James "Buddy" Oliver
My uncle was a rounder, even from his youngest days. A black-haired, black-eyed hoodlum who could do most anything with his hands and had a gift for music. He was a bit of a cowbird in a robin's nest, a dreamer and a poet in a coal mining town. He was an intellectual, and that and a nickel got him a cup of coffee in Walker Co. Alabama.I heard stories about my uncle. He liked to drink, he liked to drive fast cars and take crazy chances. He hated where he lived, and often butted heads with my grandfather, a lifetime coal miner whom I never saw without a Swisher Sweet in one hand and Pabst Blue Ribbon in the other. He was a couple years younger than my mother, who was the perfect golden child who did everything right. After he was born, my grandmother banished my grandfather from her bed, which may explain why my uncle bore the brunt of his father's anger.
He joined the Navy as a young man, I'm not quite sure when but I know it was after WWII. He wasn't what I would call an ideal military man, not with the family insanity chromosome bubbling in his gene pool, but the Navy did allow him one saving grace: he got to travel.
Apparently, he took his travels seriously. He went to India and the Middle East (this was back when they still had Shahs and Sheiks and nobody was blowing themselves up in the name of Allah) and discovered Eastern mysticism. For a young man brought up in the hocus-pocus of charismaticism and borderline snake handling, the idea of eternal oneness and reincarnation must have seemed like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
He got back from the Navy in time for the beatnik revolution and from what I can tell, set his sights on becoming a misunderstood genius. He did quite a few drugs, expanded his mind, deserted his first wife and took up with an older woman who became my aunt sometime before I was born, and generally lived up to the family reputation for black-sheepedness. According to my grandmother, he went to air conditioning repair school, worked for NASA for awhile and had a very high security clearance, but when the hippies moved to the forefront of American society he expanded his mind once too often and ended up losing it all together.
You may not know this, but there's no cure for someone who fries their brain on drugs. At least, that's why my family whispered behind their hands for years, starting when I was a wee thing and culminating when he died in 1998. You can go crazy from some kind of brain problem, like schizophrenia or bipolar or OCD and they can treat that. Then you can get a normal job, like working for the postal service (but that's another post). But going crazy because you took too much acid is a no-fixer. You're pretty much stuck being a loony toon.
My uncle was about as loony as they came, especially for me, growing up in white-bread middle class suburbia. My parents did as most rural kids who came of age after the Great Depression did. They got the hell out of Walker Co. Alabama, got a higher education, and bought a house in the suburbs. They had the requisite two children, bought two cars, a television set, and complained about the lack of respect young people had for their country. My uncle, on the other hand, couldn't hold a job to save his life. He drifted from big idea to big idea, each one sure to be the one that makes him a millionaire. Each time, he conned money from his mother and set off into the sunset, only to arrive back home in a few months, broke and with another bright idea.
Each time, my grandmother would swear she wasn't going to give him another dime. And each time, she would tuck a hundred dollar bill in his pocket or in his hand and kiss him and wish him luck. She would tell everyone who would listen how she prayed constantly for her errant boy, that he would get "saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost." (It was always a three-step-plan for my Grandmother, never a package deal like it is for us Baptists.) But, like most of us with those Irish ancestral genes, she took a small bit of pride in her wild colonial boy. He was, after all, a genius.
For a brief period of time, my uncle settled down and married the aforementioned older woman. They had one child, a little girl they named after my grandfather. She, the poor lass, inherited every crazy gene this family had to offer plus a few from her mother's side. But that's another post. Domesticity didn't suit my uncle, though, and by the time my cousin was about three years old he'd become a professional wanderer once again.
I remember my uncle in bits and pieces. Young and strong, holding my hand as we waded in the creek behind my house in Gadsden. A bit older and married, with a guitar in his hand, playing and singing at the family fish fry. Once, I remember my grandmother, my uncle, my dad, my brother and me went fishing one evening and came back well after dark. I was about four or five at the time, and my mother was pitching a major hissy fit about my being out in the night air. (night air is bad for little Southern girls. See "Gone With The Wind.") My uncle told her to hush, that I was fine and had caught more fish than everybody else in the boat.
My uncle always had a soft spot for me. Perhaps we recognized each other as fellow travelers on the road to insanity. Perhaps it was the creative genius burning inside us. He always saw himself as a tortured poet who never wrote. I always saw myself as a gay waiter in a biker bar. Being a poet in a village of redneck idiots means you get beat up a lot. Whatever the reason, he always had time for me, even when he didn't have time for his own family.
When my uncle died, he'd truly become all we feared he would. He was a gray-haired hippie, with long-hair and a long beard, who sat around the house naked because it was painful to wear clothes. There was nothing physically wrong with his skin, but he believed if he put on clothes he'd be in excruciating pain. He looked a lot like Walt Whitman, which is one reason why I've never cared for Uncle Walt's work. If I wanted to hear a madman babble, I'd listen to my uncle.
My uncle left nothing behind of himself in this world. He was cremated and my wacky new-age aunt planted a tree and spread his ashes around the base to nourish it. She claims she sends his spirit out on errands from time to time. I told her I'd pick up my own milk, but thanks for the thought.
It's funny, but when I think of my uncle I think of him as the young man in his high school picture, his hair slicked back with hair cream, his dark eyes flashing. He's become something of a legend in our family, and my brother, I believe, tries to emulate him.
As for me, I've gone both ways. I've been a crazy, unmedicated poet and a stable, steady, hard-working girl. I've done my share of wandering and I've tried sinking a few roots. In my heart, I know I'm more like my father than my uncle. I'll let my brother claim his legacy. I think my true self lies somewhere in between.
posted by Zoe Richardson @ 8:43 AM
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