By Tom Blitzenbaum circa 2k11
You don’t know about me without you have read the books Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but that ain’t no matter. Those books were spun up by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly, forgiving the usage of the pen name of course. This tale’s being spun up by Mr. Blitzenbaum, also a pen name and one which truly needs forgiveness.
That rascal (Call me Blitz, he would say) shanghaied me and Jim right out from under a chugging side-wheeler’s paddles as we laid out on the raft just going with the flow under the stars one night, then plunked us (well me at least, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Jim) into a spanking new fresh life a few centuries later. So you can see for yourself that Mr. Blitzenbaum is a tale stretcher of good caliber and a pirate of the most sordid class.
Good thing too, because rumor has it that Blitz, bored and disenchanted with his literary plunder from the public domain, has decided to raid the formidable and highly fortified dominion of the privateer King in his endless quest for the perfect quest.
Me? I’m just happy to be alive and scribing again, even if I am only writing in my head while I enjoy the supreme contentment of putting one foot in front of the other. A setting sun beams, caressing the back of my neck and easing the happily aching muscles in my shoulders. I breathe in, and I breathe out, and this is my only duty right now.
The trauma of drowning in a muddy shower of splinters, the horror of lungs filling with brown bubbling, churning, Mississippi River water is reduced to no more significance then the memory of stubbing a toe on the widow’s back porch step. I feel charged and refreshed, like I’ve just finished a good swim. My muscles ache, but it’s a good ache, an earned ache.
I’m as naked as I was when the riverboat nailed us, but I have an instinct that here clothing doesn’t have the same importance for folks that it used to, especially judging by the enormous billboards posted along this old road. I’m tall, tan, and alive when I never expected to be, so you can imagine that it would take quite a lot to bother my peace of mind, even aside of the fact that shoes and clothes never did stand high on my personal list of priorities in any case.
But a man does feel better with a pair of pants on, in most universes anyway, or even a kilt? I have no idea where that thought came from, as we didn’t wear kilts in my old Missouri, but it’s still familiar to me. No sooner is the thought across my mind, than I notice the weight of my old blue bandana rucksack bobbing at the end of the willow stick hitch-hiking a ride on my left shoulder.
The sun is dipping fast now, and I dig out my old Levis and slide on into them like a bullet into a gun chamber they fit so well. There’s a black flannel shirt in there too, India ink black, and I only notice the stark white collar around my neck for the first time when I attempt to button the shirt’s top button. No kilt though, which was probably a good thing as I was, in the words of the sinner/saint Johnny Appleweed, “going commando.”
I do have a guardian angel it seems, in Miss Kalahari Galloway, my shotgun rider. She says she never wears clothes either, but I get the feeling that she’s ribbing me with the truth a little, as it may be that Miss Kali doesn’t even wear a body. Miss Galloway is the one who’s encouraging me to write down everything about my first (first recalled at least) Augenblitz, even if I only bother to tell the story to her in my head. She says she’ll take care of the punctuation and other bothersome work that goes with writing stuff down and making it permanent. All I have to do is wear what she calls the Omega collar, and she takes care of the rest.
Somehow the work and bother of writing down the first book has faded from my mind, but one particular line in there leaps out like a Calaveras County frog, and that’s the one where I said to myself after deciding not to turn Jim over for running away; “Alright! I’ll go to Hell then.”
It was the moment when I put my past behind me and stepped up from the mire of my nightmarish boyhood as a motherless drunk’s son from a long line of jug-lugging trash where bastardies were the only family tradition.
If this is Hell, so far it ain’t so bad. Or maybe Hell is already behind me now. If Pap wasn’t the Devil he’d a done until the real one came along. Mr. Twain’s readers didn’t know the half of it.
“That boy wasn’t born, he was squeezed out of a bar rag.” they used to say in the riverfront jug dens when Pap got the rare urge to go bragging on me, usually about an hour before he would come home and whoop the hell out of me. But I look back now and know that it was exactly the right thought to have, that “go to Hell if I have to” thought.
