"Cherry Blossom
Samurai Ceremony"
Young, Fat-Assed Stabs at
Greatness
Taoist
balance, eastern myth, well-adjustedness, and immortality perhaps. And being
able to tear the throat out of anyone who called me "fat" on the schoolyard with
one karate chop to the neck.
I enrolled in Kung Fu class, fully intending to do some serious damage. Doug, the Kimino-wearing instructor, started me off with some relaxing stances. Being in absolute awe of his superior knowledge and fitness, I raised no complaint.
So I practiced my stances, while dumpy, no-nonsense types in muscle shirts concentrated on the mantra of self-improvement with grave voices and stretched like ballet dancers. It was all about how far you could push yourself, and I wondered if one day I would be a pit fighter like in all the video games-- a wrestler, perhaps.
Maybe I was young and naive, or maybe the other patrons were too wound up with coiled violence while I skipped about, but Doug refunded my parents' money and told me to come back in a couple of years. But I was imbued with a deep sense of (-- Eastern?) shame, having "lost face", and knew I would never return to the rented room in the community center.
The
classical Asian mystique never lost it's allure, though. Take the Japanese
festival down at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Parades, demonstrations, the
beating of giant drums. The multi-colored koi fish flipping upside down in the
pond. There was a winking old Japanese man, a juggler, who took compliments from
young Westerners such as myself. As I was walking off he lightly kicked me in
the behind with a sandal as a means of affection.
If he took me under his wing, I feared what wonderful lessons he would impart. Less Nintendo, for one. And no more junk food. Working hard, deferral of gratification, and being satisfied with what you have-- uniquely anti-American values in the scope of things.
And not to mention avoiding
making a ruckus-- which I tended not to do in public for the sake of "saving
face" but around those I knew well it was something else all together.
But around an Asian sweetheart, I would never screw up. Not even once, not even if the itch was of my nattering Jewish mother which was just like a roiling mosquito bite. At most, in a business suit befitting of a Hong Kong businessman, I would hiss at her to "BE QUIET!". Maybe I would reach for a phone and tell my bowing goons to throw her out the revolving doors of my high-rise office building made out of steel & glass. That was TRUE Asian grace.
******************
Breakfast at the Majestic, the diner owned by Bill the Greek. . . . . a place where one didn't have to be a Samurai 100% of the time.
From the old world over-- of Greek marble buildings kissing the clouds, of giant pink clam shells by the sea shore, of olive laurals & feisty, lacksadaisical living, Bill sternly polished a shot glass in his establishment found in the heart of the mended, gentrified Central West End. When Mom sent me up to drop off the check, he always flipped me a 5¢ mint.
But before that time, I'd always plead with my Mom for another Sprite-- as soberly and with as much seriousness as possible. My need was urgent, my need could not be denied.
Compulsively neatening a napkin, half-smiling as her eyes traveled around the restaurant, she'd "foo-foo" the notion even though I was fighting off roiling nausea. You see, I never learned to quit slathering my hot cakes with quite so much maple syrup. . . . . But Mom was funny with money-- not stinting on her artistic "kamquats" because she wanted beauty in her life.
"It gives me joy. . . . . and peace!". That's what I get for having a flaky '60s Jewish liberal for a mother! One who meditated and went to the gym!She had about as much flair for that wonderful possibility of a SECOND soda as stopping at the Baskin Robbins across the street-- even as the brown Honda Accord thumped over the cobblestones on the way home.
It was the 5 & 10
toy shop that sold penny sweets and gee-gaws and video games, in the heart of wealthy candy-ass Clayton. The prices were astronomical and the
clientele were spoiled pulp rotten-- grab! grab! grab!-- while little old ladies fondly remembered back to
My brother and I spent our $1.50 allowance on candy (-- such a paltry sum, we didn't bother to scrimp & save!) and played the video games on display above the cold glass jewel case.
Every so often the old salesman-- glasses, white hair, suspenders, & bow-tie-- would scowl at we kids, his look saying
"if any of you
young punks try to shoplift I'll have the police over here faster than you can
Jack Robinson! And by god, I'll prosecute under the fullest extent of the law!".
