Parallel Paths: Pathos, Politics, and Poetry: Chapter Three

Chapter Three – Shepherds, Teeth, and Concrete

Timothy found his newborn sleeping and later hungry in the nursery. Timothy returned me to my recuperated mother absent adequate nutritional tools. The endorphins and opiates of live birth prevented much of her subsurface throe thresholds of ripping cervix flesh remaining from her second birthing.

The oblivious bliss of Sara’s rest during my father’s previous visit surged through her system. It was time for my oedipal complex buffet. My mother embraced me in full. She nourished me with the chemical transference of antibodies. Bacterial growth began to balance the traffic lights to my digestive track by month nine.

The flavor was palatable, but did not make up for the circumcision in the following hours. That was a God damn son of a bitch. We can redirect cancers, magic basketball players can live with HIV for twenty-five years, bring down the Berlin wall, and beam satellite television like democracy complete with Trojan-man commercials, yet somehow we can not quit slicing off the seventy-percent sensitivity of infant foreskins? Patients need spokesmen. Diseases need faces. Was Magic circumcised too?

The sad part is I only think I think I know what I am missing. At least they could let me keep the cells as a souvenir. I could make a key chain or a miniature Christmas ornament with the excess. (Where do they go? Pfizer probably hoarded flesh-hats to discover Viagra. Oh, that was by accident. Charge for research. Maybe we can cure the national deficit with a penis-growth pill. ) Maybe Jesus will tip Santa to reimburse me for obeying the rules?

Maybe during Hanukah if one of my Jewish counterparts puts a little picture of his foreskin on his dreidel and promises to shave his nut-sack after his Bar Mitzvah, then God will give him less grief. A great miracle will happen by his happy patch. The Mohel could stand in some mandated Brit Milah.

The order is not even in the Qur’an. Circumcision is perpetuated in some indifference or worse celebration of male pain shared across party lines. We can not decide on a way to parcel out Jerusalem, but Jews, Muslims and Christians can agree that slicing off ding-dong halos is a good idea. I have never contemplated such a convergence of agreement that has made me doubt Earth’s religions more.

Although the Catholic Church takes an officially neutral stance on the matter, I guess my parents edged on the side of theological caution in the great tradition of reducing pondered shame by maintaining societal and religious ritual to replicate a father’s and grandfather’s genitalia.

Dare be it a son to deviate from his lineage? Come now African boy you are old enough to jerk off. Let’s slice the taqiyah to prove you are a tribe-man. Confusion founded in a pseudo-testament to an escalation of commitment towards mythical better health.

There should be a Facebook page for men angry their parent’s chose to slice off most of the nerve endings in their penis to end the tyrannical parade of replicated paternal identity. Alas times in 1975 were such. My parents were raising me Catholic.

I came home in the family Lincoln. I was indirectly introduced to five-year-old Tim. My grandparents Kurt and Jenifer dropped Tim off. My brother fumbled over me sleeping on a blanket. Apparently my parents told Tim my name, because my sibling has seemed to recognize me at varying points. I still feel I deserve to have been offered a proper introduction.

I struggle with social graces and common impractical practices conveying mutual respect conducted by humanity. Maybe this omission set the tone for my unrecognized importance of common courtesy. I have suffered a string of regrettable uncouth deportment. If I could pick between the circumcision and the introduction I would change the surrogate mohel’s handy work, but under fire, what man does not try to save his penis over his brain?

I was baptized under St. Andrew’s name in an upside-down cross dipping. Uncle Ryan and Aunt Audrey became my God parents. Like most religious ceremonies my Baptism was lather, rinse, repeating pre-written commandments read from a booklet.

In the event of my parent’s premature exit to the highway to heaven, I think I would have aligned with Uncle Ryan. He was married with a child, conveying a perfunctory knowledge on the subject besides the mandatory being a child that adults obtain by default.

My corpulent Aunt Audrey demonstrated a consistent penchant for oral fixations that proliferated into porcine proportions. I sometimes pondered if her 400 pound godmother status would have led to me being consumed accidently in a midnight sleepwalking raid. Maybe I would have ended up being her gopher scurrying to the grocery store for marshmallows and briskets.

Ryan Baker was an artistic man, working in construction. Ryan never finished college after knocking up his now wife Josie with his daughter Rachael. Rachel like most of the world’s conceived offspring was an unplanned cannonball. She altered the tower walls of where homes would be built, serfs would reside and taxes to the sheriff would be paid. Such collisions are common place.

Parallel ineptitude permeated Ryan’s hopes. There were not many left. The man let be for the occasional joint, drink and night out for Monday Night Football at a local bar. Freedoms were a matter of perspective. He had Rachel and Josie in that order.

After successfully completing the task of obtaining eternal salvation by not conscientiously objecting to my own holy water emersion, I began learning language. Despite my omnipresent fingers and toes I did not feel compelled to figure out how to tally the flexible nub on each of my appendages.

However my parent’s squib narrative chronicling the diminutive piggy’s intrigued me. What was this market? Why couldn’t I go there? Why was one of the piggies not sharing his roasted bovine? Was this supposed to teach me about the harsh realities of real-world grocery store factory-farmed selections? My mom and dad were already trying to get me to fend for myself and not be the one going wee-wee-wee.

Maybe if my parent’s had not cut part of it off, I could control it better, but apparently my mom would keep unwrapping my diaper like a prize pack and informing me I went wee-wee again. I kept waiting for them to yank on it when they said wee-wee and wondering, “Are you going to pull the rest of it off too?” Thankfully I later learned the concept of nonsense nursery rhymes, but I still have trouble understanding why adults start children out in life with such questionable pretenses of fiction.

I had many questions about this game my family felt entitled to play. I had many questions. Wasn’t interrogative my favorite form of sentence? I asked most of the questions to myself. I was alone a lot. When I remember snapshots the scenes are me without any faces around thinking. I guess I should have written more down.

My first year was jelly-filled with Grandma Jennifer. Grandma was in charge of watching me while my mother and father worked. Grandma Jen-Jen knitted me booties. She read me the living section of the newspaper.

We watched Sesame Street. My favorite character was Oscar the Grouch. Oscar seemed to be the only Muppet with a punk-rock sense of questioning authority. I mean why did Mr. Hooper get to charge whatever he wanted for apples? Where was the free market competition? Where was the global conglomerate chain store booting Hooper’s ass?

That probably would have been a better lesson on life, that D is for downsize instead of door. Jen-Jen told me Bert was Aunt Audrey’s favorite. It made more sense when I saw Avenue Q later in life.

My other grandparents resided in Kansas. There were occasional collisions around Thanksgiving and the rare weekend in Wichita. I remember the vastness of their country house. My grandfather Arthur had a bushy caveman beard and lived off disability and a plant pension. Grandma JoAnne baked oatmeal raisin cookies.

