Spring has finally returned to the Ohio Valley. Iris and daffodil bulbs are sending forth chutes, and the wheat fields turning emerald green. Just like the rest of America, I always associated green with St. Patrick's Day, the first clovers cleaving out for us country kids at recess to crawl around the softball field searching for lucky four-leafers back in the day.
I always associated March 17 with green but never gave a damn if some kid wanted to pinch me for not wearing the color. Dutifully donning green on St. Patty's Day reminded me of dressing up for church or school pictures. If some particular girl wanted to pinch me for not wearing green, maybe I sort of dug it, but for the most part if anybody wanted to pinch me they were committing a personal foul like in the NCAA basketball tournament, and would have to deal with the consequences. It wasn't until meeting up with Lasara Firefox, Mendocino County native and author of the bestseller, The Sexy Witch, that I learned of political reasons for refusing to choose green stitches on that holiday.
"St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He's credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland, meaning the Celts and Druids — the native people, and forcing them to submit to the Roman Catholic Church," she informed me, brazenly donning a black and red T-shirt on that day, explaining her reasons for wearing such colors at the little parenting group on School Street in Ukiah where we met weekly in the late 1990's on account of our mutual babies. Her hair still burns a fiery red, as well as her attitude. "The holiday basically celebrates the conquering of the island by the continental powers, and the murder of indigenous healers and leaders."
A bachelor farmer past the age of 40, I don't pay much attention to the colors I wear — more to changes in the weather, so I can't tell you whether I accidentally wore green on St. Patrick's Day this year. Nobody in my house really mentioned the holiday except for the rumor that the State Police had instituted Operation Pullover on account of the anticipated drunk driving. My normal color choices tend to be light in the summer, dark in the winter, on account of the sun.
Some time before noon on March 17, as the sun burned off fog and the floodwaters still receded from the river valley, I was just finishing a Bloody Mary when I heard a somewhat tentative knock on the bedroom door. It turned out to be one of my son's buddies, donning a baseball cap with a green bill and a white front with a three-leafed clover plastered across. "Cool if I come in?" he asked. "Jazz ain't awake, yet."
"I know." He meant my son, who usually doesn't emerge from bed until after noon, not even for his friends.
We sort of sat there awkwardly for a minute, while my son's buddy asked me for a lighter and started burning a cigarette. The smoke inevitably wafted towards me. I don't smoke tobacco, but it used to be one of the most important cash crops of our region (prior to the big USDA buy-out around the turn of the millennium), and pretty much everyone ritually and habitually smokes around here. "That clover leaf on your cap mean anything?" I asked.
"Not that I know of. Somebody just left it at my house so I started wearing it."
I set in to informing him about Lasara Firefox and the real history of St. Patrick's Day, until my phone rang. "Oh, man, you'll like this. It's Jackie Dawn." I was tempted to put the thing on speaker mode, but didn't need to.
Jackie Dawn speaks with a raspy twang originating in the swamps around the Arkansas/Louisiana border. For more than a decade she worked as a pole dancer/stripper in places like Bloomington and Louisville, and I'm not sure what that has to do with her voice, but it portrays her attitude. The reason she'd called had to do with the observation that our house needed some spring cleaning, but who knows what all she went on about as my son's buddy smoked his cigarette and listened from a distance of several feet. She and her one-eyed chauffeur had spent the previous summer in Montana, where medical marijuana is legal. They'd wintered in Colorado. She wondered if that day (March 17) would be okay to start working on cleaning the house.
"I figure if I can spend $20 on a lap dance [up in Bloomington], I can pay somebody to clean the house," I might have said.
While Jackie Dawn went on about more subjects, like this great organic seed catalogue she'd just discovered — High Mowing Seeds, I received a text from a certain Crystal who resides a little closer to the farm and wondered if the river had gone back down. "You want me come over and clean," she texted.
"Today's gonna be great," I said to my son's buddy. "It's gonna be like a damn circus."