None of us wanted to banished from our penny candy preserve, so never dared. The aghast expression of the old ladies behind the counter, as if they had never heard of such a thing! "Why a dirty boy, a filthy boy!" grabbing him by the arm and leading him around harshly. Try to run, but they've blocked the exits!
Every two months or so my brother and I would get haircuts at
"Fantastic Sam's", unpleasantly puncturing into our Spicer's time
two shops over with much distraction and irritation. Greeted by the sweet, airy smells of conditioner and specialty shampoo we'd sit in the orange leather chairs, read the plastic-covered kids' magazines, and greedily help ourselves to the complimentary lumps of chalky pink bubblegum until Mom said
"that's enough"
with the downward tug of her mouth
smiling and twitching uncomfortably with the absurdity of our youthful
inappropriateness, what the insanely "right answer" was, but which she could
never express directly as a liberal therapist.
This was fashion. . . . . hot pink neon lights. . . . . models with eye-liner & red French hats squinting seductively into the camera lens, and as an overweight young Missouri boy with an above-average I.Q, I figured that someday I'd join the fast set!
Jumbo sets & champagne, standing around in a tuxedo at classy parties, not knowing how I'd get there but guessing that I'd end up with a fashion model on my arm somehow. . . . . or at least a nice Jewish girl who made him "scrunch up", he felt so "mushy".
It was like those anime cartoons that knew exactly what to do tap into as he watched, MORTIFIED, yet entranced. A shy, repressed young man in shirt sleeves who blushes intensely every time an excruciatingly-cute girl with big eyes wanders into the scene. Later, she is taken hostage by evil, twisted, impersonal forces and the boy must use his magical power and technological know-how to turn into "a super-robot" to save her and all of Tokyo.
GAAAAHHHHH!!!!
Such consideration, such fealty to the majestic, lone wolf. . . . . the thing of out-state t-shirts and Native American soul consciousness We kids shouted kindness at the wolves, but the shy animals kept their distance, not seeming to acknowledge our exhortations to survive & propagate. However, in our hearts, we supposed that if the wolves understood the collection plate sent around on their behalf, they would certainly thank us. Ears pricking forward and back, tongues lolling out with satisfaction as they panted.
At such earth-friendly venues, it was not unknown to sell "Rainforest Crunch" candy. A substantial amount of the non-profit proceeds would go to buy up tracts of jungle so the jaguar, condor, and tapir had adequate roaming ground to fuck, shit, and die.
Naturally, any left-leaning, environmentally-friendly good like that is going to be prohibitively expensive. . . . . and Mom made us split a measly bar three ways! I threw a hissy-fit and called her a
"flaky cheap-ass!".
"Obnoxious", Mom would utter with great obviousness, raising her eyebrows and holding up the laminated piece of red construction paper like a child therapist. It was driven into my skull like a flutter of bats of exactly what I didn't want to hear, a point as shrill as an ice-pick. . . . . gooey Pavlovian conditioning that drove me mad as I'd bury my head into my folded arms and sniggle "like the dickens".
That was her ineffective way of reading me "the riot act", like the concept of "The Swear Jar" that if I kept cursing "a blue streak" with an accumulation of nickels and quarters and dimes we'd get to order pizza. The incentive system was twisted beyond recognition when you'd deliberately start cursing in case you were hungry that night and wanted "to tip the basket" in your greedy favor with a gruesome smile on your face.
Her lectures on "thrift & savings" made about as much sense as whatever she did in her private practice, such as counsel people-- holding their hands and gradually getting around to telling them the psychologically-obvious for $150/hour over 50 sessions, when their fragile egos could finally "take it". Truth did not come in blows under my Mom's influence, and we boys never really quite grasped the value of money-- nor the hardness of truth. That is, when you could always "shake the money tree" and mortgage future Christmas or birthday checks from either her or the rich Jewish relatives up in New York and escape the bonds of servitude for yet another day.