My father Timothy went to work for an oil parts supply company. My mother Sara taught high school English to cliques of ingrates and saints. Maybe if a school administrator would have asked, my mother would have composed a more diplomatic tone to overcoat the student’s potential intellectual and social capabilities. At home my mother did not feel the need to edit her conversations about her workday from her toddler while spilling the bowl of her day into my father’s ears.

My mother taught at St. Ann’s, an all-girls Catholic school. Despite the theme of edification of the moral soundness of America’s menstruating youth, the recycled classes were stung with the occasional crippling pregnancies, cursive rebellion and lesbian repression, all fantastic growth opportunities.

The administration and parents tended to shelter, ignore, and patronize the girls. That alienated my mother into a sense of Ayn-Rand-objectivism-instilled apathy that preempted her from ever truly assisting any of them. Instead mom would bitch to dad while she fed me mommy tit. While I can understand Sara thought her boy was probably too busy to listen; I made multi-tasking a habit.

My father was sidetracked from aspirations for law school after returning from Vietnam. Timothy had two mouths to feed, not counting his own. My mom was living a single-parent lifestyle in a pre-modern era. My mother managed offspring and work in a way most women of her generation found unfathomable. Most men would obfuscate reality with the illusion that caring for their offspring without the aid of feminine consultation was like asking a man to ovulate or solve quantum equations to achieve space travel. Most men and women of my generation would find this work-life equation standard. The formula resulted in a job for most and government checks for the rest.

Timothy was employed by Fouchon Specialty. He sold unions, bolts and oilfield supplies down to rigs in the Gulf. He was not the salesman type, but my father was the put-food-on-the-table type. Dad could learn how to do what you needed him to do. The capability to learn was there. That is all college really teaches anyway. Schooling guides us how to think so we can learn what we have not learned yet afterwards.

Dad was never into bantering about the idle bullshit that made salesmen great. The ability to get someone to enjoy paying you to flow your inventory in their direction is the mark of a great salesmen. My dad moved the goods, but was low on entertainment, function over flair.

There were spring-shower mushroom fields of oil and gas companies in Louisiana. Texas’ state-tax laws and proficient educational bureaucracies had not stolen the fungi-petroleum profits yet. My dad became a bit of an oilman on paper. During the Jimmy Carter gas crisis my father was a yokel mouthpiece on some local news broadcast. My dad lambasted the Louisiana economy for going into the tank for self-compounding reasons from corrupt local official decisions including limiting its taxing nexus to a reduced offshore mileage compared to other Gulf States.

People got down on my dad for bearing the burden of bad news, but my dad shot straight and talked about how all he could do was go to work each day and hope to make it through. If you did not stare life straight you were probably in denial.

Somewhere in the enclaves of our family attic-space is a recording of Timothy Baker’s temporary celebrity, which some how trumped Uncle Ryan’s arrest for streaking at an LSU game while visiting one of his high school buddies. I think that was because we were not supposed to bring football-related nudity up in mixed company.

Uncle Ryan snuck on the field and managed to urinate on the eye-of-the-tiger in front of seventy thousand people before getting tackled by a swarm of redneck pigs. My uncle is still hated by the collective purple-and-gold will of the state. These days his testes would get tasered. My dad being a Tulane alumnus never felt closer to him, but if you ask Grandpa Kurt I think he only has one son now. However, I don’t think that is why Grandpa Kurt disowned Uncle Ryan. I think Grandpa Kurt is just a dick.

For my first birthday I got a Sesame Street Count cake. My parents felt the need to light a purple-fanged vampire on fire. I would have preferred the cantankerous-green-trashcan Muppet. Learning how to speak was imperative. Maybe it was my father’s propensity for numbers or the consternation confused as exuberance during our this-little-piggy pantomimes I displayed, but numbers were not my thing.

I had a yellow rolling walker that would later be deemed by the government as unsafe for secure child development. However I question the reverse effect on the American populace for the trapeze-net nature of juvenile jurisdiction arbitrated by government decry. I was an injury prone kid. I was fine. Tim use to chase me around. When the Grand Canyon of the step down living room threatened I some how survived in my death-trap walker.

Christmas was confusing. Trees were for outside. I was not sure how I felt about a large bearded man sneaking into our house at night. I tried to talk to our beagle Betsy about guarding my room so the stranger would not abduct me. Despite my parent’s incessant warnings on the day and the time he was coming, the dog was left outside by my father.

Although Christmas-acquired fire trucks and golden books were fun, I could not read or drive. I never understood what I did to deserve such indulgences. My primary accomplishments were sitting, slobbering and filling my diaper. Those seemed to be satisfactory contributions to the family unit. However, I have never resolved this quandary. Maybe being bombarded with free-shit is the greatest marketing story ever told.

I was Tim’s little buddy. He was my Virgil-like guide, awaiting my Beatrice. Tim loved to give hugs. He was far more affectionate than either of my parents. Tim resembled more of a cuddly benevolent bear than a brother. Tim would occasionally roll around one of my trucks or fly a Popsicle-stick airplane around my head like Icarus.

On Tim’s seventh birthday, mom and dad got a magician. The Great Gustav came in a Chevy Caprice Classic Landau with a rolling trunk, top hat and cigarette aroma. Flowers appeared; a white rabbit dropped sphincter raisins on Tim’s friend when Betsy burst from the backyard to obey her natural instincts. The rabbit was unharmed, but spent an intermediate internment behind our sofa. Peeking-eyed primary school students guarded each end’s escape route while contemplating potential mammal teleportation.

Gustav swirled his show with a tempest of juggling, a miraculous forehead-Indian-card trick, and slight-of-hand chicanery befitting a mall-trained Santa capable of beguiling children en masse. The parental patrol units in the crowd seemed to be pleased Gustav was Tourettes free. He kept his speech to matters of Abra, Cadabra, and fluffy bunnies. I spent the length of the presentation on my father’s knee eating a Flintstones orange push-up, marveling at wrapping paper and fixated on an R2D2 Star Wars figurine.

My childhood transition from toddler to kindergartener was marked by few intergalactic dramas. I choked on boarded paper from a toothpaste box at the age of two and a half. Somewhere in my psyche the stuff still propels a strong gag reflex despite the tube contents having little to do with its rectangular transport prison. I also feel the hypocritical advertisements of Fluoride as a completely positive chemical to intersect with our bodies is largely disingenuous to the average consumer. If it were not for the aluminum producer’s lobby, would we even add it to our drinking water?

I do not recall making friends well in nursery school. Something about cheerio O’s being less than cheery when dibs were called amongst the citizenry. My mother would visit often, which was un-cool even then. These interludes terminated the infancy of any attempts at fostering a renegade sense of rouge-punk-rock sensibility from the ages of five to fifteen. The track of order in obedience was ingrained. Rules were paramount.

