As related to Funion Philosopher of Death, Pete "the Bog" Potterson, by Stanley "Duke" Dockett's best friend and roommate at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort, Poppy Bills.
Stanley "Duke" Dockett, so nicknamed for his attendance at Duke University, class of '37 -- a time and place in which donning harmless blackface was not just part of a normal, fun time, but celebrated to the Heavens (but those were different days, simpler days, perhaps BETTER days) for its cultural and historical significance and the joy it would bestow on anyone who gazed upon it -- the white American male face of blackness! -- for what is wrong with a little shmear of shoe polish on one's mug, a sprinkling of a flour-water mixture on one's kisser, some Charleston dancing with one's best gal? You do that now, with the blackface, and it's a fucking national emergency. Duke loved to do it, you know, so excuse me for honoring the poor fucker's fucking life.
(The Bog here. Loyal Funion Followers probably remember my three-part series on Grace Topher, the stand-up comedienne serial killer, Laughing in the Face of Death: She Killed it! - The Grace Topher Story, produced for this publication back in 1974, when the Funion was a weekly print broadsheet distributed exclusively to halfway homes. That story rendered me a sobbing, bed-wetting mess. I had, and still have, nightmares every night involving Grace Topher. A recurring one is especially debillitating: an enormous comedy club called Maniax, about the size of an airport, with as many wings and floors and signs and public restrooms; essentially it is an airport that has been converted into a comedy club. The bar is in Terminal A. I approach the bartender, a beautiful woman, and she says very loud and very slowly, as if she and only she has been captured in super slo-mo, "What... the fuck... do you... waaaant?" She has the voice of an old woman; very old, like ninety. Everything is blacklit. The beautiful bartender with the old lady voice's teeth are glowing. House music is thumping. I am staring into this beautiful bartender's mouth as she is slowly speaking then slowly closing her mouth, all the while very anxious because the show is about to start and the stage is all the way in Terminal C. I say, "Just give me hot tea, please, and hurry!" and the beautiful bartender's face morphs -- very slowly and gradually, remember -- into one of abject horror, because behind me is Grace Topher, with her red hair pulled back tight in a bun, wearing prison orange, stabbing me up the anus with a footlong knife, all of which I can see in the mirror at the bar behind the beautiful bartender -- who is now crying hysterically in super fast motion -- and I wake up with my ass on fire, so to speak, my butt cheeks tingly and still asleep, and a rock-hard, sore erection.
What does this dream mean? Why did Grace Topher terrify me so? I won't get into all of the details [if you want to learn more about Grace Topher, you'll have to read my three-part series, available by mail order from Funion HQ, P.O. Box 3, Evanston, IL 60201. Simply send in a postcard with "Request: Laughing in the Face of Death: She Killed it! - The Grace Topher Story -- ALL THREE PARTS -- by Pete "the Bog" Potterson, Funion Philosopher of Death 'YOUR ADDRESS'" written on the back and you should receive a typed copy of the manuscript in your mailbox in 4-6 weeks]. But I will say that I became obsessed with death. I truly felt, after so many interviews with Grace, after so many vividly horrifying nightmares, after so many crime scene photos, that I could die at any moment. It wasn't that I feared death. It was more like I started to live with death, like death was a non-human, non-verbal, intangible friend, but a friend that really intimidated me; a friend I wanted to impress. Each day I would think long and hard about death, usually at a coffee shop, the atmosphere of which is not unlike a morgue -- patrons with sleep-deprived, lifeless faces, staring at screens and books, ignoring every sign of life around them, in fact shutting them all out and getting pissed when anything disturbs them and brings them out of their self-imposed death trance -- and I would sit and ponder and people-watch, dreading my approaching bedtime, my inevitable Grace Topher nightmare, which is how I originally came across Stanley "Duke" Dockett.)
Duke was a good man. He never married, but he loved many girls in his day. He was something of a Casanova, a very handsome man with large, powerful hands, fingers like submarines, which made his line of work -- technical writing for kitchen appliance manuals -- difficult. He could barely type! He mostly wrote by hand, which caused terrible, painful cramping. He would get angry when his hand cramped up, so angry he'd slam it against his desk and shout, "TWAT!" at his cramped hand, trying to shame it back into functionality. One time he broke his hand and had to miss two months of work, which nearly put him in the poor house. It was during this time, with nothing else much to do, that he began to collect coins.
