Bobby Roy 2

Bobby Roy 2

       By Whining Willy Wineglass

Here is another hero known by all. Even his name blesses me still. And ferries my soul over the Styx, if I may be allowed so cultured an allusion. Robin: bird with a red breast, eater of lawn worms. And Batman’s protegé, though this last has nothing to do with anything here. Hood. As in Little Red Riding. Pirate. A monk’s. Wonderful words, “Robin Hood!” Robin Hood fascinated me all my young years. I did not, however, spend much time reading about his adventures because in our home we had for reading only a bible, an illustrated copy of Treasure Island, evangelical tracts, a devotional pamphlet called Our Daily Bread, and record covers of the Blackwood Brothers and Mario Lanza. I did enjoy short accounts of Robin Hood’s doings in school readers and somewhere around 1959 I got and consumed a longer version of his rambles in the King’s forest, his daring retrieval of the purses of the rich, his doomed loved for Maid Marion, the embarrassment with Friar Tuck, the thrilling encounter in Shrewsbury castle where he split the arrow in two, and his sudden awful hanging. When he died all possibility for love and justice, too, died in the world

       No one who came later into my view had about him any dazzle, sheen or brightness. Erasmus remained a veritable fool. Gandhi was simply thin. Indira somehow got to be powerful despite her elephantitus. Dylan sang remarkable protest songs that nevertheless could not change anything. Eliot wrote a fine but page-bound poem alluding excessively to Hamlet that managed to coax out imitations and parodies for seventy years. Rabelais made me laugh till my gut hurt but it had hurt before I read him and remained pained in a gargantuan way long after I forgot his humor. Russell and Wittgenstein I never read though I intended to, because they were British capitalists. Heidegger made me wish to rethink truth as a path not a hierarchy, but then Neitzsche reversed that order for me making truth imperial again. Goldie Hahn was smurf-like and got Rowan and Martin to look up at the window opening and closing above them. Robin Hood and Zane Grey. They made the world a place for wisdom and wonder and after them it was all holocaust, the blackest melancholy and thin soup.

       Wetzel. Where the hell . . . . I must have encountered him in an early Zane Grey novel. Possibly Riders of the Purple Sage or The UP Trail. Wetzel might well have stepped out of Richardson’s The Golden Dog looking out as he did for the early garrisoned settlers in the New World. He was a fearless white man who became for all intents and purposes an American Indian. He dressed in fringed buckskins, wore moccasins instead of boots, carried a black powder long-rifle with which he could shoot the eyes out of squirrels at a hundred paces or mow down a marauder half a mile away escaping on horseback. He wore his black hair long and braided like Britain’s Grey Wolf. His voice was low and sweet though unused to speech because he spoke so little, being alone with himself in the woods most of the time. Every woman who ever saw him, young or old, big or small, smart or wooden, adored him, wanted to floor him. Not even excepting Marjorie Paisley, the wife of the Baptist minister in Salt Lake City, Idaho, who met the famed tracker one day by accident as she took a break from berry-picking in the hills behind her sister, Jenny’s, Tennessee acreage to go for a dip in a little secluded pool she knew of there. She fancied herself unobserved. But she looked up    

(to be continued)