I deciphered the code of reading in first grade. I was on schedule with the aid of the public library and the Sweet Pickles reading series. Nightingale was no help. Fish could ride motor cycles. Unicorn wore purses. The world was perfect. Timothy and Sara were dad and mom without question of name, interpretative role or personal interest. Their callings were to meet my needs, put child first and my pedestal of ignorant bliss rotated with my ass wipes between their caring palms.

This was until I was able to banish the call of, “Mommy Daddy come wipe my hinny,” from our suburban hallway. I came to the stunning realization that I could accomplish such feats of fecal remediation on my own. It is quite a moment in a child’s life when the impossibility of such a reach-a-round is capable of being performed by one’s own arms. It is quite another in adolescence when every young man finds out that God’s intelligent design prevents other ranges of motion that may all but have lead to the extinction of the human race. Then again Darwin could have been right and all those malleable pretzels-of-men have left this world seedless.

In second grade I began my nondescript career into recreational-district tax-funded sports in the realms of soccer and T-Ball. The facility was adjacent to the city sewer treatment plant. Amongst the malodorous aroma, it was impressed early on to me that the wishes of the positions of authority desired that the distance from the ball to my interaction remain as great a sum as possible. Any diminishment in this variable would inevitably lead to the quotient of our winning percentage to decline.

It was therefore established that by such confluences of age, irrational or rational judgment as volunteer coaching fathers can wield and my own random movements between spastic and purpose-implied, I was to be more spectator than athlete in the arenas of team sports. Shin guards and helmets, knee pads and community-sponsored green jerseys were nothing compared to the ignominy of a phantom catch, kick whiff or dare be it being out-classed by a female in a co-gendered youth sports league.

The crucial nature of these Herculean trials of a young man’s strength and prowess were exacerbated by the indiscriminate parental bleacher cat-calls. In the coliseum paupers and beeper-belted lawyers sat side by side arbitrating the foibles and should-have-dones of young princes-of-men far beyond the politically lobbying input censored by the threshold of a tax bracket.

Even into the years when Tim played football in the tackle league all gladiator’d-up or baseball with a man’s glove, the collective sages dispensed the indispensable. My father, who was typically a quiet man, would lick his lips on the blood in the water. His more apex-predator-shark nature would dispense criticism of the referee, umpire or a “Why are you doing that son?” inquiry to Tim. The culmination of these events has led me to the ineffable conclusion that organized sports do not really count as playtime.

Fun is relative. Fathers and grandfathers watch, judge and spin that mental comparison of generations to the field. How far did each genetic line get? Prove me well son.

Grandpa Kurt was a three decade member of the five-percent-nation-of-Marlboro. He was unable to run around the block without reinforcements from Grandma Jennifer to designated-drive him back home. In his day Kurt could charge the beach, suck smoke into his lungs and convert the carcinogens into combat fuel. Kurt was now more of a short-charging bear hibernating in his own body. The man rarely came out his cluttered cave. When Grandpa Kurt did, he was a cantankerous ursa with a mark of Cain.

Kurt never really left the house he grew up in. His sisters were hamster-like, hunched under the newspaper whimpering in anticipation of tipping the scales of their daddy’s temper. The garbage burrowed into Kurt’s skin like recycled armor, abrasive, pungent, and repressive. I could not smell the cedar-cave lining when I was younger. I now recognize the reek as Jack Daniels and nicotine.

I remember the illusions. My impressions of my father, mother, and grandfather were filtered through glittering fallacies of ignorance. They were never kids. They never masturbated. They always knew what the fuck to do. Flustering was optional. My predecessors were shipped from the factory with pre-programmed competence.

I remember Grandpa Kurt was perpetually in the background sifting in between living spaces when Grandma Jennifer took care of Tim and me. His presence was more specter than integrated non-ghost relative. There was always an occupying game, a meeting or a job to be done. The inverse of these moments showed up in my father like barbed seedlings caught in ox hairs carried to transient soil producing a different species of plant entirely, but within the same genus.

Timothy’s colors were blue and white. Kurt was black and red. My father made sure I got out into the sun-lit-sky to un-jumble the snarling disarray of genial lines to be who I was. Dad grew up in the reprieve, the cooling pool away from the magma. My father saw the sanctity of silence and the safe passage of Uncle Ryan taking the belt. Guilt dripped down hill in that house and in inverse direction to the flames.

My dad and my uncle do not talk much. They get along, but there is this undercoating. There is an understanding of the need-not-be-spoken to relinquish what would otherwise be futile. Discussing the past would be an exercise in repetitive psychoanalysis that would reiterate itself in recycled masochistic conversations during family get-togethers.

Maybe females would harass with the-need-to-know-the-why in years of cat-tailed Sunday conversations. Mothers and daughters can talk about earlier tragedies after dessert and coffee. My uncle and my dad knew there was no why. There was what was.

I remember three things from kindergarten. Everyone was assigned an eighth grade buddy. My default assigned friend was named Andy. We had a story corner with a pillow that looked like a frog and my mother recounts my near assassination.

My parent’s were best friends with a couple initialed in double D’s. Danny and Deidra Davenport had two sons Daniel, Dustin and a daughter Denise. It was as obnoxious as the alliteration sounds, but in the core the Davenport’s were good-natured people, subject to normal human conflictions.

Daniel and Dustin were twins around twelve. Deidra was a toddler. The boys were natively restless using their limbs as battering rams against each other’s replica. Each was intent on one-upping and staking a claim of identity despite their mother’s need to cloth the twins as a dynamic duo during their initial maturation.

The four of us boys were playing in the twin’s bunk-bed fortress. The squadron of parents and tethered sister were conversing worldly matters at the kitchen table. We were rough-housing without the spackle and measuring tape of older males. Daniel pulled out his pellet gun from under his bed.

Dustin in-sync with the extraction, tacked up a bull’s eye black and white target to a space of sheetrock. Daniel bust out, “Stand back burritos,” as he pumped the lever-based compression mechanism and fired a tiny silver hourglass-shaped projectile into the paper popping off a shred and leaving no major damage to the wall behind. Daniel retorted, “My turn drum stick,” and repeated the feat, but a step further back planting his heel against the opposing baseboard.

Tim watched the two duel. After a third shot rotation, Tim was convinced to try to make meat with one of the metallic rocks. Tim’s pebble slung to the south-east quadrant of the target. Then it was my turn.

Daniel grabbed a paper kid-sized Ronald McDonald cup strewn on the ground as refuse for a ready-made archery contest. I stood sapling-like obeying orders as Robin Hood motioned me in front of the doorway. Daniel placed the cup on the crown of my head. Before Tim could get too good a look at me, Daniel reared back and fired.

I do not recall where the pellet hit other than within earshot of my mother. I only know the pellet did not intersect with my visual, olfactory, or auditory organs or orifices as I am sure such impacts would have been recounted to me on numerous occasions.

