bobberdilly.com

11/29/2008
Robert Joy

Traumatic Memory

This morning I woke up with the memory of the worst incident I experienced in New York City last February. It wasn’t even close to the worst thing I ever experienced in life. I swiped my card in the gate in the subway and I moved the turnstile before entering and I got blocked out for my stupid move. It was my first time through one of those types of gates and I learned a very fast lesson. Well, my transit card wouldn’t work again, because that’s the way the system was designed.

…. Anyway the rest of the story is bla, bla, bla… My point here is; Why is it just the traumatic things we remember so well? I can remember every nasty thing someone has done to me throught out my life. I can remember when Brad Farr punched me in the gut in the school stairwell, for no reason except he was just being a normal asshole. I can remember being tossed into the girls restroom by a mob of school thugs. I can remember all the crappy kids that caused me headaches while teaching school. I can remember the night in Vietnam when a Vietcong mortar shell landed right in front of me. I ate dirt on that one and didn’t get a scratch. I can remember all my car accidents and all the times I accidentally cut someone off in traffic and got a nasty horn blast or a finger out the window. I can remember all the times people have been rude or snotty or ignorned me on purpose.

…. I can remember all the wonderful Christmas mornings with the family as I grew up. I remember getting the most wonderful firetruck on my brothers birthday. I can remember the day I got out of the army. I can remember the first day I met my first real girlfriend and walked on air the rest of the week.

Why is it that we can remember all that stuff? It gets filed away somewhere and then without even trying, it pops out?

I can remember all the good traumatic stuff that happens, but I remember the bad traumatic stuff the best. Now, I’m wondering how that can be? Why do I have that ability? I easily forget lots of stuff, but some of it is so embedded that it never goes away. It’s a sort of Super Memory. Most of it, stuff so trivial that it really shouldn’t stick, and it stays like super glue!

I’m wondering if there could be a way to train our minds to work that way? In our everyday working, playing life, just remember stuff as if it were a brick falling on our heads. Everything would become a surprise or a tramatic happy or bad insult. I’m walking across the street and a driver stops to let me pass or I step on a small piece of fresh gun on the sidewalk and it doesn’t stick to the bottom of my shoe. The cop gives me a nice smile and thumbs up in heavy traffic or I’m on a trip to Wichita on K-96 and nothing happens. I simply arrive, safe and happy and remember it all and one morning I wake up with it in my head.

What if, every morning we’d wake up with the little things that happened the day before or ten years before on our minds. The good as well as the bad. Simple, nothing, waking moments? I’m not sure the human race is ready for a life like that. I’m not so sure I’d be ready for it myself, but it would be fun to give it a try.

After several days of waiting for the grand total of the weight of trash we picked up, swept up, scooped up and hauled bag by box out of the house we were de-trashing, has come in. May we have a drum roll here! Burrrrrrrrrrrrummmmm….. Rummmmmmm. The grand total is Five Thousand, two hundred, sixty pounds. (5,260 lbs.) Two point, six three tons (2.63 tons).

Now we’re talking actual household trash. This wasn’t old tires, car parts and tree stumps. This was trash, garbage, household crap, food, old parts of carpet, dirt, rat, cat, and dog do-do. It came from the kitchen, livingroom, upstairs landing and the junk room. It came from two rooms in the basement of the house, from the back porch, wash house, garage and the pile stuff accumulating in the yard for the past six or seven years… and you can believe this: We didn’t get nearly all the crap we wanted to get.

Now you know the rest of the story!

11/22/2008
Robert Joy
On Being Snubbed

I noticed today that my daughter complained on her blog site, about a guest speaker at a conference or meeting she attended. She said a nice “Hi!’ And got back a barely noticeable acknowledgment and then a short time later, another person enters the room and this time, the guest speaker jumps up and shakes hands and all that stuff. Well, that was very upsetting to her and I would have felt the same way if it had happened to me.

