HUNTER, THE RAILROADS ARE GONE

By Chris King

I'm approaching the anniversary of the suicide of a friend, and just wanted this posted on the internet somewhere.

I was surprised the first time I saw Hunter Brumfield looking like the same person at two band rehearsals in a row. I had known Hunter for about ten years, since he was a nervy white rapper barely out of his teens, and his flair for theatrics and personal instability had always led him to change costumes an awful lot. Not only costumes, but wholesale identities. For the last four months of his life, I saw him at least once a week, and on any given day there was no telling who he would be, or appear to be – hippie, freak, cowboy, gangster, gangsta, lizard king, thrift store dandy, hobo, rock and roll suicide. It was one of the many things I admired about this mercurial little man, that he harbored so many possibilities, and had the gumption to try them all on as masks without any apparent concern for whether or not his audience was keeping up.

Then, suddenly, he was a hobo one week after being a hobo the week before. His hobo costume – naked but for railroad coveralls – fit the weather, which sweltered at 100 degrees. And his musical identity, which had been all over the map since his white rapper youth, had settled in at hobo songster, a scruffy guy naked but for overalls reinventing Woody Guthrie with an acoustic guitar, accompanied by the cutest 19-year-old girl you will ever see in your life no matter how long you live, playing a handsaw with a violin bow. It was fine for him to be a hobo from now on, or at least until he changed again, perhaps into a shaman or a preacher, two possibilities he had glimpsed within himself and recently considered tackling. But it was shocking, and in a slightly disappointing way, to think that he had made anything like a final decision. As a man nearing forty, working what may well be my career job and preparing to move into what I intend to be my final home, I enjoyed having a friend who still didn't know what he wanted to be when he woke up.

I was packing for my move one night and listening to Jim Croce, who serves me well as comfort music when I am going through something stressful or aggravating, like cramming everything I own into boxes and buying a house for more money than I ever thought could possibly be associated with a former shape-shifting hobo like myself. For as many times as I have listened to the same Jim Croce tapes, the ones the truck stops sell, I somehow manage always to be caught off-guard by a line or verse or even an entire song, and this happened that night, when I heard, I would have sworn for the first time in my life, "The Railroad Song," in which Croce eulogizes a care-free rail-riding life that pretty much disappeared before he came along:

I thought of Hunter. It was just the kind of song he learned and performed with Lindy, his musical saw-playing gal pal. And I thought, with a certain big brotherly trip Hunter encouraged me to lay on him, that he might learn something from this song. "And though I may dream, the railroads are gone." For all that he changed, Hunter had a way of taking whoever he was at any given moment with a touch of deadly earnestness that struck me as immature. I didn't want to break the spell, but I did want to remind him that it was a spell. You can go around naked in coveralls singing about great America with a musical-saw sprite beside you, but the railroads are gone.

I sent him and Lindy a message about the song. Lindy responded by saying Hunter might already know it, he knows so many songs. Hunter said, cool, play it for me sometime. I left the cassette unpacked and in my car, so I could play it for him, but I didn't get around to playing it at the next rehearsal. We had a gig that Friday, so there was more pressing work at hand. And I was in no hurry. The band was only getting better and more comfortable with itself. We weren't going anywhere. There was plenty of time.

*

Hunter was the only reason I was trying to make a rock band work at the inconvenient age of 38. At a gig to celebrate a pair of prominent birthdays in the rock music scene, those of Ann Tkach and Roy Kasten, Hunter had surprised everyone (and probably terrified a few) by jumping onstage at a high-profile moment and sitting in on drums, an instrument no one in the club had ever known him to play. The occasion was the reunion of two members of a much-loved but defunct local band, Nadine. When two guys who have decided they don't want to play music together anymore get up and play music together as a party favor, the last thing you want is somebody who doesn't play drums jumping up and playing drums with them. But there was Hunter up there, doing the nervy thing. He had exasperated a lot of people over the years with stunts just like this.

The guys in Nadine didn't seem to be bothered. And why should they be? Hunter had picked up some chops somewhere. He didn't sound good on the drums; he sounded great. Among Hunter's many scattered talents was the gift of listening intently to music and hearing it from the inside out, and as a serious student of songwriting, he had developed a deep feel for the dynamics of song structure. It is close to pornographic, the feeling that overcomes a songwriter when he hears a drummer play that way. It's what we all are always looking for.

