"A Strange Interlude at
Summer Camp"
No closet ransacked, no scandal defused as Michael
confronts something that has bothered him for years!
When the folkways of a strong, honest manhood are not handed down from one generation to the next like oak trees to seedling, there is trouble to be had in the land. Call it a desert of ache, where little cool rain falls, and emotionally-stunted males take to fighting over warped conceptions of "honor" like chittering rats that yank a rotten hunk of cheese back and forth in some kind of underbelly of an American nightmare that most desirable women are not aware of, and shall never be until a survivor comes forward and lays down a topography of this arid nation's features. . . . . like maneless lions upon a sun-blasted corner of tuburcular tree-stripped isolation, twisted-up sprained paws, and gang-pack "hit squads" with sorrier specimens not all that much "better off".
But first, a little bit about myself. . . . .
Whatever you want to say about "the struggling male", my case was a little unique yet no less Shakespearean in predictability with what we know about "human foibles" in the happy "lemon gum-drop" plentitude of liberalism that subsidizes failure and pats the young on the back "and leaves them be" with poor excuse-making. . . . . a mixture of blame and self-pity that thinks itself "some kind of wisdom" like curdled "Cheeze Doodle" crud befouling a Nintendo controller like so much burbling grease and bulging waistlines that huffs after the kick-ball and moons over the fortunes "of luckier men", thinking it will magically "be his someday".
I was an out-of-sort type throughout much of my childhood, into adolescence with a few breaks in the clouds that I would call "good periods". Asperger's Syndrome had either, depending on your view, blessed or cursed me with an ultra-rich tapestry of thought and feeling that was remarkably sensitive to a great deal of what most people could not feel while leaving me "muted" in other ways. If I was "sitting in the tank" of my mind, looking outside the view-screen of my eyes at what scenes transpired, my internal instruments had some of the most advanced equipment ever graced to military/human hardware. However, it's communications-- transmitting and receiving messages, particularly "the code" of non-verbal social cues-- "were somewhat shaky".
As the driver who lumbered around slowly and deliberately and somewhat "top-heavy", I had a hard time "keeping in formation" or "driving in a straight column" with my quicker compatriots because my "feedback" was spotty at best, blind at worst as I stumbled through the social terrain, if not a period of being "legally blind" because I refused to wear glasses for my pudgy, squinting, nearsighted condition. Whatever I was, you could call me "hopeful" when I wasn't in despair for these things, to which I could not attribute a name.
In my earliest memories, I simply presumed that everyone's "gear" was exactly the same as mine but after a time, a boy senses that they could not "sense" what he did. One obviously would feel a sense of grandiosity for his gifts, but mortification for his disadvantages, somewhat self-imposed, as I began to regard myself as "a special case" and somewhat withdraw from the world as a part of these conflicted impulses, both "the divine son" and "the shit creature of Golgotha", depending on his comparative chronic low-level of anxiety and depression and remorseful tidal wave of clumsy bad feeling. The one thing I had, more than anyone, was a titanic sense of ego that did not like to be criticized, or told any different that with his gifted instrumentation "he was the most brilliant piece of machinery ever devised by man". Yes, "the diamond in the rough", the disguised "noble birth" of a lordly, oblivious butt-head who probably only needed "a good thrashing".
The author notes with a snicker how "Michael" in Hebrew means "he who is like God?" with a big, fat question mark. But then you have "Adams", which is rooted in "Adam", the first man who fell from divine grace in the garden because he ate from the fruit of knowledge, offered by woman-- his better half-- in order to become "fully human". And his middle name, "Steven", comes from one of my mother's favorite uncles who was consummately gifted and kind.
(-- This etiology is making "Jello Biafra" seem transient and piddling like most lisping, honk-voiced characters on the left)
But as "a fallen sort", Prometheus brooding with his chin on his fist like Rodin's "The Thinker"-- yet only about waist-high-- your kind, gifted, and lovable author at a nascent stage of development had no sense of scale or proportion. His softie, milquetoast parents of a post-McGovernik era could not shake him of indomitable will, "that once he got it into his head that he wanted something, that was it". Or didn't want something even, like turning his head away when being told "to eat his vegetables". This could either work in a positive way, or negatively. And for me, it was the sump pit of "won't", shortchanged into "can't" .
