Cantey

The Albany Journal published this Wednesday,Febrauary 9,2011 about Vic’s old friends.

Cantey Davis was a jock back then. His hero was Coach Bob Fowler, who’d won 15 Varsity letters at Earlham, the Quaker university at Richmond, Indiana. Coach Bob was 6’8” in the days when nobody else was tall enough to dunk basketballs. He inspired exemplary deportment without having to raise his voice. As a matter of fact, whenever Coach Bob wasn’t grinning, things got quiet. He was trying to teach Cantey to control his temper.
Coach Bob’s brother Jim caught hawks and hunted with them. At the time he was off somewhere in South America catching a harpy eagle. Before he made a name for himself on Wild Kingdom, our mothers warned us if we didn’t study hard, we’d end up like that worthless Jim Fowler, though we thought it took a lot of class to choose a profession by a pun on your last name.

I was sure to make my own fortune very soon after getting out of Dougherty County. I might go down to South America myself, I thought. Carve an enormous pecan plantation out of the Brazilian jungle and oversee it by horseback. I bet by God Margaret Wilson would listen up when I set up a concert grand piano for her in the grand hall of my antebellum mansion. I’d saunter in, remove my Panama hat from disheveled ducktails, lean against the doorway in my muddy English knee boots listening to Mozart with one critical eyebrow raised. I pictured her in a flowing white dress playing the concert grand or nursing me back to health from some romantic disease that didn’t involve dysentery or urinary discharges. Something like malaria, with cold chills and hot fevers. I’d lie in a high canopy bed, hovering near death, as she applied cold compresses to my winged temples. The idea of dying didn’t bother me a bit, nor did the fact that nothing in my high school curriculum had prepared me for carving out colonial plantations. In retrospect, I’ve known only two people in my life who contracted malaria. Mr. Haslam, owner of the Greatest Used Bookstore in the World, caught a fatal dose in Africa, and Jimmy Gray, who picked his up in Viet Nam. Jimmy assured me that malaria (at least the Vietnamese strain) isn’t romantic.

Cantey, bound for Dartmouth on a football and academic scholarship, was saving his cash from a temporary job delivering Easter flowers in a bunny costume for his Uncle Jim Pace, the florist. Cantey was supposed to hippity‑hop from the delivery truck to the front door with floral bouquets husbands ordered for their wives. The best hippity‑hop Cantey could manage was a lope interceded by a spastic lurch among the barking dogs and the gaggles of children who swarmed him barking and screaming, nipping and grabbing at his cotton tail.

The public danger lay in the disguise. The floppy‑ears and demented buck‑tooth smile of the headpiece innocuously masked a simmering rage stoked and maintained by teenage and adult tormentors who couldn’t estimate Cantey’s disposition and who didn’t, therefore, know when to let up, and at evening twilight of Easter Sunday, some tedious husbands with too much Jim Beam under their belts harassed a rabid bunny rabbit beyond the restraint Coach Bob had taught him.

“You ain’t going to believe this,” a neighborhood spectator called in to 911, “but they’s a big pink rabbit at a Easter Egg hunt in Hilsman Park steady kicking ass.”

Puzzled police arrived on a broken field of scattered egg basket and wounded fathers, an enormous bunny with a missing tail and one amputated ear hulking back to a white van full of lilies, slamming the door.

Vic Miller is a south Georgia novelist, humorist and naturalist. He lives aboard his sailboat “Kestyll,” often anchored near a Kuna Indian village off the Caribbean coast of Panama. He is a frequent contributor to Gray’s Sporting Journal.

Happy Valentine’s Day

On Valentine’s the birds do choose their mates.
The hawks in flight and sparrows on the ground
Stop hunting prey and hopping all around.
They couple up, and then they copulate

In feathered frenzy squawking all along.
And then some roost in trees, some merely sit
Upon the heads of statues where they shit.
Some sort of whistle, or they sing a song.
One thing is true of every kind of fowl:
Those of feather do together flock.
The buzzard never makes it with the cock.
The raven never climbs upon an owl.