You see, it seems like Augenblitz aint very picky at all, despite what you may have heard from your local Crossman preacher concerning the height of the moral bar that a man is expected to leap in order to get into Heaven. One noble moment is usually enough to justify a man’s moving on, so take my advice and don’t miss your chance at your own.
I’m not a boy anymore, which is certainly an immense relief. I know in my bones that manhood for me has been a long time coming, always just out of reach, leaving me as a soul incomplete. Jim would be laughing if he could see me now, after listening to my endless worrying about when I would get hair “down there”, one of the visible facts of life that fed my perpetual obsession with the thought that the rest of the world was moving on while I remained a boy forever, allowed only innocent puppy love from a distance.
Like with Mary Jane.
It had been quite a while since I’d seen Mary Jane, with little improvement in the manhood blooming area, between that time and a couple of summers later that we got her letter pleading for rescue from New Orleans. That letter had launched us down the river and ended up with me having my first Augenblitz.
”You just a late bloomer Huck”, Jim would say in that soothing, sympathetic, wise tone of his. “All in good time. ‘Sides, what you in such a rush to push a baby carriage fo’?”
“Mary Jane’s got more sand than any female I ever met Jim,” I told him, even though he already knew the depths of my obsession with Mary Jane and her quantity of sand. “She was already some figure of a woman when we left two years ago Jim. She ain’t going to be interested in no boy like me now.”
“She ain’t, huh? Then why she sends that letter to you in the first place, honey, out of all the men she must know in her life? Tom Sawyer didn’t get no letter, did he? And he growed his-self a scraggly red goatee the last time I seen him.” Jim laughed. “Looked like a damn freckle-faced leper’con, he did. Made me want to take the scissors to him.”
It was true, Tom hadn’t gotten any letter, and I got some satisfaction when Jim brought this up as we hadn’t parted on the best of terms anyway, Tom and I. When I showed Tom the letter and told him I was off to rescue Mary Jane from her evil brother in New Orleans he actually laughed at me.
“Huck you dope you! That’s not an R”, Tom proclaimed in that condescending know-it-all, let’s explain the world to Huck the hick tone, and poking my fragile love letter mercilessly with his bony leprechaun’s freckled finger. “That’s an L”! The evil word she needs rescuing from is ‘brothel’ not ‘brother’!”
“Oh brother”, muttered Jim, easing his bulk to a position from where he might more easily deflect any flying feckle-faced lepercon from bouncing into the corner containing his carefully stacked pyramid of 100-proof watermelons. Tom had his detective agency, but Jim’s rum-soaked watermelons kept us fed and paid the rent. Tom lost more money than he ever made on his wild goose detective chases, yet he had the gallstones to complain about my going to New Orleans after Mary Jane! Then came that brothel crack, the one that broke the billy-bumbler’s back. Jim, Yah bless him, knew me well enough to know what was coming.
At that nasty remark of Sawyer’s, I had balled up my fist, socked him square on his fuzzy red jaw, and knocked him ass over tea kettle. It was a hell of a thing to say about a fine Crossman girl with such sand as Mary Jane, just because she wrote her r’s kind of big and loopy. And of all people, Tom Sawyer ought to have known about my sore spot concerning brothels and brothel women.
Nobody ever came right out and told me so, but there were always persistent whisperings around St. Pete’s that my own ma came from a backwoods brothel to inflict her offspring (me) on the good folks of that town, only to return to a lazy life of whoredom afterward, finding that degrading but enjoyable misery preferable to the horrendous nature of domestic life with Pap’s fist, and the never-ending demands of my maternal needs. That’s how Mrs. Grundy and her Old Biddy Committee told it anyway.
I actually prefer to think that Pap maybe killed my ma, way back before I can remember. I’d certainly seen his murderous side enough times when the jug demons had full hold of him, so the idea does have some sand of its own. But that could be just the wishful thinking of a boy trying to come to terms with the fact that both of his parents were nothing more than jug-swigging trash; as it lets my faceless Ma off the hook for desertion, actually makes a martyr out of her in my mind. Slender hope for an orphan is better than none, even if it does come from pure fantasy. That Ma might have died like a she-bear protecting her cub would definitely give her the one noble moment she needed if Old Huck was her judge.
