The View From Scranton

Wrong Eyes

I found it. Some of it anyway. Or something close. It was pitch as pure white, clean as all mud, crazy and kooky and candid and truly cool. It didn’t come in a box. It didn’t come in glassine. And it didn’t come to me. I had to go get it. Specifically, to the the Scranton Cultural Center, an old Masonic Temple here. ‘Twas a suitable place, for a surprising find.

I found God.

Okay, so I didn't. But I did find myself falling fond of those who believed that they have. I'm talkin' Pentacosts. Strictly Southern charmers (of a sort). The tongue lashers, the shakers, the healers. The closest thing the cracker has to voodoo. The stuff of story. The stuff of legend.

This eve I saw Andrew Douglas' Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, one of the brightest little road trips I may ever have been taken in on. Sure it was a vicarious in, and sure I was a mite late. But I’m still a ward of the State. Half state, but nonetheless State.

'Twas damn good to get way away for awhile.

Scripted by an inspiring Steve Haisman, tripped by the charismatistic Jim White, and tracked by he and a few of his finer friends, such as Cat Power, The Handsome Family and David Johansen, Searching is a story about story, a tale about tale, told and sung and spilled from the outside. Spilled because "stories [are] everything and everything [is] stories."

That's Harry Crews talkin' one of the many truths he gets to telling. The quipless quip comes while walking down a desolate clay road and recalling the days when he and his kinfolk made up stories to go with the perfect people in the Sears Robuck catalogue. His kin weren’t perfect. Far from it. They were missing fingers and limbs and eyes. They had lesions and sores and the crazies. In a tale tarnished with character, the tallest teller is the star. Harry Crews is that bright. Grizzled, acute, sinuous, wise. The man knows things, things most of us can't even guess at.

Or get tripped up in the guessing. Flashback 1989. Maybe '90. I can’t be sure. Crews touring to support Body, another muscular trumping of the spineless competition. What am I saying? Crews has no competition. Never has. Ever. Maybe O’Connor. Maybe Faulkner. But their long gone dead. Anyway, the wisest old codge of the swamp and I were scheduled to meet, in a publisher-appointed suite at The Royalton, all so I could plug him in Paper.

It was meant to be one of my finer moments.

Of course meant-to-be's rarely are, and this was no exception. On the appointed day I arrived in The Royalton lobby eager early. Zeus knows I didn't wanna be late to meet the master. I also wanted to be braced. And I know more than a slew of the 44 bartenders who’d comp me the bracing. Since Crews was a notorious drunk as well as a formidable mind, I wanted at least a shot up.

So I hit the bar. Two neat Jack's with a black cafecito back. Before noon. It was a brace alright, braced the words right into a near slur. Not good. Another double-o joe later I was ready to meet the man. As ready as I'd ever be.

In his suite we shook hands and the lordly one asked if he could get me anything.

What are you drinking?

Coke. I quit drinkin' liquor four months ago. It was time.

Oh.

And there I stood two drinks to a slur.

But I went on instinct and the tete a tete went down well. Better than expected even. I pitched increasingly faster; Crews came back with increasing economy of speed. He was open, clever, cagey, on. A raconteur from way back, who knew well how to rack a tell.

Then came the printed nightmare. My last question was Would you yourself kill given the chance? He answered: Of course. When the interview ran however the words were flipped and instead read Would you kill yourself given the chance. Not even of the same frame. His Of course not only made all the nonsense in the world, it made him look both cowardly and suicidal. As if he were too scared to take a chance on taking his own damn self. Stupid. And it made me look like an idiot.

I was incensed. Pissed purple and rage red. Still am. To some small degree. It’s not enough to be dwarfed; I gotta be shamed too? Uh-huh. Not this here Hood. Seeing, hearing, feeling Harry Crews again brought it all back. Then the road took it all away. There are so many greater things to concern myself with, so many deeper hurts, so much more to tacit. All it takes is a fevered faith. Like the blind intuits with the wrong eyes. Ya just gotta believe.

posted by John Hood. @ 9:59 PM