Grandma & Grandpa
-- "Oh, Hi-- I just want to make sure that the children are taken care of!"
-- "Feh! They outta major in math & science like me! Anyone can be artsy-fartsy!"
Contractors came and went constantly, always tinkering around with our house that Mom saw as "an art project". Painters, roofers, landscapers as we children stayed inside-- powerless when she turned our house into a pink & purple candy-striped monstrosity. She'd protest that people would stop and take pictures of the house in the rain because it was so beautiful but I thought it was reporters from "The National Enquirer" doing exposés on daffy women all over the country.
I've come to see the analogy of the crane and rhinoceros. What is true for this crane-- an agile, silly bird-- is not true for a heavy land mammal. A crane can walk through the water without making a disturbance while a rhino will make big waves. A crane has wings and is light, and can kind of "hop around" while a rhino is "more grounded" by the laws of gravity and can't jump to save it's life. A crane falls for simple-minded tricks over and over, because it's brain is small while a rhinoceros is somewhat more intelligent but it's problem is anger and stubbornness. So oftentimes, they both fall into the same dynamic of fooling themselves and getting caught in traps but for different reasons. Just how this rhinoceros sprang from the loins of a crane, I shall never fathom. . . . . but as long as she doesn't peck on me I'll keep her around.
But at the time I'd watch television and the movies, and fantasize about becoming "a child actor". Mom would disabuse me of that notion by saying the field "was awfully competitive", akin to rushing out to buy the most popular Nintendo game in a season of shortage and turning up "empty-handed". Well, Michael never liked it "that way", so he let the matter drop.
It was largely my choice to be "unhappy & unlucky", an either/or proposition where it was "a deliberate blindness", my urge to be great-- like a battleship-- the H.M.S. Bismarck, perhaps-- trying to barge through the Panama Canal but getting jammed because it was over-laden with the freight of pomposity. The ship would hardly turn around, but would push forward and tear the hull while ripping out the sides of the passageway. While people on land would scream at "The Captain", he would put his hand in his coat jacket as if he was posing for a portrait and draft a declaration of war. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular. I was also a very lazy bastard who coasted along more on his "puffed-up" reputation than substance and when usurped and unable to scramble back into prominence, falling into elaborate throes of self-pity as I drank deeply from the cup of sorrow of what I wouldn't do for myself. All because I refused to conform, impaled gruesomely on the stake of my own stubbornness. There I would sit up in my room like "Monstro" the whale-- the most horrible, hideous beast of the deep until his father came in and laid a claw on his shoulder and said,
"Oh, come now" and threw him a dead porpoise to gnaw on which didn't do my weight any favors.And then at the ole' apartment there was Ashley who lived across
the hall, a cute little blonde urchin a year older.
She always greeted me by the apartment steps and your 10 year-old author scrunches
up bashfully in front of her sunniness like a shy, creeping thing and mutters
back a conservative "hello" as much awkwardness hangs in the air, that he covers with a
flurry of movement-- trying to pretend as if he's busy and occupied. She was the
ultimate Nintendo partner, who would make a boy so bashful while they're sitting
there in matching beanbag chairs that he'd let her be "first player"-- she's
"Mario" while he's "Luigi", and he doesn't even play his "best game" just to
make sure that she gets a turn because that's just "the kind of guy he was". *****************
Mystery and the supernatural, on this swirling speck known as planet earth, had far more appeal than flat-out science,
the world of beakers and graphs and periodic tables. Folklore, ghost stories, vampires, werewolves, and zombies-- if not the flat-out occult did it for me at a certain age. At the local library I always made my way over to a particular section and carried up an armful of books, which the old, hoary librarians scanned out at the counter without a second look. "At least he's READING", they must have figured.
I always envisioned myself as some cruel, yet benevolent authoritarian tyrant who could be capable of much generosity. That is, when
he wasn't like
"Ivan the Terrible" riding across the
steppes on black nights of terror and throwing peasants, usually his younger
brother, into the icy Volga as he looked on with wide, tragic Eastern European
eyes. Ole' Ivan, when he wished to choose a bride, would hold a grand, fancy
dance held in the St. Petersburg ballroom and he would pick only the most humble, intelligent, and beautiful. The meritocracy in effect, in other words.