The aberration forced the mandated mayhem that ensued to justify the parental interrogations to act as if their actions could some how do something now after the fact in a United Nations modus operandi. The Davenports profusely apologized and promised fair retribution against their Hickok in the way kings of countries offer to sacrifice one of their own to keep peace. The Davenports and we Bakers remain friends. The story is told jokingly on the occasion of mixed company absent my silent conscientious objections that if vocalized would do little to prevent the inevitable fabled retelling.

I attended Catholic elementary school a half-hour of traffic away from my home at St. Bartholomew’s. This secured my peaceful sanctuary-manger of learning segregated from taxpayer-funded New Orleans public schooling. I only remember a few stained-glass-windowed moments. I recall the first time I bought my lunch tickets from the lunch lady Ms. Angie on Monday mornings in first grade.

Ms. Angie was part troll with sagging-dark-valance-looking crescent moons under her eyes. The Ms. Angie troll was rotund and smelled of meat loaf. The lights-off cafeteria was dark in the morning. The cave troll sequestered herself past the stainless steel serving units. She was through the cooking corridor to the left in an office that resembled a broom closet. The would-be-maintenance-storage spot was pungent and dank, dimly lit and unlabeled.

My parents did not provide a map. Locating the longitude and latitude for this mob-boss-like transaction with the ascetic hermit of square-pan pizza and pint-carton milk was arduous. The journey was like going down into a labyrinth in search of princess Zelda without a compass. But I had my boomerang wits and a prewritten check from mom.

I pulled the folded-paper banknote from my kaki pocket. Ms. Angie pulled out a treasure book resembling the cherry-bell paper lottery tickets carnies sell to kids at street fairs. There was one for each day of the week. I acquired a month’s worth at a time. Sometimes I wonder at what age that woman died of a coronary. For surely Ms. Angie could not have lasted long under the glut of her incredible bulk. Although, I am sure she was satisfactory managing the elementary cafeteria’s nutritional offerings. At least I did not need to answer any riddles. Maybe I could have told her in an obstreperous beguiling rebuttal that the second grader behind me was plumper.

I remember in fourth grade I attended mass with my parents on a Sunday morning in the church connected to the school. My current teacher Mrs. Roy knelt down in the pew to the right and one in front of us adjacent to my position. There was no acknowledgment.

We sat in the balcony, about as far away from the altar as a family could sit. I had some of my first sexual thoughts staring at my teacher’s black stocking legs and blonde hair with my numb-peanut sack and centimeter-circumcised unit’s faux erection. I prayed to God and am still waiting on that answer.

Also in the fourth grade in St. Bartholomew’s Church we had this miraculous staging of students in what is referred to as a Living Rosary. No longer were strings and beads sufficient to regurgitate wrote iterated prayer to Jesus’ mommy and phantom-faced, but we’re sure he’s white, inverse-sperm-donor daddy. We had to enlist the limbs and abdomens of selected progeny of the congregation enrolled in grades K through eight.

I was requisitioned for this festivity. To avoid the grave injustice that God be out-smarted by a brave-winded pint dare altering the words of these sacred incantations, there was a living-practice the day beforehand. We assembled in a giant rotating ring around the church in the outer aisles. Each one of us ascended heaven’s steps to a microphone to look out over an empty assembly of pews to utter out the first half of a Hail Mary, Our Father or the perfunctory Glory-Be. The spectators would finish our prologue in unison in correlation with our beaded-position on their handheld rosary.

I was called out before my turn during this afternoon training exercise. My mother picked Tim and me up early because I had a doctor’s appointment, which negated my mother’s ability to make carpool less than an hour later.

The next morning the giant assembly of parents and clergy gathered with the consecrated-student body. I repeated the words of the Hail Mary in my head. Each kid had to recite the preamble of the prayer. The first two words were in the title. The rest were being read by each preceding angel.

When I got up to the microphone I started, transposed and attempted to start again. Somehow, “Hail Mary, bless Jesus’ fruit, Hail…” came out. There was a cacophony of uniformed faces laughing back at me in their reverent silence underneath their solemn lips including Mrs. Roy. The priest and a nun motioned me on as the next bead completed the plaudit flawlessly. Part of me wonders if my abomination-of-verse negated the solemn integrity of the sixty-two beaded-symphony of prayer canceling continuity of the orders of the hundreds of other attendee’s loaf-and-fish requests.

I have said that prayer a thousand times in Pavolvian diction, spoken like a tool-to-heal, to save, or to cap off a day. Sometimes, I wonder if any of us use the right words like some cryptic vault combination to a silently laughing arbiter behind a gate. Maybe there is a letter in a cellar under a candle-burned bush with the genuine script. Maybe we found it and incinerated it. We made up our own words and fought a thousand wars over the scorched fibers. All I know is I was always afraid of forgetting my lines. I developed a hard-line hesitation to ever audition for drama productions. The Hail Mary may have damned my career as a spoken word artist.

Throughout my youth my mother and father took us on camping trips to state and national parks in our pop-up camper. Maybe the most common rendition of these would appear through adult eyes as a series of parking spaces plopped between patches of pine trees, but to me camping was a Dukes of Hazard big-wheel riding dirt wonderland.

I took my G.I. Joe’s and He-men. I went gallivanting into leaf-carpeted alcoves. My mom and dad took the time to help me check through the natural punch-list of childhood every kid should complete: blowing a dandelion puff, paddling a canoe, star-gazing, burying a hidden treasure, skipping a stone, catching fireflies, climbing a tree, and going barefoot to dig for the sake of digging. There is something intimate to God in the non-commercial productivity of the tasks. Whatever it is, in that kernel of being a child, I nest within for it was born in moments like those, in a time of solitude realizing there was just me, my own amusement and the joy held in that seed rooting.

One night near dusk at Devil’s Den State park in Arkansas, Tim and I were throwing our football around the campsite. Our mother called us into the camper. We began an epic game of crazy-eights. Sara was flipping grilled cheese sandwiches on the camp stove.

We had recently returned from a hike through the woods. We posed for a picture on an assortment of river rocks with a waterfall in the back ground with the aid of a congenial man from North Carolina. My Yoda T-shirt and Underoos were still wet from wading in the creek with Tim. I was around eight. Tim was thirteen and right on the verge of transitioning his interests into teenage playgrounds.

On the way back from the waterfall I found a fallen tree branch, which must have nearly doubled my height in length. I set the Sisyphus wood-hunk in my mind. I would drag this log to the trailhead on my own. I termed it the “Ultimate Challenge.” My dad offered to help and was rebuffed. I was going to make it. “Do or do not there was no try.” So at the former entrance and current exit point I laid the wood in what was a thump to my own ears dusted my palms and set back to the campsite.

Back in the game of crazy-eights, dad plopped down a jack to change the suit to spades. A thud boomed out. We rotated our ears to synchronize the location on our compass to due south, the road in front of our campsite.

