February 23, 2005
An Incomplete Story
I will tell you only that this is not true. Experts call it fiction. Non-experts agree it has less filling. It has not been edited.
Swimming At The Shallow End
It was the kind of night where they play cartoons from eight to ten, nonstop. There were commercials for toys, toys that spoke to you, toys that turned your urine into lemonade and E-Z Bake ovens the size of Hondas. Every kid in America was a zoned out zombie, occasionally drawing their parents into the living room, pointing at the Play dough Mc Donald’s cookie maker supersoaker and demanding that they buy them that, tomorrow, at K-Mart. It’s only $12.99. And it is brand-new.
Cartoons, crack for the under four foot set, all night and nothing too artistic or adult, but roadrunners cracking skulls and pigs hunting rabbits and cats eating birds in bright colors. All the adults stay in the kitchen, drinking box of wine and smoking a few cigarettes. It’s a familiar smell. The smell of the adult world, a world of neckties and shifting gears. Who cares about that world when Wagner is really all about killing the rabbit? Is a world without toys and cartoons worth living in?
An adult or two swarms in once and awhile to check on us and ply us with apple juice and gram crackers, making the whole room smell sickeningly sweet. They could barely tolerate the television set, their eyes resting on it for only for a second and then looking quickly away. Like it was mangled bodies from a snuff film or two men making love, the jarring coke high of cartoons was too much for them. Or too little for them.
They bring the snacks and turn out the lights and soon, us children, we have delved into a silence and a stupor that is far from our normal four to eight year old behavior. We are normally bouncy, loud and sticky. We normally stick to walls and goo up the fabrics. The adults may not like the cartoons, but they certainly like the effects of calming us and sedating us.
Each child has it’s own comfort cloths; threadbare blankets, pillows with dried drool, blankies that are nothing more then string. I am curled up under a white soft blanket. My choice blanket has French embroidered in blue cursive, phrases like Je t’aime and Ou est le bilblotheque?. When I was six years older, I realized that “I love you” and “Where is the library?” don’t go very well together and my blanket was probably made by French I students.
I was enrolled in the high arts of Wagner and French and being eight years old, I had little appreciation. I was tired and sleepy and under deep hypnosis. My brother was asleep and was kicking me on the little loveseat we were sharing. The other children in the room, I didn’t know so well. They were second cousins and children of friends of the parents of the second cousins and I probably wouldn’t see the second category of children ever again, but it didn’t stop me from being slightly apprehensive. I was a nervous child and especially around other children, who all seemed a bit more comfortable with this “childhood” thing then I was.
Had I known then an inkling of what I know now, I would not have been so intimidated. In fact, I would never have been intimidated by short gummy people now that I’m taller and have washed my hands. I can think back and I mentally mock all the thumb-suckers and bed-wetters in the room. I have no idea if they have gotten over their afflictions or have traded up for heroin and ball gags.
One of the older children was upstairs, playing loud thumping base lines over and over again and causing slight vibrations in the painting behind me. Every few minutes, his father, my twenty-third cousin Jerry, would go upstairs and tell him to turn it down, which he would for a few minutes. And then he would turn it right back up again. I guess he was being defiant. I guess I was impressed by that, although I don’t know how impressive blasting Kajagoogoo is after 1986.
As a youngster, I was easily intimidated.
So the smell was of smoke and snacks and the tube was violent, psychedelic cats swallowing canaries, with a lone feather dancing down from the cat’s full mouth and legs that moved in windmills, not in recognizable patterns. I had a silent brother kicking me in his sleep and not waking up when I kicked him back. Kids surrounding me, subsuming me, reeking of apple juice and there was no relief in sight. There were no signs that the adults were done.
I watched clocks and said prayers. I tried to remain transfixed by the cartoons, but I just couldn’t drink the kool-aid. It was sitting in a cup right in front of me and written on it was “Drink Me” but not in an Alice in Wonderland type of way, but more in a Jamestown type of way and I was not nearly bored enough to contemplate such things. I wished for deliverance, not death. I yearned for my father to come out with the car keys in his hand.
There was male adult relative that I had never met before that night. He had what the grown-ups would refer to as a “comb-over.” He also had a “corporate job”, paid “alimony” to the “first-wife” and he drove a “small dick” truck. He was the one whose laugh sounded like a duck in a blender. I saw my mother flinch at it and look to my father. I knew it was something that would be discussed on the drive home.
