After the Mardi Gras

By R.S. Pierpoint

It takes many strands to braid a rope. Each strand stands alone yet it is strongest as part of the whole. After the Mardi Gras, is woven from smaller pieces. Three pieces. Whatcould have been, what never could be and what should have been. Part 1, Nazareth Twice Told, The Drama's ofDivorce, Alchoholism, College and Spirituality. Then we visit a strange exotic city where a bizarre kidnap plan unfolds. Part 2, The Dark is Always the Same, A Sleeper on a Mountain talks to a Dark Spirit then the Clowns have a Picnic. Part 3, Ratchethead, An Ancient Mariner leaves his home in Portugal and sails into the heart of a Pre-Tennessee Indian Maiden named "Winter Bear". All have one thing in common, a Sinful Old City that sits on the banks of a Grand Murky River.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 6, 2005
• ISBN: 9781467071482

R.S. Pierpoint

R.S. Pierpoint, an Ohioan by birth but a Tennessean by choice. His family lived by the Tennessee River until it was dammed to make electricity years ago. His Father like many others migrated to the factories up north looking for more. There R.S. was born and raised in the vast wasteland of Cleveland's suburbia. Adventure set in, the return to the South, Schools, Marriage and Work. He currently is employed in the Field of Security. He resides in Magic Valley, Tennessee, in the Shadow of the Great Indian Mounds. His previous volume PASSAGEWAYS can be found in the University of Iowa's Special Collection and he is also the author of the book AFTER THE MARDI GRAS...

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© 2005 R.S. Pierpoint. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any

means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 09/27/05

ISBN: 1-4208-8002-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-7148-2 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

***

This is just the beginning. All things that we know about have beginnings and endings. Here I am lonesome recounting these tales. In my evening years. Old. Tired and full of the stories that by happenstance found their way to me.

Even now I hear the ocean waves crash. Though far from it I am. The smell of exposed seafloor by the docks where Eckhart was hanged at low tide lingers in my nostrils. This even though the images were conveyed to me through journals and old Naval Log Books.

The noise inside that old port city calls like a long lost friend. Women chuckle with glee over the gentlemen’s plea for their attention. The men drink and revel. They all eat of the bounty of this life. Sometimes the spoils of living are rich. Other times life places you at the end of a rope for trying to take more than your share.

The city. That glorious old port city. The place where so many have found their beginnings and so many have found their end. The tale is long and seemingly convoluted, one at times struggles to make sensibilities from it. That is life. Look at your own life. Did it start sensibly and move forward from there? Doubtful. Life starts in a mystery and moves quickly on. Allowing little time for contemplation but bombarding you with new twists and turns. How can stories then be credibly shared and believed if they always make perfect sense to the beholder?

My series of tales break down into three books. These divisions, much like time, keeping everything from happening at once. Most of these stories were told to me by witnesses and/or descendants of the various peoples mentioned herein. Some of the information was taken from actual historical documents. In the case of Captain Von Dursten’s log books; I discovered them after researching a family legend of people that I had met years ago. This of course led me to the records of Captain Eckhart’s trial for piracy. However, Eckhart and Von Dursten’s story comes later. There is much to transpire before we go to Sea.

During my time as a Prison Guard I met among others a fellow named Joe. He had squandered his youth then came of age in that sinful old city that sits on the banks of that murky river. Then as if to balance the accounts he now had much time on his hands again, so he would spend hours regaling me with tales of his life. Tales of sin. Tales of redemption. I would stand for endless shifts listening to remembrances of the strange dark life he had lived. These monologues of his became After the Mardi Gras. The original title of Joe’s story was Nazareth Twice Told. It remained under that name for years in a dusty old file folder. Re-reading it after much time had passed I saw what Joe had really been telling me. This prompted me to call it by its true name. After The Mardi Gras.