Considering the goings on I witnessed growing up with Pap and his backwoods jug women, and sometimes very drunken backwoods jug men, and (the Crossman forbid) a few tragically unlucky backwoods children who had no choice in the matter at all, it bothers me quite a bit, that the whispers of Mrs. Grundy are probably more true than my imaginary noble moment version about my ma’s fate. Still, I have a strange sore spot that goes hand in hand with the soft spot in my heart concerning brothel women. After all, if it wasn’t for them, I would never have been born at all, seeing as how any respectable female would run in the opposite direction, and maybe fetch the sheriff on her way out, after laying eyes on diabolical Pap laying his eyes on them.
That my saintly Mary Jane could have sunk so low as maybe my own deserting ma had when she left me with that raging drunk just pushed my buttons to no end, and Tom Sawyer, of all people, should have known that about me. That my sweet Mary Jane could be forced into the same piggish games that I’d seen played out from my hiding spot beneath Pap’s ratty cabin bunk just rankled me. Sometimes Sawyer just let his thoughts drop on down from his brain to his tongue like a one-cent gumball machine with a loose rivet. And who was Tom Sawyer anyway, getting all high and mighty when Becky Thatcher had a very noticeable bump at her beltline before the rush-rush wedding that made her Becky Sawyer?
Don’t know what happened to Jim yet, I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for him. Who can say where a runaway slave lands after his Augenblitz? If Jim had even died with me at all? He swam like a mackerel my mighty Jim did, and I’ve seen him take a hickory club and worse to the head and shake it off. So it just might be that Jim is still back somewhere on the Mississippi, needing more than a paddlewheel to the skull to launch him to the next world. Maybe he’s even now burying my old boy’s body once and for all. I hope he remembered my cross if that’s the case. Everybody likes to leave their mark on the world they leave behind. It seems so important, though I can’t say why.
Then again, old Mr. Twain’s books are still pretty popular so maybe Jim’s just gone back to the beginning of it all yet again. That ain’t a bad fate either. As Limbos go a man could do worse than an eternity of floating free, adventuring down the Mississippi River, as one can perceive that he’s even been in Limbo only after he steps out of it. Before that, it’s a case of not knowing what you are missing I guess.
I’m alone for now, not counting Miss Galloway riding shotgun to the right of my mind, just putting one foot in front of the other on this ancient-looking scarred road, which is poking like a tunnel through solid pine forest on both sides. I can remember folks I’ve never met on this road, and history I’ve never lived through too.
I’m not concerned about the destination. The first joy of Augenblitz is the supreme relief that comes when you realize that there is something after. This fulfillment of the ultimate hope tends to squash out any anxiety about where and when the next flash takes place, and where and who you will spend it with. For now, I’m grateful for the solitude with just a clear guiding voice to listen to. Besides I realized even as a boy that no matter where you go, there you are, and if you want to make Yah laugh, tell him your plans.
The sunset is on me. There’s a salty, unmistakably fishy smell to the air whenever a stray easterly breeze fights its way through the balmy stream riding in from the orange-fired sky to my west. I remember the old saw, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight”, and simple pure joy gives another burst and puts a spring in my step. Just happy about the color of the sun is all, simple as that. Like waking up with the sleepy expectation of Bible lessons with the widow, and finding instead that you’re camping, free on Jackson Island, and your best pal is handing you a smoke to help you get your Saturday off to a good start.
There is no horizon in this maze of pine, but judging by the amount of seagulls back and forth overhead, there is an ocean nearby. No smell or sound of river anywhere, just salty air and gritty grey-white sand and scrub pines, edging the shoulder of the road, working a relentless slow incursion onto the hard pan itself. Here and there a scrub pine seedling fights its way up through the black cracks. The road is black hard tar with flaky yellow lines painted on, and scrub weeds penetrate the cracks in it that give it that look of antiquity. I know intuitively that I’m a long way from 1845. Or even 1945.
