Prince Of The Buckboard Roosters

He finally moved out, my downstairs neighbor Rob. Rather an odd sort, but quiet. One might say unnervingly quiet. Late-1970's Wes Craven movie quiet. Rob had lived downstairs ever since I moved in. His was a basement apartment with one window which fronted the steep descending driveway. I’ve been here a few years and appreciated his lack of noise, but he never spoke, never. I’d see him at the mailboxes, or walking to his car and I’d give a little tip of the verbal hat, but he’d act as if he was deaf. He wasn't deaf. Finally I gave up trying.

I can’t remember when exactly, but I ran into him once at a neighborhood grocery store, the Bushel Basket. He was my checker, but still didn’t speak to me except to mumble the amount of sale. It was uncomfortable, but I paid with a debit card and left. Odd to think of him in a job that deals with the public, but perhaps he’s only a checker when there’s a rush, otherwise stocking shelves or talking blithely to the potatoes and summer squash in the produce section. Since I rarely frequented Bushel Basket, I never saw him in his work environment again, but I’m happy he has a steady union job. If there still are union jobs. He was never unpleasant, but like I said, quiet.

Sometime near the end of the month I noticed lots of well-worn cardboard boxes out alongside the curb. It had all the tell-tale signs of someone moving out: each trash can was filled to overflowing and it was only Sunday. Surely everyone knew the garbage truck wouldn’t arrive until Thursday. I nosed around and thumbed through a few old text books he was tossing out--a highlighted college physics book, numerology paperbacks from the occult section, and a lifetime’s collection of water-damaged NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Nothing very interesting. He’d printed his name on the fly leaf of each one, Robert T. Herzog. Funny, I remembered using my middle initial when signing my name, but I’d quit it years prior. Seemed excessive somehow. No-one remembered by last name, did I think they cared about my middle name. Though it showed a desire to be recognized. Andy T. Warhol indeed.

Stealthily I listened and heard Rob moving boxes outside one evening. I pretended to be taking my garbage bag out at the same time and struck up a short conversation. Maybe the dislike he felt for me had dissipated some, because he casually answered my questions about his huge amount of trash. Sure enough he was moving out. Seems that a city inspector had made a periodic check on our triplex and found his basement unit in violation of the existing codes. They’d informed the owner and threatened large fines unless the place was vacated. Hence Rob’s quick move. I had a chance to peak inside his rooms once or twice over the years, they were dark, dank, lonely and smelled of mildew. Probably deserved evacuation. I shook his hand goodbye and wished him the best. He grunted something in reply then walked back to his smelly piece of heaven.

I’m a trash loving guy. Been known to dumpster-dive for books, magazines, old record albums, cookie tins, anything I thought I could use in collages, art projects, resell on craigslist, read, listen to, or watch. If I have a personal aesthetic, it has that cheapskate charm. I worked with a guy once who said he’d "never buy dead people's clothes,” and I was a little taken aback. Every piece of clothing I was wearing, I realized, could have come from “dead people.” Yes, even my boxers. Kind of made me feel dirty, but then I thought about the guy who had referred to them that way. He was a 6’8” geek with a harridan for a wife. And though I'd known my fair share of malcontents, he was the only one who belonged to the NRA and actually bought his lunches at the Army-Navy surplus store (freeze dried meals in a bag). Oddly, he’d never joined the military, but his heart was in a dusty village in Iraq torturing rag heads. Maybe my clothes were second hand, but I didn’t hunger that one day they'd be covered in blood.

So when Rob had gone to work I pawed through his trash looking for prizes. The books, which are my favorite addiction, were pretty bad, ditto any clothes or kitchen supplies. But I found some old Mead college notebooks which still had at least half the pages empty. I figured I’d toss out the hand-written material on the French-Indian War, or Cooper’s Theory of Culpability and use the notebooks for my own as yet undecided ends. I grabbed three of them in now-faded colors and tucked them under my sweatshirt until I was inside my door.