I rushed Hunter when he stepped off the stage. Would he play drums with me if I started up a band? "Sure, man," he said, "that would be cool!"

*

I was drinking beer with a new friend, the artist Robert Goetz, at the Tap Room downtown. Robert was really a guitar player and a frontman, but Three Fried Men had one of each of those, Mike Burgett and myself. Robert and I seemed to feel much the same way about music and many other things, so together we convinced each other that he should be the bassist in this band. "Now," he wondered, "who else is in this thing?"

I told him about Mike, one of my local rock gods from The Lettuceheads and Lydia's Trumpet; Adam Long, the redheaded hip-hop producer who played cello like an experimental angel; and the classically trained singer and heartfelt songstress Heidi Dean. When I got to Hunter on the list, Robert said, "No way!" Hunter had been his (brilliant) student in a printmaking class; he loved Hunter.

I called Hunter. Hunter drove all the way in from West County to join us at the Tap Room, then we piled into my little car to take a ride. I wanted to drive us to one of my sacred sites on the East Side, to the bog at Horseshoe Lake, a great place to celebrate change and fresh beginnings, but with the hour being so late, the beers so many and the conversation so complex, I got us good and lost. As we drove through the forsaken streets of East St. Louis, Hunter leaned up from the back of the car, wedged himself between the two front seats, and screamed, "I can't believe this! I am sitting here with two of my favorite people!" In the ruined light, he looked like the happiest man alive. And he was so very much alive.

*

A band is by definition a group experience. Rehearsing a band does not necessarily yield much one-on-one face time between the players. The first time I caught Hunter alone we were apart from the band. He stopped by to drink West African moonshine in the basement of my Dogtown rental, which I had decorated with music scene memorabilia and dubbed The Skuntry Museum.

We had a lot of catching up to do, Hunter and I. I had been in New York for six years, and had last been close with Hunter several years before I left town, when Hunter (known then to most as "Toast") had devoted some activism to a political project I spearheaded on behalf of a group of political exiles from Nigeria. Looking back, we remembered, first, those messy bowls of fiery fish pepper soup and fufu we had shared with the Ogoni exiles, and I reminded Hunter how, when the black girls came up off the street and smirked at the young white kid with the green hair, he had shut them up and then made them laugh and dance with his freestyled verses.

"So," I wondered, "how have you been?"

"Not good," Hunter said. His mother had died, somewhat suddenly, and he had not gotten over it. He was staying way out in O'Fallon in West County with his stepdad and living on disability. He had been diagnosed as bipolar.

I had one close friend with that diagnosis, and she had often struggled against suicide. I had learned to ask and say the obvious things where mental illness is concerned, so I asked Hunter if he was suicidal.

He laughed, abruptly. "Actually, the day you asked me to play in a band with you, that exact day, I had been thinking, all day long, about how I would kill myself."

I could only think to say one obvious thing, "Don't ever think there is no one to call, because you can always call me," and Hunter hugged me so tight it was scary.

*

The night at Off Broadway when Hunter leapt onstage and I fell in love with his drumming, we had talked about more superficial things, like the bands playing at the birthday party. I was surprised by Bad Folk, a group led by another kid from the Ogoni struggle, Tim Rakel. I felt like I had seen both Tim and his songs when they were awkward adolescents, and now both were impressively mature. But who in the hell is that ridiculously cute girl playing the musical saw with him?

"That's my girlfriend, actually," Hunter said. "Lindy. Lindy Woracheck." Some guys have all the luck.

Hunter began bringing Lindy to our rehearsals, when she wasn't taken by one of her other bands. The eerie, swooping sound of her bowed saw became as much a part of Three Fried Men as Hunter's hot-spirited drumming, and their somewhat reckless path as lovebirds became one of our stories.

We rehearsed downtown in the Leather Trades Building, first in the loft of the artist Jenna Bauer and then, as the summer set in and fired up, in the air-conditioned loft of the artist Andrea Day. During set breaks, Hunter and Lindy would smoke and kiss on a fire escape. If you didn't think about it too hard – if you didn't think, for example, that Hunter was 30 and Lindy was only 19 – then it was possible to think that Hunter was the luckiest man alive.

