Hi Joe,
I am considerably older and wrinklier than you, my scrawny five pounds having entered the world in 1937. You should be proud that you were worth $100. My daddy got drunk the night I was born and never paid the doctor bill. A few weeks later my mom tried to get one of the white docs for me. Neither one would come. But the black doctor came.
He wanted to take my temperature and asked mom if she had any Vaseline. No. Did she have any butter? Huh-uh. How about some lard? Nope. Bacon grease? None of that either. Talk about poor! He told my mom that she would never raise me, but here I am.
By the time I was five my dad, who used to beat up my mom every time he got drunk, was out of the picture completely. We lived on the equivalent of Kent Street. Poor white trash, for sure.
I wanted desperately to go to college but my family said it would take too much money even if I got a full scholarship. They needed me to work and help pay the rent. So I started smoking dope in 1953. I quit caring about school and my grades plummeted, but I did manage to graduate.
Now I have a couple of master's degrees and I'm a liberal. I don't know why I tell you all this except by way of saying you validate me. I feel like you're my virtual soul mate. (Tell your wife not to worry. I'm way too old and decrepit to be any kind of threat.)
Anyway, thanks.
Ruth
PS: I erred. I'm not a liberal. I'm a socialist.
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My dearest Ruth:
I can never be worthy of your heartfelt words. In no way do I validate you. Your strength and beauty and will for the common good of man validate you for eternity. I, who am supposedly some kind of populist hillbilly wordsmith according the publishing class that allows me to earn a living, am by no means up to paying homage to the beauty and pathos of your struggle as an American and as a human being.
Bear with me for a moment and let me tell you a mercifully brief story:
Tonight I went to a bar in my hometown, located on a street corner (Kent Street, actually) where at age 12 I used to sell newspapers to help my family get by. And in that bar I saw something that perhaps bodes hope for all of us whose souls will forever be in the underclass regardless of how many degrees one may earn or whatever publishing success one may eventually experience. This particular bar, considered the worst, most disreputable in town, is operated by a fellow who is going through a sex change, has a crew cut, breasts and earrings and is very overweight. And in that bar he sings karaoke with all his heart. And he wheedles all of the other beaten down working souls, to do the same. And each in turn gets up and sings, and the bikers sing and the black people sing, and the queers sing and the doddering old alcoholics sing, and every one accepts each other without question. The Iranian homo serves the drinks and the burly drywall hangers thank him and joke and leave tips they cannot afford. And every one of them is willing to go to Iraq and die for the national lie being perpetuated upon them by the owning and managing classes. Yet in that place there is respect and open laughing, drunken crying, friendship between people we are told do not associate and do not like one another and do not associate, by a lying divisionist capitalist media administered by an ignorant and unfeeling middle class.
Tonight a 78-year-old man who still has to labor 45 hours a week doing auto body work and is suffering lung cancer most likely as a result of the chemicals he breathed all his life, refused to let me buy him a $1.25 Budweiser beer. Instead, he insisted on buying me one. And we both smoked a cigarette we are not supposed to smoke. And we looked at death and each other and laughed hard. And it was the best smoke I ever had.
And there I was, fortunate enough to feel America. Again. The America that exists where, contrary to the national lie, uneducated, beaten down, essentially Christian people accept the queer, the biker, the Mexican and the Iranian swish, laughing and joking and singing until that last sad hour when their ten bucks is spent or the bartender calls last call. Then they go back to lives that cannot ever achieve what middle class people would call modest success. And they lose more ground every day.
And I cannot argue that they know as truth what I can only spout in lines of type in this sad little jerk-off liberal place called the blogosphere, or the internet or whatever it will be called next week. They know that all men are indeed brothers (though they would never express it that way) simply because they must live it every day of their lives to survive at all.
It would be arrogant for me to say tonight's experience gives me hope. It makes me ashamed of myself. Who am I to derive vain liberal vampirish "hope" from such an experience? But I do know this: I am neither worthy of their gracious and wooly cordiality nor your endearing letter.
In the brotherhood of art and labor,
Joe
PS: As for my wife "worrying," she would love you as much as I do from across this strange void in which we all now exist.