Odd to spy on a stranger’s inner life. The doodles, drawings, notes or other graphic fixations are keys into someone’s secret world. It's the stuff we don't even tell priests and it’s definitely voyeur territory. Seems Rob was something of a mystic by looking at his coded entries from the Kabbalah, his three-dimensional drawings of hexagrams, quotes from Aleister Crowley, and pages which looked like something an advanced mathematician may have created while in deep stages of crack-induced thought. All in all, a little spooky. Each notebook also had the unmistakable odor of that basement apartment. I tore out most of the pages. Some were so odd I thought I could use them in a future art piece so I laid them in a huge book of maps I keep to flatten sheets of wrinkled paper. I'm a pack rat remember.

One of the entries I came upon was ascribed to an historical personage of unknown origin. Even Wikipedia didn’t have a clue. His appellation was “Prince of the Buckboard Roosters.” Sounds vaguely like a Mississippi traveling executioner, but being surrounded by the notations and ideograms of weird pseudo-science made the text even more curious. It had that look like a cross between instructions for Satan worship and the musings of an excitable conspiracy theorist. Here’s the text Rob wrote or transcribed, you tell me:

“If I received all I craved there’s no doubt I’d be unhappy. Does it mean I crave the wrong things? Or is the act of craving what actually ruins the outcome? Or is unhappiness the perfect answer to any earnest question? (Pentagram) If I were happy at the outcome, truly happy, would it be the correct wrong answer, or the wrong correct answer, or does any of it matter? Any of what you ask? Anything born between rising and falling I answer. (Eastern Orthodox Cross)

Let’s begin again. Can I know happiness without, at the same instant, being unhappy? I think not, but who am I? Nobody? I know you thought I’d say ‘nobody and everybody.’ There is no nobody. There is no everybody. There is no Zero. There is no all encompassing end to everything. Something always squeaks through. (Star of David)

If there is no nobody and no everybody can there be a somebody? Yes, but somebody can’t ask the question, because nobody exists to ask the question of, and everybody is constantly in the process of becoming an additional somebody. Hence we may ask only ourselves the question which has no answer since we cannot be questioner and answerer at the same point in time. Only nobody can accomplish that. It would be nice if everybody could accomplish that, but because somebody is always changing the definition of everybody, everybody can only give the answer in the past tense, that is before somebody asked the question. (Cornucopia)

The past tense is obviously death. Only death can answer the question or pose the question. We are the question. We merely pass from death who questions to death who answers. The interval between those death potentials, us, cannot embody happiness or its opposite since we are in constant motion from death to death. Happiness can only modify that which doesn’t move, which is death. Only death has the ability to be joyous or sad. (Eye of Horus) We presume incorrectly that life is for the living. We are merely in motion, which is survival. We are the equivalent of a chess move played by death against itself . Death can be happy or sad at the chess game’s outcome, or completely even and non-committal. It would be incorrect to say we are of little importance however, since we are the only definition of movement, without which the chess game cannot continue. Without us, death has no existence. Without death there is no time, space, matter, or energy with which to begin movement through questions. (three intersecting arrows) We should be called ‘What Happens If I Move Here?’ Once we relay our name between the chess players called death, we cease to exist in the past tense. Instead, we stop our motion and enter the present tense where we have no function except to wait for death. Our only ability in the present tense is to wait for death to place us in the past where we once performed our purpose of survival. Currently, what we perceive as reality is illusion and amnesia. There is no future tense. Its definition can never be realized, since once we strive to move into the future, we merely push the boundary line of the present. Future is merely a game we play in the present while waiting for death to re-open the past. To think of a progression from past to present to future is erroneous. (Backward Swastika) Again, there is no future, merely the past which no longer exists, and the present which is the vanguard of the non-existent.

Fortuitously, there is also nothingness and chaos. (666) The future is structured by nothingness while the present is a complex ebb and flow of chaos. Chaos creates our definitions. Chaos is the basis of chess. The pull of life in all forms toward death is called love. Except for illusion and reconstituting the past, there is only the window with death opened by love. Our purpose is to give birth to the present then progress to the past. (Aleph) So says the Prince of the Buckboard Roosters”

Makes me want to play Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue Op. 133 really loud. I shouldn't dig in other people's trash. I'm getting too old for it.

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