Tom Tiede

Mr. J and Moms Tom Tiede

The title personalities here are wandering spirits presently operating a Laundromat in a retarded Appalachian community. Mother and son, they have little in common save devotion to one another plus an obligated interest in a town which is by turn comedic, cruel and conniving. The cruelty is offered in part by those residents who are in a larger part inward-looking and feckless. Two of them are a black man and white boy, one who may or may not have killed the other; neither is amicably whole. Other players include a cheating white woman married to the black man; a radio station commentator who encourages infidelity and racism; a sheriff who would rather be a truck driver; a lawyer once disbarred for peddling weapons to North Korea; a doctor who is not a doctor; a band of immigrants involved in a field-labor war; and a very old gremlin who enlists the geography in a quest to find the Booble (the long lost but entirely justified predecessor to the Bible). Mister J and Moms work their way through it with competing objectives. She participates, he merely records. The result is that there is a dreadful truth in the end.