*

St. Louis is a town where rockers can age somewhat gracefully. Perhaps it's because so many of the community radio producers at KDHX are of a certain vintage in the local scene, and recognize the fact that older rockers bring some seasoning to the stage along with those gray highlights and unsightly paunches. Three Fried Men was not unusual in balancing grownup lives with this forever young hobby, or habit.

When you spend time with a group of artists who have safely cleared adolescence, even the extended variety of adolescence, then inevitably you are spending time with suicide survivors, with people who have stood on the edge and peered down and who remember that particular view very well. I was spared that particular version of hell, but Robert and Mike and Andrea all talked to Hunter, at various times, about their struggles. They all had suffered inside their minds and been tempted to escape their suffering in a more permanent way than the escapes afforded by the alcohol and drugs we all craved.

Suicide dared to speak its name at Three Fried Men rehearsals. We were a rock band, we were a fancy beer party, we were an artists' collective, we were a date night for Hunter and Lindy, we were a suicide support group. We were getting better at all of these things.

*

St. Louis music scene elder statesman Bob Reuter has told me, more than once, that only your first band is actually a band; after that, according to Bob, it's just a leader with sidemen. I have never accepted that to be true. Especially in this version of Three Fried Men, I felt like one member of a band. What started as a project to play my songs, with cameos by the other writers, was becoming a band, where everyone's songs were given a genuine showcase.

The emergence of the other leaders in the band was enabled, in part, by a surprising change: I found myself able to pick up the bass guitar. Now, when I wasn't leading, I didn't have to step down from the stage and lose all my momentum and adrenaline. I could play a little bass, and we could all switch around. For a guy who came into music with nothing but notebook poems and melodies in his head, I was sublimely happy to be, at times, nothing but a bassline, nothing but a low, supportive, rhythmic thrum.

The bass is not alone in a rock band. It always travels with the drums. Hunter was my drummer when I took my first baby steps on bass. He was my first drummer – my drummer. Whenever I wasn't sure where to go, I looked for Hunter – I felt for Hunter – and he was always there, with a passionate beat and a good idea for what to do next. I knew, because he had told me, that I was one of the songwriters Hunter had studied in learning the art. I'm not sure I ever got the chance to tell Hunter, in such simple terms, that he was who I looked to in learning how to hold down the rhythm of a rock song. I would have thought there was plenty of time to say all that.

*

I have learned the hard way to stay out of people's love business. Hunter confided in me one day alone at The Skuntry Museum about his love troubles with Lindy, but I tried to stay out of it.

I could see that it was eating him alive. I knew he needed a little big brothering. I also knew – it was the talk of the music scene – that Lindy was working to land a year of teaching abroad, in China or Russia. So I cautiously stepped into his love business far enough to say he should let Lindy go. She was, after all, only 19, and about to go see the world. We had all just seen the marriage of two musician friends of uneven ages melt down because the woman had committed too much when she was too young. My advice to Hunter: It's one of those "set the bird free to see if the bird is really yours" types of deals.

He nodded, stiffly, with a horribly dark and withdrawn look on his face, then impaled himself on his cigarette.

At the next band rehearsal, Hunter surprised us by saying he and Lindy had an announcement to make. They were engaged! Toasts were poured from Tap Room growlers. Huzzahs were sounded, as convincingly as we could muster.

*

Hunter asked me about American Indian religion one night. I told him what little I knew about it. It had changed my life magnificently for the better, though I had never made the kind of commitment that it deserved. I was still in touch with the holy woman who had initiated me, Cindi. I explained how Cindi had the social bearing of a slightly ditzy white suburban soccer mom, but I had seen her survive the grueling eight-day Sun Dance on a Lakota reservation and knew for a fact that she was in touch with It, whatever in the world (or hell) It was.

Hunter said he wanted to meet her, maybe on his birthday. I wasn't free to travel on that particular day to Columbia, Missouri, where Cindi lived, since I had an Irish songster friend in town. Hunter said he thought maybe he was supposed to be a shaman. I grinned a little, inwardly, at that childish earnestness, again – I mean, who else had the innocence and nerve to look you in the face and say, "I think maybe I'm supposed to be a shaman"? – but I gave him Cindi's telephone number. She would know whether or not he was shamanic material. She could also show him what an exhausting and tedious process it is to advance in religious practice.

