Three hippies linger in the former dining room of the Farmhouse, lounged on sectional sofas and recovering from the first annual "Rakefest" Friday night. It's now Sunday afternoon, the clouds finally breaking after three days of breezy rain, temperatures in the fifties.
I guess the frigid precipitation warded off attendance for the one-night event, as folks assumed the stage would be outside. Others were paranoid the sheriffs would raid the party due to the recent mistaking of our row of okra plants for marijuana and the subsequent searching of the property. No, we renovated the interior of the house with a woodstove raging in the basement, having knocked out the walls between the dining room, kitchen, and the hardwood dance floor in the music room. We had to keep the place cozy on account of the rotating brass pole suspended between the tongue & groove oak floor and a rafter in the ceiling.
"A Ghostbuster pole!" screamed Jetta's 3 year-old son when he first saw it, clutching the brass. I guess he watches that movie nearly every day. "But it's supposed to go down to the basement!"
"Yeah, still working on that. Guess we got to cut a hole," I said, thinking it wouldn't be a half-bad idea in some ways because part of the reason we knocked out the walls was to expose the chimney and let more heat up into that front room, which is on the north side of the house.
On the posters and fliers that floated around local bars and liquor stores we'd advertised "Pole Dancing" as well as "Bar-B-Q." The plan was to butcher about a dozen of the meat chickens in our backyard coop, the Red Rangers we'd ordered this spring from the Murray McMurray hatchery in Iowa. I'm really impressed with these birds, as they have grown quickly while turning our lawn into a golf course, the back yard into a putting green lined with feathers and bird shit. I've tried the standard white meat birds before, the retarded hybrids that sit around all day and will die of thirst if the water dish is ten feet away, and wanted a bird that could fend for itself in the semi-wild. We have about thirty roosters ready to butcher, but that action never materialized prior to Rakefest. The job of replacing walls with beams, opening up the house for the stage, turned out more challenging than expected since local tweakers helped themselves to my cordless drill, skill saw, and the plug from the end of the sawz-all cord. I know it was crank heads in the case of the stolen sawz-all plug because they conscientiously wrapped the fuck around the bare wires exposed so nobody would get electrocuted by the power tool they'd rendered temporarily useless.
On Thursday afternoon Jetta hollered at me for about half an hour from the shower, I guess, while I piddled around separating our four Boer goats from four pigs. She'd just dyed her hair a more neon lavender and was in the middle of rinsing out the dye when the water quit. "Spec MacQuayde!" she was screaming when I returned to the front door, walking past the brass pole, past the newly-exposed brick chimney, and down the hall. Her eyes were closed, this dye running like half-blue blood down her skin. "There's no water pressure! I'm blind!"
"OK just a minute." At first I thought the water line leading to the pigs and goats had busted out again thanks to the vigorous rooting of the pigs near a minor leak on a plastic coupler, so I shut off the whole deal out there, thinking I'd solved the problem. My friend, Hippie, showed up with the three pilgrims who still linger in our former dining room. They were ready to help set up for the big fiesta. I guess we got distracted building a bonfire out back, so when I once again returned to the house Jetta was still blind, screaming.
"The water's not working! I can't see a fucking thing!"
After fidgeting with the cord to the pump for a spell, I decided to heck with that and dipped a five gallon feed bucket in this stock tank that actually houses a snapping turtle my son caught in the river a while back. Jetta managed to more or less rinse the dye out of her hair and eyes in the frigid water.
Oh, man we got two days of cold rain ahead, the outhouses a hundred yards away, I thought. People were calling, texting, showing up. I had no idea why our pump quit working, though suspected the little box regulating pressure had shorted out, judging by a blazing arc I noticed while fidgeting more with the cord. All night, once the crew of pilgrims (most of whom have been in Mendo from time to time) finally subsided from their obnoxious revelry, I tried to sleep, considering duct tape over the toilet, or nailing the bathroom door shut. I also worried about the last, longest beam in the front room we still hadn't installed. No cordless drill or power saw, we would have to go old-school. There was more to worry about, still. Since we'd advertised "Pole Dancing," Jetta and I had done some research at a club called "Night Moves" in Bloomington, a fairly classy place haunted mostly by dorky economics professors and college girls. I enjoy the ambiance there, not really so much interested in lap dances and such, actually preferring the place because nobody comes up to me with all the "Hey what's up, buddy?" type shit. If I go with Jetta the girls don't even talk to me. They're smart enough to dance for her, instead. About midnight, though, I grew bored of the whole scene and was ready to get the hell out of town.
"But Skittles wants to smoke some hash with us when she gets off work!"
"Who cares? She's just hustling you."
Naturally Jetta took offense to the notion that some chick would be working her over.
"That's what they do!"
Still, I guess Jetta and Skittles had exchanged numbers, so they texted later and we offered Skittles a sum of cash to dance at Rakefest.