My friend Gina told me this story: She said she was with her friend Cheryl and they were in North Central Kansas around Smith Center, for meetings of something. They were driving around the next day and wound up in Red Cloud, Nebraska on the very day of the Willa Cather Festival. I guess Willa grew up in Red Cloud. Anyway… Gina was walking around and happened on a small coffee shop and decided to drop in for a nice coffee. While she was there, she noticed a man sitting at a table next to her and he had name tag on his suit coat lapel. He must have been a guest speaker at one of the sessions in the festival. She noticed the name on the name tag was, Robert Joy! Well, Gina not being the shy type went over to the man and introduced herself and mentioned that she had noticed his name and asked him if he and I (Robert Joy) could possible be related to one another.

Now, I don’t know about other people, but having someone mention another Robert Joy is interesting and I’m sure I would have acknowledged such enlightenment, but not this Robert Joy. This Robert Joy was not the slightest bit interested in the question, he wasn’t interested in being bothered and mumbled something and went back to his thinking or self imposed solitude and this abrupt behavior shook Gina and that was that. Well, that whole incident left a bad taste in Gina’s attitude about the guy. She was not impressed and old me about the encounter.

I didn’t think much about the other Robert Joy, until Marilyn Coffey wrote me a letter which included a large newspaper article on Artist Robert Joy of Omaha Nebraska. Now I’m intrigued, so I looked up Robert Joy’s address in Omaha and wrote him a letter. I guess I wasn’t that nice as I related the story to the guy and how he’d snubbed my friend Gina. I sent a nice illustrated envelope as usual, but I must have pissed the man, because he never answered me. I either pissed him off, or he isn’t much of a letter writer as most people will attest, or he really is a self absorbed snob. I guess I’ll never know unless I should run into him one of these days. I’m really not going to bother by going out of my way to meet him. The least he could do, is write back and tell me to mind my own business. Then I’d know; wouldn’t I?

11/21/2008
Robert Joy

A good reason to have a family doctor

There are good reasons people go to the village medical clinic in some parts of rural Central America, South America, Mexico, ete, etc, etc. First of all, there is a clinic and thank god for that. Second, there are doctors, nurses, medicine, procedures available that would not otherwise be available without the clinic in the village. Jose has a very absessed tooth, so it is extracted. Maria has a rash from an insect bite. Maria gets a shot and some cream to ease the itching. Raul thinks he has a broken bone in his foot. Raul has an X-ray taken of the foot and they find it to be just a very bad sprain that he is urged to stay off of for at least a month. Raul gets a set of crutches. He should return to the clinic in a month.

Jose has a very bad infection in his jaw that the doctor didn’t look at. The doctor delt with the abssessed tooth and pulled it. Maria has a very serious nervous system problem that is causing the rashes to appear, but the doctor didn’t know that. All the doctor saw was the rash and prescribed some medicated cream. Raul has a serious bone disease that is causing a calcium loss in his bone. The doctor looked for a fracture or hair line crack. The doctor will not see these people again, because he is expected to rotate back to the United States soon.

There are good reasons people go to the village medical clinic of Ellinwood, Kansas. They go, because, in the words of one patient: “I go there, because that is where my records are and… Well, and I know all the women that work there!” There you have it; because that is where their records are kept and they know the people working in the clinic. They don’t know the doctor though, because they don’t know who or which doctor will be on call at the time of their appointment. No pick and choose here, just get whoever shows up. The good, the bad and the maybe missing that day, because of family vacation, family emergency or that golf game that couldn’t be postponed.

So Don goes to the clinic with a bad tooth and they send him to the clinic dentist. “Yes, indeed, that is a nasty absess. We better get that tooth out right away. Oh, and I see here on your chart, that you have Mandable Dentite Extractametimie, sometimes we refer to it as MDE. You should get with the clinic doctor about this.” Don gets the tooth taken care of and forgets about the MDE, because his jaw feels better. Anyway, it’s the job of the doctor to know what is wrong and it’s all in their hands. The next time Don shows up at the clinic with another problem with his teeth, the new doctor on call will send him to the clinic dentist who will fix the immediate problem and maybe notice the MDE on the chart and remind Don or assume Don knows and the other doctor knows.

