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CHARACTERS
in
(presented more-or-less in
the order of their appearance)
Page Four
The Ups and Downs of Skeeter Kitefly
Skeeter Kitefly's Sugardaddy Confessor
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Skeeter Kitefly's
Titular Assets
COMPACTIFICATION
behind the scenes
RoBynne O'Ring's
GRUNTS OF
PASSION
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Miss Nadja Pankiewicz
Huffman's youthful art teacher in 8th
grade: one reason for his early dedication to figurative art.
A free spirit just out of college, who encouraged us to call her “Nadja” and spent a lot of class time perched on the edge of her desk, engendering fantasies...
Crystal Smithson
Huffman's girlfriend all through high school, mostly because no one better appeared for either of them.
Fairly nice-looking, but painfully shy. In childhood she’d suffered from a Cindy Brady lisp that made uttering her own name a torment. By age fourteen she was burdened with braces she tried never to reveal, and a height of nearly six feet she could do nothing to hide. Plus a blush that matched the vivid tomato shade of her long red hair...
Professor Smithson
At the University of Missouri: Crystal's
father.
It didn’t help that I was 5'1" when we met, achieving only 6¼ additional inches (eventually above, relentlessly below) by way of growth-spurt. Crystal’s father, a professor of astronomy who could have expressed himself celestially, called us “Mutt and Jeff”...
Link Letterman and
Nancy "Green Springs" Ghillie
Classmates of Huffman and Crystal,
exemplifying two of the three syllables in Stonehill High.
Link Letterman (related to neither celebrity) would blaze up anything remotely flammable, and Nancy “Green Springs” Ghillie was the only person I ever heard of who could mellow out on ditchweed...
Elizabeth Erpe
Crystal's toxic best friend.
The four of us joined the school Art Club on the insistence of Crystal’s best friend Elizabeth Erpe, a poisonous shrew with an adequate singing voice who discovered the Music Club was rife with controlled substances...
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Last Updated
August 05, 2018
Our Gang
Extra-extracurricular auxiliary to
Stonehill High School's art and music clubs.
I could only smoke in the secondhand sense and Crystal was afraid to inhale, however much peer pressure Elizabeth applied; so Nancy would bake us her famous Green Springs hash brownies (ditchweed-free...)
Cherry Bust
Of Crystal, carved by Huffman for her 18th
birthday: a rare-at-that-time work in wood.
As before, sculpting in wood was such a natural snap I didn’t rate it too highly. Did I capture Crystal’s essential image, blending shy with bold and preserving it in Prunus serotina? Maybe so, but without breaking a sweat.
And cherry bust or no, she still wouldn’t sleep with me...
Gerhard Liederkranz
Benefactor of the Liederkranz Institute.
Once upon a time there was a bashful beer baron who gave his fortune to fine arts, always anonymously. After Gerhard Liederkranz’s beneficent death, they plastered his name over an institute in Madison, Wisconsin...
Bonnie Pattering
Affable student at Liederkranz, who was
Huffman's First Time. (Also his Second and Third, trying to elicit
what the initial "H." stood for.)
One quick casualty at Liederkranz was my chastity, thanks to sandy-haired Bonnie Pattering and her luminous lime-colored eyes. Plus a sun-kissed gymnast’s body that she put to bountiful use. If her unspoken ambition was to boink everyone at that institute, who were we to say her nay?...
Wendell Jones (Jonesy)
and Lucinda Faye
Huffman's roommate at Liederkranz,
and his (unrequited?) love back home in Oklahoma.
Every week Jonesy would paint another portrait of Lucinda Faye, from bewitching memory or bothersome imagination. None failed to merit a full-frontal rating; but some bordered on the peculiar...
Cheshire Mack
African-American life model at Liederkranz.
The unabashed Cheshire Mack, whose skintone I hadn't encountered to such a living extent before. Since I’d just switched my sights from clay to wood, the effect was that much more mindblowing; Cheshire seemed like a dryad indeed, a walnut sapling made womanflesh. I damn near went broke hiring her for extra sessions...
Vicki Volester
Huffman's significant other in the later 1980s, and receptionist for the Friendly Ghost—Dr. Harvey, Chicago psychiatrist.
Full name Victoria Lorraine Volester;
called
"Bun-Bunz" by Scott and "Squirmy McWriggle" by Huffman;
the heroine of Bolster, Not Molest Her.