There was a standard-sized red Ford pick-up truck skid-stopped with its windshield crackled and what appeared to be a girl about my age thrown against the glass and a busted doe body functionally inert like a speed-bump near the right front headlight.

My parents ran to the idled motor crowding my view from a trail position. The pre-cell–phone plan of action was processed with a send off of my father to the ranger station. My mother rushed to our first-aid gear which consisted of one blue ice-chest freezer pack and functionally empty assurances of an “everything will be ok” resolution.

The driver was the man who took our picture with North Carolina plates. His daughter was groggy, but conscious. The girl rode off in the ranger’s truck to proper American healthcare. Other local camp attendees gathered in the spectator-sport of tragedy commentary. One kid spouted, “Cool look at the blood,” as he pointed at the deer.

I had not seen anything so large in the process of dying. The doe’s chest was undulating in a descending rate of inflation. The skin seemed pliable and lax. Ticks peppered the deer’s hide, with a pale weight that my father informed me was a sign of over breeding in a vacuum from natural predators.

The circle of humans dwindled to abandon the deer to become asphalt-compost for some Arkansas state employee to process. The carcass was gone by morning. Maybe the body was transported to a road-kill grave as carrion for foxes, crows or saprotroph out of public view next to an interstate sign, not meant for anyone to get too good a look at death. Then again the heap may have immediately ascended into heaven as soon as the final set of human eyes turned away.

We recollected ourselves back inside our camper. The night dragged. The card game never got finished. We ate and scratched our limbs from an apparent chigger infestation. By morning my legs looked like scatter-shot riddled with red bumps. My parents informed me the malady was curable by nail polish. Maybe Maybelline is an old Indian panacea. My father always thought he was a Cherokee in a past life. Maybe it was in his blood to know such medicinal nostrums.

Around this age Grandma Jennifer and Grandpa Kurt’s house was our default babysitting base camp. My parents went to a late night dress-up costume dance as Kermit and Ms. Piggy complete with spray-painted green flippers and a string snout. After we were in bed I wandered to my grandparent’s room for assistance after a broken toilet in the hall rendered me incapable of completing my typical restroom routine.

The plumbing backed up. Being the over-adamant “address problems now” sort of child that I was, I ended up compounding the clog by attempting to alleviate the malady myself in order to eschew any remedial consequence from Grandpa Kurt. In my desperation, I acquiesced for the aid of elders. Armed with my end-of-my-first-decade wisdom, I opened Grandma’s bedroom door and caught my grandparent’s having sex.

For a child of my age this was tantamount to Guantanamo Bay water boarding, only to potentially be exceeded by uncovering a scenario of one generation lower in my own home. I imagine the inverse of being caught masturbating by one of these counterparts in later years would have been eminently more discomforting. So as with most things I count myself lucky for things not being worse.

The two wrinkled porcupines quit moving. I assume they were both crack naked since my grandfather was stooping my grandmother from the rear. I did not have time to get the question out. I involuntarily viewed, retreated and closed the door without verbal recognition by any party involved.

The toilet remained un-flushed. The shit sat there like a beaver dam. I assume Grandpa Kurt resolved the matter of burying the unsightly remains in due course, because none of it was ever discussed. Grandma Jennifer made animal pancakes with a gazelle and a rhino for breakfast.

My best friend growing up was my next door neighbor Robert. Everybody called Robert, Bortz, because he was like the fourth in a line of identically-named progeny. Ostentatious sounding nicknames probably codified family reunions. Bortz was a year younger and indemnified from utilizing neighborhood kids as first-choice-friend options. His parents enrolled him in a cornucopia of programs: baseball, violin, drama camps all in preparation to be some enhanced clone that would matriculate through St. Ignatius High School and pop out the other end in the Ivy League.

These activities kept Bortz busy with six-degrees-of-separation connections, but where I lived Bortz was what I had. He was in and out. I solo-raced my blue-and-yellow BMX around the neighborhood. I peddled faster and faster past the lawn mowers, peeking into the white over-cluttered garages, the porch settlers and the free-range dogs shitting at will.

This was a time before bike helmets were feasible. We called this one kid Mushroom Head for wearing one. Silly parents thinking they were helping. Nobody played with that kid or at least nobody wanted to venture past the shelter barrier his parents erected.

During one 1980’s summer, Nintendo hit big. Atari had been around, but Nintendo was paradigm shifting. Kids still played outside before then: freeze tag, street football with the drainage grates as end zones and snowball-stand runs. All these prepubescent boundaries were on the verge of obliteration. I made a trade with Bortz, unbeknownst to either of our parental units: his Batman for my Metroid Nintendo game.

The Batman was found at the Family Dollar and impossible to locate afterwards. For some reason I wanted the caped crusader like a hold-on to all those days in the forest, still capable of reenactment The cowl-covered figure had a yellow utility belt complete with a drawstring to a concave crescent-molded piece of plastic that could stretch and serve as a grappling hook. The toy had a cape, four limbs and nonfunctional bat ears. Basic Batman was exchanged for a fifty dollar Nintendo game; a new world plaything for a novelty act.

The only problem was in the lockdown. Such rebel ruses can only perpetuate for so long before parents smell the disturbance in the force. A few weeks later, Sara and Bortz’s mother figured out the Faustian bargain and demanded we trade back. The only problem was that in the interim Deidre Davenport came over with her family. Deidra picked Batman up and used the grappling-hook belt as dental floss, popping the line. The Batman had to go back to Bortz’s cave. The dark knight I had to send was out of commission. Handicapped Bruce Wayne departed and my best friend de-bested me canceling the one-sided equation.

The kid blamed me thinking I broke the belt on purpose. Where the fuck was eBay to salvage such clusters? Bortz spent the rest of the summer avoiding me and not answering the door when he was not off camping or practicing to be baseball Jesus. Come late August a Mayflower moving van arrived. Bortz’s family moved away to some undisclosed location, in some other bat-time on some other bat-channel.

I remember driving up in the back of my mom’s Astro minivan to our house as the moving truck was parked. Bortz was outside. I waved to him through the window. I walked towards my house. Bortz would not even acknowledge me. That was the last time I ever saw the best friend I ever had growing up.

After that I started hanging out more with this kid Charlie. Charlie had the bane of too much rope in the bungee-chord of adolescence. His mother was skittish and aloof, smoked a pack a day and drove a Z28 two-door with three kids and no father remaining in the picture. The house was randomly unfurnished with large expanses of carpeting littered with objects that generally get bundled in closets.

Charlie watched Freddie Kruger and shot fireworks in the middle of spring. At one point, I remember Charlie had a donkey roped up in his backyard while he made lawn-doughnuts with his motor bike next to a green mosquito vat former swimming pool, but Charlie did not start out that way.