Now and again I pass huge paintings on poster board signs. One had women dressed only in their under things urging the reader to “Enjoy Cocaine-Cola” while they cavort on a beach with a white ball suspended above their outstretched, superbly tanned arms. Another of those gigantic sign boards features a pretty showgirl balancing a tray of golden whiskey drinks on her shoulder and little else in the way of costume, urging the reader to visit “Showboat Casino, Atlantic City’s Crown Jewel.” I don’t even consider that particular destination. Augenblitz or not, I’ve had enough truck with boats of any kind for awhile.
We were near to New Orleans when our raft was reduced to splinters by that side-wheeler, and now I’m in New Jersey according to Miss Galloway and the poster signs. Everything interesting starts in New Jersey. She’s whispering to me to relax, that this is all just part of the Augenblitz experience, which is just Blitz’s cute term for something that authors have been describing for centuries now. No need for me to keep pounding the point home, as the Fair Readers have been conditioned to accept the idea for long enough now that I risk losing their attention by preaching to a choir that already has faith enough to believe when they know it ain’t so.
Augenblitz is no secret Huck. The King in his prolific mastery knows all about it, back through Mr. Heinlein, as did Mr. Twain, and Mr. Welles, and Mr. Dodgson, ad- infinitum. Though the good reverend too, hid his Omega collar under a pen name when he told Alice’s adventures. Augenblitz is nothing new under the sun, folks have been writing about it since folks have been writing at all, but it sure seems new when you live through it, huh Huck?
There are some folks around, according to Miss Galloway, who can remember all of their deaths, (or so they think anyhow), but me? I’m only able to go back as far as Pap and the booze and the nightmares I saw in the jug shack, and Jim and Tom Sawyer and their ilk. It’s like I didn’t truly exist before that somehow, but as my future stretches before me now, the blanks of my incomplete past are starting to get some color too.
The funniest, most unexpected thing about dying is how fast it all happens. The eye blinks. In the realm between the paddlewheel churning up our raft to kindling, and blinking awake to the here and now, you walk out with a lot of answers to those big questions everybody asks themselves as they whistle past the graveyard, and it’s all there in an eye flash.
No transition period, no time for your eyes to adjust to the dark because there ain’t no dark; just an awareness of wisdom that wasn’t there before, wisdom like an inserted or forgotten section of mind, unearned, and unattached to any particular episode or lived-through experience. But no use me going on and on about the experience, because anybody who’s had Augenblitz knows how futile it is to try and explain it to anybody who ain’t. And anybody who’s been through Augenblitz knows how hard it is to shut up about it.
Besides Miss Galloway is whispering to me that the initial thrill of Augenblitz always wears off, which I guess is a natural thing, and a good and necessary thing or folks would tend to move on, flashing from life to life just chasing that first thrill of after-death like an addict chasing his first high, without ever slowing down to live things out in their own right. Or worse, men and women would try to make the move with suicide which the universe discourages at all costs for some reason.
Suicide is the opposite of the Noble Moment, enough so that it may even erase a whole passel of noble moments piled up in a lifetime. Maybe this is why the magical talent of childhood has to wear itself out in a man, for his own good.
Good thing we’re in the third millennium (quite a ways from 1945, I knew it!) where a Miss Kalahari Galloway can exist, or you most likely wouldn’t be reading this book at all. You of Mr. Twain’s faithful Fair Readers may recall that I vowed never to write another book again, considering all the trouble it took to get the last one down.
I’m a lefty, a southpaw, “one of Yah’s gifted chillun” as we southpaws like to say, and any southpaw can tell you what a mess can be made writing left to right with a pen hand that tries to smudge or erase everything you’ve scrawled down as you go. After the last manuscript, my left hand was blacker than Jim’s by the time I got it all down.
But here we’ve got the sweet Miss Kalahari Galloway taking down our thoughts and musings without me even having to dip a pen or dull a pencil, so you can give Kal Gal the credit for my new up-to-date 21rst Century dialect. Or maybe it’s more of that forgotten wisdom I talked about before?
Mr. Blitzenbaum calls this “breaking the dynamic continuity barrier” but I’d say that’s just his way of rationaLiling his outright piracy when he takes it upon himself to kidnap folks out of old books. That’s OK with me; I’ve always loved a good pirate. It is nice that they’ve decided to present me as more educated in my manhood, but that could just be Mr. Blitzenbaum’s method of dodging the tedious task of recreating 19th Century Missouri slang that is such a chore for Miss Galloway to spell check and punctuate.