The heron does not stoop to hump the quail,
And lovebirds only nestle in a pair
with other lovebirds. The world never dare
to mount a peacock’s multi-colored tail.

You never see a bluebird mount a jay,
and chickadees don’t dittle mockingbirds,
but I could waste a hundred thousand words
and still not tell you what I have to say

about the birds and all that they don’t do.
They do enough of interest, to be sure,
although they keep their pedigrees quite pure.
To illustrate, I will describe a few:

Male ostriches jump on their partner’s back.
Her head is stuck securely in the sand,
and eagles daily high above the land.
The duck has his orgasm with a quack!

The penguins pass the long mid-winter’s night
with lots and lots of sub-Antarctic vice.
They hunker down and do it on the ice
because they were denied the gift of flight

and can’t fly off to Florida to mate.
Despite the cold the females are not frigid,
and little feathered penises get rigid
when February 14 is the date.

The vulture mixes dalliance with death.
His boudoir is the rib cage of a horse.
When buzzards have imbibed the final course,
they huddle up and coo with rancid breath.

And then there is the cuckoo, we are told,
that lays its eggs into another’s nest,
and foster parenthood is then impressed.
The bird that’s wronged is labeled the cuckold.

Some feathered fornicators mate in flight.
At least they come together in the air.
Then they become a quickly falling pair
with ruffled feathers, squawking with delight.

They roll their soaring passion in a ball
but wisely keep an eye upon the ground
as they, inflamed in lust, come hurling down
while yodeling in joy their mating call.

A carefree couple high above the stone
— two eagles, say, or falcons, even hawks —
may quite forget themselves in their sweet squawks
and break their feathered asses and their bones.

For birds that do their mating in the skies,
it’s best to prematurely ‘jaculate,
for they will both be wasted if they wait.
Coitus interruptus is advised.
The robin in his russet feathered breast
will strut his stuff upon the frosty ground,
while horny maiden robins gather round
deciding which cock robin they like best

And after that decision has been made
they gang-bang him round-robin near to death
until he’s long of tongue and short of breath
and cured of any notion to get laid.

The female hummingbird receives a thrill
so quick it is a singular sensation
that’s put to her as one high-speed vibration.
She might as well sit on a dentist drill

as let that high-tech hummer have his way —
he hits and runs and ravishes so fast
she feels a subtle tingle in her ass,
and that is all. I’m sure she could say

for sure if she’d been diddled by a beau
or felt alone an airy premonition.
He never bothers with a proposition,
but if he’s good, she’ll ask “Which way’d he go?”
Well, people, too, when they are so inclined,
will come in season when the sap is down
in February, and they’ll choose their mates and call them Valentines,

whom the will hop upon with birdlike glee
and warble, whistle, whip-poor-will, or screech
when one is tow and half of all is each.
They may climb up and do it in a tree

or in a hammock swinging from its limbs,
in airplane restrooms high above the earth.
In caves they’ll fornicate for all they’re worth
or in the church’s vestry during hymns.

The human couples, like the owl or loon,
in cloistered darkness or in broad daylight
will come together morning, noon, and night
upon the water or beneath the moon.

They’ll stretch their loves spread-eagle on the grass
or couple in the backseat of a car.
It doesn’t really matter where they are.
The body’s mobile when the mind’s on ass.

But now this Valentine is getting long.
And high time that I practiced what I preach
and hoping that my grasp exceeds my reach,
I’ll tell you why I up and wrote this song:

I have admired your beauty from a-far
and now would like to have a closer look,
at all your crannies, valleys, hills, and nooks –
the stuff that makes you beauty that you are,

So if you’ll sacrifice a little time,
we’ll put our knees together for a chat,
and we’ll exchange our kisses tit for tat,
and you can then become my valentine.

