Haitian Capital
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—One time when Scrib was in Delray Beach, in an auto parts store, he heard a clerk answer the phone, “Haitian Capital.”
Then he heard the clerk explain, “New York is the capital of Puerto Rico, Miami is the capital of Cuba, Delray Beach is the capital of Haiti.”
Since the recent earthquake, in Haiti, one of the main imports to Haiti has been sociologists studying queueing behavior, and one of the main exports has been primitive paintings.
Haitian paintings are sold in antique shops, gift shops, and primitive art shops in Delray Beach. It’s a regular industry.
One popular painting is of the loup-garou, or werewolf, a stray dog that eats dead people, then bites a live person and turns them into a zombie.
That’s actually a Blue Dog painting by the famous Cajun artist George Rodrigue, but it’s what most of the Haitian paintings look like, and it’s called “Loup Garou.”
If I include art in the columns they run less that 750 words, but the art takes up an equivalent amount of space. And “fewer than” 750 words is technically correct.
A Mexican folk art painting that contains text, telling what the painting is about, is called an ex-voto painting.
The Southern folk artist Howard Finster would include text in his canvases saying things like, “Howard Finster is discovered by the collector Sidney Janis.” Or “Rock musician Elvis Presley is discovered by the soft drink manufacturer Coca-Cola.”
Scrib once wrote a column about ex-voto paintings and the editor wrote in the margin of his copy, “Are these your own words?”
He was defining ex-voto paintings, or explaining that ex-voto was from the Latin “ex voto suscepto, from the vow made.”
When the editor wrote “Are these your own words?” in the margin, Scrib replied, “Give me back my manuscript. I have waited ten years—I can wait ten more.”
That’s what Solzhenitsyn told the editors of Novy Mir when they wanted him to change something in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The last newspaper Scrib wrote a column for had a picture of a printing press on the masthead. Scrib called the paper Old Sparky, because the correctional officers at the prison—a prison was the main employer in the rural Northwest Florida county Scrib moved to when he left South Florida—thought the press looked like the electric chair at Raiford.
Prisons, mental hospitals, and reform schools. Those were the industries the counties Scrib lived in attracted. The naval stores industry. Turpentine.
He was far from Haitian Capital now. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw a Haitian.
Of course, if you watched television you would see them.
Earthquakes were news.
Natural disasters were news.
Hurricane Katrina was news. Fires, mud-slides, Santa Ana winds were news in California. O. J., Michael Jackson, Celebrity Rehab.
Isn’t that Heidi Fleiss? Isn’t that Dennis Rodman? Isn’t that Tom Sizemore?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Scrib didn’t want to know.
He was suffering from information overload.
Too much information, or the wrong kind of information.
Civil rights, feminism, gay pride. The DC-10.
You’re on top right now, woman, but nothin’ stays the same.
Every once in a while, baby, Lady Luck deals another hand.
Scrib called this the Spinning Fatalist. A lawn jockey, with a pointing finger.
You spun him, and whatever he landed on, that was the topic. A concrete lawn jockey. In brightly-colored silks.
But if you rushed over there and put all your eggs in that basket, he would spin again, and land on another topic. Your topic would be old news before it was news. So to speak.