Wisco – Hinty
Milwaukee is a busy town with small-town suburbs. Suburbs as comfortable as your girlfriend’s books tucked up underneath your arm on a walk home to her house after school.
That was my experience of Wisconsin while enjoying the pleasant hospitality of my host, Hintysen.
Hinty is a newspaperman, and when you look at him you’ll expect something quite unlike what lies not too far from the surface of that calm, ultra-right and conservative looking still water.
Something you can catch just underneath the smile if you notice the twinkle in his eye.
Pay heed. Think of a tarantula dressed smartly in a fashionable new business suit, sipping an old fashioned in an up-scale mid-town pub, and keep that picture in mind, because if you fail in that task, you may be surprised when you catch a glimpse of the wickedly sinister smile of a bleached skull and cross bones on a black t-shirt underneath.
The Jolly Rogers flies from the Good Ship Hintysen, and like all good Pirates, Hinty is warning you of what waits for you upon his arrival.
Yes, Hinty is The Jolly Rogers come to life, the resurrected body of Jolly Old Roger, fit comfortably to the skeleton which Pirates have revered and with which they have signaled their arrival to others:
“Caution… these be Pirates ahead”
Hinty is very comfortable driving home from work on the dark and dangerous streets where Jeffrey Dahmer hand selected humans to eat. The dangerous, dreary streets of down-town Milwaukee, largest city of Wisconsin; located in southeastern Wisconsin on Lake Michigan; known for its breweries; a place where street thugs push old women into the oncoming traffic of busy streets as sport just to watch brittle old bones tumble and crack under the wheels of a city bus like a cloth sack of old twigs.
Don’t grimace, man, it’s a solution here in the land of the free. The Eskimos rid themselves of their old setting them adrift on icebergs, and killing the old is a tradition and as respected a sport as old as time itself.
Driving along, Hinty turns up a punk rock band on the dvd player and checks his grey crew-cut in the rear view mirror; moistens the gleam in his eye with a blink; and looks back to the road ahead.
Don’t misunderstand, Hinty wouldn’t run over old people. No, no. He’d maneuver around a lifeless body, sprawled and bloody.
Hinty may, however, stop and encourage a jumper on a bridge. Everyone needs a little push now and again…
Hinty is a good man, a fine man, and he knows right from wrong and he has a demeanor far from the smarmy charm of a Hollywood Art fag party.
And Hinty has lived in that shadow-land deep inside, a land inside where death buys life the final round of drinks.
So, find him there, inside yourself where the best you have to offer lives and grows. I recommend you do so.
And if inside yourself is too far for you to travel, find him closing Wolski’s bar in Wisco. Hinty may be your guide.
He was mine and I don’t know how to repay him.
Thank him for me when you see him, I’d appreciate it.