Oh, I’ll provide the tats. You bring the other,
and we can dally well into the night
until the morning planet sends her light
to charm you wits. Then you will be my lover.
We’ll join up with the eagle and the dove,
of Mars and Venus, mom and dad of Cupid,
who (everybody knows that isn’t stupid)
can shoot a hypodermic dart of love

That will unite us solely; that’s a fact.
He can inflame man, woman, beast or birds.
Then you and I will make, in Shakespeare’s words,
the legendary “beast that has two backs.”

Vic’s Article in Vintage Magazine

Open December 2010 and go to page 12

Rhetoric Flambe

Even assholes
ought to see
it’s words we shout
…that makes us free,
so stifle sticks,
condem the stones,
but leave our fucking
speech alone!

The Last Christmas

The Last Christmas
Season’s greetings
From:
O. Vic Miller

T’was right before Christmas & Ms. Santa Clause
was shrewishly numbering her husband’s flaws:
“You lecherous, drunken, degenerate slob,
Your manners and humor is rough as a cob.
You snore like a donkey and smell like a goat.
The bank, it won’t honor the check I just wrote.
You burp, and you snore halitosis like sump.
You’re never romantic, you overweight lump.”

As NASCAR engines run best when they’re hot,
she ran down the wherefores, ascending whatnots.

Then flexing her mandibles, spreading her neck,
she jettisoned dentures to lay it on thick.
She warmed up her mastoids and started to nag–
from on the toenail clippings she’d found in the shag
to the sorry-ass redbone asleep on the mat,
from his stinking cigars to the bells on his hat.

“The cap’s off the toothpaste! The lawn ain’t been mowed!”
“My dear,” he informed her, “it’s under the snow…”
“Don’t backtalk, you lardass, or offer excuses.
I’ve had it to here with your spousal abuses.”
And drawing her finger beneath her thick chin,
she offered the gesture of doing him in.
(Oh, vain to imagine how wedlock can worsen
when spouses start threatening damage to person!)
“The elf that I married was nothing like you.
My youth has been wasted, my mother’s dreams too,
on a drunk who don’t labor but one day a year
with a face like a roadmap from sucking up beer
and chasing a coonhound as sorry as him
Through snowdrifts and snowstorms and ice-lacy glen
With no passing care for the wife you left home
Until you get hungry, shitfaced or stoned
With never a whisper of sweetness or care
For the sweet natured bride you left languishing here.

You pig out the den while you’re watching TV.
You’re never considerate! What about me?”
She blamed him for peanuts she’d found in the sofa.
She called him misogynist, chauvinist, loafer.
She scaled down one tirade then flew up another.
She threatened attorneys and calling her mother.
She raged, filibustered, she screamed and she wept.
She swore that she’d scald him with grits when he slept.

Nick knew she’d exhausted what patience she had.
Deciding to vacate before she got mad,
He feigned a front exit, then dash out the back,
the hound right behind him, his tail in his crack.
Nick’s sleigh was all packed so he harnessed his deer.
She screamed, “Go ahead! Get the hell out of here.
Go visit your cronies, your potheads and slatterns,
continue to follow dysfunctional patterns.
But after tonight you can live in your socks,
Cause I’m burning your clothes and I’m changing the locks!”

“Ho, ho, Sugar booger,” I bet you forgot
tomorrow is Christmas. You know that I’ve got
to be off on my mission distributing toys
for all the exemplary girlies and boys.”

“You can bet I don’t care if you fly straight to hell.”
He waved and departed and cried out “Noel!”
But exclaimed to the hound as he drove out of sight:
“I’m marking the milestone– my last Christmas flight.
It’s Christmas two-thousand and time to retire.
The Shriners can have it. I’m down to the wire.
My ride’s obsolescent, my piles are aflame.
The Salvation Army has cheapened my name.
The census has tripled, I can’t get around.
The prefabs have chimneys too small to go down.
The children can purchase their toys on the Net.
The sky is congested with corporate jets
and smog that is thick as the down on a thistle.
and I live in sheer terror of ground-to-air missiles,
Spud warheads and tomahawks fretting the sky
It’s quickly becoming too dangerous to fly.
I don’t trust the Arabs; I’m scared of the Jews.
My wife is hormonal with empty nest blues.
The reindeers are skittish, in estrus or rut.
They mount one another while we are in route.
For the rest of my days I expect to live single,
or the name on my pension ain’t Christopher Kringle.”