Hunter called Cindi, and went to see her on his 31^st birthday, on June 5, 2005. He returned to the Tap Room that night and called me, many times, but I was hung up at the house concert I had thrown together for my Irish rover buddy. "I went to see Cindi," he said, at the next band rehearsal. "It was great! We prayed together. She's amazing!" I said I wanted to hear all about it sometime. There was plenty of time.

*

Three Fried Men was easygoing about missing an occasional band rehearsal. We looked at a missing member as a chance to rehearse as a sectional, like orchestras and big bands do; after all, at seven players, we were pretty damn big.

Hunter missed only one rehearsal, and that was because he found his little kitten dead by the side of the road. I'll admit I wasn't very supportive when he called with the news. I don't quite get cats, and being a parent of a child has made me a little impatient with the way childless people carry on about pets. Maybe later I would have beaten myself up over this as a missed opportunity, as a time when I carelessly failed to take into account Hunter's mental illness and left him stranded emotionally, but the rest of the band had me covered.

Turns out they are a bunch of cat lovers. As I later told Hunter, his dead kitten and his grief dominated the rehearsal he missed; and he was very ably nurtured upon his return. I am left wondering why we treated a bipolar person with confessed, persistent thoughts of suicide as a drinking buddy. Other than that, the jury in my soul acquits Three Fried Men of the murder or assisted suicide of Hunter Marion Brumfield III. We did what we could to keep him alive.

*

So why did we treat a bipolar person with confessed, persistent thoughts of suicide as a drinking buddy?

It's safe to say that every player in the band, like most musicians we know, kept a demon in a bottle – or a growler, in our case, since we kept our gig money in a Growler Fund that went exclusively toward jugs of craftmade beer at The Tap Room. We all came from drunks. At times, we all drank too much and probably too often. This, like suicide, was a sobering topic we addressed as grownups in band conversations. Both Heidi and Mike briefly set aside drinking at different times in our brief life as a band. Even though the band paid for very good beer and freely supplied it at every rehearsal and every gig, I think it's fair to say it was a supportive environment for quitting drinking, if that's what you wanted to do.

After Hunter was gone, at the band wake for him, held at The Tap Room on a Wednesday to fit our weekly ritual of meeting there before shuttling down the street to the Leather Trades Building, Lindy talked about Hunter, his illness, and his drinking. She said he hated to take his medicine because then he couldn't drink, and if he couldn't drink he didn't want to be in bars, and if he couldn't be in bars then he couldn't be in a band. Maybe it was a way of saying he would rather die than quit playing music in bars.

I think I speak for the rest of our band, and perhaps for the St. Louis music scene, when I say I was never comfortable telling someone that I knew what was good for them better than they knew themselves. When I try to imagine a version of events that keeps Hunter alive up until now, which is something I do more or less constantly, I can't quite picture myself pulling Hunter aside and saying he is too sick to be drinking and carrying on like the rest of us. Maybe someday I will read these words and be ashamed of my cowardice or my codependence, but even in the darkest hours of my nights, when I wake up from nightmares in which Hunter is (barely) alive and it's up to me to save him (and I'm failing), even then I feel like I fairly observed the limits of our friendship in regard to drinking, even though I know in my heart that drinking was an essential ingredient in Hunter's suicide.

The other fatal ingredient was the deceptive charm of the bipolar personality. Or, to put it another way, how damn good at being alive Hunter seemed to be when things were going well. His talents were so many, his laughter so pure, his girlfriend so beautiful, his charisma so irresistible. He was enviable, not pathetic. This was a guy who, in previous bands, in previous lives, had picked pointless fights, heckled other musicians, taken pisses while onstage and playing, but in our band he was just an eager guy who faithfully lugged his battered and borrowed drumkit to rehearsal every Wednesday night, brought our song structures to life with his sense of change, and then stole the show with his cameo roots number about rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry, if you don't give me rye whiskey, I surely will die.

At the end of our set on July 29, 2005, at Jacobsmeyers Tavern in my hometown of Granite City, Illinois, Hunter took a request for "Rye Whiskey." He played it with Mike on drums, Robert on bass, and Adam ..o. It was our last song; Hunter's last song. No one would have paid any unusual attention to this at the time, but that must mean the last words he sang were, "I surely will die." He killed himself two days later.