I remember these moments of hanging out with Charlie, like windows into how other kids grew up. Being around Charlie was like a litmus test for the boundary of what the loosest sense of parental behavioral modification would do to a house of three brothers by the time the youngest hits puberty.

There were men though; hobo-men coming and going on the fringe. I did not know until I was older, but some of the men abused him. We ended up hanging out in high school one random confluence of paths night out by the levee during our junior year. Charlie talked.

A few of them would leave him alone, but apparently going inches deep into a boy’s mother is not enough to fuck over for some men. This guy Steve was slapping him around after all the beer was drained from the fridge. Six-year-old Charlie bit into the man’s thigh, clenched like a vice of pre-wisdom teeth until the flesh frayed. The mark sunk in and left Charlie knocked out with a purple knot from Steve’s massive knuckles. Steve ended up getting arrested after Charlie showed up at school, but as always there was a replacement. Man after man, none of them hit Charlie that bad again. Most just ignored Charlie and his brothers to bone his mom.

Charlie got hit on both ends too. Around nine a neighbor sexually abused him. The guy made Charlie touch him. Like any shit-scum who has read the predator’s handbook, the asshole told Charlie, “If you tell anyone. I’ll kill you. I’ll make sure no one will believe you.”

When I was around twelve, before I knew all that shit, one Monday Charlie and I were out riding bikes in this park the city made out of an abandoned par-three golf course. There was a former water hazard that became a bullfrog pond, random wooden outdoor exercise equipment, a basketball court without any nets and a backstop for baseball. A running track was available most of the time for preteens like us to scoot around on our bikes and for taxpayers to jog.

We rode our bikes with a basketball to go shoot hoops. Learning to ride your bike without needing to hold on to the handlebars is another item on the bucket list of childhood. We did not hang out much, but Charlie was one of the only kids left my age in the neighborhood.

I missed a shot. The ball rebounded over the catty-corner fence of a house that backed up to the park. It was Charlie’s ball so we exited the park, rode to the doorbell and rang for a potential retrieval. A just-past-middle-aged woman came to the door. After obtaining an understanding of what had transpired, the woman led Charlie and I to a wooden-gate.

Two German Shepherds barked incessantly inside the fence. We knew the dogs were there because we could see the dogs through the shooting-lane panels of sight between the fence boards from the court. The dogs reported the existence of any basketball or jogging activity on a regular basis to those within earshot. We saw the ball in the corner. The lady led Charlie and I inside and commanded in a firm tone, “Rex, Auga, heel.” The two dogs moved to the high-heeled shoe of the woman with a collar in each hand.

Charlie set foot on an expedition towards the orange sphere. As Charlie picked the ball up, Auga bolted loose. The matriarch gripped the other dog by the collar in a V-legged-angled restraint, but could do nothing but bark back at the other shepherd. I stood stone-footed witnessing the first exchange. The lady told me to run to the neighbor’s for help.

Auga leaped up on Charlie and snagged his calf, then his arm. Charlie started screaming. I pounded on the neighbor’s door and yelled, “Help the dog is attacking Charlie.” Some useless offspring was first to the entry way and summoned his father who could hear the screaming pouring in the foyer. The man sprinted in purposeful motion, smacked the fuck out of Auga, ripped the dog off of Charlie and reined the canine by the collar.

Charlie zombie-stumbled to the driveway as we waited for an ambulance. The humane man’s wife alerted authorities. I remember seeing Charlie whimpering and not knowing what to tell him. I was never the kind of person to provide false senses of security to pander to an idealistic truth that eschewed the reality of a situation.

The sight of Charlie’s thigh reminded me of fish flesh. My dad caught a King Mackerel out in the Gulf one summer and cut it open in front of me with this shimmering spread of green and red. There was a fold where muscle was supposed to connect.

The paramedics came and took Charlie away. I did not know Charlie’s phone number, but the neighbor called my folks who got in touch with Charlie’s mom eventually. I saw Charlie a week later. He was stitched up with black-twine cross marks. We did not talk much about the incident. We were not even that good of friends, but I do remember that long bike ride back to my house holding Charlie’s basketball.

I wondered what if I had not missed that shot. What if I had manned up and found a stick to bat the dog? I wonder how much that neighbor just wanted to take it out on those animals. Those beasts must have barked non-stop. Did he garner some perverse satisfaction by dominating the smaller mammal? I wonder if that lady had to put the dog to sleep. Once an animal obeys its true genetic nature it tends to mandate its own destruction.

After that Charlie kind of went his own way with the motorbikes and the fireworks. His mom let him get the farm animals in his backyard. Charlie pretty much got to the point where he could do anything he wanted and went through these stages of nonsensical adolescent behavior.

One time we rode grocery carts down the grass by the local canal. Charlie taught me how to make myself faint by holding my fingers over my throat and my temples. I got dizzy and never really tried it again.

Between then, Charlie’s introduction to drugs and that time out by the levee we lost touch until a random afternoon in my thirties. Charlie ended up knocking up a girlfriend his junior year in high school. The two are still married. Charlie is a lieutenant in the Navy.

High school was a long way off. I was eleven and on the threshold of junior high school. I made good grades. I never asked for help with my studies. The scholastic part of school was straight forward. Tim hung out with me, even when he had other options. It was rare for me to be chosen.

We played Nintendo. Tim was a wizard at Super Mario Brothers Three and showed me how to use the raccoon tail to take out the turtles. Tim would let me sit in and listen to some of his heavy metal cassettes and introduced me to Metallica, Nine Inch Nails and Pantera.

I was getting into comic books. Kids in my class started collecting these Marvel collector cards: Spiderman, the X-Men, Captain America, etc. One night it was Tim and me’s turn to do the dishes. I was lying on the floor of my room reviewing my card collection. Tim knocked on my door. I told him five minutes. I never came. Tim returned and let me know it was time to go because I was holding him up.

I ignored Tim. He asked to get a look at one of my cards. He reversed over past the doorway and said, “Ethan if you don’t get through this door right now. I am going to bend this card.” I didn’t move and he did. Tim bent my Cyclops card. This mono-vision laser blasting leader of the X-men had a diagonal slash across the top left border.

I was upset. I felt like Tim had no right to do what he did. It was one of the only times I ever remember being angry with Tim. Tim apparently had already done the dishes by himself when he came to get me and was just going to tell me after I got up. All he wanted was to see that I would keep my word and respect him enough to make the effort to provide my assistance. I always remember that line-in-the-sand feeling my brother gave me. The choice, that there is one and with each divergent path on the choice made there is a consequence, so often unseen and unpredicted.

I keep my word. Maybe it was trivial. Maybe Tim was being pedantic in all this life-learning I needed to catch up on. Maybe it was trite or sadistic on some level to an eleven-year-old me. But all that is relative and frivolous to some kid in Kenya or Sierra Leone picking coffee or asked to hold up an AK for the R.U.F. I was worried about a make-believe warrior on a piece of cardstock. Imaginary laser beams do not compare to gunshot screams.

