The Crews Cruise: Port ‘o Call 5

Naked In Garden Hills (1969)

Crews’ second novel. My plan was to read his entire body of work (as many as I could get my hands on, at least. Other than the essays (a middle work), I’ve read several novels up to 1976. There are another 30 years worth of output that I have not touched. And I think I’m cutting this voyage short. As I’ve found out, many of Crews’ novels are short by most standards hovering around and below the 200-page mark. I’m beginning to wonder if this is on purpose. Is it possible that even Crews can’t spend more time with his creations than that?

Fat Man is “five feet tall and…five hundred and seventy-eight pounds”  and is  addicted to Metrecal. Cases and cases of the stuff. Fat Man lives on “the hill”  – a familiar motif in Crews’ work. His father had sold land to a Phosphate mine developer (Jack O’Boylan) and become rich. Garden Hills is a typical company town. Think Detroit to the max. Later, the plant shuts down and everything reverted to Fat Man’s father. The common fantasy is that Jack O’Boylan will come back and get the town back on its feet. Redemption. O’Boylan is like God. He may or may not exist – depending  on your beliefs. In the meantime, the legacy passes to Fat Man after his father goes  mad and disappears.

“…he was mad. He sometimes went down naked into Garden Hills. About once a month he tried to throw himself into the Phosphate grinders and make himself into phosphate. Eventually he did. They never found him. Nobody ever said it, but it was assumed he was sold in a bag.. And if he was, it was justice. It was his fondest dream come true. It was retribution.”

John Henry Williams (Jester, a former jockey) is Fat Man’s lawn jockey, valet/chauffeur/lackey. His girlfriend, Nestraldidi (Lucy) is a cooch girl in the carny.  In fact, Jester is also in the carny, as a dunk tank jockey, sitting on a wooden horse. Jester is another of Crews’ flawed/damaged characters. Jester had been a promising jockey who had been injured and lost his horse on his very first ride. Through no fault of his own, and he could never again conquer the fear.

Dolly is a town girl with big dreams and Crews’ familiar bit tits – another beauty queen with dreams of escape. And the familiar misogyny:

“She saw it in men’s eyes, saw it while she was still a child. You dud not love her, you raped her: you did not caress her, you bit her. She was the thing in men’s souls that is never sated, the beast in every man’s jungle.”

This is a novel of the ‘God created this orbiting ball of dirt and dust and then turned his back’. The impotent  ’savior’ (the Baby Jesus) is a 600 pound colossus who can do nothing  for himself. Stop the World. I wanna get off.

♦♦♦½

Revolutionary Road ~ (2008, USA) ~ DVD

I put off viewing this for awhile, having had no burning desire to see it. It was as depressing as I thought it would be, but a better movie than I would have thought possible. I’m just not a big fan of the stultified 50’s domestic scene (with some exceptions). I was there as an observer, after all. So, did the mirror reflect the times more realistically that the actual? Who is to say

Anyway, Leonardo and Kate were just great.  As with most movies of those times, I hope I don’t get lung cancer from just watching.

I never read the book, so I wonder. In the movie, my sympathies were more with April Wheeler, than with Frank. Frank was somewhat of a coward, and left April hanging out to dry in many respects.  The film is a study in the ways we don’t communicate. In the closing scene the realtor’s (Kathy Bates’) husband turns down his hearing aid as his wife begns to drone on and on and on. Seems he’s hear it all before. Fade to black. Great touch.

♦♦♦

The Crews Cruise: Port ‘o Call 4

A Feast of Snakes (1976)

The setting is Mystic – a small town in southern Georgia, not far from Florida. Mystic is the kind of town, has the kind of people, and considers the same themes that were prevalent in Crews’ essays. So, this is more like it.

Still, the homophobia and misogyny begin to wear. The women seem to come in two flavors, either beaten down (and beaten on) wives with babies on their hip, or versions of cheerleaders, baton twirlers, or beauty contestants. Take your pick. Some of the latter are not necessarily ‘weak’ women, but they know their Southern roles and how to play them.

The main character in A Feast Of Snakes is Joe Lon Mackey. His father is a broken down drunk, a vicious, mean spirited pit-bull breeder whose wife so loathed him that she ran off with a traveling salesman (of course). When Big Joe (Joe Lon’s father) tracks her down, and brings her back home, she puts a bag over her head rather than live any longer in the squalor and abuse. She pins a note on her body to the effect of ‘come get me now you son-uva-bitch’. His sister found the body and has never been the same, watching tv all day with the volume turned to the max. Rarely, if  ever leaving her room.

Most of the characters, including both men and women, are damaged – not only psychologically, but physically. The glory days for these people, like the glory days for the South, are long gone. The town sheriff has a peg leg, the result of Vietnam. He arrests women and rapes them in his jail cell with impunity. Every one knows this. The attitude seems to be, well I wouldn’t do that, and it’s a shame, but they are only women after all. Joe Lon is a former high school hero football star with bad wheels. His fate seems sealed to mirror his father’s. Somewhere, he seems to have a sense of this and his tragic fate.

The time is the Annual snake hunt and round-up (featuring of course a bikini beauty contest). Running the event is now the inherited responsibility of Joe Lon – Boss Snake himself. On the day of the event, every thread, every emotion, every perversion merges. A violent ending to a violent story concerning a violent sub-culture. Not a place you want to hang out too long.

♦♦♦