*

In need of comfort music once again, unpacking in a big empty house with my friend, my little brother, my drummer dead and gone, I listened to Jim Croce. I am listening to Jim Croce right now. He can be a little sappy, but I can be a little sappy, when I'm in a fix, and I'm in a fix. Three Fried Men did not occupy that huge of a space in any of our lives, but the space it occupied was important and satisfying – sometimes transcendent – and it was a space Hunter helped create and shared absolutely. He surely wasn't thinking of the band when he decided to end his life, but we can't stop thinking about him now that he is gone. The man who could have been anybody, on any given day, in the end elected to be nobody at all.

Mike Burgett is the oldest person in what's left of our band. He is the hardest-edge, the least sentimental among us, and Hunter is not the first friend he has lost to suicide. Neither does he suspect Hunter will be the last. But he is mourning Hunter as hard as any of us, because they had a new friendship, tender as new things tend to be. Mike had few memories of Hunter, but many expectations, and expectations die a hard, haunting death.

Something Mike said last night at a guitar circle set me back a bit in my grief. We have been that way for each other, we Three Fried Men. We're like people trying to help each other out of a mudslide. Any gesture, whatever its helpful intention, is as likely to hurt as to help. The only thing certain is that we are stuck in roughly the same place, together, for some time to come, and it's a mess.

The guitar circle last night evolved into an impromptu tribute to Hunter, as things in the St. Louis music scene have a way of doing these days. Adam played "Rye Whiskey" solo ..o. Heidi ended her song about losing a friend wordlessly weeping. Robert pointed out all of the pauses that would have been smoke breaks had Hunter been alive and smoking. I played "Hot Country," the last song of mine that Hunter requested from me, at a guitar circle on the 4^th of July, when we drank West African moonshine and he marveled at how a legendary local busker had taken him and Lindy under his wing. Our friend Chris Johnson, yet another suicide survivor with a guitar, sang his new elegy for Hunter, "A Girl Who Played the Saw," which left lumps in throats the size of chaws of chewing tobacco.

At the end of the night, Mike said, "If only he had hung on for two more days, he might have made it another three, four years." That was what set me back.

When I am able to believe that a man fed up with suffering without end and unbearably longing to join his mother in death made the only decision he felt was left open to him, then I begin to accept Hunter's suicide as a fact of life, and I sort of know what to do next in the course of still being alive myself. But when any part of me accepts the possibility that it was a stupid mistake, a pathetic overreaction, with a touch of the immature stunt to catch the attention of the girl who played the saw and who was determined to leave for Russia regardless of how desperate it made Hunter feel, then I start staring for long periods of time at nothing whatsoever.

"If only he had hung on for two more days, he might have made it another three, four years."

It's the insight of one who has been there, and who knows that not killing yourself is a decision that needs to be made again tomorrow, and if through not killing yourself one tomorrow at a time you can stretch a few more unlikely years out of this miracle of life, then go get it. Go get three or four more years of incessant costume changes, constant yearning, Brautigan and Bukowski, experiments in search of God, cigarettes, Lindy, whiskey, laughter, sketchy road trips, money on the bum, Woody Guthrie songs, drum parts that know the secret minds of songwriters.

" … he might have made it three or four more years ..." It's the modesty of the hope, and its realism, that breaks my heart all over again. It sets me back.

All the way back to Lindy's email.

The ones left behind by a suicide are left in a maze. We keep circling and turning corners, but no progress is made, and there is no exit, or if there is an exit I can't see it from here. Here's my latest pointless circle, my last corner turned: Hunter killing himself reminded me how life is a game, and how we all accept the rules of that game within certain variations and uncertainties and inevitable misunderstandings. The decision Hunter made was to break the most fundamental rule of the game of life, and to play instead by the rules of death, which he must now know, but which remain a mystery to those of us still playing by the old rules, the rules Hunter discarded when he quit the cosmos, the rules of life, which now seem a little suspect and arbitrary, a little silly even, now that we have seen them broken by one of us, and at about this point in the circle of talking constantly to myself without getting anywhere I realize that someone else is talking to me or trying to merge into my lane on the highway, and for the time being I am forced to forget about the maze, about the mystery, about Hunter killing Hunter, and I return to life, to the miracle, to the misery, though now I am only an actor in it, an unconvincing actor in life, now I'm like some nervous guy who wears a different costume every day of the week and who doesn't know who he is or wants to be.