Ashley, the girl who lived across the hall from me at the apartment, became part of my fantasy life. She was a working class scrapper, eleven years old, who helped her mother baby-sit the kids-- a small home-based business on the side. I imagined that someday I would reveal to her my princely, upper middle-class origins at my high-strung Jewish mother's and show her beneficence. Would she partake in the supernatural? Would we go around the world investigating the weird & unexplained like the researchers of "Ripley's Believe It or Not"?
We'd hang out on the stoop, the sweetest thing in the world, and somehow I knew with her around I wouldn't have my enemies mounted up on stakes like Vlad the Impaler in 14th century Transylvania. Not even if they made fun of my weight.
********************
I step my way through demolished plaster,
through the "whrrrr" of power drills. The wooden ribs of a
busted wall, exposed like an artisan's project in Renaissance Italy. Yet this is
dingy South St. Louis and these folk are poor as church mice. Here is the
radio/cassette player spackled with white paint. The hoosier wife had to shout over the melè to be heard.
Their friends were over, lackadaisically renovating the place in exchange for a day of rock n' roll radio, a few cracked beers, a communal bag of rustling pretzels laying open, and a couple of hours lounging in the living room watching "Saturday Movie II" on KPLR 11. In between car chases and sweaty action heroes slinging guns before a backdrop of explosions, advertisements for car title-loan services and E-Z financing for those with "bad credit" or "no credit". The gray light of January shined through the grime-streaked windows, in these days of the early '90s recession suffusing the land with its deep bone-ache.
Inertia.
The husband sits on the broken-down porch, his elbows splayed out on
the cushions like a friendly ex-con. Black curly hair. The pallor of a recovering alcoholic. The blue tattoos of a hard life running up and down his arms. Snakes.
Grim reapers. Harleys. Mottoes whose gist seem to signify "Death from Above". He sometimes regrets having them, for how stable folk might perceive him. Stable folk like my Mom.
She gets along with blue-collar folk; she gets along with everybody. Russian Jewish, fine features, a stretched black t-shirt over her slender legs. High-strung, yet with the easy demeanor of a liberal social worker. . . . . a New York City ebullience taking in everyone as she stands on the soap box of tolerance. No one could dislike her-- perched on her legs like a fat crane.
Mom saw something decent in this husband & wife, and joins them in a drive to create an outreach center for drug & alcohol abuse
clients. The Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance firm plans to fund half the venture
and she'll put up the rest, lending it to the couple with a bond of trust.
The wife shouts a hoarse welcome and the husband stands to greet their investor. And their investor's
unsuspecting kids. My brother's six and I'm going on eleven. Handshakes all around. I like Bill immediately. His grip is firm,
and I'm taken in by the romance of working class people "just trying to get by".
My mental gears are gnashing, and I think of "the heavy metal alley cat"
slinking past with just the change in his ripped jeans' pockets and a bottle of
booze in hand setting up a show where there would be lots of "bodacious babes".
His audacity and
"balls to the wall" gutter mentality out there "livin' on the
edge" catapaults him into the American dream. Or at least that seemed like
the logical course of action to a 10 year-old.
The wife leads us through the indoor rubble, where I peer around and soak in the laid-back atmosphere, swelling up with the romance of it while the guys drink beer and scratch themselves. She hangs her head out the back-door and yells for her son. . . . . . voice carrying over porch steps, chain-link fence, deserted alleys, and cracked asphalt beyond.
Hands on hips, shaking her auburn ponytail with good-natured reproof, she tells us to make ourselves right at home. We remove our jackets just as she throws open the fridge and puts bottles of Coca-Cola in our hands. I feel like a liberator welcomed into a village, greeted with splendorous hospitality.