Nick beat it to Patrick’s, a pub, to unload
and toss down an eggnog or three for the road.
Where drunkards sing carols with voices like bleats
as they clap with their hands and they stomp with their feet.
(Whenever Dame Claus got to calling him there.
Old Patrick would tell her, “Naw, Santa ain’t here.”)
He stood a few rounds and he told a few lies,
and soon he was snockered and ready to fly.
He fondled the bar maid, a minx named Yvonne,
then tipped her a fifty when he had to run.
“You ain’t in condition for driving on ice.
Let’s cull out from my place who’s naughty and nice;
We can Fed-ex the gifts to arrive in one day.”

But no one absconded the keys to his sleigh.
He ordered a go-cup of nog without egg
and lurched up to fetch it on rubbery legs.
His eyes didn’t focus, his reflexes slow.
His boots printed staggering tracks in the snow
to the eight tiny deers who was pawing with fright,
with eyeballs wide open to three quarters white.
What spooked them to panic is anyone’s guess,
but Santa approached them without much finesse.
He snatched at the harness, addressing the sled.
He stepped on the runners and swung up a leg,
but before he was seated, the reindeers went nuts,
got to twitching the tails on the top of their butts.
First Rudolph went postal, he snorted and blew.
Then Cupid and Blitzen became stressful too.
They bolted in harness, then farted and reared,
Hurtled the traces and whip-lashed the sled,
which skidded on slush before spinning around
in the path of a beer truck arriving in town.
The driver careened and he ran off the road,
rolling the beer-truck, and spewing the load,
thus launching the redbone into howling flight
to shatter the silence of this holy night.

The kegs blew their bung stops, commencing to spew
in a geyser of foam and some beverage too.
There was bitter and pilsner and lager and bock,
and they flooded the pavement for one city block
with beer that was marbled with by deer dung and blood.
The drunks congregated to drink them up some
Of the booze (not the deer shit) where the tankards had run.
The sheriff arrived and the ambulance came
With lawyers to litigate damage and blame,
a fire truck, a Krishna, a nun preaching hell,
a Salvation Santa Clause ringing his bell,
MADD mamas, pro lifers, and one skinny girl
announcing in Yiddish the end of the world.

So deep from the wreckage they drug St. Nick out
of the beer and the deer and the ale and the stout.
He was sloshed from his boots to the hat on his head[
If he hadn’t been plastered, he would’ve been dead.
He was soggy with beer from his head to his toes.
His buddies was worried their pal would get froze,
so they called up a taxi to take Santa home.
and he got there at sunrise on Christmas day morn.

No lamps, not a candle or taper, was lit.
He discovered his key to the door didn’t fit.
But Santa was freezing and they couldn’t stop,
so high to the rooftop they boosted him up.
He crawled across shingles as quiet as a mouse
to breach his traditional way into houses.
But he crashed through the flute and rolled out on the rug.
Then crawled to the bathroom to hurl in the tub.
He retched and he heaved and he coughed and he spat
till his face was as pale as the fur on his hat.
Then laying his cheek on the cool of the tile,
he snored and he snorted and slept for a while.