*

Dedicated to all musicians, past and future, who survive suicide.

'Blind Cat Black' director on KDHX Monday 7:30 p.m.

Premiere at Tivoli Tuesday 7 p.m.

Amateur director Chris King will appear on "The Wire" on KDHX 88.1 FM at 7:30 p.m. Monday, July 23 to discuss his first feature film, "Blind Cat Black," which premieres at 7 p.m. the following night (Tuesday, July 24) at The Tivoli Theater in the U. City Loop as part of The St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase.

The Wire is co-hosted by independent journalists and civic instigators Thomas Crone and Amanda Doyle. KDHX FM 88.1 also streams live on the web at www.kdhx.org.

"It makes sense to talk about the film on KDHX and especially with Crone," said the amateur filmmaker.

"Crone even appears in the film's closing credits, because he let me move his garden hose and he himself slightly parted a drape on our behalf (to shed some light on the scene) when we were scouting his house as an exterior location."

King explained that the crew eventually decided against the Crone domicile (located off of South Grand) on the advice of scenic coordinator Lynn Josse. She could find no environmental motivation for the artificial light they would have needed to cast on the side of Crone's home to shoot the scene, which happens at dusk. That parted drape just didn't cut it.

"I'm sure Crone was deeply relieved that we passed on using the side of his house as a location, since we scouted it for the back-alley blow job scene, and Thomas is – how to say? – he is less than flamboyant regarding carnal matters," King said.

King noted that he considered a wall attached to a dwelling Thomas Crone calls home for such a sordid scene because they were already set up to shoot next door, in a building owned by Crone's mother that is rented to Thom Fletcher and Stefene Russell, who were key players in both the cast and crew of "Blind Cat Black."

"As it is, if Thomas comes to the premiere, he will possibly want to avert his eyes when he sees some of the, uh, explorations that Jason Wallace Triefenbach embarks upon while sprawled across an antique couch positioned inside a building owned by his mother," King said.

Triefenbach plays The Flower Shop Boy, who can be understood as either a confused young man going on a gender bender or as an alter ego to The Absent-Minded Tightrope Walker, played by local rapper Toyy Davis. Toyy's character is further along in her/his gender experimentation and moral skid. Both are perched on a social abyss symbolized by the freaks and zombies that comprise most of the rest of the cast, headed by The King of the Zombies, played by Ray Brewer.

Two of the zombie actors, in fact, were recruited through a community media course that KDHX offered to help the fledgling production get off the ground.

"Aaron AuBuchon, the key editor, planned to train some people to help us shoot and edit the film, and we did get two production assistants out of the deal, Serra Bording-Jones and Carla Doss," King said.

As an unforeseen bonus, the production company behind the film, the local arts group Poetry Scores, even found an energetic new board member in Lumpkin.

"Conceptually and visually, this is a disturbing film, but the whole production was kind of feel-good, and it was way more integrated, in terms of black/white, North/South, hip-hop/rock, than you usually see in St. Louis," King said.

"So, it was fitting that KDHX landed us one black actor and one white actor – for that matter, one black p.a. and one white p.a. – and that it helped to diversify Poetry Scores by recruiting us a highly motivated African-American board member in Charlois."

King concluded, "It just goes to show that our movie, despite being about prostitution and death – selling your body and selling your soul – is good for just about everybody."

Tickets for "Blind Cat Black" and the other shows in The St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase are on sale now at The Tivoli box office.

In the slideshow at myspace.com/blindcatblack

Charlois Lumpkin in "Peter Criss" zombie makeup in The Zombie Green Room inside John Eiler's garage, South Grand at Arsenal. Makeup, perhaps, by Barbara Manzara (it was all hands on deck that day – even Toyy worked the zombie makeup table). Behind Charlois can be glimpsed the sales stick toted throughout the film by The Vendor of Puppets, played by Thom Fletcher. Photo by Claire Nowak-Boyd.

