I lived for some time up in the Maine around Belfast, Maine.
It's a very poor area, 25% unemployment.
And they make their money plucking chickens
and doing terrible things to chickens, all non-sexual,
just awful.
It's a bad job.
So Belfast is also full of various group
homes and various veteran's home solutions.
You can go out on a day and look one way and see five mongoloids
and look another way and see five more mongoloids.
But there are a lot of veterans who are apparently
shell-shocked or something.
And they wander back and forth through town.
And they got sort of--
they become really invisible.
We don't really see them if we look around.
And this is sort of about that.
I don't know if it has any--
The only obscure reference is to Curly, Moe, and Shemp
who are The Three Stooges.
There's another one whose name sounds good.
Funny.
This is Funny.
These guys, you wouldn't believe these guys.
They're stuck in a halfway house for half crazy vets
at the top of the hill and they stroll through town
with their hands and their pockets.
They're smiling and waving.
Or you see them in bars eating an ice cream cone
or maybe drinking beer, although with all that medication
you think they couldn't drink, but what
the heck they've probably got lobotomies.
Anyway, they sit in the bar like Curly, Moe, and Shemp
grinning and staring at the girls,
I mean, any girls or sometimes they'll just
focus on a blank spot on the wall or flickering Budweiser
sign.
One time one of them snuck up behind the city council
president who was sipping a martini
and he's got orange hair like a dandelion clock.
And this crazy vet just ruffled it
like you might rub down a watermelon or feel a tit.
The guy from the council swore he'd never seen the vet before,
although you wonder how he'd ever missed him,
and he would have decked him if the vet hadn't left so quick.
They all wear funny hats either to warm their brains
or keep their heads from popping off, you don't know which.
And they look like teenagers somehow,
although they're pushing 50.
One of them keeps his graying hair in a perfect duck's ass
haircut, wears a jacket with padded shoulders
and makes wolf whistles at girls.
I keep picturing him in Korea on Hill 366
like in that movie with Gregory Peck,
and the Chinese keep shelling them all day and night
and each shell clicks his life another notch
towards Belfast, Maine.
And this guy, he's probably from Nebraska or someplace
and he quit high school in 1951 and took a job in a garage
so he can work on his car, a 1948 purple
Merc with a chopped top so the windshield's only six
inches high and double chrome pipes and huge chrome bumpers.
And I think of this guy trying to peer into that chrome
because in his head it's still 1951
even though he's sitting in the Belfast Cafe
with an ice cream cone.
And he's searching for his face in the chrome,
but it's distorted like in a trick mirror.
And he can't see it's him, can't see
it's his old motorcycle cap, his DA haircut, his scarred
forehead, his wandering and witless 50-year-old eyes.
Now that's what I call funny.