#TIGER HILLBILLY ROCK MANUAL#

Talking about he was a pervert, and putting him in jail for sodomy and annulling the marriage. Put him in the hospital with a broken collarbone and two broken ribs. That night Daddy and Rex came and beat the living daylights out of Cletis. She tore out of the trailer and ran home to Daddy. Oh God, well, and I didn’t know, either, so I asked her if I could get pregnant if I swallowed Cletis’s come. I suppose I felt I was big enough to talk to her now about S.E.X. I made coffee and served Oreos on a little dish. I guess I was just feeling like a married lady, you know? A grown-up. Oh, Little Lou, I love him so bad, so bad! Next darn fool thing I did and why I did it I’ll never know. So I just took it all outside and poured kerosene on it, set fire to everything, and we kissed and made up. Cletis had a fit, said I had spent more money in two hours than he made in six months. Then one day I went to the Popular Dry Goods and bought some clothes and towels, just a few things, on my old charge account I’ve had my entire life long. And I had to explain it over and over to Cletis too, because even though I refused to move he took to sulking. I tried to explain to Daddy we didn’t need his ol’ house, how I’d be happy living with Cletis on the back of a flatbed truck. On Rim Road, you know, a mansion, columns on the porch, but we didn’t want his house so Cletis and Daddy had an awful fight. First bad thing that happened was Daddy forgave me for marrying him and he bought us a house. I cleaned house and washed dishes! I cooked, made pineapple upside-down cake and macaroni, all kinds of things, and he was proud of me, and me of him. Why in heaven’s name are clams happy? We had a dear little trailer in the south valley, by the river. I swear nobody ever had such a sweet tender love. Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy. Long pale blond hair and yellow-brown eyes. She was probably the most beautiful woman in West Texas, she must have won a million beauty contests. Standing up and waving from a powder-blue Cadillac convertible, wearing a fringed suede cowgirl outfit. But I couldn’t wait to see my cousin Bella Lynn and my uncle John, who was coming from L.A.Īnd there was Bella Lynn! In the train depot parking lot. They had almost died when I got married at seventeen, so my divorce was the last straw.

I dreaded seeing my parents… they were furious because my husband, Joe, had left me. For one thing he was hoping my folks and I would make up. My uncle Tyler had cooked up a family reunion for Christmas. And the stars at night were big and bright like in the song, so insistently dazzling it made sense that wise men couldn’t help but follow any one of them and find their way. Dark-shawled women with infants and poor gaunt men with sufferer’s, savior’s eyes. Rushes by the river and huge crucifixes everywhere.

When I first went there, to live with Mamie and Grandpa during the war, that’s when I first heard about Jesus and Mary and the Bible and sin, so Jerusalem got all mixed up with El Paso’s jagged mountains and deserts. Caliche, sage, sulphur from the smelter, wood fires from Mexican shacks by the Rio Grande. I didn’t wake my baby, Ben, but carried him out to the vestibule so I could look out. The train slowed down outside of El Paso. Her stories are inspired by her early childhood in various Western mining towns her teenage years in Santiago, Chile three failed marriages lifelong alcoholism her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. Berlin worked throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

#TIGER HILLBILLY ROCK MANUAL#

The following is a story from Lucia Berlin’s selected stories A Manual for Cleaning Women.

Tiger hillbilly rock