Beavercreek

Beavercreek was built high up in the snow under the shadow of Old Luther’s Knob that stiff, unbending granite stump jabbing into the clouds, defiant in its barrenness and its simple message – I will endure.

           Fuck your wedding cake resort, your onion domes and blue turrets tingling with fairy lights. Fuck-you! lycra clad pussies. Fuck-you! permatan man and woman and your ultra-violet lip gloss. Fuck your Magic Carpet ski lift and your pseudo-Alpine clock and mermaid fountains. Fuck your eateries and your Kids go Free special offers. Fuck your salad bars where the lettuce wrinkles under sixty watt bulbs and even a half starved mountain rabbit would go fucking cold turkey rather than eat that shit. Fuck the razzmatazz of your neon nightclub Humdinger with its Jaeger bombs and mountain sausage and sloshed up city boys and pumped up au pairs.  Fuck-you in all your tanned impermanence.  No carousel in neighbouring Bachelor Gulch, no menopausal renewal for HRT housewives, no cushioned alcoves for tired old farts tobogganing down my flanks in pursuit of love’s young dream can outlast my dream. Neither Ray Bans nor wraparounds can shut out my granite smile.  A smile so ferociously bright, sharpened by years of the sun and moon bouncing their light off my peak.

Waldo Prentice had hoped that some of Old Luther’s defiance would rub off on his visionary dream. Ever since he arrived in America in 1935 and, later, gained his qualifications in psychiatry, he had dreamed of a winter camp, Beavercreek, where childhood trauma could be aired in the crisp, mountain air. The first trip he took to Beavercreek in 1942 with the orphanage and the director’s children as a nine year old had been instrumental in his development. Rudy, the director’s eldest son, had bashed his head against a pine tree and called him a ‘dirty, freeloading kike...don’t think your sucking up to my dad is going to help you one little bit. Some fucking east European cuckoo walloping all our grub...’ In between the blood and the pine bark and Rudy’s tight little fists he’d felt a strange stillness as the snow fell through boughs and animals scurried through the forest. The flashing lights in his head swelled into the bulbs of a carousel where red and gold enamel horses with teeth larger than Rudy’s capered among giant teacups. Later, Waldo wondered whether the blow to the head had altered his brain chemistry forever. In moments of stress he would seek out forests and bang his head against white bark, rocks, even the brass door knob in his apartment on Madrigal Heights and in the rhythmic violence find the stillness of some secret mountain retreat.

        Even when he worked as a meat packer in Chicago he sketched in the blood and sawdust his plans for a childhood Utopia incorporating winter hygiene and his world famous children’s characters, The Tumblewicks. The Tumblewicks would make him rich, change his life and mine too. They would preside over the festivities: Tumblewick instructors in green leggings with rolling eyes and dangling noses, Tumblewick litterbins with gaping toothless mouths overflowing with greasy paper and pastry crumbs and crinkly cellophane.

         Waldo knew from that moment in the snow when Rudy turned  and, much later too, when co-workers squared up to him that the lack of enchantment in people’s lives leads to a craving for sweet things, blood sugar problems, early onset diabetes, homicidal mania. The whole fucking shebuddle. The meatpackers pawed their women, indulged in cross dressing, shot heroin in apartments lined with brown wrapping paper. If they met Little Red Riding Hood they would have ogled her, spat at her buckled shoes, clapped big hands to their crotch, scratched at her legs and then raped her, splitting open her unripe vulva brighter than a horse chestnut, filling her with their grease and anger and weariness. What they wanted to prise out was the brightness in her eyes, the liquid crystal that fascinated but couldn’t be seized. Instead they were left with the smashed-up thing and their own brown-paper dreams.  Waldo diagnosed their problem: they came from an impoverished story telling background. They needed fairy tales, brighter and more vicious than themselves to teach them that they were all little girls with wolves inside and that those grey beasts could only leap out during public holidays.

        Perhaps it was fear of their own precarious inner Princess that led the meatpackers to such outrageous street brawls. What if they were allowed to dress up in gingham dresses and Alice bands? What if they could enact certain fantasies in a controlled environment and at the same time their unconscious could be civilized?

Waldo devised the first of his story-telling clinics combining theatre and cabaret and his own form of street therapy in the ex-abattoir, The Cauldron, where his clientele could let rip in wigs and blood spattered overalls under stroboscopic lights. And in the confusion of dry ice machines and fabric forest glades he needed to come up with a guide.