ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter Nine: Home at the Bar
There’s a Johnny Depp movie, Ed Wood, that Ernie and Joshua watched over and over again. In it, the Bela Lugosi character, played by Martin Landau, says: “Home? I have no home. The jungle is my home.”
Ernie was fond of quoting these lines. At odd times, out of the blue, he’d recite them. It was an Ernie-ism I didn’t pay much attention to. Now, I pay attention to all he said or did. Everything holds meaning.
Home? I have no home. The jungle is my home.
Did Ernie ever feel truly comfortable anywhere? Did he ever feel at home?
When he was a child, his father moved the family of three around a lot, mainly to cheaper and smaller rentals. When his father stopped drinking and began to save money, he bought a tall brick house on Second Street, built in the early 1900s.
“I loved Second Street,” Ernie said. “Finally I had my own bedroom. One Christmas my parents bought me a movie camera. I filmed snow on the Second Street bridge. I had my own darkroom, too, on the third floor. Daddy was making money then. He owned his own grocery and employed half a dozen people. Then he needed money again and sold Second Street. I hated the place we moved to, a cracker box in the suburbs. None of us liked it. We didn’t stay there long, but Second Street was history.”
After Ernie left his parents’ house — when he married Helen — he was hired by the Frankfort State Journal as its political reporter, and he and Helen moved into an apartment in the old part of Frankfort. The paper’s editor liked Ernie’s work, but Ernie soon quit this job to start his own paper, The Crusader. “I couldn’t make a go of it — I only published two issues — and owed everyone in town, so we moved back here and rented a carriage house. That’s where Helen slit her wrist.”
The marriage soon broke up, and Ernie moved to North Carolina to join a fraternity brother on the Greensboro Daily News, where they both worked the copy desk. He rented a tiny room in the Y.M.C.A. — a place to sleep in and to stash his empties in. By this time he needed a drink even in the morning. “My hands trembled so much, I had to use one to steady the other to lift the glass.”
Persona non grata, Ernie said of himself. “No one wanted to see me coming — except my friends at the bar. They knew I was always good for a round of drinks.”
Home? Ernie had no home. The bar was his home.
