything just gets a little screwy, and in this case, hipsters deciding to raise backyard chickens seem to me are making a poor “fashion statement.” If there be any good news for the chickens at least, as I reminded you all at the start of this piece; it is illegal to raise chickens in the city limits of Portsmouth, Va. I don’t even need to resort to my old standby here, as it is much simpler than upper level shit in this case, just humans being dumb…under the sad and unfortunate guise of trying to fit in.