Some of this tale is distasteful. Not deeply evil or anything like that. Some few parts are better suited for the locker room than for the eyes of refined and cultured ladies. So therefore I apologize beforehand to anyone who legitimately finds something offensive about any parts of this work. I was much younger when I wrote book one of After the Mardi Gras. So, it was written with a younger mans eye for things. Most any part that is off-color was most assuredly dictated to me by Joe. It was almost impossible to separate out parts of his recounting without changing the core of what he was saying. Book two, The Dark is Always the Same, was written sometime later and contains little of Joe’s indelicacies. By the time I got to book three, Ratchethead, the subject matter had moved almost exclusively into philosophical symbolism. The tales begin in darkness and have many dark elements in them. There are many somber gray evenings in our lives. If you stay with me through the dark parts I promise that you will eventually emerge from the dark valley. If we begin in the sunlight we could only proceed towards the black engulfing arms of endless night. However if we begin in the stygian pits of forsaken life we can then move forward to the brilliant sunshine of a joyful and beautiful land. It is my intention and my promise that this long and twisting tale will finally leave you in bright light of a peaceful and loving new day. A new day.

So then the question arose; How do I organize all this rich and varied deep draughts of life? Really it was enough for three different books. As I studied it however, I came to see that there were underlying threads that tied all the stories together. Then the more I worked the more I was amazed and hypnotized by how simple it all really was. I was not working on three tales at all.

That is the reason for this lengthy explanation of one book versus three books. The only part that did not covenant under the umbrella of the unseen hands was the Tales of the Clowns. At least it did not at first. Slowly, like winter molasses, even this became part of the long recounting. However if I explain everything now there will be nothing for you to sort out on your own. Smoothing out all the bumps in the road transforms what should be weighty meals into a soft gruel for an old and recalcitrant stomach. So I leave the rough edges within. You know what you can digest and what you cannot. I would not chew your food for you. Likewise I will not present over indulgent explanations about what was meant to be said unless it is absolutely required to clarify some rogue thought. They said what they said. On that same note, they are responsible for their own actions both good and bad.

Like a raft on the ocean or the proverbial feather in the wind we are cast and blown about. Sometimes things are reasonable. Sometimes things are absurd. The dreamers dream on. The singer still sings. Out of chaos comes order. There is a wheel in the sky. There are unseen hands that work the puppet strings. There are times and seasons. There is love and hate. There are old men that sit and tell stories fantastic to believe. There is also a time for reckoning and a time for judgment. There will also be a time when we can try to rekindle the love that we once had. It will be in that time after the Mardi Gras.

There are forces beyond what we can see. Then sometimes, through a gray mist, we get a glimpse beyond the mundanity of this every day life. Sometimes the Flying Dutchman does indeed appear to errant sailors, warning them to change their wicked ways, while they still have a chance.

***

After the Mardi Gras

Part One

Nazareth Twice Told

by

R.S. Pierpoint

2005

The Pimp told the whore, I think I have you a customer. Both of them looked down the sidewalks and over the heads of all the milling residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. They looked at nothing. It was night.

I was not her customer but I looked into her eyes any way. What I saw in the Whores eyes was surreal. In her eyes I saw pleasure, pain, lust and fear. I also saw something else in her eyes. It has no name. The mystery in the Prostitutes eye’s I saw that night became the foundation of the searching in my life. It is the engine that propels this tale forward. It is the fuel. The lights from the doorways and overhead signs illuminate the pathway that lays before me.

Look Ma no hands. That is how I have lived my life. Or at least that is how I used to live it. I had seen Hookers before but this one was different. I don’t mean the Hooker with a heart of gold different, but not your typical barroom sleaze either. She had class. She showed indications of having been brought up correctly. The Pimp had no class. It is an unwritten rule, Pimps shall not have class. The Pimp was superfluous. He was scum.

The whore was an actress playing out a role she couldn’t or didn’t comprehend. Like the other men I wanted her badly. I couldn’t pay the price or I had already paid the price. I don’t know which. She was beautiful but part of her was somewhere else.

They come to me in my dreams now. Last night in my sleep the brought me warm beer, meat and tobacco. It appeared to be an offering or a bribe. Perhaps they thought I had joined their team. No, for the most part I remain a Christian. Not a good Christian just a Christian.