"Satan's seed" was accustomed to having everything at once in an orgy of instant gratification: he would attempt to lift the entire steak off the plate at the same time, where it would then collapse in a splutter of hot, spurting juice. If only he had taken the time and discipline to cut the meat into manageable slices like a reasonable child, he wouldn't have scalded himself or knocked over his water glass. Pride wounded, he took to feeling sorry for himself and wailing as other people turned their head in the restaurant and wondered who this fat, crying little boy was with his mild, pattering parents "trying to settle him down". Lectures were ineffective, as he would block his ears with his hands-- mortified at being thought of as "unintelligent" and made all the angrier when he couldn't "silence criticism" with the click of the remote control.
As it is with young men like this, my I.Q. was pleasingly high but what you wanted to call my "emotional intelligence" was quite infantile and about as "P.U." as a vomit-stained bib.
My grandfathers on either side were exactly the same way. Ole' Chesley on my father's side was a mean drinker who ran wild with four brothers out in rural Missouri and terrorized his family with abusive rants and "getting fired" from practically every job he ever had. He was a World War II veteran who always had the brights, motivation, and desire to become an engineer but couldn't because he had a wife and a litter of kids to feed. He was only put in his place every five years or so when grandma had her fill and started throwing pots and pans at him; a strange way to ridicule his bankruptcy and trouble putting food on the table-- a sure way to drive home the point as he got clunked on the head with the sound of an empty cash register that rung up a "no sale".
On my mother's side, Herman was a brilliant, verbally two-fisted scrapper who fought his way up from New York "City College" and variously did work for the Army Corps of Engineers and chemical companies. He was so talented, that no one could afford "to fire him" and let him rave on like a Yiddish-accented banshee. The household would be in a state of emotional banishment as he hurled invective and "considered it settled" before going back down to his copy of the paper around the breakfast table, his voice rising like a swelling horn to put whoever in their place before his antsy wife, scuttling around the kitchen like a nervous canary, told him "to go shit in his hat".
Both my grandfathers had produced somewhat "recessive" children, and then my parents produced me. . . . . who ruled with "the knotted scepter of Cain". If not a club, then a Nintendo controller as he sent "Super Mario" scurrying around "The Mushroom Kingdom" at his imperious will like "Lord of all of 8-bit heaven" as he slurped soda and farted like "The Beast" foretold in Revelations with a snort. Only occasionally was "this boy tyrant" usurped by "the wrath of Dad", but only "when he really deserved it" like Bart chased around the house by Homer Simpson and throttled to gagging effect. On to nature primeval. . . . .
On the PBS documentaries that were running in our den constantly, a pride of lions lay sleepily in the African savannah. Cubs play with their father's flicking tail, and "he takes no mind". Our Dad was very much like that, when he didn't tell us" to go away" because he was reading a book and didn't want to be irritated by jibing imps dancing with glee.
In the nature video, the father lion teaches the cub "how to roar"-- both the adult's coaching bellow and junior's scratchy imitation, the cub's ears pressed flat down as he "holds that note" and the elder nods. Our Dad never really taught us "how to be assertive".
This would haunt me for years, though he did teach us a love for reading and was never short of neat tidbits about history and an amusing anecdote gleaned from NPR as we gathered around his knee, roving around the county in the old beat-up station-wagon or sitting in the run-down neighborhood "Jack n' the Box" with our tray of burgers and soda. All and all, we were bright, well-learned kids who also "had a hard road to hoe" in a world that didn't necessarily value our skills or the cradle from whence my brother and I sprung like so much history/poli-sci/social work vomit, probably no better or worse-- in the eventual scheme of things-- than others of that trope.