Cobwebs and moss haunted all the windows, and the kitchen and bathroom had taken on the air of a Rob Zombie set after a whole winter of redneck American kids stomping around the cold, shadowy nooks and crannies. Women had been volunteering to come out and clean up for months, but none had actually shown up for the job until St. Patrick's Day, when both Crystal and Jackie Dawn planned to arrive around noon. I started frying some bacon on the skillet in the unsanitary kitchen, nervously deciding it best to just wait until help arrived. I really don't like telling people what to do, and hoped the women would just take over and give orders to us guys. Crystal showed up first, and she and I both agreed the first thing to do was bag up all the plastic, glass, and aluminum receptacles in the kitchen, living room, and hallway, a task which my son's buddy in the baseball cap with the three leaf clover helped out in until Jackie Dawn arrived with her one-eyed chauffeur.
"She likes to talk a lot in this real southern drawl," I warned Crystal. "But you seem pretty quiet. You all might get along."
"Maybe I'll just work on the living room, let her have the kitchen."
So Jackie Dawn cleaned the kitchen counters and rearranged, telling me all about Montana as I decided to put together another round of Bloody Mary's, meanwhile cracking free-range eggs and frying them in the bacon grease. I guess in Montana, residents can purchase a permit to grow a certain amount of plants, and nobody's really capitalizing on the whole thing yet. It was Montana this, Montana that for a few minutes.
"I'll go see if the boys are up, yet, and maybe can put some music on," I said.
My son had woken up at this point, and he and his buddy were playing some kind of high-resolution motor-cross bike video game. They barely looked up at me when I entered the room.
"Hey I got bacon and eggs goin in there. They're cleanin the house, and I thought maybe you could put some music on."
"Why don't you?" asked Jazz.
"I don't know how." We have a pretty kicking stereo system in the front room where all the music equipment is, and my son has one in his room, but I can't really work either. The systems are always being rearranged, with all these I-phones and play-stations and other contraptions I don't want to learn how to operate. "Come on, man, they're cleaning."
He ignored me, and his buddy in the clover leaf cap shrugged apologetically.
So I went back to the kitchen, finished making the bacon and eggs, stuck some bread in the toaster, and returned to the boys' bedroom with breakfast. "Come on, put some music on."
"Yeah."
I guess I must have stood there for a minute with my arms folded across my chest, watching them play the video games. Such behavior probably does make American youth uncomfortable, as usually their buddies are all watching the screen with them — not staring back at them like they are some kind of weird wild hominoids in a nature video.
"Quit standing there and staring at me!" Jazz hollered, tossing a fried egg at me.
I ducked, and it sailed through the doorway, into the hall where Crystal was sweeping.
"Get the fuck out of my room!"
"I just wanted you to put some music on."
"Well you don't have to stand and give me this Clint Eastwood glare, put on a show for everybody!"
"How about I do a Ben Stiller impersonation? Or I do a pretty good Richard Prior paranoid."
My son's buddy laughed at this, but Jazz didn't. He managed to put on Hank Williams III, though, (yes the grandson of Old Hank), a rowdy bar-room brawl-style song, "Smoke and Wine," blasting at top decibel, and straight dropped the play station controller and lunged at me.
I collapsed to the floor and assumed the lotus position. "Now I'm more like the Buddha than Clint Eastwood."
For a minute he didn't know what to do. He danced around for a minute, but soon decided to literally try to use his boots and kick me from his room.
At this point, with the rowdy music blaring, I grabbed his legs and took him to the floor. A scuffle ensued, broken up finally by Jackie Dawn. "I don't want to see anybody getting hurt while I'm here!" she yelled, separating us. "You got that aquarium right there, and it could fall on y'all, and I'd have one HELL of a mess to clean up, all the blood and everything!"
Now the whole house had to hear the breakdown of the conflict, while Hank III continued to provide appropriate background. Nobody bothered to turn down the stereo system. Once again, I was accused of utilizing the Clint Eastwood glare, and, once again, my son's buddy had to crack up at the mention. Gradually, the boys ate breakfast, the house got cleaned, and we all went to work, though in the retelling of the event, the whole Clint Eastwood glare got mentioned around town so many times that now when I go to the grocery store and wheel the cart around, and some old lady ends up in front of me in the aisle, apologizing as she gets out of the way, I can't help but wondered if I'm giving her THAT look. "It's okay," I try to say, but my voice sounds too husky, like I just blew away a whole corrupt, renegade posse and still had a smoking six-gun in each holster. "You don't have to be sorry."
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