I switched schools from Catholic to public in junior high to attend Troy Middle. My mother switched jobs to teach at the school after a final falling out with the St. Ann’s administration around the time my dad lost his job. We needed the money. I still went to church. I still did all the kneeling and witnessed the transubstantiation of grain circles into abdomens. I just did not do it alongside a parochial setting. I was glad to go to public school.

New Orleans was a different breed of city. New Orleans is the land of Homer Plessy’s past, the failed political statement train car tripping up this nation into legalizing separate-but-equal. We were trying to prove how wrong separate-but-unequal was. Treme and Albion Tourgee, Plessy’s lawyer set in the crosshairs. We were the largest population of free blacks in America and in the aftermath, New Orleans created this double-tiered system with a mask of religion to perpetuate the decree of the Supreme Court that lingers today.

We created two Universities of New Orleans a mile apart that only came into mutual existence because of that train car. In times of financial stress the State tried to consolidate them, but it was like trying to un-wrap a ball of tangled fishing line with a fish hooked on both ends.

The public schools were a train-wreck. Unless you were in the gifted and talented program and segregated from most of the madness like I was. Life could get a bit chaotic, but then again it was more reality than chaos. Isn’t reality what schools are supposed to be preparing you for?

My first year at Troy, I got in a fight the Monday before Christmas break. I did not even throw a punch. Others may call the altercation a fight in concept. I think of the exchange as a moment of awakening of the lines others were right-on-the-border ready to cross if given the minutest conceived provocation compared to this grid-of-rules in my head.

The grid stated, “Do not hit. Do not break the rules. Turn your cheek and maintain civil obedience.” My three front teeth got knocked out. In my mind I imagine some compatriot of the opposing party was holding my arms back over the tennis ball we were apparently dueling over in the schoolyard. In reality I was in my own self-imposed rules straight jacket.

His group of friends took a ball away from my group. I was in the enviable position to try to grab the ball off the concrete after an errant keep-away pass at the same time as a kid in my algebra class who I had never even spoken to who was about to become my unrequested combatant.

As our hands met, I held on to that yellow sphere a fringe too long. The kid cocked back his right arm and plowed into my face, grabbed me by my European hair and took his left and slammed my mouth into the ground with a truculent fury.

A circle of jeering and ring-side commentators formed. Before I could even get up the bout was over. No administrator came. No comrade aid. The bell rang everybody just went back to class, except for me.

My mom was off campus training. I wandered into the main building and headed for the principal’s office. I guess the authority could see I needed a doctor. I do not remember conversing. All I know is my mother came back to the school and we went to a dentist.

The other kid got suspended for two days. I got a junior-high flipper denture with makeshift temporary teeth until I was old enough to get implants in college. Somewhere the grid rules and the Cyclops card were still intact.

I had my limbs. My ego was never really big enough to notice whether anybody was concerned enough to detect a difference in my stride upon my return from Christmas break. Math class was great. We never spoke. The position of our desks allowed us not to have to have direct visual contact outside the provisional entry and exit. I did learn the foil method.

In eighth grade I got to know Sidney. Sidney was a curly brunette with blue eyes and a bit of an overbite, about two inches shorter than me. As in most cases of male female interaction such a differential is like one of those height bars for drive-through overhangs, which indicates a maximum height of an acceptable vehicle that can fit under an awning.

Girls seem to have a reverse one of those in their heads that involves equations with shoes and heeled footwear, picture scenarios and overall levels of interest. Later in life these equations formulate out in variables of height to required income streams to compensate. I guess I am glad I made it through algebra alive. I just wish I had not quit growing taller after my sophomore year of high school.

Sidney was not the most popular or beautiful, but clearly was a step up from my standing in terms of social discourse. Sidney was integrated into the matrix that allowed her access to tiers of socially-adept kids with out-of-classroom acumen beyond my reach. Sidney was trailing off an interest in a taller freshly-Bar Mitzvah’d kid Elijah, who had the indelible star-crossed notorious historical-moniker as the only identifiable Jew.

Sidney accidently starting talking to me one day after English. She was the kind of girl who in the setting straddled that line of conformity. Underneath Sidney was a suicide girl painted beneath her skin. That inner-inked element of Sidney was waiting for that time when a girl can own her own decisions. The color of that sentiment might not have been needled-on yet, but the precursor was there. It drew me in.

We started conversing during lunch. We often would skip the formality of consuming nutritional-intake to hoard parentally-obtained lunch-money to use as spending cash. This was an investment strategy that lingered on for me through high school.

Sidney wrote me these only-girls-could-fold notes on violet hued paper written in bubble pen script in a flowing legible-speak. Sidney was my first girlfriend. I was a notch in a line for her for that time in four of nine weeks in the spring of junior high.

We talked over my chorded-white plastic-mold telephone. Sidney spouted intricacies of her local New Orleans waitress mother and foreign father in Portland Maine. Sidney was a star on the midway dancing with her friends with an imbedded insecurity. I was like a boy with an empty glass pressed between my ear and a closed white-wash door dissecting a hidden world I did not understand the operations or the cogs in the clocks.

Sidney knew about non-parental transport and pop genres even if she declined to listen to or cultivate the generic format in private. Sidney seemed to know something of drugs in the sense that Sidney had friends who did them and at least tested the line of stimulating the murk in the water to see if it cleared after ankles were wet. I have never to this day even gone as far as setting a cigarette to my lips. I drink, not a drunk, but I drink. I mean life’s shit. Smoking, snorting, injecting and free-basing just seem like life-hijackers.

Maybe there was some line in the grid like a mouth-guard pretending to be my friend keeping me from experimenting with drugs. It certainly wasn’t Nancy Reagan. Time past, that traditional adolescent window was gone before the flutter feathers of reconsideration could return from migration.

Sidney and I had one official date to a movie theater to see “Big”. I nervously prepared for the occasion by wearing one of my heavy-metal band T-shirts, which would surely indicate my devotion to all things deafeningly defiant. Sidney was a big hard rock fan at least on the girly end: Poison, Kiss, Motley Crue, Ratt. Somewhere in the balance of that scale involved me draped in Metallica garb.

I passed my tongue over the roof of my mouth about a hundred times evaluating the flexibility of my upper flipper denture harnessing my central and left lateral incisors. I was confounded by the odor of the appliance. I was still getting use to having geriatric mouth-wear in junior high with no guide on how to operate and maintain the oral stalactite.

Sidney showed up to my house in a green wool sweater and blue jeans. Her hair was curly in a bushy-sort-of-way to each side that partitioned a view of her blue eyes. She had a turquoise birthstone ring and shoes only a girl would remember the term for. Her mom dropped us off at the theater. We sat in the right-rear quadrant of a sparsely attended showing of a movie most of the world must have already seen.