I had never been formally diagnosed with any disorder, though my lack of coordination was apparent and I had received some occupational therapy when I was very young, if not a bit of speech coaching for a minor speech impediment as the boy lumbered from side-to-side like an Ewok. My handwriting was a hopeless scrawl and Mom joked that
But they didn't know exactly "what to do with me" and hoped that nature would take its course for the good. I remember my mother sitting by my beside, telling me about the great future that was ahead and how life would keep inevitably getting "better and better". Like the 19th century ideal of "progress", or the 1960's credo that directed my parents' social work activism as, yes-- stranded McGoverniks who still thought the system could be fixed like so many shining Kennedy moments captured in the pages of "Life" like iconic poster-board.
I believed. . . . . because there was nothing better to believe in, and even I wasn't so much of a "sour-puss" to deny "my heaven on earth to come" like a party-pooper foo-fooing "the end of history" as everyone boogied in the streets in perfect world harmony.
Concurrent with my merge into adolescence, the world paradigm was beginning to morph in some very strange ways. The Cold War was over and the media was conglomerating with massive, titanic forces I didn't necessarily understand, like the same within my body.
Forces above were ruthlessly reaching for what was "the most profitable" without respecting the endangered environment, the cries of dismay, of those below who were on "the losing end of evolution" and were thrashing like a Brontasaurus in a tar pit as the sky went red with a bloated, dying sun. Or at least that's what it felt like "up in Michael's head". . . . . terrified as he was at the changes going on around him, within himself, unable to give an adequate account as the nation fast-forwarded into the '90s and the Clinton era and the end of the century and the dawning of a new millennium with it's attendant overtures of cosmic implication.
I was reminded of one of Gary Larson's "Far Side" cartoons when a seminar of dinosaur scientists are gathered in a hall, and one says "The situation is bleak, gentleman. The climate is changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have brains about the size of a walnut".
If you can imagine how much I identified with that single-cartoon panel-- giddily depressed, so jumpy he didn't feel like going outside to face the world-- but then when he did he was like a Russian exiting the Kremlin who carried a top secret sheaf of papers on the eve of communism's fall when an entire world was unsure of what may come.
What was in those papers were the basic "blue-print" of how saw things, that hopefully upon another star he would still "come out #1".
But he could not escape life's exigencies. . . . .
I was akin to the condition of the broken-down Soviet state, a product of its own disease-- laziness and corruption. Rife with incompetence, inefficiency, broken machinery, poor excuses, crumbling manifestos, strained theories of dubious social science, blustering gestures of chest-thumping titanic nationalism, and not forgetting self-exemption for the leaders of the very Kremlin.
I might as well have been a hard-liner standing on a tank. . . . . but that is a different story for another time.
*******************
As that quotation by H.L. Mencken goes, "It is a one of the capital tragedies of youth-- and youth is a time of tragedy-- the the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect".
And that too, would go for my peers.
If I was like Gogol staring on with wide, owl-like eyes through the bars of an insane asylum across the river somewhere in Gorky park, contemplating "how the candle now burns at both ends" like a stray line from that joyless riff-a-romic Metallica polemic, "The Frayed End of Sanity", my fellow 6th graders in that jail of a middle-school weren't very intelligent.
They could not understand the hypnosis of a chess game, or at least the idea of it, when two grandmasters face off and one offers a timely queen sacrifice whose implications are so stark, unexpected, and unsettling that his opponent surrenders his king and causes the stolid Russian crowd to lay on a spontaneous shower of applause and gold coins.
-- "We don't know any Russians around here, do we?"
Instead, they were flinging their fingers around to the creepy, funky beat of Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Membrane". . . . . a state of MTV degeneration that your author could not readily "funk out to" like the icy stare of the Eastern European race-soul, about as "funky" and "mysterious" in it's own way as the Hagia Sophia or the twisting onion domes of Tetris.
But you can bet he tried to fit in, yes?
In class we were required to perform self-conscious readings of little 5-minute "fairy tales". But not the classics, no!-- but modern ones produced by authors trying to flag down young peoples' attention in reading by being slightly off-putting and outrageous.
One was "The Stinky Cheese Man".