This house, with bug-eyed faux figurines and furry skulls on the wall, was his and his wife’s house. From the shards of information I had gotten from my parents and grandparents, it was mostly the wife’s house. The wife wore too much rouge and cooked something sweet and eggplant for dinner, the strings of which were in my teeth ten years after that evening. She also had an odd laugh, but since she was the one who was “blood”, we wouldn’t be hearing about her laugh tonight. Maybe later, when my brother and I were older and considered ready to be in the “loop” about certain things.
When I was told that this was a family gathering, I was expecting familiar faces some of them with hands baring cash or chocolate. I was not prepared for new people. Isn’t the whole selling point of family its exclusiveness? A club that only genes or marriage lets you into and only death or divorce divide you from. Nobody told me the invite extended to strange people whose house smelled like piss.
I was a nervous child.
So the male adult “relative”, Gary, told the adults that he was going downstairs. His voice was the soothing bossa nova of a subway announcer on fire. Static, crackle, pop. The “F” train is running on the “G” line. And Gary is going downstairs to fix something, with hammers and nails and screwdrivers made with Absolut.
Admire the grown person rude enough to drink three gin and tonics and go pound some nails, guests be damned. He has gumption and flair. He will win no popularity contests, but he must have the strength not to care or be dumb enough to think that such transgressions will be forgiven or forgotten by family members. Family has the memory of a tree in the Amazon.
And so down the stairs, thump, thump thump, thump, heel toe, thump, thump, heel toe. The other children, mesmerized by Heathcliff the orange cat, ignored him. Maybe they knew something I didn’t. I’m sure they knew a lot of things I didn’t, like how to simply be a child and have no curiosity about the mind and matter of adults. To me at eight or nine, there was nothing more I wanted to know then how the grown-ups ticked. Partly because they were larger. And partly because the sooner I deducted their secrets the sooner I would be one of them.
Heathcliff is bounding in some garbage heap and one of the rug lickers gets their hands on a the remote and we are off to the races. The channel changes at about forty clicks a second and various shots of people and kitty litter commercials are hardly recognizable. Someone that lives in this house, Melissa, groans and snaps back the remote.
“I was watching Heathcliff!” She says snottily and changes the channel back.
“Heathcliff is lame,” some girl says.
“I want to watch, I want to watch,” the two year old mews.
“You’re dumb,” Melissa tells the girl.
“You’re dumber,” the girl retorts and it’s a wonder I haven’t tried to bash my skull in with the back of the couch. What cutting insults eight year olds hurl at each other, like candy and snowballs, both can cause serious damage. I’m so bored and my parents should know better then to try to assuage me with other children. Perhaps this is part of their devious plot to turn me into one.
“Applesauce, gah!” My brother says in his sleep. No chance of him turning out normal, either. He sure does love the applesauce.
I get up from where I am sitting, my legs almost moving themselves to the terrorizing sounds of the thump, thump, thump. Somewhere in this house, something must be happening that does not involve cartoons or alcohol or the loud bass. I couldn’t take the television, that crack whore. I wasn’t allowed into the kitchen, where false financial statements and lewd off-hands were thrown about like monkey feces.
The other children didn’t notice as I moved towards the wood door of the basement. The crack whores. The boob lickers. I moved like a spy, like a thief to the oak door with chips on the side. I opened it and slipped inside.
As soon as I shut the door, I could hear my second aunt’s cousin offer all the remaining syncophants “peanut butter cookies.” The damn robots get everything.
The first thing that struck me beyond the door, beyond the faint light and the unpolished steps, was that there was a stuffed deer head. It was staring back at me wit h an expression that either said, “what the hell happened to me” or “what the hell happened to you.” It looked so sad, I reached out to pet it. I thought it would be like the goat at the petting zoo. Dead deer’s fur is much colder then a living goats and I jumped back on the stark wood stair.
And then something bizarre happened.
I heard a motor running and a sharp click. The deer shut one eye, paused a second and then opened it again. His jaw popped once, twice and then I heard:
Everywhere around the world
They're coming to America
Every time that flag's unfurled
They're coming to America
Got a dream to take them there
They're coming to America
Got a dream they've come to share
They're coming to America
It wasn’t Neil Diamond, it was a female voice was a slight South African accent. There were congas and a conch shell and what sounded like a Moog synthezier harmonizing with the female deer. Whose mouth moved like a cheap motorized toy. This family had more problems then just “little dick” trucks.
I looked down at my fingers. There are smidgens of black dirt where my fingertips had touched the nozzle of the singing deer head. I heard the sounds of more pounding and braced myself with the carcass, which caused the whirls and the whines and the chica chica coming to America. And then with a close of its eyes, the moment between the beast and I was over.