She was another short dark narrow-eyed lady, the one who doused herself with White Linen before putting on outfits made of pure polyester. Plus fashionable shoulder pads that would have been outsized on one of Da Bearssss. But Vicki maintained a sort of balance (precariously) by having her hair biggified, permed up and poufed out till it doubled the scope of her smallish slightish noggin...
Canasta with Freud
Huffman panel presented to Dr. Harvey.
I quickcarved a panel showing the Friendly Ghost playing canasta with Freud, to mark one year of our making no progress together. As expected, he asked Vicki to hang it in the waiting room. As anticipated, it got her all agog...
Scott (alias "Pooh Bear")
Vicki Volester's alleged fiancé.
Called "Pooh Bastard" by Huffman.
I tried to make amends, presenting her at my next appointment with a quickcarved butterfly. Which Vicki picklejarringly said she could not accept, since (flashy wave of cubic zirconia) she had just gotten engaged.
What surprised me was the depth of protective indignation I felt. For her: poor Vicki, seduced by some cheap bastard...
The Absolute Woman
Huffman's intended masterpiece: a screen
of
three doors he plans to design while staying at the
Old McRale Place.
Wooden screen, of course. Three folding panels. Or rather three frames, each containing panels carved separately... Six panels carved on both sides—no, then I’d be stuck carving basso-relievo, and femininity calls for alto. When it does I want to respond with sculpture, not incisions...
Willamene
A small Bombay cat that invades
the Old McRale Place and makes its presence felt even inside Huffman's
brain. (Originally called Trespassers Will.)
Draw me.
You've got to be kidding.
As if I haven’t wasted enough time on this animal...
Still: I’ve heard cats have a knack for selecting effective backdrops. In this case, a white oak buffet. With north light gleaming off its fur or hide or whatever the term is.
I take up pad and charcoal and start to sketch.
“Trespassers Will” I could call it. In childhood I identified with Piglet’s grandfather since he, like I, suffered from Shortness of Breath...
The Three Fatefulettes
Relief panel inspired by a trio of girls seen at the
Schraube Reservoir
(reminding Huffman of the Vietnamese quartet, minus its hiccupper).
The second of twelve panels planned for The Absolute Woman.
Three young women, gliding toward me up the slope. Bare-armed, bare-legged, in butterfly swimsuits. Two swing a wicker basket between them. The third tears at something held in one hand, letting bits of it float out of the other. Petals from a rose? Fragments of a note? Breadcrumbs from a loaf? They hover in the hot still air like slo-mo confetti...
Kimberly Wu (Cranky Lynnette)
The Girl Around the Corner from Huffman at
the Strichleiter Lofts in Milwaukee: Gothic photographer, punkette cellist,
and La Belle Chinoise Sans Merci. Singer-songwriter of "Bruise from Nowhere" and
"We Were the Dead
(Guess You Had to Be There)."
Originally referred to as VYOF—for
appearing
very young, very "Oriental," and very if
not extremely female.
She had eyes like sloes... eyes the color of wine in a vault. Set obliquely in a head shaped like an old-fashioned spinning top—very wide brow tapering down to a very small chin above a very slim neck. Below that was the ivory hourglass, clad now in skintight raven singlet and fleshtaut raven shorts. Plus a pair of silver suspenders to emphasize her undeniable form. Up close she was actually diminutive, much shorter than myself—but oh the bosom-rack and oh the buttock-shelf and oh the waspy-waist swerving from the uppers to the latters. Oh the Shalimar dabbed on every vital spot, convex or concave. The only thing remotely flat about Cranky Lynnette was her stare...
Non Nonnamou and Theo
MC and bouncer (respectively) of a
punk-gone-Gothic club in the cellar of a waterbed emporium on Milwaukee's East Side.
Yet she insisted on being driven to Nonnamou’s for her Saturday gigs, even if it meant singing through the respirator. And being so afraid of the basement stairs that Theo had to carry her down them. And then up onto the stage, swathed in an uncanny muu-muu, evoking a Chinese fertility goddess with very bad joss.
“And now my friends,” Non would croak as the blue spot enshrouded my Venus of Willendorf...
Tattoo Rula
Bartender at Nonnamou's.
The barkeep inclined her gray mohawk. Looking like a Maori wisewoman who’d seen it all and had it engraved upon her person...
Varney Otranto and Dastard Castle
Band playing the first time Huffman went to Nonnamou's,
whose lead singer caught Cranky Lynnette's eye that same night.
In the next room were another couple dozen hoodish-types, additional smoke and oil and rancor, plus a sacksuited gargoyle and his backing band:
What goes on in your dreeeeams
Is nothing like it seeeems
You think they’re falling leeeeaves
They’re not what you perceeeeive...