It’s on Don’s chart. Big bold letters, MDE, but the fact that Don is on crutches (another condition, known as Infected Knee Joint Syndrome or sometimes called IKJS doesn’t get conveyed to the doctor. This doctor sees the IKJS, but he can’t see the connection. He doesn’t see the connection, because Don is new to him. If this doctor knew Don and was witness to his changing condition, he’d be concerned and would certainly have reason to ask about conditions at home.

It seems that Don simply goes home and lays down on the divan like a beached whale and doesn’t move unless it is time to eat and he rolls over a tiny bit so his wife can feed him. The fact that Don remains inclined on the divan and with weight on his jaw most of the time, has cause the MDE to become aggravated.

Then Don develops a fever, dizziness, fainting and his whole mouth swells up from accute Mandable Dentie Extactametime or sometimes known as AMDE. That diagnosis will be added to the chart by the girls in the office under supervision of the visting physician. Don’s whole jaw, now must be removed and he will be put on medication that will render him to an indeterminate hospital stay with little or no chance of recovery… Anyway that’s what the doctor on call tells him.

The doctor really knows that Don isn’t going to make it, so why bother to tell Don to just go home and have as much a normal life for the next three months as he can. Of course, he’d be given a nice supply of high powered pain killers! But Why do that? Why cause Don to lose hope over a hopeless situation. The doctor won’t be around.

The scheduled clinic doctor will see Don with a scheduled appointment in two weeks if some emergency arises. Then Don just has to drive an hour and a half to see him in his regular office to only receive another supply of drugs to knock him out further. Why not just fill Don, his wife and loved ones with a glimmer of hope? A glimmer of hope that he’ll pull through with some radical lazer surgery, X-Ray therapy, and Chemotherapy to just be sure.

Of course, the side effects of this course of action will render Don, semi-comotose for the reminder of his life on earth. The family won’t be able to express their concerns as to his treatment, because the doctor will not be availible… well, unless the family requests an appointment and that will take two weeks. Still they do have the doctor on duty, but he doesn’t know anymore than what’s on the chart and… Well… Don really isn’t his patient. Well… Don isn’t really, anyone’s patient; is he?

11/20/2008
Robert Joy

The bad habits I don’t have and how I avoided them.

Down at the ole Diner job. There are the poor folks that have to take a smoke break. They check out and they go out into the cold to take a quick drag. I have my bad habits, but I don’t have that one. When I was little sprout, I stole a pack of cigarettes from someone in the family. It wasn’t hard in the early 1950’s because everyone on the planet smoked. They sit around with smoking cigarettes in their hands everywhere. Every cafe, every public performance, ball game, bingo hall, dance. Everyone smoked and while choking on the effects of the foul weed, they would instruct us kids on the evils of smoking, so naturally I had to try the dammed things to find out why everyone seemed to need to smoke. Well, I found out! It was one of the worst experiences in my life. It was worse than when I tried to eat a whole stick of pure butter, because it tasted so good on everything. I thought a whole stick would be heaven. It turned out to be, “Pucksville”… Well smoking, was right up there with that. Why in hell does anyone smoke? How in hell do they get hooked on the crap when it is so awful to do? I gagged and choked and hated every second of the experience and never did it again.

The only other similar thing I had the misfortune to try was a shot at pot. It was shortly after my divorce and I was very depressed and a friend of mine thought it was time to get turned on and so he decided I should come over to his house and get high. I did it, because anything was better than being depressed and miserable. Anything proported to bring me up was something I was willing to try. The experience was a downer. I got high alright. I felt like I was inside my head, trapped behind my eyeballs and all I wanted was to be let out and let alone. It was way too much and way more than I expected. I never did it again.

