Dispatch from Indiana, pt. 2

Events in this post are part of the trip documented in the previous post "Unscheduled Departure." The following photos come from my co-correspondent, Honeysuckle.

So I’m doing these out of order, simply because, well, these get better as we go on, and really - what better way to begin work in 2006 than with a picture of me looking tense around large animals? As I may have mentioned before – cows are like dogs - gigantic, motorcycle-helmet-sized-turd-spurting, smelly, frighteningly curious dogs that can trample your spinal column. I’m not sure what these ones are more curious about – Schutte taking the picture, or the tenderfoot in the khakis and the windbreaker. At the time this picture was taken, I was the closest I’ve come to this many cows in my life without the protection of a fence. You may not be able to tell from this photo, but I’m pressing a lump of coal between my asscheeks into a diamond. Cameron’s got NOTHING on me.

These cows, by the way, are Vic’s – a man so tough, he fell off the roof of his barn and drove to the neighbors to raise help with two broken arms. Kinda casts my complaining about being out of Band-Aids yesterday into sharp relief.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve grown to appreciate cows after my trip. And they can be awfully cute.

'Possums, on the other hand...

So yes, my worst fears have been realized – a hot woman comes up out of nowhere to the car I’m riding in, which is good, but she’s holding a dead ‘possum, which is not. To clarify - I am not smiling in this photo. That is not a smile. That is a grimace. That is the look of a man who loves nature, except when its freshly-dead ass-end is being thrust into his face by people he had grown to trust in the last few days – trust irrevocably broken by this moment. I’ve noticed that since my visit, Budweiser has borne a slight aftertaste of fear, adrenaline and regret.

On the left – Schutte’s sister. In her hand – one ‘possum, gone onto a better world. Next to her – one citified dork wearing a Carhartt vest, holding onto a beer bottle containing the last dregs of his dignity. On the right – Schutte’s future sister-in-law, holding the toilet paper we used to vandalize the home of some man that had done some wrong to some member of the Schutte family – the details are unclear. It should be clear, however, from these photos, that if you wind up in Milhousen, Indiana for some reason – DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SCHUTTE WOMEN.

Otherwise – you might wind up with a dead animal in your mailbox.

It’s like the Godfather down there, except the horses keep their heads. And they drive combines instead of Packards.

You sometimes sad and sweet and crazy girl.

FooBaRoo requested that I rerun this post from way back. I know it's a copout for those three or four of you wanting new LL&CB content, but hey - I just got a REQUEST. Who knows when that'll happen again?

Anyway. Happy Belated Valentine's Day.




Dear B:

They used to talk around sex in old movies. They used to dance and spin and call up to heaven and down to hell for a good go around without ever saying so. See Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind:

“You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how.”

It’s got little to do with kissing. Even if you didn’t know from the get go that, before everything burnt to the ground, Scarlett could’ve used a weekend in Hilton Head with a barrel fulla daquiris and Rhett handcuffed to the headboard - you’d’ve known it had very little to do with kissing.

The Hays code - that sphincter-tightening, long-standing Hollywood institution of social mores is no longer with us, but before it fell under the bootheel of the sexual revolution, it gave us beautiful, brilliant, sexy dialogue, dialogue I miss, like the stuff from North by Northwest, while Roger and Eve sped through the night, alone, together, in a dining car on the Northern Limited from Manhattan to Chicago:

Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.

And then:

Eve Kendall: It’s going to be a long night.
Roger Thornhill: True.
Eve Kendall: And I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started.

I may sound like a fuddy-duddy mourning the passing of lines like these - I may sound like a fuddy-duddy using the term fuddy-duddy - but I wish I could’ve lived through a time when sex wasn’t trafficked, but discovered, hinted at, and slinkily descended into - or, at least, lived through a time when there was a little more grace to the whole endeavor, as opposed to now, where directors just cut to the chase and hope that the audience, already numbed into apathy by internet porn and “Wild On,” will find something more than mechanical in what’s going on, will imbue their writhing cinematic proxies with their hopes and wants, as if that excuses the end of mystery, the death, really, of articulate lust, and the beginning of an America occasionally titillated and humored by, but ultimately, bored by sex.

Sometimes I look at you, and see, sometimes, something of Eve Kendall, a little bit of the well-intentioned mischief in your voice, a little bit held back, a little bit offered, but always, a bit wild.

And sometimes, these days, I get the movies and the here and now confused, and hope I’ll find an empty seat next to you in a dining car, in the evening, on a train barreling past Pennsylvania farm houses filled with sleeping innocents – and even the unworldly farmhands would know, would, even in their dream-state, affirm the notion, empty Martini glasses littering our tabletop, my leaning in, and my whisper, they’d understand – they’d see your eyes and your smile and hear the sly smirk in every word you speak and wish the same, for me, and for you, you sometimes sad and sweet and crazy girl:

“You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how.”