Writer's Corner
An Ass Like Buddy Hackett
a short story by dave schwartz
This is the damnedest place.
Mom frequently said this.
Mom had been an aide in a nursing home. That was her job. That was where she spent most of her living days. She earned our food and rent caring for those who were too old, too broken, or too confused to care for themselves. So, Mom cared for them, and her days were long. I’m guessing that the residents’ days were even longer. Until they died, of course. I imagine being dead is like one long day, whether there is a heaven or not. Sometimes I feel like I am stuck in one long day.
Mom liked sharing stories from Center Village. Center Village is where Mom worked. When I was a kid, she jokingly called it “The Nuthouse” because of all the folks there who had “loose screws”. Mom liked saying that, too. It made her smile and Mom had a great big honest smile. One resident was the source of many of Mom’s stories. Her name was Alice Purvis and Miss Purvis was old, really old. One of the aides, Annie Jo, was really funny and she used to tell me that Miss Purvis had cooked biscuits for Lee back in Gettysburg. She looked that old to me. I remember. Until I was a teenager it was easy to get transportation around the city and Mom used to bring me to the nursing home with her all the time.
Miss Purvis was mostly blind and mostly deaf, and she never left her bed. She chewed snuff, not chewing tobacco. Snuff. It’s gritty, black stuff that looks like gunpowder. It came in a small tin. She would only spit it into a paper cup, and it absolutely had to be a Dixie brand paper cup (paper cups used to be available and Dixie is no longer a word anyone uses). She had a piercing Southern accent, and she directed that voice like artillery toward anyone and everyone passing by her small room.
Miss Purvis would call out, “Can you hep me? Can you? Y’awl listenin’? Anybody? Won’t ya hep me please?” And whether anyone answered her or not, Miss Purvis would raise her voice just as much as her 90-pound skeleton allowed and proclaim, “This is the damnedest place,” or, the all-inclusive, “This is the damnedest place, and these are the god damnedest people.” So, in time, Mom adopted Miss Purvis’ phrase for nearly every situation that was even slightly askew. Nowadays things are more than slightly askew. This truly is the damnedest place.
My grandmother had been a nurse. It was what she had wanted to be from the time she was a little girl. Grandma’s father, my great-grandfather, had been a successful doctor and his financial success meant that my grandmother had options. In those days there were many places Grandma could go to become a nurse and work as a nurse. Even more importantly, there were places where Grandma could go to learn to be a nurse from other nurses in nursing schools, in person. And so, when the time came, she chose to become a nurse.
My mother, on the other hand, did not have many choices. Things had changed. Options for individual human beings scarcely existed when my mom entered the workforce. By then Mom was only able to find work as a nurse’s aide and she learned how to do that on the job, in person. It paid the bills, as I said before, but Mom never told me she worked hard because she was trying to make a better life for me and her. My mom didn’t lie. Besides, by the time I was a kid, the virtual world had taken over because the outside world had collapsed.
Nowadays, beyond the basics of food, water, and shelter, there isn’t much that can be done with money. More food. More flower. Delivered by drone-bots to your front door. I guess I could buy nice clothes but what is the point? There is nowhere for me to go, and the drone-bots don’t care how I look.
When it came time for me to find a job, I had exactly two options. First, I could work at the front door of the building next to the building where I live. The job there was pushing the button that opened the huge, heavy security doors to the building after the face recognition scan was completed and the resident’s identity confirmed, or after a drone-bots delivery status is confirmed. It paid enough to cover rent and utilities, and to eat modestly. I would have had plenty of flower to smoke, and there would have been some money left over after that.
That’s not the job I picked. I picked the other option---this gig, that I am walking to right now, that I have walked to every day of the week for...I don’t really know how many years it has been. Keeping track of the date doesn’t make much sense when you’ve got nowhere to go. I started work when I was 17 and I’m in my 40s now, I guess. Where I work pays much better than front-door-button-pusher but like I said, money doesn’t really mean much these days.
Being around real people is the main reason I took this job. I do get to interact with a few other people in the flesh each day, like my friend Bruce. When I started, I had really hoped there might be women working here. Sadly, when they hired me, I replaced the very last woman to have worked here. She had worked until she decided to retire. Her name was Julie H. and she spent the rest of her days with her loving husband, Mr. H., in their apartment, I suppose.
Bruce and I won’t be retiring. We’d rather die at our workstations near someone breathing than die in our apartments alone, to rot. The odds are slimmer than slim that we will ever meet anyone to love and to retire with. New people won’t move into the area, and no one is making babies that might grow up and work here. It is the way life is now. When we are all dead, the machines in this office will eventually go offline, and the building will become a decaying mausoleum. This is the damnedest place.
I like to read. The virtual world is filled with every kind of book you can think up. Sure, most books were written years ago. I’m not even sure anyone writes anything new anymore. You’d have to have experiences or at least interesting thoughts in order to generate enough content for literature. I doubt anyone nowadays could even generate a decent limerick let alone a novel. Everyone’s stuck living inside, and there’s only so much inspiration one can get from isolation.