I really don’t drink coffee any longer. I did for a while, but the stuff just made me anxious all the time. I just wanted to run and hide under the nearest bridge. I stopped and just faced my problems.

I once woke up in the night with a coughing fit that I couldn’t control or stop. My wife suggested I take some codine. Wow! That crap knocked that coughing into the next county and it scared the crap out of me. I don’t like medicine that works like that crap. I stay away from stuff like that. I approach it like I do a rattlesnake. I use a stick and run the other way.

I guess I’m some sort of odd ball that had bad experiences with all the horrible crap people get hooked on. Maybe there could be some way that this could be the standard for kids today wanting to form a bad habit that will kill them when they get my age. They just try the poison of their choice and the experience is so horrible that they form a life long desire to avoid it.

Maybe it could be put on the supper table, colored green and the parent insist that Johnnie and Janie take a portion and insist they can’t leave the table until they clean up their plates. “Just remember, there are children in China with all these bad habits and they would be glad to have your portion… so eat up or no X-Box for you.”

11/18/2008
Robert Joy

“Mission Accomplished!”
We did it! Marcella and I moved mountains. About a month ago we were granted the opportunity to go out to her (Marcella’s) childhood farm home and clean it up. We’d been wanting to do it for a long time. Then one day, last month, we got a call from the inhabitants of that place; the owner called and asked us for help! Come out and dig me out of this rat hole. We went with one goal of trying to see if any remnant of her childhood remained. Maybe something she hadn’t remembered or retrieved in the past years. Her brother had taken ownership of the property and lived there for many years. Then he died and his wife of course took possession and the place went down hill. Her children moved back (Well, some of them) and they trashed the property, allowed multiple pets to inhabit the house. They simply didn’t take any trash to the dump for at least six years.

The house smelled bad when we started and to be completely honest, it still does. We scooped out the crap in the living room, and the kitchen. The floor was covered in trash, dishes, lost tools, old food, cat, dog, mouse litter. The owner also informed us the mice were getting much larger. We didn’t tell her those mice were now rats. The flies were thick and I wouldn’t eat a bite of anything, even if I were on the verge of starvation, from one dish in that whole house.

We plowed, swept, moved, dug, scooped, dragged crap out the door, down the steps, up the steps. I cleaned out the wash house while Marcella scraped and pecked at the stove to make it white again. Marcella found a litter of new baby kittens in a large bowl under the cabinet in the kitchen and the owner told her of another litter in a closet. There were at least two other adult female cats, running around with fat little bellies looking for good spots to form a new family. There were at least four dogs in the house that went where they needed to go. Two CuJo size mutts tied up outside. A ferret and broken windows upstairs, downstairs, in the wash house and everywhere else. The roof leaks and the plaster is falling from the ceiling and wall paper falling off in long strands. The place is an incredible mess… And people live in that hole.

They heat the place with one wood stove and three electric space heaters. The place is a giant fire trap with all the discarded clothes and crap on the floors. I simply cannot convey the condition of that house on this page. It is beyond description. The best way I can attempt a description is to allow you to see the condition of a fly strip they had hanging in the kitchen when we arrived. It was so full of dead flies that it looked like a black strip of something hanging from the ceiling. It was so full, there wasn’t room for anymore flies to land and get stuck. Marcella and I changed it and within fifteen minutes, there were six or eight flies stuck and more on the way.

Well, we worked for three weeks, on and off. We hired a giant dumpster to come and we started to fill it up. I We cleaned out the kitchen, living room, upstairs landing, the junk room (as they called it and it was indeed full of junk and crap. It is now the cleanliest room in the entire hubble. We cleaned a couple rooms in the basement, but then after that, we started to hear rumblings from the family (not the owner) the adult children, that we were tossing out valuable tupperware and valuable spices that were strewn and buried under rat crap on the basement floor. Marcella and I decided it was time to wrap up the effort. We went outside to pick up the six years of accumulated garbage and load the dumpster. We failed to clean out the garage, shop, oil house, old granary, chicken coop. All full of useless, molding, animal dropping covered crap. We decided those things and buildings were off bounds, because the adult children declared it “their stuff.”

