Carolina Dreamin’

The following is just one of many pages taken from the magazine that chronicles my years on earth. I’ve considered that the magazine should be properly titled “I’ve Led a Charmed Life”. Every step of the way has had some magical qualities to it where people came in with arcing trajectories that happened to collide with mine at just the right moment and made the next step I needed to take be seemingly effortless.

By no means am I trying to say that life hasn’t had its challenges. But there has definitely been a real sense that I’ve had this little fairy godmother looking over my shoulder and sprinkling pixie dust to clear the air (much like waving burning sage in your environment will clear the negativity out of your life space.)  This particular page, “Carolina Dreamin’ “, details the beginning of a vision that was forming in my mind around living in Western North Carolina.

To set the stage, I had found myself stuck in Southeast Missouri and needed to get out (again).  I’d tried teaching all the sciences for Junior High and High School in, of all places, a tiny berg called Cuba, Missouri and realized I absolutely hated teaching in a traditional setting. To reference a few timestamps, this period of time was after I’d stopped being a professional dancer and stage performer in New York,  Rhode Island and other venues. (I later resumed the dancing and went back to some of my more “exotic artist” modes of movement)

To reiterate, I was chomping at the bit to leave the town of Cape Girardeau, Mo. (My deepest apologies to all my Bootheel friends who live there and love it, but it was just too flat, too backwater and too conservative at the time to suit my quirky ways). My dream had always been to get out of the State of Misery as fast as possible.

And there was the added core energy of JV exemplified by the statement.

“That boy there’s got ants in his pants”.

My grandmother Emma (my dad’s side) more accurately summed it up by saying:

“Grandson….you have ze Vanderlust”

(She didn’t know the half of it as to my true travels up to that point, but she hit it right on the money as perfectly as if she’d had a bow and arrow and shot right thru the bullseye)

So, yes, I was itching to leave Swampeast Missouri and the magic dust was tossed in front of my feet as the phone rang and on the other end of the line was my aunt Betty, who lived in the foothills of the Smokies. What happened in that phone call set my heart to soaring in anticipation of new vistas to embrace. My Dad (who had met my mom long ago in North Carolina) was sitting out on the front porch at that moment and singing.

“Nothin’ could be finer than to be in Caroliner in the morning”

(with the emphasis  being on dragging the word morning out over about 4 warbling notes and having some fun with it, which Ray Sr. loved to do)

The dream had a place in mind and a song to go with it.

Life was good for JV.

Mordant Smoke and Flaming Mohair

(This is one of a series of events that happened in the mail room of the Mother Earth News when I was first hired there.) This commentary is probably 4 days into describing my interactions with my nemesis…. cigarette smoke

The misters I was using were making a dent in the ever increasing advance of a dark looming cloud that was out to envelope my part of the room and its precious air. I was buying time by firing off the aromatic sprays and actually seemed to be making some headway in forestalling the inevitable overtaking of my space by the Beast Cloud. And there were other presences inserting themselves into my sector as well. A trio of young women had become intrigued with the vaporizers and their contents and, oddly enough, intrigued with my presence, even though I was dressed up like an anarchist.

One was slim and athletic with curly blond hair and an attractive smile.
Another was tall and lean, a little on the coarse side but a redhead. (I’ve always been a sucker for redheads). She was well dressed in an angora top with just a hint of not wearing a bra. She pulled the look off rather stunningly.
The third was dark haired, voluptuous and sparkly.

This would be another time in my life when 3 women collectively would venture in to see what made JV tick. It always seemed like strength in numbers made them more bold than they might be otherwise.

“Whatcha got in that there sprinkle whatzit?”

The brown haired one had belted that question out in a North Carolina husky drawl that comes about after you’ve been force feeding flames down your windpipe for far too many fortnights. The smoke came out of her lips as she said this, hung in the air for a moment and then decided it would be more comfortable if it just sank into her cleavage, like cold air does as it falls into the valleys below the mountains. Actually, I guess I’d have to be more truthful in saying that it fell onto her mountains like a little blanket of fog.

“Lavendar, Lilacs and Jasmine” I replied. “Among others. Helps to cut the smoke.”

Now keep in mind that they still had cigarettes around them. One held a cigarillo in her hand. One woman had a ciggie pressed in her lips and one had a burning stick cradled between her fingers on her hips.

The bold redhead said, “I bet you got bedroom eyes behind those dark spectacles”

(In more private moments, I would have looked at this utterance to be an invitation to start up a chain reaction of events that would result in the creation of some potent thermonuclear fusion. Like in the nearest mail cart, for instance. Just pull a postal sack over the top of us, right? And, in case you were wondering, yep, I’m a complete hormonal juvenile to this day)

I smiled, laughed a little and shot her some Lavender showers so that they drifted right past her face. Sort of a little whimsical tease and it served a double purpose to turn that damn smoke ring she was forming into a mini-cirrus slender cloud that ran right into the blonde’s face. Blondie snorted a little bit and put her arm around her tall ginger companion’s waist. The sparkly and full bodied gal blew smoke straight up into the air and exclaimed.

“Hey, I think we should find out what he’s got behind those goggles~!”

I adjusted the streaming mechanism and shot her right straight on, so that the mist played a little set of enveloping brush strokes against her throat.

“Not today ladies.”

