Lonesome Bert Hodge, raised and marginally socialized in Palatka, a Tom Sawyer town in north Florida, wasted his youth chasing Confederate ghosts and skipping stones on the St Johns River. His first real job, delivering Coca-Cola, moonshine and reefer to the turpentine camps, exposed him at an early age to the joys of Saturday night jubilation, intercultural romance, and the “pine-pitch honky-tonk” musical style.
A perfunctory scholar, Bert coasted through school on the merits of his eidetic memory, fetching up finally with a BA from FSU, an award based almost entirely on his recitation of Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” after a single reading. Shortly thereafter, a career opportunity interview with his draft board propelled him into the US Navy, where they taught him to fly and rain death from the air on mid-ocean marine life.
After most of a lifetime of commercial airplanes, deep-woods land surveying, and rental property wrangling, Bert discovered the thrill of street-corner busking, and became a finger-picking folk-singing fool. He writes his own material, because who else could? He has even written his own epitaph: “Born lonely, lived lonesome, lasted a long time and gone” and is working on a Gypsy jazz arrangement for it.
Today Lonesome Bert is considered the go-to man for any Irene project for which no other recourse can be found. He can fix anything, from the crack of dawn to a broken heart, and is willing to undertake any conceivable undertaking, such as dragging the dead opossums from under the house for a proper burial, or exploratory excavation of the main drain sewer line on a Christmas eve, all done for the tiniest of rewards and quickly overtaken by subsequent events.
As to his position in Irene’s stable of indispensable talents, you could say “He has a good beat, and you can dance to him.”