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Spent the week putzing and reading a book by someone called Carl Carmer, printed in 1939, and entitled The Hudson: The Dramatic Story of the Hudson River and Its People from the 1500s to the Present.
My grandfather’s house in Brooklyn had a basement that was crammed with rotting, mildewed old books like this one, and one of the few delights of my otherwise miserable childhood was reading through them. Carmer has that typically bombastic pre-War style that draws heartily on personification (“their boats knew distant rivers”), adverbs like “lustily,” and a kind of King-James-Bible fondness for the preposition “for”: The great panic of 1837 was much to blame, for all prices dropped to a low level and stayed there.
His paragraphs are structured like those church services where the pastor booms out some gospel verse and the congregants reply: Some of the captains said the upriver businessmen would not put enough money into the trade… The businessmen replied that the river towns were too distant from the whale produce markets…
I’m studying Carmer’s style because it’s perfect for the heart of the Eleanor story, what the old man tells Molly at the horrible Friends of the Livingston Legacy gathering.
###
Also this week, I got a refresher course in No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Not a big deal, certainly. More of an eyebrow raiser.
It was coupled, though, with a weird quasi-hallucinatory experience of the type that I used to have frequently ages and ages ago back when I was the Acid Queen.
That was kind of a Big Deal.
###
Kimberly, you may remember, was the spunky, spitfire, Sicilian girl whom I watched one day drive her truck up the practically-180-degree incline of a Triple A truck. When Kimberly’s elderly cat died, I spent an entire day consoling her with cookies, treats, and bad movies. L and I also took Kimberly and her boyfriend Austin out for dinner on their respective birthdays – they each were turning 21, a not-insignificant birthday. We felt badly that they had no family members or friends around to make a fuss over them.
Anyway, LiRong was gone in May but back in the middle of June. L put her in the downstairs room formerly occupied by Kimberly and Austin so that the upstairs room could go back to being the Airbnb digs.
As soon as LiRong walked into the downstairs room, she was attacked by ravenous hoard of fleas! She must have gotten 20 bites. In the course of something like five minutes.
LiRong instantly moved out and found another place to live. Who could blame her?
Clearly, the fleas were from Kimberly and Austin’s cats. Who were not on any kind of flea medication.
My cats are on Advantage. They don’t have fleas.
More than once during her months here, Kimberly had actually showered her cats because she’d found fleas on them – a really drastic procedure and rather traumatizing for the cats, I’d assume.
“Why don’t you just put them on Advantage or Frontline?” I’d ask. “You can buy it at any pet store.”
“They don’t need it!” she’d snap with the unspoken caveat, And mind your own fucking business.
I suspect this was one of their many false economies. Kimberly could spend $350 a month to lease this enormous, gas-guzzling truck but she wouldn’t cough up $60 for necessary care items for her animals because, you know, she and Austin were saving to move to Tennessee, which somehow, in her brain, was the Promised Land.
###
There was major unpleasantness when Kimberly and Austin moved out. I wasn’t around for it. Kimberly cleaned the carpets, but L wanted to keep their pet deposit for a week or so to see if any residual cat miasma floated up. Of course, this is perfectly acceptable behavior: L and I are extremely good friends, but I wouldn’t expect her to behave differently when I move out – business is business, and animals are messy.
Evidently, Kimberly did the whole Mafioso, nose-on-nose screaming thing to L. Give me back my money.
Thing about L, though, is that she’s not easily intimidated. She has the most placid, easy-going personality you could possibly imagine but you can’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. And you can’t make her angry.
“Behaving like this isn’t going to change my mind,” she told Kimberly calmly. “And it’s very bad behavior. It makes me think you are cheap and low class.”
After about a week, L did return the deposit because the room didn’t develop a cat smell.
This turned out to be a mistake, though.
We ended up flea bombing the downstairs four times, and L got the carpets cleaned and flea-treated twice. Not cheap.
Finally, this week, L wrote to Kimberly to tell her that her cats had fleas. In the email, she described the expenses associated with getting rid of the fleas, but she didn’t ask for any money from Kimberly.
She got the most hateful email you could possibly imagine back. Not only hateful towards L, but also hateful towards me, which was kind of bizarre since I’d never been anything but nice toward the girl, and I wasn’t involved in the wrangle over the deposit. I was quite shocked.
I’d always had this very, very strong presentiment – which I did not share with L or anyone else – that Kimberly had been sexually abused by her father, and this presentiment came back very strongly while L sat on my bed, chuckling, reading Kimberly’s incredibly ungrammatical diatribe aloud – like I said, L doesn’t get intimidated by anything.
I was sitting facing a mirror while L read the email. And in the mirror, I could actually see the old farmhouse in Cooperstown. Hear the creaks on the landing as the fat father sneaked upstairs. Feel Kimberly’s emotions – which were an odd combination of… possessiveness and triumph... (I know, I know, weird words for incest, but hey! that’s what I got) as she finished him off in her grubby little fist.
And when that vision faded, another one took its place: Kimberly, 15 years from now, weighing around 250 pounds, engaged in some sort of screaming fight with Austin to whom she was/will be married. He’d never managed to materialize those dreams of his own restaurant, his own distillery; he’d only been able to find a job as a line cook making ten bucks an hour, and eventually had taken a job as a manager at an (ulp) Olive Garden restaurant (very specific!) in historic downtown Franklin, Tennessee. Not sure what they were fighting about in this fantasy –
The confabulatory mind of the old-druggie-cum-wannabe-storyteller at work.
Quite odd.
Anyway, this experience with Kimberly won’t stop me from being nice to people who need someone to be nice to them. Certainly, plenty of people have been nice to me over the years at times when I was in desperate circumstances. You try to pay it forward when you can.