Others at Nonnamou's
Hoodish-types from whom emanated a fog of mingled nicotine, patchouli oil, and surly perspiration.
Some were swaying to the gargoyle’s elegy and some were genuflecting, while a few danced the Metropolis Bop: part trudge, part taunt, part android folly...
Erin/Aaron
Coworker of Cranky Lynnette.
Weekdays Lynnette got driven to her photolab dayjob by Erin/Aaron, a fellow employee and the least convincing transvestite ever to strap on a garter belt (his Nixonian jowls had five o’clock shadow at all hours…)
Frieze-Frame
Huffman's first stand-alone relief panel, carved
in cavo-rilievo for
the Egyptiana-loving Lynnette.
A recessed niche. A naked profile. A cello held but not hid behind, so that the fortunate viewer beholds her all. Willful beauty captured but not captive: “krewl” in its ageless Cleopatraness, its indifference to the effect wreaked upon poor sorry mortal us…
Johnny Ajahr
Self-styled promoter who stole Lynnette's heart—scrapping it when she announced she wanted his baby.
Also referred to as "Too The Hell"
and "TTH."
He was too the hell tall and too the hell wide and too the hell tan. Travolta coif and Burt Reynolds moustache. Three-piece suit the color of bad salad dressing, with lapels wider than pterodactyl wings. Possibly a shirt beneath the jacket, but if so just to offset the gold medallions and pelt of Gucci chest hair…
Gilbert Blyght
Musician and hanger-out at Nonnamou's.
Then a third guy horned in. Dastard Castle’s jitterish guitarist Gilbert Blyght sidled over to tug at TTH’s sleeve. “Hey Johnny? Johnny, you selling tonight?”
Downing his shot: “Could be, pal.” Clamping a meathook on Lynnette’s slender wrist: “Not this, though…”
Poppaea
Lynnette's midwife and prenatal counselor.
One night I awoke to find Lynnette conversing with her beach ball.
“Kick once for yayess…”
“…what the hell?”
“Poppaea sez she kin hear me now ‘n’ I should be talkin’ tew her.”
“To Poppaea?”
“No-ew—Baby!...”
Dorita
Lynnette's unborn child, conceived
before/after a suicide attempt; about whose parentage
Lynnette was certain (and Huffman less so).
“Whut girl names go good with Ajahr?”
“Dora,” I said. Cementheadedly.
“Dorita—that’s it!” (To the beach ball:) “Lovely Dorita, meet yer maid; nuthin’ll come between us…” (To me:) “Dew y’mind? This is private talk...”
Three Plumbers in Hubsker
Who prove unhelpful when Huffman, in Mr.
Wilson's absence, wants the Old McRale Place's pipes checked.
Number One put me on hold and abandoned me there. Number Two said he could check the coughing pipes “sometime next week.” Number Three had just answered my call when the wireless signal flickered or faded or whatever causes calls to drop—and deny me reconnection…
"Nikki Ningal Jr."
Health care provider who treats Huffman's
lacerated hand at the
county hospital in Hubsker, and might have been Nicolette Ningal's love
child by a merman.
Chestnut ringlets, moss-green eyes, water-lily complexion, and an eminently sculptable seersucker blouse.
“Mr. Hummums,” she announced, “you’re a lucky fellow.” Had I waited any longer, the risk of infection would have been too great and she’d’ve had to send me home unsutured. But Nikki Jr. reckoned I was just within the safety margin, so—jab! jab! jab!—she stuck me with three different needles…
An Editor at Saltear Press
Who wrote the preface to Mary Iris Monica
Franzia's Baseless Mime.
Contributed by an editor at Saltear Press who never met Ms. Franzia, but doesn’t let that stymie a belated post-mortem... Diagnosis: conflicted desires and confused identity—Sappho vs. Priapus—as we could hear for ourselves, if Saltear’s budget permitted enclosure of a CD....
Absolute Woman (Cherry Bust) II
Huffman's end-of-his-rope
effort to retrieve one last woman, sleeping or waking, prized beyond
possession, from all he has lost.
Sculpt throughout the day. Turn the laid-aside block into another in-the-round, a second cherry bust. No breaks for food or drink or rest or anything but honing, stropping, topping off the tools with slipstones. Razor-sharpness: prime rule of thumb. Which is cramping. Along with the other thumb and all eight fingers. Give them a quick rub and proceed. Pay the price…
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