There was perfunctory conversation and veiled attempt at watching the set up minutes of the movie. We turned towards each other and I had my first kiss. The physical marker was made and left within skipping seconds leaving a prevailing wind to clear the path to France. In the landing on Normandy her tongue must have clipped a molar or a rouge bicuspid clamping up my denture. The pink-palate spider-web of teeth came unlatched. The space became quickly crowded like the swelling hull of the Titanic. Rose floated away on a stray drifting door and Jack descended.

Sidney did not realize what happened. Girls of that age are not bound to ask clarifying questions in fear of cascading the flood of two-sided embarrassment. We returned to pre-standard positions, watched toy magnate Tom Hanks trail-tale home in clown shoes to a sentimental-pedophile Elizabeth Perkins. But then again every young boy has fantasies about older women whether we verbalize them or not.

Sidney and I contractually dated for about a week longer. She ceremoniously dumped me in a pocket note because I had officially changed in bold-printed letters with triple exclamation points.

Sidney moved to St. Petersburg Florida after school let out. I kept every note she ever gave me like historical artifacts. The pages were testaments that she existed and was not a ghost I dreamed up to respond to a fracturing prayer.

The rest of my time at Troy was marked by being a fringe member of a Quiz Bowl team, Spanish class fieldtrips to a Mexican buffet restaurant, and a friendship with a Hispanic Jehovah’s witness named Rafael who taught me that wearing skull-metal shirts around his father was a ticket to eternal damnation. Rafael went to services ten hours a week and was left out of the questionable beneficial treasure hauls of birthdays and Christmas. I never understood why everyone gets a gift on someone else’s mandated birthday, except for the fact that somebody else did it first. So like most historical practices not enough people complained so it became gospel.

For a while my parents kept a camping trailer in our driveway and allowed my associates and me to hold sleepover-adolescent-male festivals until dawn. The nights were basically one big fart joke of playing Nintendo, dares and impersonating people who knew more than up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select start got you thirty men in Contra. A few times we would shit and piss in Ziploc bags and leave the feces on people’s automobiles or doorsteps. Yes, it was juvenile. Yes, it was gross. No, humans, monkeys, and lions are not that different; at least not the twelve-year-old male versions.

My grandpa Arthur died in Kansas the summer after my eighth grade year. He was sixty-one years old, past his expiration date by some accounts, premature by most. The coffin was blanketed in a tightly-tucked American flag. There was a traffic jam of adults I had neither the capability nor inclination to decipher who they were or why they were there. I guess I was there, so I could remember that I was there. I learned more of the man after his death than before.

Grandpa Arthur’s heart gave out. Most of his body was obedient, but that purple heart was treacherous and opinionated. There was no clogged artery, no formula computing to cholesterol anomalies or plaque, just a muscle that missed a registered spasm. Arthur went blue while Grandma JoAnne was out with the ladies auxiliary. JoAnne found him sprawled pants down face to the floor in the bathroom. Pissing or masturbating, it was not clear, but however it ended someone made the executive decision to belt him up for the funeral.

I wonder why adults dress corpses. We come into this world naked, yet leave it clothed. Do the morticians dress a body prior to cremation? Is it such a poor site to have shlong viewings as part of the deceased? Aren’t we there to see death? Do we not want that good a look to see a human body as it is, either wrinkled, bloody or young? I think I want a full-nude cremation attended by no more than two or three. Play a song. Let me out, but see me as raw in this irrelevant external shell as I am. If not then, then when?

I ponder the arrogance of those willed into cemeteries and the petty selfishness under misguided respect of the families of the dead who hock the bereaved body in an auction of condolence. Irrelevant arbitrary formalities swim like mosquitoes. Morticians inject embalming fluid to drain the true blood for a plastic-doll push flush face with glossed-glass eyeballs like a taxidermist’s deer.

Let’s hang grandpa on the wall. Let’s board G-paw up like Christ, but put him in a suit to show dignity. Little Jimmy should not see his dong and testicular sack. He might want to make a little keep-sake souvenir out of his pubes. A bird’s nest would be nice or maybe a keychain? Oh, nudity is much too dangerous!

Burn me. Incinerate me into an efficient dust pyre! Dirt devil suck me up. Spread me into soil. Save me in a casserole dish or roll me into cigarette papers and send me to George Lucas’ Edutopia in a cigar box marked death sticks and make up a story that I died of lung cancer instead of heart ailments.

In all iterations make the dusty grit you consider a remnant me, a truth only in a misguided memory. Acknowledge the fallacy. Define death and make it real. This body is only a shell of exculpated tortoise with a hundred year expectancy flopped in a coffin to appease the living. What happens in the ground is rudimentary biology. Life is returned long ago. So please do not put on a carnival. Funerals are not for the dead. That is why I do not attend them whenever possible.

We measure out some kind of tragedy scale by the age of the deceased based on how many days we collectively feel as humans that the dead deserved to keep breathing to balance out how long we feel we deserve to live with our own fear of dying “too soon”. The scale rarely balances and Grandpa Arthur was no exception.

At the reception, Grandma JoAnne was a recalcitrant widow. She hovered around the house with cucumber sandwiches and seven-layer-taco dip. People kept asking her to slow down and let them get that. Joanne was defiant with a harlequin smile. Aunt Audrey was beached on the sofa with a handkerchief from her father’s collection blotting her eyes. Mom seemed to be the organizer, informing various parties about bathroom facilities. I guess so they could leave flowers by the shrine, sort of like Elvis and Graceland.

None of them really stopped. There was no toast. No jazz music, certainly no Kansas second-line. There was just this crumpet and tortilla-chip-mashed combination of characters. We were there for three days.

I used the same toilet. At least it flushed. I saluted one of my shits to pay my respects. I guess Grandpa Arthur would rather it this way, us all just moving on. Maybe a drink or a tear or two, but in the end business has to get done. Get the fuck over it and live. Spit the bit. Cemeteries are lobbies.

On the flight back to New Orleans, my mother talked about her brother Adam. Sara told me when he was little he liked to play Cowboys and Indians. Most of the time she would blow Adam off. Adam would run around with sticks like a makeshift bow and arrow firing off in the front lawn. My mom kind of ignored him because those were boy games.

After Adam died, Grandpa Arthur grew a beard for one year and shaved it off on the anniversary of his son’s death. My mom thought maybe it was like a protest or like a bear in winter, because the family never really talked about Adam at least not in front of Grandma JoAnne and Aunt Audrey. Mom and Grandpa Arthur would sit and have a moment or two, but for the most part what was there to say? Maybe grandpa just needed to go in his cave for a while. Mom gave me a hug and said, “You never know how much time you have. Do you want some peanuts?”

Continue to Chapter 4 part 1

Parallel Paths: Pathos, Politics, and Poetry

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Sunday, December 2, 2012

Chapter Three – Shepherds, Teeth, and Concrete

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