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~ Beth ~ Jeff, the most intoxicatingly enchanting man I have ever encountered, could sell anything to anyone, I think. His job at the Renaissance Faire as Pan the Pagan Love God was to sell handmade ceramic horns to people for $12 a pair, and after he got started sales apparently went from a few hundred a week to that many a day, and more people had to be hired to make the damn things just to keep pace with him. No one had ever come close to what he was able to achieve, and he kept it up steadily for several years. Once, he said, he sold a dirty, half-eaten sausage on the end of a stick, and another time it was a horse turd: five dollars, please. His talent, he said - Pagan Superpower, actually - was to see a couple hundred people coming up a hill and be able to pick out his targets before they ever saw him perched at the top watching them. He'd zero in on the chinks in their armor and use them to humiliate or enthrall, depending on his agenda. He could pull a woman out of the crowd with a devilish grin and a gentle hand on the arm and have her outfitted with a pair of horns, blushing and giggling, in under two minutes - look at that smile, he'd say to her boyfriend in that smoky rumble, never taking his hot, hooded gaze from her; twelve dollars, please, thank you very much, come again, enjoy your day at the faire. People were so predictable, and he saw them in herds every day of his Renaissance life. He made a hobby of getting women to punch their men in the stomach: "How much for the girl?" he'd shout, and almost invariably the poor bastard would blurt, in front of everyone, "You can HAVE her!" and then: "Oof!" Hundreds of times in a row, like clockwork. Getting drunk, insulting people, seducing women and selling horns: not a bad living, he'd say, for a guy in furry pants. The itinerant, Bohemian lifestyle was exactly what he needed. He had few possessions, lived in campgrounds and traveled frequently, and so he saw interesting unorthodox people in short, cyclic bursts and then moved on. He made an absurd amount of money doing all of the things he was best at, things usually considered inappropriate in regular workplace settings. He was adored and revered, famed and infamous, and had constant, vibrant sources of stimulus and diversion, not to mention all the women he had the time and energy - which in the interest of that endeavor were considerable - to charm. A couple in one of the campgrounds took a picture of him one night, tripping on mushrooms and walking across the rocky ground in his boots, battered cowboy hat and bathrobe, a toaster bumping along behind him by the cord. They had just fallen in love with him, they said, and couldn't bear to part with the photo, no matter how he tried to persuade them. I wish I knew where those people were. I'd give a great deal to see it, just once. One day, as the story was told to me by the man himself, Our Hero was walking along through the food area of the fairgrounds without his glasses on, and perhaps with a bit of sun in his eye, when he happened to notice a sign which read - he thought - Great Naked Potato. What, he wondered aloud and in more colorful language, could this mean? Never one to be daunted by the lack of information about a thing, he decided he knew, and began, rather loudly, to enlighten bystanders. After a short time he had attracted a crowd, as he was wont to do, and being one who bloomed like a Morning Glory under the warm rays of admiration, waxed poetic. It didn't take long for him to entame their spirits to his worship and for them then to transfer that adulation at his behest to an unassuming root vegetable. After a time the newly inspired Prophet grew tired, and as he paused to draw breath and seek further inspiration, he discerned that the sun had changed position and the sign from above was now clear. "Oh," he said to his eager new acolytes: "...Great Baked Potato. Never mind." And then he was gone from their midst, leaving them to ponder his teachings. The next day he woke to find the words You Will Believe spelled out in French Fries on the hood of his car, and the legend was born. Now, apparently, there are Rennies who still practice this religion complete with sacraments of vodka and Pringles, who have spread the word and built a chapel, and who actually have a Spud Fest with an official parade in Big Lake, Minnesota every summer. He was mesmerizing in motion, exquisite and often forlorn in repose. His gaze through his glasses could be like the sun through a magnifying glass; in other moments it was as crystalline and guileless as a child's. His voice was like summer thunder, his laugh unexpected in contrast, bubbling up out of him, fairly tinkling with impish glee. He was at wide and surprising turns serene and tempestuous, stable and volatile, unbearably sweet and unbelievably cruel; a satyr, an angel, a bastard, a nightmare: honeyed poison, terrible as he was glorious, repellent as he was irresistible. He was roiling with need and rage, neglected hope and battered earnestness, towering arrogance and abject self-loathing and vast, limpid pools of unexpressed, undiscovered beauty. Who was Jeff? I don't know if anyone really knows; I don't know if he knew. There was so much of him, more than he could possibly navigate. He was as kaleidoscopic and mercurial a soul as I have ever seen, and felt more deeply and intensely than anyone else I've ever known. Life was as painful as it was beautiful to him, and in the end I think it was the loveliness of it as much as the agony which overwhelmed him. He died of joy as well as sorrow; it was as if once he was able to open his heart he simply bled to death. Jeff Kelly: a real-life, modern-day Starbuck, a rainmaker who could make plain women feel beautiful and happy women hit their husbands, sell horseshit on a stick and create a cult around an unseasoned starchy staple food - and those are just a few brief, glimmering instants out of a lifetime of total, magical improbability. - Beth The Cult of the Great Naked Potato __________________________________________ Song Of Myself: 51 The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them, Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Do I contradict myself? I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his
supper? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late? Walt Whitman |
