GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

Main Street; Sardis, Mississippi - Photo from flickr.com My first visit to the Deep South was 120 years after the Civil War ended yet it was painfully obvious who had lost.  I left Memphis and drove south for a little over an hour on Interstate 55 to reach the town of Sardis , Mississippi which lies just north of the Little Tallahatchie River .  The town was first settled in 1844 and grew to become the county seat when the Panola County Courthouse was erected there in 1871.  The town's original name of "Danville" was judged to be too lengthy by U.S. Postal officials so the local folks switched to Sardis - one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse from the New Testament Book of Revelations.  Sardis' population peaked a hundred years later in 1970 at 2,300 but has declined 10% every decade since.   I-55 is Mississippi ’s main thoroughfare and a two-hour drive south will take you from Sardis to Jackson , the state capital.  Although...

Image from tera.enmasse.com A post-Victorian period drama that chronicles the lives of some snooty wimps who occupy the household of an  aristocratic xenophobic family – what’s not to like? I bailed on this show a few seasons back when I became unwilling to tolerate another scene where the only characters offered up were the soulless upper crust of British imperialists or a sprinkling of well-meaning imbeciles.     I’ve seen reviews that praise the show for its “satire”, which I guess leaves the door open for others to find elements of slapstick in D.W.Griffith's The Birth of a Nation .   The subtlety of the series’ supposed satire may have gone unnoticed by United States Congressman Aaron Schock who had his congressional offices done over as an homage to the lavish Downton Abbey interiors.   I am confident that ex-Congressman Schock will some day look back and appreciate the irony (a requirement of satire) in having been forced to resig...

A potentially significant scientific breakthrough took place less than three feet in front of me but I never realized it at the time.  I was sitting on the toilet watching a handful of ants travel back and forth via a ten-foot-long path that I’d seen them use often during the summer.  They entered the bathroom by way of a window, crossed over to the shower, proceeded down the side of the shower door and then traversed westward along the edge of the bathtub before disappearing into the faucet. Photo by Alex Wild I assumed at the time that the ants were out to retrieve water from the faucet.   I later learned a nts have a separate stomach which they can use to transport water back to their nest which accounted for the two-way traffic on the path.   As I watched the traffic, certain patterns of behavior became clear.  When an east-bound ant, heading back to the nest, encountered a west-bound ant, there were two things that took place more than 95% of the...

Liberace as coffin specialist Mr. Stark from The Loved One . If I’d never seen Liberace in The Loved One , I might have taken the job.   After Ingrid and I were married at the end of 1971, I spent the better part of the following year trying to find work.   I had used seven years of fine arts in college to string along the draft board until I stumbled onto a legal way to avoid it altogether.   However, the same strategy that enabled me to bypass the Viet Nam War left me completely unqualified for anything other than day labor.   On one of several visits to my new in-laws in San Diego that year, I met Wally.  He showed up at a large Dutch-Indonesian picnic on Shelter Island one afternoon and like me, was among the few white Anglos that made up my in-laws’ large circle of friends and fellow immigrants.  Wally asked me if I liked clams, I said yes, and twenty minutes later I was pulling them out from under his feet.  Wally was born and rai...

Carey went through a spectacular rough patch during the early 1970s.   He had quit hauling water for Sparklettes and did some world-class thrashing around while trying to settle into something new.   Among a series of false starts was an attempt to break into the movies.   He had gone to the trouble to have head shots done and was sent out to a location where they were filming an action drama with cowboys and Indians .   They had checked with him regarding his horsemanship and he had told them he’d been riding since the age of five.   However,  Carey neglected to mention that (1) it was on one of those medicated Griffith Park ponies that walk slowly in a circle with a toddler on board; and (2), that the nearest he had been to any horse since then was sitting in the grandstands at Santa Anita. The scene called for him to take his mount down a hill, then across a short level stretch before galloping down the main street of a 1880s Dodge City facsimile....

Most of my friends in high school wouldn’t call my house for fear my father would answer the phone.  My dad was unaware how enraged and belligerent he sounded because it was so intimidating no one ever had the balls to ask, “What’s your fucking problem?”  It was all a misunderstanding.  I never let on to anyone how kind and gentle my dad was because it was too much fun having them think he was a capo in the cosa nostra.  Had he known how terrifying he came across over the phone he would have been embarrassed. It all stemmed from my dad viewing a ringing telephone the same as a home invasion robbery.  My parents kept to themselves at home and never entertained a group of people in our home – not once, ever.  There were never more than a handful of times within any given year when an old friend of my parents or a couple might stop by but it was very rare.  I was perfectly happy with the situation - my friends did not come to my house, I always went ...

You couldn’t drag my parents into a church with logging chains.  They held religion responsible for countless centuries of genocide and misery,  and had no doubt the world would have been far better off without it.  That was as far as either one of them was willing to discuss the subject which of course made me all the more curious.  Once in a while as a kid I would tag along with friends when invited to visit their church.  At one time or another, I sat through services that were Catholic, Presbyterian and Seventh Day Adventist; none of which appealed to me.  I also went to a baptism with a neighbor’s kid whose hair had been turned bright green by roller derby tryouts, but I don’t recall what kind of church it was.  I knew a girl named Cheryl in high school who attended a Pentecostal Church with her family where according to her, members of the congregation frequently spoke in tongues.  They didn't allow in curious observers so I regretful...