My grandfather’s house in Brooklyn had a basement that was crammed with rotting, mildewed old books like this one, and one of the few delights of my otherwise miserable childhood was reading through them. Carmer has that typically bombastic pre-War style that draws heartily on personification (“their boats knew distant rivers”), adverbs like “lustily,” and a kind of King-James-Bible fondness for the preposition “for”: The great panic of 1837 was much to blame, for all prices dropped to a low level and stayed there.
His paragraphs are structured like those church services where the pastor booms out some gospel verse and the congregants reply: Some of the captains said the upriver businessmen would not put enough money into the trade… The businessmen replied that the river towns were too distant from the whale produce markets…
I’m studying Carmer’s style because it’s perfect for the heart of the Eleanor story, what the old man tells Molly at the horrible Friends of the Livingston Legacy gathering.
###
Also this week, I got a refresher course in No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Not a big deal, certainly. More of an eyebrow raiser.
It was coupled, though, with a weird quasi-hallucinatory experience of the type that I used to have frequently ages and ages ago back when I was the Acid Queen.
That was kind of a Big Deal.
###
Kimberly, you may remember, was the spunky, spitfire, Sicilian girl whom I watched one day drive her truck up the practically-180-degree incline of a Triple A truck. When Kimberly’s elderly cat died, I spent an entire day consoling her with cookies, treats, and bad movies. L and I also took Kimberly and her boyfriend Austin out for dinner on their respective birthdays – they each were turning 21, a not-insignificant birthday. We felt badly that they had no family members or friends around to make a fuss over them.
Anyway, LiRong was gone in May but back in the middle of June. L put her in the downstairs room formerly occupied by Kimberly and Austin so that the upstairs room could go back to being the Airbnb digs.
As soon as LiRong walked into the downstairs room, she was attacked by ravenous hoard of fleas! She must have gotten 20 bites. In the course of something like five minutes.
LiRong instantly moved out and found another place to live. Who could blame her?
Clearly, the fleas were from Kimberly and Austin’s cats. Who were not on any kind of flea medication.
My cats are on Advantage. They don’t have fleas.
More than once during her months here, Kimberly had actually showered her cats because she’d found fleas on them – a really drastic procedure and rather traumatizing for the cats, I’d assume.
“Why don’t you just put them on Advantage or Frontline?” I’d ask. “You can buy it at any pet store.”
“They don’t need it!” she’d snap with the unspoken caveat, And mind your own fucking business.
I suspect this was one of their many false economies. Kimberly could spend $350 a month to lease this enormous, gas-guzzling truck but she wouldn’t cough up $60 for necessary care items for her animals because, you know, she and Austin were saving to move to Tennessee, which somehow, in her brain, was the Promised Land.
###
There was major unpleasantness when Kimberly and Austin moved out. I wasn’t around for it. Kimberly cleaned the carpets, but L wanted to keep their pet deposit for a week or so to see if any residual cat miasma floated up. Of course, this is perfectly acceptable behavior: L and I are extremely good friends, but I wouldn’t expect her to behave differently when I move out – business is business, and animals are messy.
Evidently, Kimberly did the whole Mafioso, nose-on-nose screaming thing to L. Give me back my money.
Thing about L, though, is that she’s not easily intimidated. She has the most placid, easy-going personality you could possibly imagine but you can’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. And you can’t make her angry.
“Behaving like this isn’t going to change my mind,” she told Kimberly calmly. “And it’s very bad behavior. It makes me think you are cheap and low class.”
After about a week, L did return the deposit because the room didn’t develop a cat smell.
This turned out to be a mistake, though.
We ended up flea bombing the downstairs four times, and L got the carpets cleaned and flea-treated twice. Not cheap.
Finally, this week, L wrote to Kimberly to tell her that her cats had fleas. In the email, she described the expenses associated with getting rid of the fleas, but she didn’t ask for any money from Kimberly.
She got the most hateful email you could possibly imagine back. Not only hateful towards L, but also hateful towards me, which was kind of bizarre since I’d never been anything but nice toward the girl, and I wasn’t involved in the wrangle over the deposit. I was quite shocked.
I’d always had this very, very strong presentiment – which I did not share with L or anyone else – that Kimberly had been sexually abused by her father, and this presentiment came back very strongly while L sat on my bed, chuckling, reading Kimberly’s incredibly ungrammatical diatribe aloud – like I said, L doesn’t get intimidated by anything.
I was sitting facing a mirror while L read the email. And in the mirror, I could actually see the old farmhouse in Cooperstown. Hear the creaks on the landing as the fat father sneaked upstairs. Feel Kimberly’s emotions – which were an odd combination of… possessiveness and triumph... (I know, I know, weird words for incest, but hey! that’s what I got) as she finished him off in her grubby little fist.
And when that vision faded, another one took its place: Kimberly, 15 years from now, weighing around 250 pounds, engaged in some sort of screaming fight with Austin to whom she was/will be married. He’d never managed to materialize those dreams of his own restaurant, his own distillery; he’d only been able to find a job as a line cook making ten bucks an hour, and eventually had taken a job as a manager at an (ulp) Olive Garden restaurant (very specific!) in historic downtown Franklin, Tennessee. Not sure what they were fighting about in this fantasy –
The confabulatory mind of the old-druggie-cum-wannabe-storyteller at work.
Quite odd.
Anyway, this experience with Kimberly won’t stop me from being nice to people who need someone to be nice to them. Certainly, plenty of people have been nice to me over the years at times when I was in desperate circumstances. You try to pay it forward when you can.