No one at that age, especially around 12 years-old when you're under the onerous peer pressure of each other, wants to be reminded of that. . . . . the unforgivable human stink when you're not as fresh and well-scrubbed and bright-lit and casual as a pop icon or movie star in the "tween" magazines, on cable, "Entertainment Tonight", or the silver screen like flitting, sour, cracker-jack celebrities striking ironic poses. But the clueless, dove-like teacher with short gray hair and the withered pain of cancer-stricken endurance didn't understand our concerns.
At one critical juncture, a wayfarer played by a rotten 12 year-old whose kicking obliteration I faced by the double-stacked, cheerfully-bright fire-truck red lockers with the dinge of neglect between each & every period, asked in a pitifully small, insecure voice--
"what's that funky smell?", his eyes held in one place, trying not to dance with his scrunched-up features.The bastardized slur of Ebonics:
"It be 'de funky cheese man's momma!"
Later, much laughter and frivolity in the hallway. . . . . like a smiling Franz Kafka clapped on the shoulder by Zulus.
To the extent that I was dying to live, living to die and was getting nowhere as the candle blazed bi-laterally. Despite little incidents like these when I was "the king of the class", the pressure eventually got so head-splitting on my senses with the sad, deflating balloon of my self-esteem that I transferred to another school-- like Trotsky leaving a straw dummy in his bunk and escaping to the liberalized West.
*******************
Could it be said to be "the best of times", or "the worst of times" as Gogol beheld a madness of a new sort? Women, African-Americans, "people of color", Jews, queers, "the transgendered", if not Generation-X and all the so-called "marginalized" getting into the act and "talking about talking" like a pesky talk-show of gesturing hand movements and "self-esteem" issues and pretending to talk about stern truths while ignoring the bedrock facts of Kafkaesque proportion as if could all be "smoothed over" in front of a cow-eyed audience of young people, if not mean-spirited sneering in "the cheap seats" in an orgy of grandstanding "and pretending to be the reasonable ones" like Clinton-voting alt-children unable "to get to the bottom of things" with the secret language "of what goes unsaid" and the preposterousness of ironic cultural language that naturally, presumed "that everyone was on the same page"-- but savaged you if one wasn't with one-upmanship and snide lingo, and pitied for the stricken like a retarded spastic wheeled on a crash-cart and struggling to speak, if not the ego-gratifying "authenticity" of speaking to the lesser.
Maybe one day the middle-schoolers would get their own politically-correct mention, like a sun-lit Vietnamese woman making a crucified post on the seashore, if one of us had the meticulous, footnoted ambition to actually type up some kind of left-wing manifesto/screed for a Berkley student newspaper that Oliver Stone would arch his eyebrows at in significance, and actually "throw some largess" our way-- hopefully some free Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo games. Preferably "Mortal Kombat", as you had v-fingered martial-arts figures tearing each other to pieces with blood-flying, fist-meets-face digitized violence in the frenetic vein of "Pulp Fiction" or "Natural Born Killers" which was the state of our "extreme media" era when 1st Amendment hucksters, posing with heads askew, asked questions that apparently had "no answers" and which by themselves, apparently-- "was some kind of answer".
Down in "the cheap seats", here the young were, the defiant Nirvana generation, balling their fists up in flannel shirts and proclaiming themselves to be staunch individualists, "nonconformists", pissy and self-righteous, daring the authorities to take away their right to be petulant as Bill Clinton flowed honey-drippin' rhetoric and MTV fed them what they wanted. World-weary, cynical, mean-spiritedly taking a drag off a cigarette as they contemplated the futility of man's enterprise and figured there was no point aspiring after anything unless you could either get rich or ultra-famous (-- not very likely). Wrapped up in bottomless speculation of how far you'd have to get beaten-down-to-the-curb with the threshing floor of society's indifference-- why, even to try.
You had the image of a homeless female street musician standing in the subway terminal and playing guitar, singing her heart out, for a few coins from the briefcase-toting masses before the cops
(-- "the PIGS!") moved her along. Or a grubby Italian man selling bootlegged t-shirts outside the Coliseum in Rome, a crooked grin of endearment as he hustled 14 hours a day in front of the tourists, before he's shut down by the copyright enforcers.Someone hears an idle rumor about someone else piecing together a pipe bomb in their apartment, presumably to throw at a policeman trotting by on horseback. It arises a shiver of anticipation, of excitement. The worship of nihilism, a spasm of meaningless violence to protest the confinement of being alive as the rebellious youth "STICK IT TO THE MAN", but more likely blowing themselves into bloody chunks by accident.