We loaded and loaded crap onto the dumpster for three different days and today we accomplished our mission. We are hauling away a fraction of what should be hauled away, but as far as we’re concerned… We moved a mountain.

Urban Renewal
4/14/2007
Robert Joy

I was walking the back alleys of down town Great Bend this morning.
Eve’s were dripping from a recent snow.
I saw old brick, long neglected.
I saw battered windows covered with iron bars and broken glass.

Old stair cases leading up into dismal unused rooms I die to explore.
Nothing speaks to me louder than the empty rooms.
Debris of a former life left scattered and left behind on the floors.

I went around the block and passed one shop on Washington Ave.
It was an old shop behind the old Opera House.

This broken derrilick may as well not have had a roof.
The rain of melted snow was draining inside like someone had left a shower on up stairs.

There was an old coke bottle sitting in the window, it’s stagnant contents cooked by a thousand sunrises.
The crown, still intact was worn and white. It stood in the window like the king of the realm.
On the floor below this soveriean of time, was a litter of junk.
Old card board boxes, old paint cans and other flamable stuff waiting to become a fire.

This was Urban Renewal in the making.
It needed only Roman Emperor Nero and his fiddle.

I watched the water coming from the melting snow through the roof and through the floor of the room above.
I watched the shower raining down on a operating electric fan the owner had left running to dry the place out.

11/7/2008
Robert Joy

It is possible that you no longer need to worry about doing something important in your life. Maybe you already have; and just don’t realize it. May a person has left this world without knowing the greatness they left behind. Don’t try to find it, you’ll just get a headache and your choice will, most likely, just turn out to be completely wrong.

Just think, your letter to me may turn out to be that crowning moment and my letter back to you may be my moment. Great things, never have to be large. Look at the “Maginiot Line,” the line of forts between Germany and France. They were enormous monoliths of concrete and steel and look how they turned out; complete “Flops!”

I never could draw or paint, until I decided I needed to take a different road. I got a college degree in art, back in the 1970’s, I got a masters degree in the 1980’s and I don’t remember being able to be any kind of artist. I was just doing what I was expected to do or worse yet; what I thought I was expected to do and expected to be and I was getting nowhere. I was feeling as if I weren’t accomplishing anything.

I put out allot of stuff I later wished I could make dissolve or just burn up in a house fire. I once had a person give me back one of my old paintings after her husband died. She thought I needed it. I certainly did and I secretly disposed of it. “Good riddance”, I said to myself. One less thing out there to haunt me.

Then one day (and I can’t remember the date) I decided to just do what came out of pen, the pencil, the brush, the keyboard. No forcing, no editing. It was a very hard thing to do, like trying to stop smoking. I had to stop the judgement and to stop worrying about what “others might expect of me!” I even had to drop my own expectations of how something had to be. After that, if I liked the result or particular flow; Well then, Okay, I’d just keep it or if I didn’t like the result, I’d toss it out.

A strange thing happened. The personality of my work emerged. You know, the personality hidden inside one’s own individual handwriting? Your style!”. I had a friend of mine say to me one day, (you have to deepen your voice here) “Hey Bob, you know, I can tell what works of art in a room are yours without reading the little paper on the wall under the pictures?”

I answered, (Not so deep here) “What?”

“Yeah man; I walk into the gallery and “BOOM! There they are and I know who drew them”

Well, I must say, that never happened before. The only way to have that sort of reaction to one’s work was to repeat the same theme over and over until you had developed a repetition of doing such singular subjects. I could eventually become the fish guy or the flower guy or the clown guy. Most people out in the art world are trying to develope a style in just that manner.