But who to his piteous sighs should arrive,
but an irate Miz. Clause set to eat him alive?
Her hair was in curlers, her face was a fright,
a Halloween nightmare on Christmas Eve night.
A terry cloth robe that her mother had gave her,
she wore it wide open, broadcasting her gender.
She shuffled in slippers of pink rabbit fur,
and Santa was mortally frightened of her.
Her eyes were like brimstones, her lips thick as liver.
Like Jell-O or clabber, her jowls were aquiver.
Her slander was pelting her husband like rain.
Her nostrils flared open exposing her brain.
She kicked him and tattooed his skull with her brush.
She stomped on his fingers and called him a lush,
But he “hey, ho, ho-ed” as he rolled on the floor,
which angered his bloodthirsty bride even more.
Well, the jolly old martyr of spousal abuse
was begging no quarter and made no excuses,
in spite of his wife, who still ranted and hissed
like a hellcat embroiled in a menopause fit.
Nick summonsed his helpers to gather post haste
to hear the important announcement he’d make.
The elves gathered ‘round like a road crew on Sunday,
attracted to carnage as Theodore Bundy,
but nothing can’t humble a drunk who’s retired.
Chris cackled and shouted, “You bastards are fired!
I’m bound and determined to start a new life
without the encumber of workers or wives!

For the first time in decades, Fra Clause shut her mouth
to marvel the stranger who’d broke in her house.
His eyes was a-twinkle though swole black and blue.
The grin through his whiskers was puzzling too,
as the haggard old gentleman rose to his feet,
and, clearing his throat, he commenced with this speech:

“For two thousand years I’ve been making this run.
My mission is up, the millennia’s done.
My heart is arrhythmic, my blood pressure’s up.
By God, I’ve decided enough is enough.
My last Christmas carol is finished and sung.
I’m through cleaning boot heels of ungulate dung.
I’ve heard till I’m crazy ‘The Nutcracker Suite’.
My coon hound has perished. I’m dead on my feet.
My children are thankless; my wife has got old;
my dentures won’t seal and my prostate is swole.
My bladder is leaky; my bowels are loose;
these long winter evenings are cooking my goose.
My sled has been totaled; my reindeers are dead.
I can’t wear my hat for the knots on my head.

But I’ve finally concluded that naughty IS nice–
that virtue’s rewards ain’t got nothing on vice,
so effective right now, I’m retiring my number,
to bed down Yvonne for a long winter’s slumber.
Y’all can pick up your paychecks and call them your last,
‘Cause I’m finished, RETIRED! Y’all can kiss my fat ass!”

Merry Christmas!
ovm

John Yow’s “Armchair Birder”

http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1619

Maisy Miller Barnette In the News

Baby Doll

O.Victor Miller
So last Monday I’m snorkeling up the edge of Radium Golf Course rapids looking for river glass and space-drifting, Derek, Cochise and Will walking around on the rocks. Because of the injured back State Farm won’t pay to have treated (see “Chicanery” ovictormiller.com), I’m more comfortable staying in the water where gravity is slack. So I’m pulling myself upstream through the shallows, hand walking the limestone rocks, thinking about that first body my treble hooks snagged up from the Kinchafoonee with Alex Walker and Sea Scouts around 1957; the two Tallahassee divers Moose Fountain, Jerry Lindsey and I recovered from Radium Cave in 1960; the 400 lb teacher in a polka dot dress I thought I’d found and hadn’t and the bodies over the last 50 years I looked for and didn’t find.

Ned Newcomb knows when you’re feeling around on the bottom of a dark river for a body, the very last thing you want is to actually find one, which may account for why divers don’t recover as many as you’d think they would. I’m blowing spume out the snorkel and wondering how I ever got mixed up with recovery in the first place, though before the fire departments and police got divers, the few kids with tanks got drafted into body and evidence recovery before we’d learned to tell adults in uniform to kiss off.

The worst case scenario then and now is a lost child. The unbearable urgency, the intense dread and deep sadness of the enterprise–such sadness. I’ve always had a horror about finding drowned children and all the epidemic emptiness a vanished child causes– and I didn’t mean to get into all this, but that’s what I was thinking when I came up on the muddy hank of curly wires flagging from something buried under rubble and sand.