It cannot be denied that sometimes I am tempted. Once here in this very Sodom and Gomorrah they called to me on the street. It wasn’t just for me however. It was for whoever passed by. It was just a wooden house but it called to me. Its white and yellow paint dripped painfully into wandering souls. The slow syrupy cry that it made was melancholic and lonesome. It was beautiful and compelling and mysterious all at the same time. All of the windows were open. Slow music drifted out of the windows into the street. I never saw anyone inside the house come out. It was just as well. Whoever or whatever lived there had to be completely irresistible. No one could have refused them any thing. I shuffled along those sidewalks of dreams for untold ages. The din and shuffling sounds that all the people made sounded like a low murmuring roar trying to get back to its mother, the river of life. The sounds of the city were not unhappy ones. Low voices in whispers then yells to emphasize certain points. Smells of exotic foods danced and sailed through all quarters of the city. Frying and baking. Fruits and vegetables. Buying and selling of their hopes and dreams. The black licorice of the evil was also there.

Did I mention that Pimps are scum? Pimps are not as some believe at the bottom of the criminal-scum ladder. Pimps are one step above homosexuals. God hates a homosexual. At least that is what he says in his great book of rules. They are an abomination in his eyes. There is something lower than the dreaded Fag. The very bottom of scum-evil-perversion scale is the Voodoo Witch Doctor. I once read of a Voodoo lady who would place a secret drop of her menstrual blood in her husband’s morning coffee. This supposedly kept him pliable and in bondage to her. That certainly is evil.

(If I might interject here. When Joe was relating this story to me I stopped him to offer cautious advice about some of his opinions. Joe claims he was trying to place everything on a relative scale of being. If you study the Christian Bible you will indeed read that God hates homosexuals. With that one could rate them on a scale of wickedness, I suppose, if one wanted to. Then perhaps Joe was only trying to tie these things into the ultimate fate of Sodom and Gomorrah which was destroyed by God Almighty himself for their indulgences in wickedness. Perhaps Voodoo is more misunderstood than anything else. It may be of the old adage that you cannot judge a book by its cover. Anytime however that you have groups that meet in secret and perform strange rituals you are leaving the door open for miss-interpretation. I make my own coffee. I am in agreement that Pimps are scum.)

***

I don’t have the really horrible dreams anymore. I had the real bad ones when I was married to Bernice. I don’t know why that is. Bernice is what happens to a man when he turns his brain off. We were married in the home of a local minister. All through the ceremony one of Bernice’s children kept sobbing for attention. Then towards the end of the ceremony a black cat ran between myself and Bernice. I knew instantly that I had made a huge mistake. When I went to kiss her I noticed how bad her breath really was. That was just the first awakening for me. In the harsh light of day any sign of attractiveness on Bernice’s part vanished with the sunlight. Make-up had hidden blotchy skin. Her upper lip was discolored from the shaving off of a faint moustache. On top of that she had an odor about her. I originally thought it was just from not having time to do laundry and that her clothes were dirty. It turns out she had some kind of permanent body odor which made her smell perpetually unclean. Then the bad dreams started. Well, my ex-wife lied a whole lot and that seemed to cause most of it. Some nights I would wake up absolutely horrified. Sometimes I would wake up and not know where I was at. Now I know where I was at. I was in Hell.

I am quite sure my ex-wife brought some demons into the marriage with her. One should seriously examine the person one is preparing to share the marriage bed with. Bernice had three children by three different men. She was married or had been married to some of the fathers. The father of at least one child was unknown to all. For some reason I came to the conclusion that marrying Bernice would at the Zing and Pep to my life that it had been missing. It certainly added a new dimension to my life.

Let me share this with you; When you marry an adulterous woman your life goes straight to hell. (Let me place in this location a clarification of which I said I was not going to do much of. Some women simply choose the wrong men to marry. Other women get tricked into marriage by loathsome gold-diggers. We can find ample forgiveness for women who must replace men due to circumstances. When I refer to adulterous women I mean women who thrive on betrayal and lies.) Bernice lied a lot. Well, saying Bernice lied a lot is like saying the Atlantic Ocean has a lot of water in it. She belonged in the liars Hall of Fame. This lady could flat out tell a lie. She would lie and get in trouble when a more rational person would have just told the truth and went on about their business.