I wonder if Mary Jane is here?
HUCK’S HUB >>>>>>>>>>>GREAT ADVENTURE
Designated Greyhound Station
That was the message of the biggest sign on the top of the pole poking up from a cluster of overgrown purple weeds. Underneath it someone had tacked a wildly spiraling collection of lesser wooden arrow pointers. Some have destinations inscribed on them in fuzzy painted letters. Other names are boldly burnt into the wood as if there will never be a reason to alter them. One says “Live TV “. Another advertises “Live Nude Girls” and I wonder why anyone would want a dead nude girl, and what TV stands for.
There’s also a picture of a running greyhound, announcing with its caption “Designated Greyhound Station”. I wonder why in the world dogs would rate their own station. In my day only trains had a station. This world can’t be so weird that folks ride around on dogs can it, or maybe on dogsleds like the Eskimos? The thought makes me chuckle. Dog sleds on sand and blacktop probably aint going to make it.
That one dazzling sign is jumping out at me from its crowning position, loud and bawdy like a carnival barker. It’s not fashioned from mere wood crate scraps like the others, and it sits right at my new manly eye level on the crowded signpost. Its words are formed with what look like bent tubes of glaring bluish-white light, and there are small arrows of red lights, blinking on and then off in a spooky sequence that makes the arrow seem to move in the direction the sign wants me to go.
I try to read the names on the lesser signs, but the glare from the Great Adventure pointer washes them out. There’s a road for every arrow, all converging at this signpost, and there are a bunch of arrows. The sun is down now, but the moon is up to do her shift in full glory, huge as she can be, down so close to the new horizon.
Well if there is one thing I’ve brought forward with me, one thing I’ve learned, from a long loop of living my tale of a life on the Mississippi, it is to go with the flow. There’s a tavern or lodge up ahead too, if I go in the direction this universe seems to want me to go, and a sudden thirst for a root beer quells my curiosity about the alternate destinations on the post, so that’s the path I choose.
Adding to the attraction for this particular path, on the porch of the tavern I can see a girl with long flowing jet black hair reflecting the light from this humongous full moon. Mary Jane had jet black hair, but this moonlit beauty is standing out there smoking, a man’s vice that my saintly Mary Jane would never consider! The tiny glow from the fire on the end of her slender cigar illuminates the clouds of blue smoke hovering around her alabaster face.
She stands, gorgeous in the glow of a halo formed by the spilled light from the batwing doors behind her, aloof and oblivious to the raucous music and bawdy hollers from the tavern. She wears a red and white striped apron and nothing else, creamy smooth skin peeking out in tantalizing places that make me want to see more, which is somehow naughtier than if she’d been out in front of the place smoking stark naked.
I move in closer, drawn by the strange yet still familiar feminine gravity of her, without my feet even touching the ground it seems, as if the attraction between us is so strong that I’ve drawn her and the surrounding sector of the world she stands on right to me. An all too familiar ache of hope fires in my heart.
The old hope is involuntary, and there is nothing I can do to stifle it. It rises of itself, as it always has, never deterred by the knowledge that I’m deluding myself yet again. The stubborn hope remains undiluted by all the fruitless false hopes I’ve seen crushed before when I futilely searched the crowds and faces; first for my Ma, and now for Mary Jane ever since she sent me that letter. That relentless hope that always tells me I’ve suddenly become worthy of the attention of such a beautiful woman as this.
She looks up as I approach, smiling under a sign over the massive batwing doors announcing that this place is simply “The Hub”, and in smaller burnt-in letters, the slogan in quotes, “Come on in and palaver awhile!” And before I can bite my tongue, that crazy hope just up and spills out loud from my mouth, seemingly of its own accord.
“Mary Jane?” I ask.
“I can be Mary fucking Magdalene for you if you’ve got the dinero Padre.” is what Lucy Ferguson first said to me, as she blew a stream of smoke through pouty red lips just inches away from my own.
I never stood a chance.
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