The Sugarhouse: A Novella (plus four novel excerpts)

By Donald O'Donovan

A charming and sentimental trip back to a world of homespun characters, fertile fishing ponds, innocent love, and, at the center of it all, Cooperstown, New York's much-loved house of ill repute, the Sugarhouse.

Excerpts from four novels by Donald O’Donovan accompany THE SUGARHOUSE, including ORGASMO, NIGHT TRAIN, CONFESSIONS OF A BEDBUG HAULER and TARANTULA WOMAN.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Books
• Release date: Aug 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452482422

Donald O'Donovan

Donald O'Donovan is an optioned screenwriter and voice actor with film and audio book credits. He was born in Cooperstown, New York. A teenage runaway, O'Donovan rode freights, traveled the US, joined the army to get off the street, lived in Mexico, and worked at more than 200 occupations including long distance truck driver, undertaker and roller skate repairman. The first draft of Night Train was written on 23 yellow legal pads while the author was homeless in the streets of Los Angeles. Donald O'Donovan recently narrated the documentary film, The Forgotten, produced and directed by Sarem Yadegari. His screenplay, Cutter's Woods, is a semi-finalist in the 2009 FilmStream Screenplay Competition.

Book preview

THE SUGARHOUSE

A Novella

plus four novel excerpts from

Orgasmo

Night Train

Confessions of a Bedbug Hauler

Tarantula Woman

Donald O’Donovan

Open Books

Copyright 2010 ©Donald O’Donovan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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For more information about Donald O’Donovan, visit the official site of Open Books at

www.open-bks.com

CONTENTS

THE SUGARHOUSE

THE GOLDEN AGE from the novel Orgasmo

BATH DAY from the novel Night Train

48 AND CANADA from the novel Confessions of a Bedbug Hauler

THE REAL MEXICO from the novel Tarantula Woman

THE SUGARHOUSE

TWENTY YEARS had passed since I'd left Cooperstown. Now I was going back. Why, I didn’t know. I no longer knew anyone in Cooperstown. I'd just returned to New York from Europe. My wife and I had separated. Christmas was approaching. I got an unexpected check from my publisher. Middle age does strange things to a man. I found myself thinking, as I strolled along MacDougal Street, about my hometown. Was Elm Street still there? And Brooklyn Avenue? Did the Sawmill whistle still blow at five o'clock? What had happened to that all-too-comfortable little world in which I once swam like a goldfish in a bowl? Was it still intact, a relic from an innocent age, or had it been swept away, as so much of the world has been swept away, and did the past, my past, as I strongly suspected, now exist only in my mind? Suddenly, I had to find out.

The next day, December 24th—Christmas Eve—I boarded a bus, carrying a single suitcase.

As we cleared the frozen city maze and inched our way into the Hudson Valley world of softly rounded hills dotted with farmhouses I fell asleep. The instant I closed my eyes I was surrounded. I heard the rustle of clothing, a murmuring of voices. I saw their faces, faces of people I hadn't seen, much less thought of, in twenty years. They were all around me, rushing forward to greet me.

The driver hissed on the brakes and I awoke. A cow was blocking the road. As we crept forward I saw the brute's huge head next to the windowpane, the enormous glistening eye, the steaming breath standing in the air, the slaver from the jaws frozen into icicles. I thought of Rip Van Winkle, who slept for twenty years. Maybe the same thing had happened to me. Could it be that the twenty years that had passed since I’d left Cooperstown were only a dream? Could it be that I was now awakening, awakening to my real life, which had somehow continued, despite my absence, in that slumbering steepled village?

As I dozed again in my seat I heard someone say that the bus was running three, maybe four hours late. I opened my eyes and saw sleet striking the windowpane. The driver was crawling in second gear. Some Canadians behind me were speaking French. I understood part of it. The woman was asking her son if he had to go pipi.

A speaker crackled and blurted out the name of a town, some God-forsaken hole. The bus lurched to a stop and I opened my eyes. People were getting on and off. I pressed my face against the cold window. Already it was getting dark. Ice-coated cables sagged from fragile black telephone poles. A few shabby gray buildings shuddered on the frozen streets. A block away a Genesee beer sign blinked blue and red.

I was feeling apprehensive now, panicky even. Like Rip Van Winkle, I was returning to the world of Time, but perhaps too late. Twenty years. What if the scenery had been dismantled? Supposing the whole town had been bulldozed away to make room for a strip mall, what one thing would I want to remain, to remain forever? Immediately I thought of the Sugarhouse. Yes, the Sugarhouse. Smash everything if you must, but don't destroy the Sugarhouse. That was my prayer.

The Sugarhouse, as everyone called it—and the nickname had a double meaning—was over on Brooklyn Avenue near the lumberyard, a sprawling Victorian house, the home of Ma Rutledge and her two daughters, Bertha and Emma. Hollyhocks bloomed along the drive, and an enormous lilac bush threatened to engulf the porch. Around back Ma Rutledge had a sunken vegetable garden bursting with corn and tomatoes, string beans and raspberries. A apple tree near the garden bore red juicy apples, Northern Spies, and in late fall the neighborhood kids came to gather up the apples that covered the ground like a bumpy red blanket. When spring arrived, March to be exact, Ma and the girls drove spouts into the big maple tree in the front yard and into the many trees in the maple orchard behind the house and drained out buckets of sap for maple syrup.

Despite all of this bucolic atmosphere, Ma's place, the big house on Brooklyn Avenue, the Sugarhouse, as it was called—was a whorehouse. Customers entered and sat down in the parlor, which was dimly lit and musty smelling, but well furnished with a number of overstuffed chairs and an antique divan as big as a landing barge. On the mantle above the brick fireplace with its gleaming brass andirons were photographs of the two older sisters, Estelle and Danielle, who had done their time in the nunnery and graduated. Estelle was married to a truck driver in Utica and Danielle supposedly had gone to the Big Apple and become a model, a story which I doubted, not only because of the family longshoreman physique that all the Rutledge girls had inherited, but because nobody from Cooperstown ever became a model or anything.

Also on the mantle was a photograph of Hap, the only Rutledge son, killed at the Chosin Reservoir, and a large, gilt-framed photo of Mr. Rutledge, snapped at a picnic at Three Mile Point. Mr. Rutledge had been dead for twenty years, but in the photo he was bright and chipper, wearing a floppy hat, holding a nice string of perch in one hand and a foaming glass of beer in the other. He stood in the sunshine with his mustache drooping, squinting a little and smiling contentedly.

Ma Rutledge presided over the Sugarhouse, a sturdily built woman with the flattened bulldog face. She wore thick rimless glasses that hugely magnified her eyes, and a growth of silky black hair graced her upper lip. When the door chimes tolled lugubriously, Ma showed the fellows into the parlor and asked who they were calling for that particular evening. Since the only two girls were Bertha and Emma, there really wasn't much of a choice. Customers could bring in their own whiskey, rum or vodka, and a beer bar in the adjoining room featured an old Wurlitzer jukebox, a shuffleboard and a flashing Genesee beer sign. The goings on at the Sugarhouse were conducted in a sedate and mannerly fashion. If the sunburned farmers waiting in the dim parlor wanted a soft drink or some ice, Ma served them, or they were free to go into the kitchen and get their own and leave their money in the cigar box on the cooler.

A dark carpeted hallway led from