"Cash up front? And you give me a ride?" she texted back.
I agreed, so that meant that Jetta and I would have to leave the farm and drive clear up to Bloomington Friday afternoon to pick up this nebulous babe who I didn't remember, one more reason I couldn't sleep. With three dogs, several kittens and cats, and a nocturnal rooster outside, not to mention alcoholic hippies crashing in various rooms, sleep is a precious commodity. In the morning after bullshitting around with everyone we tore into the pump situation, discovering happily that the old wiring had simply fried, an easy fix. Once the water ran again, one of the crashing transients helped install the last beam across the gap between rooms. All that done, Jetta and I were ready to go pick up the dancer from Bloomington, except Skittles didn't wake up until after two p.m., and it turned out she was crashing in this tweaker shack about half an hour to the north and west of Bloomington, the opposite direction from the Farmhouse. "No way we'll be able to pick her up and get back before the music starts!"
We didn't realize it was a tweaker shack until showing up. You can tell the difference between straight Christian republicans who mow their lawn like a crew cut, hippies like me who don't really care if a few weeds grow up around the barn, and tweakers who straight don't give a damn about anything, just by the appearance of the yard. This yard, strewn with debris, reeked of the latter. Still, we'd driven all this way. Turned out that the young blonde, Skittles, had allowed some dude to take off with all her dancing clothes, she said, so we would have to meet him at the K-Mart parking lot in Bloomington. "He's my Teddy Bear," she told us, as the fellow turned out to be a young, plump dude with glasses and a nice car.
"I like being late for my own party," I said, trying to break the ice as we drove through town. The back window of my Ford Ranger still hasn't been replaced since my son and his buddies busted it out with a johnboat in the spring, and with the cold rain, Skittles complained of cold from our lack of a back seat, stretched out on a pillow. I sort of wished Jetta would sit in the back, switch places with this dancer who was gonna be working her legs all night, but didn't want to suggest that as it might sound awkward. Skittles was hungry, she said, and I thought about the chickens we'd never butchered or barbecued as we stopped at Wendy's in Bedford where it took half an hour before the girls could get served. I sat in the truck and glared at an unopened beer can thinking shit at least I'll be sober for the set I was gonna play at 9 or so with Derick Howard and Picker Dan. "I like being late. It'll be like we're on tour, on our way to the next gig, everybody waiting for us. The first band will already be playing when we get there!"
Sure enough, by the time we showed up at the Farmhouse, James Lane was playing, the sound system set up all over the house, basement, and back yard, disco-like lights flashing in the music room. The Kenan Rainwater Band took the stage, killing it. Late in the set, he started encouraging Skittles to get on the pole and dance, for crying out loud. She complained that the pole needed to be cleaned with rubbing alcohol, so we poured a little moonshine into a pint jar, dabbed it on a white towel. After that the pole didn't spin freely enough, said Skittles.
"Somebody needs to put some WD-40 on that pole or loosen it up at the top, or something," said Kenan between songs. "I wanna see some dancing!"
"Jeez, Skittles, nobody cares if your act is perfect. Just get up and dance!"
She got out and did some half-assed moves for part of a song, donning one of Jetta's jangly belly-dancing bikini outfits. Apparently she hadn't needed those dancing clothes, after all. Kenan left the stage during the guitar solos and cut the rug with her while his band played--he's a pretty suave character with that sort of thing. After that, Skittles basically changed back into blue jeans and sneakers, a T-shirt, and sat on the sofa texting her "Teddy Bear", I guess, because he soon showed up. All week Jetta had been worried that the dancer would come down to the house and steal the show, but Skittles was gone before the White Lightning Boys even took the stage. "I'm worried about my cats," she said. She'd also stated on the way home that she'd only tried crank once and not liked it.
Never mind the non-dancer, Jetta wore a black shawl and gradually warmed into dancing for an audience for the first time, generating some long-awaited cheers. Who knows, without the stripper stiffing us, maybe she would have been too shy. She danced all night, as did some other women who'd actually paid to get into the show. Of course a bunch of guys, including me, had to try the pole. It seemed to spin just fine for us amateurs. By the time Derick Howard jammed along with the rasta-style rapper, R-Juna in the wee hours approaching dawn, we all agreed there'd been no need to hire a dancer in the first place, as well as agreeing that Derick and R-Juna should play together more often.
Sometime Saturday afternoon Jetta woke up with bruises on her thighs from hanging upside down on the pole, her arms and legs incredibly sore, "like after the first day of volleyball practice," she said. The hippies had cleaned the house, separated the recycling, made breakfast, and drank all my beer. Rain still drizzled, the trees waving at us from outside the windows. The former owner of the house showed up with some chicken he'd barbecued on a spit at their new pad in the village of Verona, and we made plans to butcher chickens and bring them over to his place for the party at the pioneer festival, Old Verona Days, in a couple weeks.
Be First to Comment