When I grab a fistful of the stuff and pull. In an explosions of silt a small pallid face with closed eyelids and naked shoulders appears with the shocking recognition that I have a handful of blanched hair the texture of steel wool. I find myself standing in knee-deep water with no memory of struggling to my feet, my fist unable to turn this horrible thing a-loose, screaming until my back buckles and sits me back down.
Fellow glass gleaners get curious enough to wander over. “What’s wrong with you now?”

“Nothing,” I wheeze, throwing the dripping thing up the bank. “I just got excited about finding this baby doll for Derek’s river collage is all.”
(end)

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.40 minutes ago · Friends Only · Comment ·LikeUnlike · Share
Write a comment….
.Vic MillerDouglas Kaliher: You rascal! Come see me! High’s yo mama’n'em? Sydney and Cappy came by–I hadn’t seen Cappy since she was around 9. She knocked me over. Saw your grandma going in Publics–didn’t get a chance to speak but she looks great. Ain’t seen Bill since he used to jump out of trees on the guests of Rusty’s and my birthday parties.
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Douglas Kaliher I’m doing well. Mom is living in Athens, Ga. and doing well. I saw Sydney and Kappy about three months ago for a Kaliher reunion. My dad (Bill) is living in Swainsboro, Ga. rising horses. He has about 17 of them and yes for my grandmother to be almost 93 years young and still drives, she looks great. If I ever get to Albany I’ll look you up.
3 hours ago · LikeUnlike.Write a comment….
.Vic MillerAmy Elizabeth Dupuy: Hey kid, how you been? I see Kim from time to time and her young’uns. Y’all get prettier every year.
on Saturday · Comment ·LikeUnlike · See Wall-to-Wall

Amy Elizabeth Dupuy thanks Vic! all is well, getting married in the fall. where are u now? still in the south? talking about u the other day. my cousin was laughing about how he came home from college one summer. he took a class from u but had to drop it bc he kept goofing off. never forget when u brought a snake to class and told us to write about it. u were a great teacher.
23 hours ago · LikeUnlike.Write a comment….
.Vic Miller God’s not finished with me yet. Maybe She hasn’t even started, but I’m going to try to learn how to invert the order of these maddening little rectangles. Until then, please know that Facebook communiications (and almost everything else) is presented ass-backwards, ironically appropriate since old farts spend most of their time looking back.
on Saturday · Friends Only · Comment ·LikeUnlike
Rose Hancock Kemp, Kristen Taylor and Gayla Weaver Catrett like this..
.Keith Strickland You’ve paid your dues Vick. Do what you want.
Yesterday at 10:42am · LikeUnlike · .Vic Miller Thanks Keith, but damn the dues. I should’ve started doing it at nine. We all spend too much time dancing to somebody else’s drum. I know I should’ve told more college administrators than I did to kiss off. Heartbeat’s the only rhythm anybody needs. If you find yourself in a moving crowd, turn around and go the other way.
about an hour ago · LikeUnlike · .Write a comment….

See 4 more posts from Vic.Vic Miller
.Flint River by Clint
12 new photos
.on Friday · Friends Only · Comment ·LikeUnlike · Share
Megan Ketchum likes this..
.Clint Elliott thanks vic! im the one that took your amatuer profile picture john. hehe
11 hours ago · LikeUnlike · .Vic Miller Clint’s talented, John, but like you he’s immature and unsure of himself, carries a goddamn cell phone on the river, which I guarantee won’t get him out of half the trouble I can get him in.
about an hour ago · LikeUnlike · .Write a comment….
.Vic Miller Check out the amazing artwork of the lovely and talented Catherine “Ursula” Edgerton.
Album Art | S.C. Edgerton
livinontheedgerton.com
Lanterns / Midtown Dickens Oh Yell / Midtown Dickens Duck Kee Sessions / Schooner..on Friday · Friends Only · Comment ·LikeUnlike · Share

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