Mostly I read the classics from the 20 th Century, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Roald Dahl, George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. My favorite author is John Steinbeck. I have read and listened to Of Mice and Men dozens of times. These writers all seemed to be warning us not to become what we have become. They hinted and no one listened. Even if they had shouted no one would have listened, I’m guessing.
I have one physical book that I’ve had since I can remember. I really like the way the pages sound when I turn them. It’s a children’s picture book and it’s called The Guam ABC’s. My dad was in the Navy overseas, and he brought it back for me right after I was born. Dad was in the Navy because that was his only choice for a job. When I was very young, I remember seeing him three or four times and then, we didn’t see him again. I guess Dad at least had some choices that were convenient for him. I don’t have any pictures of Dad and I haven’t looked for any.
That grey brick wall over there, the one with the rusty razor wire covering it like a crown of thorns replaced the entrance to what was a park way back when. That is the last place I remember being with Dad. He was holding my hand and we were walking through grass that was tall and tickled my legs. I don’t remember when the park disappeared, and the wall went up. But I do remember what grass smells like. Geez, I can’t remember the last time I saw a real blade of grass.
Here. Let’s stop here before I need to go into work. I still have a couple of minutes and I like this concrete bench. This cul-de-sac used to be a bus stop. Sometime after the buses stopped running someone decided to wall off this alley with cinder blocks. Over the years graffiti began appearing until nearly every square inch of the wall was covered. In the mornings before work, and if the rain is not too heavy, I like to back a bowl with flower, light up, and take in all the scribbles and doodles.
I’m not sure I’d call it art. It entertains me. Along the wall there is a lexicon of profanity. There are also a number of eyeballs, some with tears, and a variety of male and female body parts. But what fascinates me most are the messages written clearly and confidently.
Ron Loves Jenny.
Judy Loves Ron.
Go St. Lucius.
Suck it.
Someone wrote, “The End is Near.” And someone else crossed out the ‘N’ and replaced it with an ‘R’; “The End is Rear.” Funny.
My favorite has always been, “She has an ass like Buddy Hackett.” I can’t imagine the person who took the time to spray paint that on a wall, but I’d love to meet them and get the full story on that one. I looked up Buddy Hackett and I’m certain that it isn’t a compliment for the anonymous ‘she’ or for Buddy Hackett.
No matter how many times I look at those marks, I am fascinated. Like those caves in Altamira, this graffiti may be the only sign that any of the artists were ever alive.
If you look closely, on the very bottom, far left corner, you can see where Mom and I left our mark. It was a long time ago. The date next to our names was Mom’s last birthday and the very last time we took a walk together in the sunshine. In fact, that’s also the day when I learned about those remarkable caves in Spain.
Mom told me that those rock paintings are the earliest works of art created by human hands. Those artists left behind vibrant images of deer, buffalo, and horses. They left behind painted handprints. And they left behind symbols that are indecipherable. Even more so than the Buddy Hackett piece. I used to spend a lot of time hanging out in the virtual world version of those caves—most of what I have seen and experienced has been in the virtual world. I don’t teleport there anymore but this cinder block wall still amuses me.
I don’t know how the world ended up being the way it is. I certainly don’t think that there is any one thing that can be blamed for all of this. Besides, even if I did have answers for you, it would be complicated. It would take too long to tell and I need to finish this doobie and head in to work.
I can say this. I have seen countless pictures of the past from archives. I have seen pictures of parks teeming with families taking in the day, children running in grass and playing games, and couples holding hands. Happy faces. But as time passed by the pictures changed into photographs of crowds gathered, separated by barriers, holding signs, and people screaming at each other. Unhappy faces. As the last hundred years rolled by, there were more and more pictures of unhappy faces and fewer and fewer pictures of happy ones. I found lots of pictures of people complaining. Mom once told me that when the laws were written they were designed to protect people from the tyranny of the greedy. But slowly the number of complainers exploded to such a degree that ideas of freedom became so extreme, and the laws so diluted that law no longer made any difference, they stopped protecting, and freedom became our tyranny. That’s what Mom said. Mom said, “The dipshits won, Sweetie.”
Technology was supposed to help humanity adapt, survive, and thrive. Once upon a time there was the notion that we were destined for the stars. Now our only destinations are virtual worlds created to occupy our time in our residences as the desire to venture forth in the world no longer exists. All our entertainment and most of our human contact is virtual, online. No one ever actually goes anywhere. My walk to work through this polluted, broken glass, concrete, and rusted metal back alley in a city that was used up long ago, is probably the farthest I will ever travel. After 30,000 years, we are more stuck in caves than those hopeful and expressive Paleolithic ancestors. At least I get to hang with Bruce.
OK. This smoke is finished, and I need to head in and start emptying caches and deleting accounts. Yeah. That is my job. Me and Bruce delete the digital vestiges of people that are no longer active. Maybe their creators are dead. Maybe they just got bored. At any rate, nowadays, cleaning the digital world is more important than cleaning up the physical world.
This is the damnedest place.
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