Eugene with Red Hair
7/15/23
Account given by Father Rabbit:
‘The cars sound like boats,’ was the first thing another Eugene thought when beside me on the sidewalk.
He has long, red dreadlocks and is in the process of changing careers from Manager of Staples to Attorney. He was a tax evader that was never found out.
The decor of his home is red because he lives inside a pomegranate. His parents grew him that pomegranate home, then smiled candidly, and were never seen again after they waved by the white gate and said adieu. Eugene brings girls back into his pomegranate sometimes. He spared me the details.
He cannot get away from himself, especially when he invites buddies over to sit on seed stools to chatter and play bloody knuckles. These friendships had been going on for five, maybe seven years.
He can’t explain this to his childhood self.
Him as a boy sits there sullen.
Eugene stares at papers of Law homework.
Alone, Eugene realizes he has a deep, dark heart that is a cavernous chasm, only felt, truly, on rare occasions, though never satiated. When he is sitting there imbibing and playing bloody knuckles with his friends, he doesn’t address much, and this had been going on for over five years, maybe seven years.
His boyhood self sits there in knee pants and scowls.
“I miss mommy,” he says, alone in bed after he ignores a new girlfriend.
Adult Eugene thinks,
“So, do you remember that lightning storm long ago?”
Boy Eugene goes,
“I don’t like lightning storms.”
“…”
“I don’t like the sounds of airplanes.”
While looking into his own heart, Eugene realizes that people, maybe all people, may never understand enough to forgive themselves.
They may never find apt council.
They can sit there and must face Dread and can look at old photographs of themselves, like they don’t wither, but time on Earth is limited.
Then there is a thunderstorm! A yellow bearded man shows up at his door saying he is Zeus, or Jay – zeus, Eugene cannot tell; the man’s words are soft and seem to change in the seconds it takes Eugene to hear them. Eugene invites the man inside, and the stranger takes a seat on the seed stool that stems up from the floor.
The old man and Eugene’s Aunt, Kindness, sit in the corner talking, discussing the likelihood the Pomegranate home will be put somewhere dangerous by The Great Spirit, who, without asking, has taken it up in a mesh bag and started to walk across American soil.
The world’s intimacy problems rise like an ice forest below as the entity grows larger and so lifts the Pomegranate higher.
All is still inside.
At the same time, Aunt Kindness complains she forgot her umbrella though she is unphased by the rain that wet her raincoat on her way in through the escape hatch. She has white whiskers on her lip. Eugene can’t look at her closely because she looks much older than he wants to accept.
“Eugene the pomegranate needs a woman’s touch,” says Kindness.
The bearded man looks at Eugene with innocence that makes him know his sins are apparent, as bright as neon to the vagrant. Meanwhile, there is a fireman using a ladder to get a cat out of a tree despite the storm because he is bored and wants to get out of the firehouse, where the fraternal bickering is all a bore.
The abduction of the pomegranate is witnessed by the fireman who is in the tree branches looking yon, befuddled by the mesh bag totted by an invisible force, now carrying the Pomegranate toward Rhode Island. (In that neighborhood, many people live in fruit so the Great Spirit, the Creator of Native Myths, steps deftly through a pumpkin patch that is occupied by people whose grandparents hailed from Poland.)
Eugene, Aunt Kindness, and the prodigal stranger are stuck to their seats, and there is a voice that whispers, ‘citrus.’
Eugene’s younger self, around the age of nine, comes out from under the sink.
The yellow-bearded man knew this would happen.
Eugene thinks to get smart for a minute, glancing toward his Law papers.
The stranger whispers,
“King James.”
“Spontaneity is the spice of life,” reminds Aunt Kindness as the objects in the place tremble a little.
Eugene wishes she hadn’t said that for it is a cliché, and then he feels mean and he sits and talks with his boyhood self.
He sits there.
Eugene wishes it was four nights before when he had a lady friend there and he almost had the gall to touch her leg.
‘You should stop tormenting yourself,’ says the boy to Eugene. ‘Be nice to yourself. That’s what grandma says.’
Eugene’s grandma had died five years hence.
Aunt Kindness had a good visit. Once the pomegranate is impaled on the top of a City Hall, she returns home to take care of children.
I found myself nibbling at the Eugene’s home as it rotted on the dirt, days later.
I believe he got out okay.