Today, I’m trying to live my life in just that manner, but its proving to be very difficult. There is so much pressure to conform. We are all expected to “Lock Step” and not stand out. It’s discouraged to go it alone, like being a team member on the volleyball team. Just try and go out and develope an individualistic style of volley ball and you’ll be sent home in the first wave of dismissals. We’re encouraged to blend. Don’t sing out, don’t stand up and raise your hand or wear a bright red shirt to the funeral. Do as everyone else is doing. Sing in harmony, take the same steps so as not trip anyone in the march.

That’s what’s expected, and that’s why our art and our efforts seem so ordinary and down right boring even to ourselves. That’s why no one can see you in the crowd, when they walk into a room. You have no style. “Where’s Bob?” Where’s Cathy?” If they want to find you, they have to walk around the room looking at the name labels on everyone’s coat lapel.

Robert Joy, they’d read each label and then when they see it, they’d say, “Wow! So you’re the famous Robert Joy who draws dogs over and over and over? You’re the dog guy? Wow, I’m so excited! I’m going to tell all my friends, I got to stand next to Robert Joy, the dog guy?” Honestly though, that’s what’s been happening. It’s what was happening to me.

Honestly, we all should be out exploiting our personalities and not trying to develope some canned set of step that every one will know you by. It would be like learning the waltz with one shoe nailed to the floor.

Some where in this world there may be a country, maybe, but I’ve never been criticized for my handwriting, except maybe because it was sloppy and I didn’t curl my S’s in the Palmer style, but no one has ever said to me, I shouldn’t use my natural writing inclination. What would have happened it all the great writers put all their energy into developing a writing style in their story telling. Just learn the way Mrs. Maples’ preached with a yard stick and don’t do anything else. Hieroglyphics on the walls of ancient Egypt is what everything would be like. Where then, would Shakespear be Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Gilbert Sorrentino in world of great writing?

Great writing is not so much in the words themselves as it is in the natural unconscious style of the writer. How those words are connected and woven and twisted to wring the meaning from the ink on the page and into the readers head. There is this enormous difference between, trying to develope a style and exploiting one’s own natural unrehearsed personality. Developing, is something to “hold on to” and exploiting something is something to, “let go of.” I want to “Let Go!” One day a friend will say to me: “Hey Bob, ole boy, I can pick you out in a room full of people right off. I just look and there you are and with the slightest of effort on my part. You don’t have to be moving around or waving your hands in the air and I can pick you out! How about that, Bob?”

Boy Ole Boy, what a way to exist. To be recognizable just by style. The way you move and walk, and turn your head or blink your eyes. If that were possible for us all… We’d never be alone, or unaccomplished, or running around trying to attract attention by being the “dog man” or stripping and running into a stadium full of people or shooting a rock star to death on the street or collecting power and respect from the barrel of a gun.. We’d all just be human beings; human animals and content with that. We’d all be the stars we wish we were and get on with our lives.

11/12/2008
Robert Joy

Leaving Tucumcari

I don’t know what came over Janis. She just rolled out of her bed and started digging around in the room for her bag. She needed it… the one with the strap all patched together with wire and duct tape. The one with all the wishes and dreams sewed, glued, and written all over every inch, inside and out. The bag she kept telling everyone she was going to pack her whole childhood, her whole schoolhood, her whole adulthood and leave town.

She never left. She just hung on like a dog on the porch. She just went from sun up to sun down, eating, working, talking on the phone to anyone about nothing. Going over to her parents’ house on Sunday and reminded herself of growing up in Tucumcari. Going to college in Denver, Colorado and coming back to Tucumcari to spawn and die along with the rest of the town.

Janis wasn’t being quiet about it. She was tossing things about in a frenzy, but not as if the room hadn’t been tossed around a dozen, six dozen, a life time of tossings. She’d done this before, then decided she was hungry and went to Wendy’s for breakfast. It was just a block away and on the main highway through Tucumcari. She’d done it last week and the week before and all the farther it got her was to breakfast next to the highway. Next to the Tucumcari water tower where she liked to sit on hot afternoons, under the spray from an ancient leak a hundred feet above her head. Next to her boyfriend still sleeping under a wad of hot morning blankets.

