Dispatch from the Abyss

When noir protagonists are in a tough spot, they stop by the Abyss for dangertinis and sympathy. Every bartender has a sharp eye for back-lit doorway silhouettes, and can prepare the perfect pitcher in the time it takes to traverse the length of the bar. The pool table is level. The jukebox is free. The hat pegs and coat rack are full of trench coats and ribboned felt. A game of switchblade darts is usually underway, as is gun show and tell. Safe-crackers debate in low voices. Attack dogs dream and twitch under tables. The fan draft catches the cigar smoke, the perfume, and the aftershave. It incenses the air and ripples the hanging blueprints, the wanted posters. The Abyss is a fountain of noir comforts, our oasis in the rust belt desert.

Holed up at the Abyss on the night of the 4th of July, Sammy Napalm, Two Quiet Mikes, JD, and I admitted that none of us have ever been very good patriots. We mused on why, and found a common disgust for racist idiots. Also, we’d never met a patriot that wasn’t better than 50% moron, but for the sake of the conversation, we stuck to racist idiot encounters. When it was my turn, I told them about my Eviction-proof White Trash Neighbors.

I refer to my EWTN as the Ewwtons. The Ewwton Clan. Since White Trash live everywhere in North America now, and only a very few of them are as usefully entertaining as the Trailer Park Boys and Eminem, it seems important to classify them definitively. The Ewwtons in Buffalo have their origins in the great Southern Welfare Diaspora of the 80s, specifically Catbox, North Carolina. They spent their first two decades in New York acclimating in the projects, enjoying indoor plumbing, real mayonnaise sandwiches, and expressing their fertility and their ignorance as simultaneously as possible.

Whether from drug and alcohol abuse, or because Catbox generations are less Homo Sapien than barn animal or fruit fly, the patriarch and matriarch not-inappropriately appear to be elderly grandparents. They are 45. The Ewwtons have eight children, and seven grandchildren, who are 0 for 7 in legitimacy. No one in the clan has ever worked, possessed a driver’s license, a car, pride, or finished high school. Their alternative milestones are: I have no idea. Maybe pregnancy, juvie, dishonorable discharges, and jail time.

The male Ewwtons are cadaverous, dingo-faced, dustbowl era looking pieces of work. The females are massive, shrill, lazy and stupid. The kids are dirty and wily and seem to be fed a steady diet of fast food and lead paint chips. They never change.

Since the day they moved in, JD and I have observed them with a horror bordering on wonder. They constantly do things we can’t fathom, and in the most remarkably public way. Not accidentally public, say due to their loudness, nor incidentally public, due to a conflict spilling out of the apartment. The Ewwtons clearly prefer to conduct all their most perplexing dramas in front of an audience. So at some point early on, we started inviting friends and family over to witness White Trash Theater.

Some highlights: Moving Day is a passion play in 7 or 8 acts, with 20 minute intermissions between each. It’s a fully reversible assemblage of scenes on such subjects as: the ownership and/or right to remove/insert mattresses, box springs, stereo speakers, stereo, TV, couch cushions, lounge chairs, kitchen appliances, fake plants, chrome tables, a requisite quantity of particle board assumed to be shelving but which may also be bunk beds or a bedroom suite from rent-to-own. The youngest children ride in, around, and on top of each load. They hold everything in place.

Big Garbage Pick-up Day is a seasonally occurring, roving production in which the children scour the neighborhood for suitable garbage, drag it back to their house and make a giant garbage fort. Act two is when the teenage parents take over the fort and have romantic moments while huffing propellants.

Muralology is another repeating series. This play opens whenever an Ewwton lucks into a can of spray paint. The neighborhood becomes a temporarily more curious and colorful place for the giant marijuana leaves on the backs of everyone’s garages. Between regular productions, the Ewwtons keep up their practice through advanced dirt studies. Their canvas is a thick layer of grime on any surface, such as the siding of their own house; their medium and instrument, copious spit and a sleeve. With these modest implements, they make swastikas and SS-lightning bolts appear right out of the space that before was just mere filth. Watch your back, Michaelangelo.

Gardening for Dummies is an annual summer play about the Ewwtons admiring their neighbors’ gardens, hanging baskets and porch furniture, and then every second weekend in June, stealing what they especially like. Act two is where three police cars and the neighbors march on the Ewwton’s apartment and the owners reclaim their property.

Unfortunately, White Trash Theater enjoys an uninterrupted run, but what’s a noir heroine to do? No, really. It’d be too easy to lure them to a location en masse, with a simple invitation to a reality show casting call. But then what? No one I know, even those from the Abyss, could stand being in a room with any of them long enough to kill even one of them. Frankly, we’re at a loss. The floor’s open.