The Lilac mists I was directing at her flowed up and around her neck, then condensed on her skin and formed little waterfalls into her cleavage. I realized that playing with misters was a way I could flirt and have it be ok.

(Keep in mind, this was 1980 and it wasn’t unusual for coworkers to flirt with each other, form relationships or to be casual about their behavior or language. Today…. you’d get brought up on charges of harassment)

The late afternoon sun rays illuminated the smokey environment as though we were standing in a cave of eerie vapors. As my eyes adjusted to the smog, someone lit up the stereo with the beginning chords of Jimi Hendrix playing……Purple Haze.

The ladies took a deep drag and a step forward and that’s when I noticed the twitches. As the smoke curled up out of their mouths it intersected with the edges of their eyes and since muscles respond to stress, I noticed these little spasms going on around the eyelash area. It also tended to make the mascara start to travel and display like a little Rorschach print, since the lacrimal glands were working overtime to produce a little extra tearing to combat the smoky onslaught from below. I didn’t interpret these physiological responses as being attractive in the least and took a step back.
But I had also partially recoiled because I realized that, besides the tobacco being burned, there was another scent in the air. The odor of combusting hair. At first, I was concerned that the blonde had managed to set her locks on fire. But in reality, it was the redhead’s mohair sweater that had managed to get lit up, care of her friend’s ember burning in her hand.

“Oooooh…..Ooooooh….. OOOOOhhhh…..” She exclaimed as she started this little hopping dance while both of her friends started to whack the hell out of her. I mean, this sweater had turned to blazing up in a hurry. To this day, I don’t ever think I’ve seen such great tapotement, such exuberant percussive smacks, such determined blows that went this way and that. She got her butt smacked, her chest pummeled, and the area between the shoulder blades got such a going over that you’d have thought she’d have asked for the Heimlich maneuver.
I must admit, I was thoroughly entertained at this lively demonstration but when I quit laughing I realized I had the solution to the flaming (literally) red haired girl in hand.
I stepped into the trio of flailing arms and unloaded all three atomizers at once until I had nothing left to squirt. I was out of ammo.
My once full reservoirs were spent. And, opposite my gaze, I beheld a very limp looking, disheveled, and sorry looking mess of a woman. It was the sort of scene you might encounter walking past a Nordstrom’s manikin display after some disgruntled and inebriated employee had commenced to creating a macabre exhibition of distorted limbs and clothing rearrangement. The poundings she’d endured had caused her once elevated shoulder girdle to droop and sag. Her head was listing to one side and had an anterior slant to it. Her whole posture resembled what would happen if you let the air out of a blow up doll and it proceeded to sag forwards as though about to fall into your arms. I wouldn’t say her face resembled the Joker in Batman, but it certainly had taken on the air of an apparition that would give a makeup artist nightmares. Red lipstick was smeared up and back like she’d been in a wind tunnel. There were smudged handprints all over her face from her clapping her hands to her mouth in a desperate attempt to keep from screaming since her diaphragm was in convulsive overload. Her hair looked like she’d just endured a ride in a commercial Laundromat washer (on high spin). The sooty strands of goat wool that once helped to project a rather statuesque and sultry physique now hung like bedraggled vermicelli and draped her breasts like blackened rivulets that had run amok in a headlong plunge toward the floor. Her chest was hardly being obscured by the remnants of her attire at this point. I’d brought an extra hoodie with me so I wrapped that around her and escorted her away from my region of the room (and was grateful to have the tobacco triplets safely across the room and farther from my breathing corner.) Since I was having a hard time taking this occurrence seriously, I smiled as graciously as I could from across the room and chuckled a little. Somehow this cued her companions into large bursts of laughter that got rolling along in that uncontrollable way when a smoker has to breath, laugh and cough at the same time.
The three of them got to sounding like my Grand Uncle’s tractor would on a cold morning startup, smoking and banging while it tried to catch itself and run smoothly.
The girls made noises like this:
“Ga ha ha ha …Ga ha ….Ga ha ha ha …Ga ha.. Ga ha Ga ha Ga hack
Ga hack Ga hack…. Ga ha ha ha… Ga hack hack.. Ga Hack.. Ga Hack..Ga Hack.”

So they are over there playing Hack-a-doodle and I’m going out of my noodle listening to this hawking and barking. To ease my ears, someone mercifully turned the music up and Led Zeppelin comes belting in with :

“Stairway To Heaven”

Believe me, I was ready to go.
Lord… just take me now and deliver me from this twin misery of an indescribably sooty set of breath inhalations combined with the torture of having to listen to this triumvirate of gaggalicious yo-yos.
I actually believe that the Justus family (my mom’s side) tractors sounded better than these characters. They sort of reminded me of a Florida pelican trying to disgorge a fish that was obviously bigger than it had anticipated.

Lovely. So romantic. So attractive. So compelling.

This went on for upwards of ten minutes and resulted in the girls bent over, holding on to their knees with fits of coughing and (to my mind) it appeared that they were about to deliver a lung up just as the UPS man walked in. I figured he’d take care of any immediate needs they might have but their paroxysmal racket was so darn loud it was making it hard to get into the rhythm of the Allman Brother’s Band as they hit the opening beats of “Blue Sky”. Looking up at the darkening atmosphere above me that was becoming more obscured by the moment, I wished longingly for clear air and realized I had none. The women had been fun in their goofy way, but my chances for female companionship would have to wait. There were better, non smoking, choices in my future.