This morning was just like all the other mornings. It was almost eleven and the sun was cooking the house, the room. The morning was like all the other mornings in Tucumcari. It came up and heated the city and something else fell. Something else broke loose and either fell to the ground or it swung on a tether. Lots of things were tethered and swinging in Tucumcari. That was the nature of the place. People hung and swung and the teather kept them from leaving. Janis was no exception.

“Goddamn-it, Terry, where the hell is my bag?” she’s shouting. Terry is barely conscience and rolls over under the wad of hot blankets. He has a headache from sleeping too long. His hair is in a wad on top of his head and part of it is draped over his face. It’s like an animal smothering him and as he wakes, he’s trying to toss it off as if it were a cat sleeping there. He can hear and feel the house trembling as Janis is thrashing around in her closet and drawers and under the bed.

“What the hell is going on, man,” mumbles Terry?

“I gotta find my bag,” answers Janis with panic in her voice.

“Why?”

“Cuz I’m leaving, Goddamn-it!”

“Man… You don’t need yer bag to go to Wendy’s.”

Janis wasn’t listening when she turned on the bed. She reached and tore the blanket off and tossed the wadded mass into a corner. Terry lurched back as if he believed he was next. He felt exposed in the morning sunlight and still in his undershorts as he rolled out onto the floor and started looking for his clothes.

“What the hell is going on, man?” he tried to ask Janis as she dug and pulled and tossed everything from under the bed.

“I’m leaving.”

“Slow down. Let me get dressed and I’ll go with you.”

“I ain’t got time to slow down.”

“What’s the big hurry, man?”

“Where the hell is my bag,” shouts Janis as if she’s the only person in the room.

“Well… like I know where it is, man, but why do you need it to go to breakfast?”

“I need it Terry, because I’m leaving.”

“Like leaving? Like really leaving?” asks Terry and by this time he has a desperate look on his face. “You mean your leaving me? You’re going to live with someone else. You’re just walking out, just like that?”

“I’m leaving, Terry. I’m leaving this dried up, dead tumbleweed of a town. I’m going to get the hell out of here. I can’t take it any longer. I wake up in this crap hole and it’s eleven o’clock. It’s hot as hell and I’m frozen in place. I have no ambition. I eat at that grease pit on the highway and spend my evenings dancing around a pole for toothless old has-beens for lousy tips and minimun wage. I’m getting the hell out of this place… Now where’s my bag?”

“Like… What about me, man?” asks Terry as if his mother is running off with the next loser man on her list.

“Terry!” shouts Janis. “Where the hell is my bag?”

“It’s out on your bike!”

“What the hell is it out there for?”

“I used it last week when I rode out with Jake to find cans on the highway”

“You used my bag?”

“Yeah, man. I was in a hurry and I just picked it up and used it.”

“And you just left it out there? You jerk! It better still be there or you’ll be jerking off without me from now on,” and before Terry can say another word, Janis is up on her feet and out the door.

Well, that’s how the morning came and went. I wasn’t sure what was going on with those two, but it was for certain that Janis was going much farther than the Wendys on the highway. Terry was confused and was desperately running around behind Janis like a lost puppy trying to get her to tell him what was going on. Janis just kept telling him she was leaving. She just went through the stuff in the two rooms they had rented. Some of which she tossed back in the corner and back onto the floor. With a rattle of “No!… Yes… No… No!”

Janis kept packing and repacking. Taking a sweater and tossing it out. Taking a teddy bear and not finding room inside so she straps it on the outside. No way she was leaving without her childhood bear. Terry is running around now with his old army surplus duffle bag and stuffing everything he owns into it.

“Like, where the hell are we going?”

“We’re not going anywhere. I’m going. I’m getting out of here with or without you.”

