Woody Guthrie at Hands On, part 2

A few nights ago, I heard John read “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” and I wrote “Woody Guthrie” on my hand in blue marker so I would remember it in the morning and tell it to you. When I wrote those words on my hand, I thought that just giving you Dylan’s thoughts might be able to sum it all up. And in the morning, I thought, 'well maybe not.' It gets at the feeling I'm talking about, but I guess the details make the telling.

The story starts with a open mic night that no one signs up for but a brave new Christian, saved from Lortabs and booze and given wisdom, that looks like it will fall to nothingness but is tended and grows and swells up into something that vibrates in the air, that will vibrate in the air far from here in time and space when people remember it, because of talented people, all of their moments contributing to the experience of John, cigarette dangling, red eyed, reading on and on to a rapt audience perched on picnic tables and tailgates, channeling Dylan. Everyone’s moment on that little plywood stage made everyone else’s moment mean something. That’s called community.

Later, the founder of Hands On came into town, set up late into the night with ten of us and a cooler of beer out in the Spin Cycle, the concrete laundry room with a couple of old square tables that look like they came from a church basement (I guess they did) covered in marker graffiti. Founder Dave is looking for the next step for Hands On, and he asks us what we think, and hears from all of us, and listens.

I’m typing this stretched out on the loft floor on my sleeping bag. A grey haired fellow volunteer, a sleep-neighbor just came by and he introduced himself and when I got to my feet, he hugged me instead of shaking hands and within our three minute conversation he said that there was no better place than this for care and respect. And he can use the words “care and respect” and it doesn’t sound heavy handed and it is not tinged with irony. A piece about the Duke rape by a sports columnist for the Birmingham News said this:

"Near the end of a rather long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how Duke University is looking for answers to the bigger picture of athletes' behavior, a freshman named Jason Pate is quoted. 'You have to make caring popular, as idealistic and ridiculous as that might sound.' It's too bad that such idealism can sound ridiculous."

Here, that sort of idealism makes sense.

The way I’m writing this reminds me of the evening meeting two nights ago. The rabbi from the congregation who is also sharing this space with the Methodists since the hurricane gave a speech about how good this place was and it went on forever. It went on forever. And every time he would say one thing, it would remind him of something else, and nothing seemed to contribute to whatever his end message was, and people were reminded of their grandfathers, and maybe the reason that it went like that and the reason that my story wanders in the same way is that the end message, the real point that we want to communicate is a feeling and you can’t cut to the chase when you’re talking about love. That meeting was wild, so feel-good that with some mild substance abuse you could really enjoy all two hours of it after dinner. Rose stood up and asked the real grown-ups to plug the place in letters to the AARP magazine because “there is no age gap here.” That’s what she said and what I guess she has experienced. Cool. And so we tell more wandering stories and try to invite more people to discover this spot.

Not that people don’t get tired, not that there aren’t hard words sometimes and hard days and problems that look like they can’t be solved. I wish you had all heard Guillermo (Will Olivos, look for whatever he ends up publishing) reading his black mold soul killing blues last night. Mold is hard to kill, and it's after you.

And sometimes it’s hard to keep 150 people peaceful in a place, but it mostly can be done and the products of this place are well worth the effort. And sometimes the love comes out it kind of dark ways for people who feel the intensity of this disaster and of whatever bit of life preceded their arrival here and some are escaping something when they come here and Sue tells me that in the car to take one of our own to the airport, one who was leaving hard, “all those boys started burning each other and I started just crying because those boys loved each other enough to be burned, putting their cigarettes out on each others' arms. . . " She adds,"now I don’t love any of y’all that much.”

So Dave is looking for the next step, and after discussing the upset win of first-Hands-On-marriage against first-Hands-On-baby and the end of that running bet, we got to the business and Dave said he wants to go to Darfur, and he wants to invite his volunteers to start a core there and he wants to use his MacGeyver plane model over there. Darfur makes him mad as hell and he thinks that this very flexible, passionate and fairly gutsy organization (he landed on the Gulf Coast with no plan and no place to stay and a big chunk of cash and confidence that he could attract volunteers) is the way to make good change there. And we all agree that something is working here, and that there is need and opportunity for Hands On elsewhere, somewhere. And then we get to the Darfur idea and most of us respond that it's completely nuts, but I’ll be damned if Ike didn’t say that he would go, and mean it as sincerely as Dave meant it when he proposed the idea.

Ike is a 47 year old painter, former military, with a grey handlebar mustache, an empty bank account, and a beer in his hand. He half-jokes that he isn’t a good volunteer because he slept-through cooking breakfast and is rowdy and tough and he hollers “Good Morning Vietnam!” when you walk by him with his first morning cigarette and wouldn’t fit in too good at the Salvation Army, but he is a damn fine painter, he has a skill, he can lead, he can seal five houses in a day to stop mold regrowth. And so at Hands On, he is the perfect volunteer just like the rest of us are in our ways. And he would follow this scene to Darfur if it went. He would lead this scene out into that scary unknown. He said to me this morning, “Hell, that guy last night was serious. I haven’t heard anyone talk like that since the sixties. And maybe it wasn’t really just what the sixties sounded like, the semi-corporate lingo about flexibility, the talk centering on gaining media time, but the feeling must have been familiar to Ike, that feeling I keep talking about, the one that Hunter S. Thompson said like this:

"There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."

If we don't have the universal sense that we are winning, at least we have the sense that what we're doing is right, and that we're doing it as good as anyone has yet. For Dave, it seems like that feeling, and his cash without many strings, is what makes this organization different from any other and what would make us succeed at some as yet unknown goal in an as yet unknown place. He asked us what the residents would think if Haliburton came in and did the work we were doing at the pace we were doing it. He said they would bitch and complain, and he is right. We can do the work and be loved for it because it comes as a gift and not an obligation. People feel the gift in what we do.

Back to the rabbi's thank you speech: If it's not obvious from the rambling tales above, there's no summing this up. Come down here.

And last, in this piece I spent a lot of time talking about this organization and no time talking about Biloxi and you should know that there is still all the work anyone can do down here on the Gulf Coast and of course the government is mostly leaving it to the volunteers, so come work, and I’m going to also post something I wrote about my December trip to Hands On that talks more about the world outside this little tent city off Pass Road.