Pounding continued down the steps and I looked around the basement in the dim light. High school football trophies and pin-ups in front of cars with dust on them. Someone was manager of the year at Arbys for four straight years and his mustache grease was dripping into a vat of French fry paste. Dead flowers were stapled to the ceiling; roses and tulips and daises and parlsey and sage and Simon and Garfunkel all held up with at least a million strips of metal a piece. Farrah Fauccets gleaming smile right back at me.
Gary was sitting down by his workbench, with nails and a hammer and a knotted piece of wood and thick black glasses, two strands of greasy locks shifted over his dome. He pounds, he swears, he pounds some more and there is a strange cigarette with a funny smell burning on his workbench. He glances up at me.
“You should be upstairs with the other kids,” but he doesn’t seem extremely annoyed. Just distant. I doubt he even knows my name or what set of people in his kitchen I belong to.
“It’s boring upstairs,” I feel I can speak for both of us on that matter. He had snuck out on the adults and I had snuck out on the kids and we were hiding in a room full of sticky smoke, stale flowers and kitsch deerheads.
He snorts and puts a nail to one of the pieces of wood in front of him. “It’s not that bad, just be grateful that you’re allowed to watch TV.”
I didn’t understand what he was getting at, so I sat down on the stairs and drew my arms around me knees. I suppose he was waiting for that time honored child question of “What are you doing?” but I was not that curious.
“What are you kids watching?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Cartoons, Heathcliff.”
“Ah, Heathcliff. Know it well. It’s just a knock-off of Garfield, right?”
I shrug again. “They’re both orange and they’re both cartoons, so I guess...”
Gary interrupts me, as he stands and takes a glass coke bottle full of rusty nails from the shelf above his workbench. “Garfield came first and Garfield is in the papers. I think Garfield is a lot funnier then Heathcliff if you ask me. More adult.”
I vow to watch and read nothing but Garfield from now on, not because Gary likes him, however. I thump one of my knees and put my chin on my hand. He keeps going, propelled...
“You know, the owner in “Garfield” is based on the cartoonist, Jim Davis. He’s the guy that invented Garfield and Odie and all of them. But, you know, if I had the wherewithall to create characters and everything and see them nationally syndicated, I wouldn’t paint myself as such a loser that I couldn’t even get a date with the vet who looked like Betty Boop, you know what I mean?”
“Whose Betty Boop?”
He put out the funky cigarette with his thumb and his forefinger. “You’re upstairs, watching cartoons, and you don’t know who Betty Boop is? She’s one of the first!”
“She’s the first cartoon?”
“Well, one of them.”
“One of the first cartoons ever.”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“How many years ago would that be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About a hundred.”
I eye him and I’m now just aware that the wood steps I am sitting on haven’t exactly been sanded. What does he do down here with all these tools? Whacking random things, not making but destroying.
“I don’t think it would have been a hundred,” I say, shifting slightly. “They didn’t have films a hundred years ago.”
Gary gives me a wary look. “I’m sure they did. Anyway, Betty Boop was in black and white and she was pretty heavy-set and she sang “boop boop be boop” and the vet in Garfield looks like her, but thinner.”
His voice actually went falsetto for the “boop boop be boop” part, which I would, a few years later, find out he was wrong about. He was also wrong on the origin of movies and cartoons, probably wrong about a great many things in life and in love, but there’s no room for an eight or nine year old to figure all that out sitting in a cold basement. I still had black smudges on my fingers.
“I don’t like cartoons,” I say, my voice sounding small in the basement.
“Well,” Gary sounds like he’s trying not to sound annoyed. “What do you like?”
I think for a moment. “Well... I like baseball games, Laffy Taffy, The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins...”
“Are those the blond?”
“Yes, Elizabeth is the... the.... nice one and Jessica is the bad one.”
Gary gaffaws. “And you’re sitting up there making fun of Betty Boop.”
“I’ve never heard of Betty Boop.”
“Still...”
“I can’t make fun of something I’ve never heard of.”
He suddenly faces me full on and makes eye-contact. “You should learn about some of the things that happened before you were born. No need to be ignorant just because you’re short.”
“I’m not short! I’m a kid, I haven’t reached my spurt yet!”
“See, you’re smart. You know you’e going to get bigger.”
“I certainly hope I get bigger!”
His chubby fingers put a brown nail on top of a piece of wood. There were several pieces of wood nailed together, looking like nothing resembling nothing. 20 years later, I would think of a stoned masterpiece of abstract art, maybe adding some cock feathers or french curse words in a 14pt magic marker, but I was only into Monet and Dali at this point. Life had yet to teach me a few things.