ST. LOUIS, July 10 – In a brief ceremony held yesterday at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood, the St. Louis-based arts organization Poetry Scores unveiled Kevin Belford's new portrait, "Mona Bob Danforth," and presented it to Tom Danforth, who had bid on and won the experience of having his dog painted as The Mona Lisa at Poetry Scores' recent Experiential Auction fundraiser.

"The Gioconda, famously, bears an ambiguous facial expression," said Poetry Scores creative director Chris King, using a pretentious alternative title for Leonardo da Vinci's timeless portrait of Lisa Gherardini. "Not so much, however, with The Mona Bob. Bob – appropriately, I think, for a dog – is depicted with something of a shit-eating grin."

The Mona Lisa was painted over the course of four years, 1503-1506, in Florence, Italy, according to Vasari. The Mona Bob was painted over the course of a week or so spanning June and July of 2007 in Kirkwood, Missouri.

The experience of having the Kirkwood-based Belford (best known in St. Louis for illustrating RFT covers when Ray Hartmann owned the paper) paint his dog Bob cost Danforth some $450, making it Experiential Auction 2007's most expensive item. Danforth also purchased a private tour and tasting at The Tap Room with head brewer Stephen Hale and tutoring in how to score a baseball game by Alvin A. Reid at a Cardinals home game in seats provided by The St. Louis American, making Danforth the high roller at Experiential Auction 2007.

"I don't know what gives," King said. "Last year, the first year we held the auction, our high roller was Gillian Noero, an anti-apartheid activist from back in the day who consulted on some of the writing of the new South African Constitution. This year, it's Senator's Danforth's son. We've got some kind of spooky, high-powered political mojo going on."

King added that, of course, Tom Danforth is a complex, adult human being in his own right; and, as such, he is unfairly reduced to "Senator Danforth's son." "But with all due respect to our high roller, if you walk around this town with a name like 'Danforth' and a face like Tom's, then people are going to start doing your family tree the second they see you, whether you (or they) like it or not."

Speaking of family trees, this week King secured an inventory item for Experiential Auction 2008 in the form of a personalized lesson in genealogy from an expert with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

"The Mormons are big into genealogy, in part because there is more at stake for them, because they believe you can baptize dead people who died unsaved, and thereby save their souls," King said, paraphrasing what a Mormon friend told him recently over egg rolls and kimchi at Pho Saigon. "Which, in and of itself, I think, is highly cool. So, I asked my friend if the Latter Day Saints could donate the experience of being present at the baptism of a dead person. She politely declined, saying, 'Please, don't make our religion look bizarre.' And I said to her, 'Look, religion is bizarre. The belief that getting a baby's head wet can save its soul from hell is no more or less strange to me than performing a similar feat to save the soul of a dead man."

Belford's portrait of The Mona Bob was presented to Danforth during a Poetry Scores board meeting. "This was not planned in any way, shape or form as a board recruitment effort on Tom Danforth," King insisted. "Though, let's face it, something about 'high roller' and 'Poetry Scores board member' does roll right off the tongue."

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Poetry Scores' first feature film production, "Blind Cat Black," premieres at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 24 at The Tivoli Theatre as part of the 2007 St. Louis Filmmakers' Showcase, a production of Cinema St. Louis. Directed by King and starring Toyy Davis and Jason Wallace Triefenbach, "Blind Cat Black" is a surreal silent zombie film shot and edited to the poetry score for the Turkish poem of the same name released by Poetry Scores last year at Mad Art Gallery and featuring musical performances by Pops Farrar, Fred Friction, Tom Hall, Michael Cooney and Three Fried Men.

Part of the proceeds from Experiential Auction 2007 – in fact, roughly as much as Danforth spent on The Mona Bob – is being spent on tickets to the screening to be given to the extensive cast and crew of the film (which also includes, to name a few, Ray Brewer, K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Tory Z Starbuck, Bradd Young, Brooke Holladay, Aaron AuBuchon, Leata Price-Land and Wiley Price). This means Danforth's money is going right from the coffers of Poetry Scores into the coffers of Cinema St. Louis, which just goes to show that giving your money to Poetry Scores is good for just about everybody.

Poetry Scores is currently between websites, but the movie has a sketchy MySpace page at www.MySpace.com/blindcatblack.

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In the slideshow: "The Mona Bob" by Kevin Belford (2007)