Months before, Boy Scrimshaw had sat counting hours and considering Wallace Stevens in his jail cell in a converted room in what he called a Geem-naz-yoom, but what we’d recognize as the local high school. Assistant Professor Boy Take Scrimshaw, Solidarity representative and member of the Faculty of Poetics and Socialist Vision at the University of Lódz (pronounced, I learn, Lewd-j like the sled), jazz critic for the New Views (rhymes with Lódz), mimeographed essayist, former Party Subsectional Secretary for Educational Matters, had been put in the slammer. The charge: general principles, and one scared General with a border full of Ruskies.
A few weeks later he’d been sprung and shipped with wife and son to Munich, bound he thought for America, home of his beloved Miles Mingus, Chick Jarrett, and Steinbeck F. Hemingway; shipped care of Cat-lick Relief, packed full of guilt at giving up the fight, destination Times Square Chicago, Hollywood Louisiana, or somewhere in between.
His luck he got betwixt rather than between. Given over to the care of a family in what he knew only as New York, he arrived at Pleasant Lake in an early May North Country snow shower and was shown how to light the Wardynski’s cottage oil furnace, told that Welfare day was Tuesday, and politely admonished to find a place of his own before the snow melted and the Wart-dumbski’s needed their cottage.
At which point his wife and son began to weep.