AND THE END IS DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
It was back to B’More, Hon. I escaped Wilmington, North Carolina in the dead of night leaving a clean house with a big tree down in the back yard and a stack of unpaid bills that could choke a mule. I gave Chanter and her boyfriend most of my books and everything I knew I wouldn’t have a place for at my new destination. I was EMPTY, living right there in the seat of my old, uninsured water truck, Iris, expired tags and all. I did still have a bicycle. The 60 dollars from Kay Eager came in handy since most of the two thousand dollars from Baxter-Hyland Pharmaceuticals went towards the final VHS copies, mailings and film festival entries. We had gotten one invitation from Yamagata, Japan for the film, but there was no money to do anything about it. I arrived three weeks before Christmas at the home of a still living brother, Yabba Duda, and I parked the truck off the street in back of his small combination farm/junkyard. I had been totally out of the drug culture for a dozen years until trying to get money from the pharmaceutical companies that got away with killing a lot of people. I didn’t know anyone in Baltimore with hemophilia. I was officially out of the BLOOD and flat broke. Everything was normal. I crashed on the couch.
Jackal had rotten teeth and lived in a back room of the house. Jackal was an ex-con with a big heart and was Yabba’s right arm since Yabba had such horrible health. Yabba had a stroke a couple of years earlier and something called Reiter’s Syndrome which he said had caused him to have a heart valve replaced several years earlier; he wanted me to make a movie about his Reiter’s Syndrome. “What’s with this homophelia?” he asked. “It’s hemophilia, Yabba. You really should read once in awhile.”
“I do stuff—I don’t need to read,” Yabba told me on my arrival. “Look at you. You read books and you’re on my couch. I haven’t read a book since high school. I own a bar.”
Despite his ill health and constant pain and handfuls of medication and beer every day, he managed to function as a father to kids that weren’t his blood and operate a redneck bar. The problem was that his wife was still around. Yabba and Courtney had a son in the marriage that was actually Yabba’s best friend Jackal’s son though it was not something discussed openly since Yabba had this thing about collecting things and ownership for the prestige of ownership–the obvious didn’t seem to bother him outwardly—the kid looked exactly like Jackal. Yabba’s wife, Courtney, lived in an upstairs apartment with her boyfriend Bobo, a part time crack dealer who didn’t like kids. Yabba took care of Jackal and Courtney’s son Gorp who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and Courtney’s daughter Madonna from a former boyfriend, and held on to a confused set of morals and responsibilities. Besides a drug problem, Courtney also had a severe drinking problem. “I love my children,” was her Mantra—“I really love my beer,” was her activity.
The “Redneck Bar” in Essex was directly across the alley from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room and employed some of the foxiest deranged fillies that ever bit the cap off of a bottle of beer. It was good to be home for the holidays. FaLaLaLaLa LaLa LaLAAA.