One of the bizarre nightmares that sprung from my twisted and tortured psyche caused by being in close proximity to habitual and compulsive liar went like this; I dreamed I was in the part of hell where lies come from. The sky was green and the grass was blue. The lies have their birth as broken pieces of clear glass. The little pieces of broken glass lay in the blue grass. You must walk through the glass-infested grass bare-footed. No matter how you step the little broken glass lies will cut you. The first building I saw in that part of Hell was something that resembled a Christian Church. It was full of pregnant women in Nuns habits. Bernice was there, pregnant and dressed as a Nun. This may represent whatever started her on the journey and descent into hell, I don’t know. The next thing I saw was three babies in a pea-pod contraption. One baby on each end and one in the middle. Only there faces were showing. They were lying there in the broken glass sea of lies crying pitifully. I picked it up in the middle and both end babies fell to the ground. I picked it up by both ends and the middle baby fell to the ground. No matter which way I picked it up a baby would end up in the sea of broken glass. I then, very sadly, laid the whole thing down and walked off.

Moving on from the pea-pod babies I passed a University. There were acres of students listening to Professors. Their faces were painted on. I am spinning. Falling. Faster. Walking again. My feet bleeding profusely from the broken glass lay cuts. Then a fence. A high fence topped with. prison wire or military barbed wire. Concertina I believe is what it is called. There was a chained and locked gate with a sign that said, Property of the United States Government. STAY OUT. I felt it was most efficacious to obey the sign and I moved on.

The last thing I saw on that particular trip to hell was a small military bunker. It had sand bags and an artillery piece. Several soldiers and an Officer were engaged in firing the weapon. The Officer began talking on his field telephone. He said, We need and air strike on position 0678, over. One of the soldiers screamed, But Sir, that’s our position. The Officer replied, I know son, liars always call in fire on their own positions.

***

There was a very tall apartment building at a very tall school. Some 435 apartments to be exact. They hired yours truly to be a Night Watchman in the tall apartment building. I, the Night Watchman lived in the building along with my wife Bernice. It was the Married Student Housing for the Robert E. Lee Institute of Technology. It was from here that I began my journey down that old murky river. Still there was much to transpire before my eyes were opened on that steamy nighttime sidewalk, miles and years away.

I was a very notorious Night Watchman. Not only for the way I conducted business but also for using it as a pulpit to expound my beliefs about the nature of reality. I said that there was no God. It was also about this time that I started printing a newspaper which also set forth my views. Actually it was more of a newsletter. It was named The World Is Going To End Newsletter. There may still be few copies of it floating around. If you encounter a copy of The End Of The World News please destroy it. I would be most grateful.

After all, there is no God is there? I was quite ready to publish and tell the entire world that there very clearly was not a God. For me the only possible explanation was that all things happened by accident. On the other hand, if by some quirk of a twisted fate there was a God he certainly possessed a very poor sense of humor. As it turns out God has a great sense of humor. That is why he sends so many atheists to college.

Not only did I not believe in God I desperately wanted to prove that he did not exist. Without God there is no such thing as sin. Without God the Christian Bible is just so much hot air. Without God there is no accountability. One could stay intoxicated and bigoted forever without repercussions.

It was during this time at the R.E.L. Inst. Of Tech. That my newsletter was born. The school was ethnically diverse. So I made somewhat of a friend of a Chinese student. I showed him a copy of my Newsletter and he initially told me that he couldn’t be seen with me anymore publicly. He felt that the Government would have me eliminated at any moment. He didn’t want to be standing there with a copy of my work when it happened. He had not been in this country very long.

The people that actually did touch a copy of my newsletter handled it like it was nuclear waste. Everyone else tried to avoid it altogether. My newsletter was a howling failure.

In the years before I met Bernice and prior to my time at the RELIOT (Robert E. Lee Institute of Technology), I spent a winter in a woman’s arms. That winter was spent in house down the road from the Dog Food Factory. It was her father’s house. Really it was the landlord’s house. It didn’t matter because at this point we were all white trash. I met this woman on the same evening I got laid-off from work at the Dog Food Plant. It seems dogs were not eating as much as they used to and there was a shortage of horses out west. So someone had to go. My drinking began as soon as I cashed my last paycheck. Therefore total intoxication overtook me prior to meeting Jilly. She was sitting there at a table in Bubba Higgins Big Dog Bar and Grill when I staggered in at midnight. Our eyes met. I walked over an introduced myself as Joe. She asked, Joe? and I said, Yeah, Just Joe. It was odd how Bourbon had transformed her into such a beautiful woman. The Bourbon had certainly transformed me into a handsome and striking figure.

Jilly and I spent the night together at a motel and moved in with her brother Dale the next day. Jilly’s brother was crippled in both legs. He was born without Achilles tendons