(The Bog again. I am indeed writing the above obituary, but not in my voice, but rather in the voice of Poppy Bills, Stanley "Duke" Dockett's best friend and roommate at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort, who told me all of this information. Aside from the occassional literary flourish that can only come from the mind of the Bog, the voice is all Poppy's. I do not condone blackface, in any generation. When I showed up at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort, Poppy was all blackfaced out, in honor of his friend, and I was aghast and taken back to one of my Grace Topher nightmares in a sort of P.T.S.D. flashback, the one in which Grace is a dominatrix, wearing a black leather mask, beating me mercilessly with my mother's prized twirling baton -- the one she twirled and threw and caught to victory in the State Finals. When I came to I was on Poppy's floral-patterned couch with a wet coffee machine filter full of wet coffee grounds on my forehead. Poppy's blackened face was staring down at me.
"Duke wrote the manual for that there coffee machine," he said, pointing. He sat down at his kitchen table. I removed the filter from my forehead and placed it on the nearby end table. Streaks of black water ran down my face. I looked as if I had been crying my mascara-lined eyes out. I sat down with Poppy at the kitchen table. He was flipping through old photographs.
I should point out that the trouble with writing this obituary is that I'm not sure how sound of mind Poppy is, and what to believe and what not to believe of what he tells me. Did Duke actually enjoy putting on blackface? Or was this just an obssession of Poppy's that he dementedly projected onto Duke? Did Duke really write the book on this coffee machine? I'm not sure Poppy knew how to properly use it -- let alone know who wrote the manual -- given his apparent belief that the filter and the beans and the water combined to make a cold compress with restorative qualities. Though it did seem to make me come to, and I didn't have a head ache -- which I usually did have after a P.T.S.D. nightmare attack -- so maybe Poppy just knew something I didn't.
Let me go back to when I first saw Duke. I was sitting outside on the patio of my favorite cafe, The Roast Institute, sipping a cup of French-pressed Belgian Toffee-toasted Shaved Walnut Strawberry-blonde Roast, thinking about what it would be like to drown in salt water, when a man came walking by, an older gentleman, nicely dressed in slacks, Rockports, a sweater over a plaid shirt, bald, glasses, looking for something on the ground as he strolled. He passed me and glanced underneath my table. I watched him make his way down the street. He stopped at a newspaper dispenser and put two fingers in the coin slot [they barely fit] like he was pleasuring a woman. Same thing at a payphone. He then turned the corner and vanished.
How strange. It had a profound effect on me. This man just seemed so interesting. He was a man on a mission. He appeared to be looking for change, but also appeared to be a man who was not in need of spare or loose change, given his nice, clean wardrobe. I sat down in the same spot everyday for weeks, and each day at the same time Duke would come strolling by looking for change in every crevice he could find, but never asking anyone for change, like he was too proud to do so.)
Duke was a proud man. He took pride in his appearance, like a Senator, always the perfectly manicured head of hair, clean slacks, crisply starched shirts. He commanded respect. People feared him. He was a Duke man. He could knock out an Irishman with one punch to the gut. Yes, a punch to the gut from old Duke would black out an Irishman's world. Curtains. But Duke was also very loving. He loved children. He kept balloons in his work desk that he would blow up and deliver to children playing in the park across the street from the office during his lunch break. He did not eat lunch. He'd rather spend the break with kids. Nowadays a man can't do that, because what the fuck has the world come to? A man can't give a kid a fucking balloon now? You try to do that now, and the mother comes over screaming, "KEVIN!" and grabs Kevin's hand and leads him to the shade underneath a tree and kneels down to look Kevin in the eye and says, "Kevin, do not accept anything from strangers like that, ok? Say, 'Ok, Mommy.'" Like Kevin knows what the fuck "accept" means. Meanwhile the good-intentioned man is standing there holding a balloon like a fucking idiot. You tell me what the world has come to. Duke never wanted to fuck no little boy, which you can quote me on. Just because a guy's got no wife means he wants to suck a tiny dick? Duke loved his beloved ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth.
(Paging Dr. the Bog. Back at Poppy's kitchen table, he's looking at the photos like he's got a great poker hand. He pinches one of them and places it on the table. He surveys the hand again. He pinches another and places it on the table next to the first one. He then folds and tosses the remaning photos into a shoebox on the floor. He picks up the first one.