“Don’t we all hope to get bigger,” Gary said with a small sigh as he began pounding on the wood. “But some of us don’t. That’s something to think about. Some people never get bigger.”
“Midgets.”
He nods slightly. “Physical midgets, mental midgets... they say there are emotional midgets, too, but I’m not so sure you can be shrunk by your own emotions. I mean, if you’re feeling sad or depressed, you can always make yourself happy again. And anyone who says that you can’t, well, that’s just plain hooey, don’t you think? Can’t you always make yourself happy?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question.
Neither did he. “Nevermind. That was a stupid question.”
I was almost tempted to ask about the hooey, but if hooey looked anything close to how it sounded, it was either a pile of snot or a bicycle from the 1890s. Either way, I’m sure Gary wouldn’t have the correct answer. I was starting to feel a bit light headed and someone upstairs had turned the volume up on the television. The “Looney Toons” theme and I began to pant.
Gary couldn’t notice a child in pain. “Ah, Looney Toons. You mentioned babysitters and teenagers and you don’t like Heathcliff and you don’t know Betty Boop, but we haven’t discussed Looney Toons.”
“Looney Toons haven’t been around since a hundred years ago, have they?”
“They’re in color, so I don’t think so.” Gary walked into the dark curves of the basement and his voice floated up to me. “I’m not real good with things like this and I don’t really remember the Looney Toons that well.”
He comes out of the darkness carrying a toothed saw about half my size and expression of deep thought and painful bowel movements. My hands get a bit clammy as I realize that my parents barely know this person. He qualifies as a stranger. I’ve been taught. Never take candy. Never get in the car. Don’t sit on splintering steps while he’s holding a viable murder weapon. A toothy saw.
I talk too fast and too high. “The thing about Looney Toons is that it gets kinda boring after awhile. I mean, the roadrunner would’ve caught the coyote by now, and he wouldn’t have survived all the things that have happened to him, if it were real. And the old lady wouldn’t have been so dumn about Sylvester and Tweety. And Porky pig is kind of, I don’t know, I mean pork is pig and pig is pork and I can’t be friends with a cartoon that I’d eat. And Elmer Fudd and Bugs... I don’t think its nice. All the characters just want to kill or eat each other. Or they smell bad, like Pepe. I think maybe I’m getting too old for it.”
“How do you know Pepe smells bad? It’s the television.”
“They always make a joke out of it. I don’t like it when people smell bad. I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“Well, he’s French and I guess just being French and smelling bad and trying to romance a skunk is funny. You haven’t been romancing skunks yet. Have to wait until you’re a bit older.”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to romance something that isn’t human.”
Gary set down the saw. “You know, I think we have a skunk somewhere around here.”
“A skunk?” I wonder what I could have possibly said. How I had made him think that I wished to cuddle with a skunk. “You keep skunks?”
“It’s a stuffed skunk.”
“Does it sing too?”
He stands up and looks at me in askance. “Why the hell would you think that it would sing?”
“The deer head... on top of the stairs... it sings.”
And apparently my head is cracked open and fruit flies are dancing above my skull, he looks at me and I feel like I’ve done something wrong. I’m not so sure. The other children have gummed up the walls and urinated on the furniture. I believe I chewed with my mouth closed during dinner. I think I made it to the bathroom everytime.
“I don’t think it does,” he sounds patronizing and distant. “Did it sing for you?”
“Yeah, it sang “Coming to America.”
He looks at me for a moment and then shrugs his shoulders. “This one won’t sing.”
A stuffed skunk hits my lap, with a stench that crosses vineager, formeldahyde, mildew and french fries. It’s really a toss up, whether I scream or vomit and it’s remarkable that I choose to do neither and instead place the skunk carefully on the stair behind me.
“I hit that with my car about ten years ago.”
I should have vomitted then.
“I was driving home, it was late and I hit it and it didn’t bleed or anything. Just stared at me. So I thought, what the hell? A kill’s a kill. Bring him home and see, you know, what to do with it. And it turns out you can’t really do anything with a dead skunk. Just smells real bad. So I took him to a taxidermist and got him stuffed.”
My father never brought home any road kill. I couldn’t imagine anyone in my immediate family saying “A kill’s a kill” unless it involved a comedian on stage or perhaps in someone’s most vengeful moment, a spider. And we never kept the spiders around after they were gone. Wrapped in kleenex and flushed down the toliet. No one spoke of them again.