“Like, are you breaking up with me, Janis?”

“I’m leaving town, goddamn-it. I’m not going to stay here one more day. I’m not going to take care of you for one more day, Terry. I’m not going to take care of this town and all those over-the-hill losers at the Gentleman’s Club. Gentleman’s club! What an idiot up name to call it. It should be called the Tucumcari’s Old Losers Club. I’m leaving, Terry, and if you want to tag along, do it, but I’m not taking care of you another minute,” and at that she picked up her old straw hat and headed out the door.

“What about the rest of our stuff?” shouts Terry, as he follows her out the door.

“I got everything I need!”

“What about the rent?”

“They can try to find me if they want. They should have been paying us to live in this dump.”

“What about your mom and dad?”

“I’ll write. This town still has a post office, doesn’t it?”

I watched them go. I sat in my favorite chair outside the apartment house where I clean and watched Janis leave with her bag and with her boy friend in tow. I said, “Good bye,” but she didn’t hear me. I’d wondered why it had taken so long. All the other kids had left Tucumcai for college and never came back, but Janis had and now she was going. There it was. The final scene. Two kids walking fast toward the highway. The old route 66 with two ways to go, East or West and it didn’t really matter, because this place needs help and either way leds out of town.

The end

11/11/2008
Robert Joy

The Greatest American Artist of the Twenty-First Century

It would be just horrible to be defined as the last of something. I don’t seek to be the last and I’m sure hardly anyone actually planned on it. The last of the World War One veterans are all lined up for the end of life. The oldest dude is one hundred twelve years old. The worst part is to have one’s whole life measured on a few short years. These guys went to a war and survived it. Thank God, some people managed to do that. They just come home and went back to whatever they were doing when the war sucked them in.

No big honors for surviving the war. It’s as if the survivors didn’t matter. The guys that came home without a physical scratch that they could show off to the grandchildren just went on except for the horrible memories, nightmares and all the terrible stuff that just doesn’t show out loud, at first. The guys, like becoming a prisoner of war, getting wounded, doing something heroic and extraordinary, being someone famous before going to the war or the men who beat their own drums are the ones that get all the honor. Then when all the easy ones have passed on, the guys who live the longest are defined by the war they survived. What about the rest of their life? I guess it just takes a back seat, just like surviving guys had to take a back seat to a man coming home wounded.

I came home on a nice clean jet and got off in the air terminal in Garden City, Kansas in November 1969. No band, no banners, no line of dignitaries with a grandstand to make speeches. I’ve never been asked to give a speech in high school or the VFW hall on Veteran’s day. I’ve never had a Veteran’s day off from work. I wasn’t wounded, made prisoner of the enemy and I certainly didn’t do any stupid heroic stuff. I just went and did as I was told.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of what I did, but I’m sure as hell wasn’t defined by it. Some of the guys come home and they go join the VFW or the American Legion and march in all the parades, still try to squeeze into their uniforms, march at the funerals and parades. For some of those guys, the war will never be over. They’ll keep looking back and hoping they can somehow find the same comradeship and freedom they once had. Maybe all of them want to be the last living Veteran of their own war. To be the final honored soldier of their conflict and have themselves defined by that and only that, for the rest of time.

Well, I’m sixty-five at this writing. I spent one year in Vietnam. November 1968 to November 1969 and I came home in one piece with a missing filling in my tooth and two planter warts on the bottom of one foot. I didn’t do one damned thing that would define me as a hero. I was one of those contemptible REMF’s (Rear Eschelon Mother F–ker’s). I didn’t shoot at anyone or volunteer to go out looking for someone to shoot. I went, did as I was told and got on the freedom bird and came home. The world forgot me. The war forgot me and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be redefined by that one stinking year of my life by outliving all twelve million vets to the Vietnam war.

I’ll tell you what I’d like to be defined as! I want someone to recognize me as the Greatest American Artist of the Twenty-First Century.