Lon Chaney Jr.

            I spent a lot of Friday getting caught up on my journal.

            I filled out my income report for Ontario Works but didn’t feel like mailing it. I decided it wouldn’t be too late if I drop it into the mailbox on Saturday on my way to No Frills.

            I made some slight changes to the responses by the second voice in my poem “Wave in the Air”.

            I changed the last verse of “Princesses Hear a Pea” to “Don’t clear-cut the culture of these confines / though you’re very welcome to add to the mound / You can lay your flavour on top of mine / build a mountain of music in my part of town”

            I made some changes to “Tailor-Made Chain Haibun”:

Those stinking Rothmans sticks you smoke that smell like tobacco blended with sugar and sewage turn my stomach and so does their memory, do you start smoking with dad or do you start with the other girls in boarding school, you smoke everywhere, you smoke with everyone and have lots of friends but it must be tough for you when dad kicks the habit, smoking in the smoky teachers lounge with your colleagues, you smoke with my brother, with your next oldest brothers, your cousins and my father’s sisters, and nobody complains but my dad, my sister and me, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, the fowl smell of cigarette corpses in the house and car ashtrays, and after dinner plates full of butts, you smoke even after your mastectomy until you die of breast cancer when I am seventeen

sighing under a beehive

she crushes the lipstick filter

into unfinished eggs

            I changed my poem “Raja” to present tense and ditched the unnecessary punctuation, plus I made the stanza switch that Albert suggested.

            I boiled a potato heated a piece of pork tenderloin and made some chicken gravy.

            I watched an interesting episode of Rawhide. The trail drive is waiting for the Devil River to shallow so they can get the herd across and so the men are getting bored. There is a town nearby but Gil the trail boss is reluctant to let the drovers go in. That night a small wagon arrives at the trail drive campfire driven by a man in a Confederate officer’s uniform and an attractive well-dressed woman named Narcissa. She hands out pamphlets and the colonel gives a speech in a British accent about a new Confederacy being built in Panama. He refers to himself as the Emperor of Panama. Gil recognizes him as Colonel Millet from the war just as Millet refers to Gil as Lieutenant Favor. Gil tells the colonel to leave and after he leaves he tells his men that he will fight any man that falls for the colonel’s con game and starts preaching it to the other men. Jessie, a sentimental but illiterate ox of a man has been swayed by Narcissa’s flirtations and becomes the colonel’s first recruit. He returns to the camp drunk the next morning and declares that he is now in the Panamanian Confederate army. As Gil promised they have to fight but Jessie is bigger and stronger than Gil and he wins. Jessie leaves the drive. Gil decides that though the river is still deep and fast he can’t afford to lose any more men and so he attempts a crossing. One of his men, a northerner known as Boston drowns and they can’t ford the river. Several men are upset at Gil about his mistake and they decide to join the colonel. The colonel makes Jessie a captain. The colonel keeps thinking he can convince Gil to join him. He lives in a replica of a Virginia plantation where when Gil arrives he is greeted by the first Black man to appear on Rawhide. He is a butler and he is singing the traditional song, “There’s a Man Going Round taking Names”: “He’s taken my father’s name and left my heart in pain …” When the butler leads Gil inside Narcissa asks him to finish the song for Gil and he sings, “And Death is the man taking names …” She tells Gil that Millette is all washed up and that she needs Gil to fulfill her dream of rebuilding the Confederacy in Panama. She kisses him and he does not resist but it does not sway him. Millette arrives and it’s clear that he’s insane. He says he’s broke and so he’s going to lead his new recruits on a raid on the treasury of a certain fort while the cavalry is occupied with an Indian battle. That they they will gain the money to travel to Panama. The next night in town the men are drinking and preparing for their first mission. One of them says that he’s heard there’ll be banana plantations in Panama instead of cotton and he wonders, “What’s a banana?” The colonel arrives to fire the men up for tomorrow’s mission though he doesn’t tell them exactly what it is. Meanwhile Jessie has become so obsessed with Narcissa that he believes her flirtations are an indication that she wants to marry him. He goes to her room and asks her when they’ll be wed but she tells him he disgusts her and of course this upsets him. After the colonel finishes his speech he goes upstairs to find Narcissa frightened and distraught. He begins comforting her and Jessie becomes jealous. When Gil, Rowdy and some of the other drovers arrive at the saloon to try to convince the men not to follow the colonel, Jessie emerges from the second floor hotel room with a struggling Narcissa in his grip. He is wearing the colonel’s coat and announces that Millette is dead and he is their new leader. No one wants to follow Jessie. He pulls a gun and descends the stairs with Narcissa as a shield. But he gets shot twice anyway. He drags Narcissa to the livery stable where he dies.

            I wonder if we were expected to ignore the fact that Colonel Millette had a British accent. I found out though that there was at least one British officer that fought for the Confederacy, a few sergeants and many more British and foreign soldiers. Brits that were involved in the cotton or fabric industry felt motivated to support the south and some other Brits just liked the snooty fake aristocracy that the Confederacy tried to maintain.

            I also wondered if there had really been a plan to rebuild the Confederacy in Panama. The Confederacy had plans even before the Civil War to take over parts of Latin America, including Mexico and Brazil. One southerner, William Walker actually formed a private army and conquered Nicaragua for a year, becoming its president. He was defeated by a coalition of Central American countries and when he tried to return and take over again he was captured and executed by Honduras. After the war 20,000 rebels fled to Brazil where they formed two colonies, one of which is Americana. They still meet once a year to celebrate their heritage.

            Jessie was played by legendary character actor Lon Chaney Jr., most famous for The Wolf Man.

            Narcissa was played by film noire star, Marie Windsor. She was so notorious as a “bad woman” in her film roles that people used to mail her Bibles to help save her soul. She was known as Queen of the Bs because of all the B movies she starred in.