I didn’t know what to say. “It’s a nice skunk.”
Gary laughed. “As nice as Pepe?”
“Pepe’s not real.”
He raises an eyebrow at me and I hope I hope I hope he isn’t going to employ that stupid trick all adults do, to try and convince kids that cartoon characters, tooth fairies and other such things are real.
“Yeah, but this skunk doesn’t talk or romance, unlike Pepe.”
I turn around and look at the dead skunk again. He has no eyes and some of his fur seems a bit matted and dirty. I imagine he’s very dirty. Thoughts, paranoid thoughts for a nine year old, flutter through my head. I wonder if stuffed animals can carry diseases...Maybe an adult disease, one that causes boils and coughing blood and snot and my face will turn green and distorted....
“I don’t think animals....” I can’t seem to think of anything to say. “I don’t think they think.”
“They don’t think. They’re just animals.”
“Well, so are we.” I wasn’t really trying to be contrary or precocious, but I paid attention in school and my parents didn’t have any fur coats or deer heads.
Gary put a piece of wood on top of his... contraption that he was building. It really didn’t look like anything. Two planks nailed together, one plank going sideways, nails bent and sticking out. He grabbed the saw and started to move, loud noises filling the basement. Like a robot caughing or ten-thousand nails being scratched against a clean blackboard. I held in my cringe.
“We’re not animals,” he shouted above the din. “An animal can’t use a saw or pound nails or draw cartoons to put on the TV. An animal doesn’t have feelings or thoughts or anything. It’s just a beast. God created us better, you know. We’re in His image.”
My parents would not be happy with that. They did not approve of using his with a capital “H”. At best, it was an it or a her, but my parents doubted that there was anything at all. And, I thought, they would not approve of Gary very much at all. Why were we at his house?
“This saw isn’t good enough,” Gary said and put it down. “The wood is tough.”
Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit.
One of the children upstairs was crying and one of the parents had left the kitchen to comfort and force feed oatmeal cookies. My absence would be noticed and I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to hang with God, the power tools and the stuffed actual animals anymore.
Upstairs, Elmer Fudd is loading his gun and aiming at Bugs Bunny. But Bugs is always smarter then Elmer. Almost sadistically so. It’s cosmic revenge and some child has just turned up the volume so its BURSTING through the wood door fo the basement. That and Gary has found a power saw, plugged it in and is now sawing pieces of wood on his workbench. He has on goggles and that goddamn kid upstairs is still crying. Cookies usually shut me up.
“What are you making?”
“I’m making...”
And then there was blood everywhere. Spurting, fountains and fountains touching the dead flowers on the ceilings. And a grown man in front of me was screaming obscenties and crying. Tears and blood.
There was a finger on the wood.
The finger did not point, did not make gestures, did not flip me off or tap out any stanzas of “God Save The Queen.” It was bloody and wierd and it just laid there, discarded. Gary was screaming “fuck” over and over again. And adults were racing down the stairs, pushing me aside.
My father picked me up and we soon left their house, as ambulances arrived. The finger could not be re-attached.Two years later, Gary came to a birthday party for my mother and tried to take my brother out deer hunting with a shotgun he had brought.
We never saw them again after that.
Posted by emily at 1:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
Who is Fat Charlie?
Fat Charlie played with Minnesota Fats and Benny Goodman at the Twiddlestick club down in North Wabash. He is 5 foot eleven inches tall and twenty feet wide. Please ignore his goiter. He's having it removed next Thursday.
When Fat Charlie was young, he used to twirl the world on a stick. Now he just takes gum off other people's shoes. But it's a living. He can solve a rubix cube like a motherfucker. There is no stopping him now.
He witnessed both Nixon inaugurations from the back of a pick-up truck. They were delivering melons. They had the wrong address. You can have your Frank Capra and your Oliver Stone, but Fat Charlie can drink a margarita, drive stick and shoot on Super-8 without leaving his bathroom. He's brilliant that way.
David Letterman booked him as a guest, but at the last minute he had to drop out due to inflamed joints. Been to China, been to France, been to Oslo, been to the TikiTikiTavern Inn off Route 12 in Hot Springs. Nothing impresses him anymore.
He's a sad lump of bones, our "F.C." No more melons for John Dean or Bob Woodward. But when the lights go up on Broadway, he can still remember the soft tap of his shoes and when the world was young, when the world was new, Fat Charlie was sitting in the Garden of Eden. Or was it Olive Garden. These things are unimportant.
Posted by emily at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)