Upstairs we go
to play video games. Busted closet space. Nylon bags, old shoe boxes. Shirts on hangars, laying rumpled on the bed in chaos. It reminds me of my Dad's place,
a consummate junk-hoarder,
and I feel even more at home. We turn on the Sega Genesis they bought for Christmas. Six or seven games to choose from, at $40/pop, seemed an expensive proposition.
"They're not good with money-- they blow the entire wad" Mom explained on the drive over. She could tell us these things, but we were naught to repeat them. Like how, for instance, when they got a bit of money in their pocket they'd dress up and visit a fancy restaurant, chuckling with the abashed novelty of it. Or buy a cool car, which was parked outside the dwelling like something out of an '80s action movie, chasing around drug dealers with squealing tires and getting your windows shot out.
The working-class "at play" were a whole lot more exciting than my home of pastel colors, potted plants, and Mom's fancy artwork. I saw less-heeled parents at video arcades and flea markets-- coarse, cheerfully vulgar-- jumping in with almost as much enthusiasm as the kids
sometimes.
In fact, I liked it when the day-to-day rudiments were a chaotic ordeal, a bumptious hay-ride of panic and quick-fix solutions. For instance, I watched the wife frantically searching for her purse, eyes pinched wide open with chaos. Tone full of worry, everyone dragged along with the local crisis of the moment, while her husband folded his hands across his stomach and watched t.v.
The daughter walked in from the other room, holding the purse, and I stiffened up in my sweatshirt like a baron at a formal ball. She's 13 or 14, smiling at her company in the bloom of youth. That was one "bodacious babe", and I had my eye on her, completely enchanted.
Meanwhile, the mother and daughter quarrel-- the offspring insisting that "I only left my lipstick in there!" like it was no big deal. Later, in confidential tones, I learned that she ran away from home a couple of times and hung out with bikers. It was a blight upon my yearning, civilized soul-- like a Unitarian social reformer investigating the horror of the slums firsthand with romantic notions of reform that just never panned out, grotesquely enough. . . . .
. . . . .
Despite all the family's commotion, their son turned out pretty mellow.
Boys will be boys.
We swung the sledge a bit breathlessly, and made impact upon a cinder block. The handle tried to weave out of my hands with each slam, but I made up for it the best I could. Then we were joined by his friends. . . . . ducking out of garages, climbing over fences like stray alley cats coming down to investigate. White kids in sweatshirts & parkas, black kids in sports jackets (-- bald domes, & toothy grins). Each of us took a turn with the sledge. The cinder block was chipped at best, cheering in a circle like youth gone wild.
I introduced a motion to "get" my younger brother who at the moment was retrieving a book from Mom's car. We laugh with the idea of it, chuckling at first but stalking up silently like Indians. I call his name: dipping the vocals up and down like a wavy graph line.
"Ohhhh, Jesse. . . . .".
The gang follows my lead, picking up rocks and "beating sticks", as Jesse crawls inside the driver's door and frantically presses the lock DOWN. Mom's key chain is gripped in his baby-fat hands, knuckles white, eyes wide.
We chant his name like cultists, slowly converging on the car with grins and waving our fingers forward like "the lost boys" gone bad. Indians, Cossacks, Nazis. I lug the sledge and pretend as if I mean to smash the windshield with an icy crash. A fine sacrifice for the dumpster god-- the stinking open maw-- as we would close the grooved plastic lid in finality as my younger brother screams in the stink.
Then Mom comes outside and cheerfully deflates the tension, with an obvious "what's going on out there?". Ah, c'mon. We weren't going to kill him anyhow!
. . . . .
It was a small building, down in the main drag of Maplewood. If you're not from St. Louis, it's an older, rougher township bordering on the trashy.
The steps were wooden and steep, the heavy breath of mold on the second floor. There was the main floor that lead to open rooms of white plaster and manufactured fold-out tables. Beneath standard-issue fluorescent lights, the husband sits and concentrates. Resting his chin on knuckles, hair curling down the back of his neck. The wife leans her hip to the table, smiling with drooping eyes. Just a bit of night-work, added to the stew of 10 hour days like a 9 PM snack.