"This is the love of Duke's life," he says, showing me the photo. It's very old, but the girl appears to be beautiful. "Even in Duke's death. I say 'is' because love never fucking dies, right?" I agree. He tells me that the girl's name is Elizabeth, and she and Duke were romantically involved at Duke University. One night they had agreed to meet at a party that Duke's fraternity was putting on. Duke was so excited. He loved her and that night he was going to ask her to marry him. He got ready for the party really fast, put on his blackface really hastily, brushed his hair swiftly, and generally did himself up really sharp-like. He was the spitting image of Al Jolson. Real handsome. He went downstairs to the main room of the fraternity house where people had already begun to mill about. He started to dance. In comes Elizabeth and starts to look around for Duke, but she doesn't see him. She doesn't recognize him with the blackface on. Duke sees her and goes right up to her and says, "Here I am, baby!" Now Elizabeth came from a real Methodist background, a real enlightened type of broad [again, these are, for the most part, though not a direct transcript, Poppy's words], read a lot of books, had respect for everyone and everything, and she was fucking horrified. She couldn't believe that her boyfriend would play the blackface game like a fucking "neanderthal." She left right away and ignored Duke for the rest of their time at school, and he never really talked to her again. And he never put on blackface again. And, despite dating a lot of girls, never loved again.
I ask Poppy if he was there, did he go to Duke University with Duke? He said no, that Duke just told him all of this, and that Duke gave him this picture, the second picture, which just looked like a kitchen appliance. I ask Poppy, "Is that a blender? Did he write the manual for that? Was that the first manual that he ever wrote?" Poppy says, "No. It's his time machine that he built himself, but he never told me where it was." I sort of chuckle, and Poppy stands up angrily. "It's true! He built a fucking time machine, because he was fucking Stanley 'Duke' Dockett! And he told me so. And if Dukie tells you something, it must be so!" Poppy goes outside, slamming the front door.
$
After I had watched Duke walking along the street, looking for change, for several weeks, I finally worked up the courage to approach him. I caught up to him about 100 feet away from the Roast Institute.
"Excuse me, sir," I said. "What are you looking for?"
"A coin," Duke said.
"You mean change, like several coins, in order to buy something you want to buy?"
"No," he said. "I'm looking for a quarter. A 1936 quarter."
"So you're a collector," I said.
"No," he said, and walked away quickly. It was the first and last time I talked to Stanley "Duke" Dockett. He died a few days later -- the news of which reached me through my inside source at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort, who tells me of all the deaths that occur there, given my work -- at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort, which I proceeded to visit, where I met Poppy.
$
I go outside and Poppy is sitting on his stoop. I tell him I know it's hard, death is intense stuff, that it's only been a few days since Duke died and it will get better.
"His time machine was coin-operated. It worked. Duke went back to the nineties all the time."
"How?" I ask.
"If you put a 1995 quarter into the time machine, it would take you back to the day that the quarter was made, in 1995."
"How interesting," I say, trying not to sound like a dick.
"Ever since he made the time machine, like fifteen years ago, he searched for a 1936 quarter that would take him back to his days with Elizabeth, so that he could skip that blackface party and take Elizabeth to a nice restaurant instead and propose to her there, or at the beach or something." Poppy is now crying. "He ain't never found it." Poppy stands up and walks toward the cafeteria, a squat one-floor building in the middle of a semi-circular formation of houses, presumably to get some food.)
Duke is dead, but Duke will never actually die. He leaves behind no one and nothing but the memory of Elizabeth, who may still be alive somewhere, and his time machine, the location of which is unknown. A memorial service will be held at Ricky Randolph's Retirement Resort on Saturday at noon.
(One last time, the Bog, signing off. Now instead of just thinking about death in the abstract, I think about Duke's death, and Poppy's imminent death. Did Duke actually die? Or did he succeed and travel back in time to 1936 and just didn't tell Poppy about it? But I've been to Duke's grave. I've read his tombstone. I think it's quite possible that Poppy is simply descending into the Hell that is dementia. But if so, why was Duke looking for that particular coin? He told me that part himself, after all. A lot to ponder. But now it's late, and a nightmare awaits me. I hope eventually my nightmares will be replaced by dreams of Duke and Elizabeth together. And I really hope I don't have that one about Grace Topher vomiting blood into an enormous feed trough for what feels like six hours until the trough overflows with the blood and brains and smiles of her many victims, at the end of which she turns to me, smiling, blood dripping from her chin, and just screams at me until I wake up. Either way, from the Bog himself, Pete Potterson, Funion Philosopher of Death: Sweet dreams!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment