originally published January 17, 2008

this writing
is in the chapbook

Long Gone Blues
by Sam Martin

(a Down in the Dirt chapbook)

this chapbook is also available for sale for $3.50 (+ $1.00 shipping and handling per chapbook)

this writing is in the collection book Decrepit Remains (PDF file) download: only $9.95 (b&w pgs): paperback book $18.92 (b&w pgs):hardcover book $32.95 (color pgs): paperback book $75.45 (color pgs): hardcover book $88.45

The Unerringly Bad Judgment of James Dean Harbinger

Sam Martin

    “James Dean Harbinger, get in this house and eat your supper, boy!”
    James Dean didn’t want to, so he hid in the bushes in an outer corner of the back yard. He had hooked the top part of one set of toes on the fence he had tried to clear, and had further flattened his nose. It was bleeding, and he didn’t want his Mama to see it, because he knew what she would say:
    “Boy, whadjou do to yoreself this time? Don’t you ever use good judgment?”
    No, he never did. He had tried again to jump over a fence he knew he couldn’t jump over, knew it because he had tried to and failed to so many times before. He knew it, but he couldn’t resist trying again and again, not because of any daring or bravado on his part, but because, as his Mama had long ago concluded, to her sorrow but not to her surprise (she knew his father), he had, so far at least, developed no judgment except bad, and, furthermore, unknown to everybody but the two of them, him and his Demon, had been egged on by the Latter, a more common companion to both boys and men than Man had yet discovered, or would discover, at least until 1955 A. D. (ANNO DEMONI)
    The weather hadn’t yet turned cold in South Texas, but if it had, it wouldn’t have mattered to J. D., because he would have stayed out in it (hiding from his Mama’s calls) until he caught a cold that would have migrated into pneumonia, a fatal illness if treatment of it is denied, as would have been done if left to J. D.’s estimate of the situation, which might have been a blessing-in-false-face to all involved when you think about it, as I, his life-time narrator, certainly have (thought about it, you see).
    Anyway, his Mama found him out in the yard squatting in the bushes like a defecating monkey, and branch-whipped him into the house to eat his supper, attending to his nose before he sat down at table.
    Sure enough, halfway through the meal, he agitated the dog again, got bit, and had to have his hand washed, monkey-blood and a band-aid applied to it, and sent to bed without the rest of his supper, which he had mostly anyway already given to “Brownie.”
    J. D.——“Mama, gimme ‘nother piece o’ meat.”
     “Here, Brownie. Here, Brownie.”
    Brownie: “Slurp. Swallow.”
    J. D.——“Mama, gimme ‘nother piece o’ meat.”
     “Here, Brownie. Here, Brownie.”
    Brownie: “Gulp. Wolf.” “Clamp. Tear.”

    (J. D. had showed the bad judgment to reach out to pet Brownie, who concluded that J. D. wanted to be an Indian-giver, and so defended his supper.)

SCHOOL DAYS

    ELEMENTARY

    Predictably, J. D. chose the biggest, meanest girl in the sixth grade to pick on. “Bertha Boots” (her big feet fit only in her brother’s cast-off Army brogans) was a mixed-breed?half-boy and half-girl?and she truly didn’t know who she was, or how she felt about anything. She seemed to be of two minds, not a dual personality, understand, but just confused: one day she had a crush on a boy, the next day on a girl, even though nobody, boy or girl or beast, wanted to be anywhere near her. She was both large and fat, pockmarked and smelly, with stringy hair and piggy eyes. She looked bad, but most sad, she smelled bad.
    One day, J. D. attempted a mimic (of his no-good father) but managed only a mis-speak:
    “Bootsie,” he declared, “your breath bowls me over, like a buzzard.” When Bertha heard this iteration of only one of her many self-acknowledged failings, she knocked him off his pins. She then set him up, and refinished his surface, meanwhile utilizing descriptive terminology not only foreign to the rescuing academics, but describing traits and suggesting activities they had never considered actual, but only potential, and then only in the “minds” of the lower strati of “human society,” so called.
    Principal: “Dam’n it, J. D.! Ain’t you ever gonna learn to use good judgment?!”
    J. D.——“Mumph!”
    Nurse: “Hold still! Lord, child, ain’t you even got sense enough to sit still?! Dam’n! (She blushed.)

SIGN ON THE PRINCIPAL’S WALL

    Intelligence + Experience = Good Judgment (hopefully)

    J. D. persisted, so before the school year ended, Bertha had whipped him down several more times, although she ultimately would rather have not anymore. She had gone through phases with him? hate, then love (as a woman has for a man she can control), then hate (as a woman has for a man she can control), but this latest phase was exhaustion, physical and emotional. After the school year ended, Bertha was sent to work behind the meat counter in the local grocery store, and J. D. was promoted (among a conflicting mixture of sighs) to Junior High.

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