Mom had a white binder opened before her, ringlets glinting, turned to a page with the ever-present Blue Cross/Blue Shield logo. The husband nods along, struggling to keep up with the details. The white and blue reminded me of a flag, from the regal days of Old Europe. The flag of Tuscany, perhaps. The husband looked Italian enough. I could see his swarthy ancestor wearing armor. Or sailing the Mediterranean, a ring through his ear, paying for impulsive purchases with gold bullion and rubies the deepest red.
We kids roamed out front. Bikers thundered past, leaving cold winter air in their wake. Above, street banners were strung across adjacent light poles like something out of an old Western town. Above that, the black level of night. The sister trotted back to us across the street, arms missing from the green sweatshirt sleeves, hugging them to her chest in warmth.
She was gorgeous, and the air of scruffy possibility was in the evening. Her brother returned with twin sodas in
Styrofoam cups-- the dark fizz of Pepsi. Across the way, pizza chefs in yellow shirts work behind the glass. Next to that, a pawn shop.
I wished that my family was more like theirs.
. . . . .
Need I say more but the deal fell through, naturally. Paper work piled in droves; the monthly lease running out; financial meltdown.
"They were nice people", Mom explained. "Money is not their fortè".
She expected to be reimbursed, if not for the principle of the thing. Bill and his wife weren't crooks, I absolutely believe that. Besieged by creditors, forfeiting their mortgage by default, they stuck together despite their money woes-- like cornbread slop in a mixing bowl. One night, in the middle of everything, they packed up their stuff and moved across town. No forwarding address, no phone number. The son made a new alley-full of friends. The daughter ran away again.
The faintest echo I heard of them, clattering across town like tinkers, was their son going to the emergency room. Call it a lapse of judgment but his new pals stuck him under a mattress and rambunctiously hopped on their make-shift trampoline. The wail of ambulance sirens, emergency care paid for by Medicaid, the family standing in the waiting room-- eyes pinched wide open with chaos.
*******************
Years later. . . . .
When I fill up at the pump down at my local gas station, I eyeball a lad working part-time behind the counter who could either make you laugh or cry, with the state of the nation. This tall, square-shouldered youth looks so conventionally all-American, so bright-eyed, so wholesome, so much like what America is not in these woebegone, wasted times of fraud, dubiety, and degeneration that I burst out laughing. He easily takes on the cast of a baseball player slugging homeruns out of Yankee Stadium in the 1940's, or would have been the hero in "the golden age" of comic books driving off with "the girl" in a jalopy.
He is Henry Ford's "masterpiece" of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, clean-thinking WASP who marries the boss's daughter and raises fine examples of eugenically-pure Anglo-Saxon children to lead this country into the future of automation and frictionless solutions. He is "Wonder Bread" and plain, baked potato chips and light-hearted Protestant optimism. He may be kind-natured, but there's not much depth in those blue eyes of his.
If I ever tried to explain my mental pictures, and I've attempted to, broadly speaking-- he'd laugh and look around uncomfortably-- not really having the soul or historical background to know what the hell I'm talking about. For him, history exists like a pile of bleached bones-- like sedimentary rock on the edge of the Missouri cliff-sides along the highway instead of a rich potion of postmodern essences. Most people live rather unadorned existences, because there was never a reason for a creative spark to take off. Isn't it said that friction is the mother of invention? For most, it's all about touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell-- like the rolling Mars pathfinder robot sent over that strange spheroid's surface and collecting data, unable to tell you about broader meaning or implication of "what it means".
When I set eyes on him, I'm somewhat reminded of the actor, Matt Damon-- one of Winona's former suitors but only "less so". If ole' Matt looked impossibly Kennedyesque, and flashed a brilliant, elf-like perk of a smile that made him appear either superhuman, or like a caricature of Eastern Establishment handsomeness, or "a freak of nature" even, the gas station attendant appears far more like some body you'd reasonably expect to meet in person on this dusty earth-ball. Next to the hype and glitter of Hollywood, it's the difference between roadside apple cider and an artificially-flavored corporate mixture with all sorts of chemicals and preservatives, if not carcinogens as you cook under the klieg lights and get rattled by the ominous buzz of paparazzi rushing past like the sound of angry bees and slaughtered pigs, for the heinous undercurrent.
Hollywood rant aside, I always had a certain fascination for clean-cut people like these-- how the string of their souls vibrates cleanly in the cosmic ether-- and how I was always particularly drawn to WASPy girls, the ultimate Disneyfied American archetype of sweet wholesomeness. Maybe because it's almost as if I have my nose pressed up against a window, looking in on a mythical, exotic, unbothered existence where one is not dogged by complication and shame. Call it the anxiety of semi-poverty, or eating food from "the poor man's grocery", or having an upper middle-class Jewish mother who nipped at me like a goose until you knocked her back, honking, or lack of coordination that made me useless at sports or drawing anything of quality in the art-room, the learned helplessness and dark, secret shadows of being housebound and overweight, frustration at what would not change like a lawnmower grinding over tough, unyielding material with burbling oil and stink lines of dark rage and the yawning cavern of sorrow for all these things.
Ole'
Monstro had been in a place where he had been promised "a magical undersea
kingdom" by his flaky "sunfish" of a mother, had swam all that way, and had
merely found an empty cave full of whale-shit. If that wasn't been enough, there
was a tribe of creepy-looking, mundo-bizzaro hammerhead sharks that began to pick on him. It wasn't exactly
that "Young Monstro" was any less grotesque than they were, but since there were
more of them he assumed "he was the freaky one" and swam off.
And here was another corner of the ocean where you had the anime geeks, Green party leftists, and less stern, constitutionally-weaker people who "fritter about" without purpose like "seaweed".
And sometimes the phone rings, plaintive and noisome as I gritted my teeth like Clint Eastwood obstructed by the red tape of civilization.
In my life of sales calls and AT&T trying to sell me carrier long distance I was about ready to throw the phone out the window and send a yowling cat scurrying with the crash of trash cans.
"WHAT?!" I shouted into the receiver.
It was Jim Hamilton, my wobbly socialist mentor who saw "Trotykist potential" in this grizzled whiskey-hound, surrounded by the trappings of capitalistic excess in his insanely packed home office of books, CD's, and pictures taped up on the wall like the hang-out of Genghis Khan. There was selfless organizing for the faceless, ungrateful hordes mumbling behind their screen doors in the steaming heat of summertime in this sleepy river town, then again there was retreating back to the cool cave like a grizzly bear and licking the blood off your paws with one's own kills. The vegetable mind of the collective usually did not have me out there foraging for the common good. Not enough calories to tide over a warm-blooded carnivore with a craving for the raw meat of excitement. One came up with a bogus excuse and avoided going to another Trotskyist 4th Internationalist meeting in a dumpy community center.
But whatever you want to say, when it comes to drinking, drugging, gambling, pornography, and whoring, the puritan inside would recoil at these sins and feel the social expectation to shudder and be "right-thinking" in all things like a Samurai meditating in a tea room. Yet in different circumstances, part of me would wink at these "real men's pursuits" and slap my buddy on the shoulder down at the barracks, or at the bar, or wherever it is that men gather and "have their understanding" with camaraderie. Men let each other alone, so long as each "is patrolling their perimeter" with honor intact. There is a way to act and a way not to act. A man keeps to himself and is not getting all over his neighbor like an exploding paint-bomb of florid emotion.
Most would find that highly embarrassing.
A man needs to be in control of himself, yet in his bemused self-interest he may slowly be led into temptation like a lion gnawing on a ham-hock. A beer, a Playboy magazine, a poker game. If his mother saw him, he would merely blush. . . . . if his minister saw him, he would be mortified. And he certainly wouldn't continue on with children skipping around the room.
Men need a vent and sometimes the only outlet are somewhat questionable pastimes. So long as he knows the difference, there's still hope for him yet. . . . . but always remember the contrast between professed ideals and the unspoken subterranean world where men are men and the sheep are frightened and the Samurai toast their sake to the sumo wrestlers.
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
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