"Game Over", dude.
Like a freakish-looking, pop-eyed geek playing a "next generation" console as "a game tester" and doodling around compulsively four hours in a pile of their own grease, electolytes, and skin flakes.
The biggest boast of all, was no one wanted to be "a POSTER-CHILD" for anything, a desperate eye-dabbing cause like a saucer-eyed waif on the side of the road being saved by Mother Teresa.
A "media whore", in other words-- an image of this bitchy, self-important prima DONNA downing scotch and telling her harrowing life story for the producers of "Extra!" and the glitz "Entertainment Tonight" of how she used to know Rock Hudson before he withered away into a convulsing, teeth-chattering mummy who weighed only 86 pounds as he excreted a thin, yellow, watery gruel from his drainage pipe where he had been "fucked into oblivion" by whatever-kind-of-homo-congo-line like a chain-letter that informs you "you're dead".
If this wasn't disturbing enough, I found this savagery brought about by boredom the most disturbing thing I had ever witnessed. "Think for yourself" was the credo but the mass mind was already made up with nothing-- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING-- held sacred.
On and on. . . . . On and on. . . . .
Why, a long line of skinny, naked Jewish males hoping to get laid like panting neurosis, obsessive-compulsive will, blown up on the flat-out camcorder video screens of New York-dominated MTV like the modern youth culture shibboleth of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll as the ultimate existential authority. Yes, or any kind of media paradigm-- past, present, or future that won't have a postmodern, media-savvy audience like my brother and myself rolling in the aisles with hilarity as much like "hipsters" raised on "Archie comics" and old "Boy's Life" magazines, if not an antidivullian Atari 2600 can "with hindsight".
It seemed "easier" and "safer" to go along with the raging mores of the day and show deep piety as if you would get an inherent reward for being subsumed by this thoughtless mass brazenly uplifting the destruction of forms, throwing yourself up blindly into the melting pot of impurity and miscegenation and the downward drag of the crowd in order to belong like an atom drifting along in MTV-marketed cosmopolitan chaos.
And not much was going on in this bankrupt world, as if everything was played out and "post". "All wars fought, all ideals dead", and nothing was left except for the grotesque squabbling like pigeons fighting for a chunk of pretzel on the beach, a swarm of flies whizzing out of an overripe trash can as people went on pseudo-intellectually about "paradigms" and "hemongeny".
What cautious conclusions could I make from all this emptiness, where it led to? Well, I knew we all had to work hard for something to be anybody besides a passive spectator, a worthless parasite standing around uselessly with their arms hanging slackly at their sides like any one of the expendable hordes passed over and left to rot with insecurity like a beached sea lion as the crowd turned all their attention and pity to a blonder, more angular, photogenic type like River Phoenix or the self-pitying sump of Kurt Cobain. . . . .
To see a short, rail-thin girl donned in a black-strap dress with clockspring orange curls and a cottage-cheese complexion, langorously looking down at your lazy punk ass
with contempt because you didn't show up with your junior cub assignment while she's turning in dry, meticulously-written 12th grade English assignments.
"Oh baby, I surrender",
throwing yourself at her feet in submission-- for her love-- but she'd kick you off with a black slipper and a grimace.
"Oh, how grotesque is humanity"
she'd think to herself with a gothic air before bobbing down the hallway like an
apparition out of a Bram Stoker novel.
So I vowed to become a better, to believe in this nihilism wholeheartedly as someone who grossly missed the point. I was young, foolish, and dutiful-- like Dudley Do-Right saluting those grunge avatars malingering around in the Mounties' dispatch office and shooting up heroin.
"A million poppies to make me sleep",
he'd slur with a marble-mouth, drool trickling out the side of his unhappy, down-turned lips as his eyes rolled in the back of his head like some kind of slow, postmodern death-fuck of the warm-blooded senses."Yes, sir!",
as I gallivanted out the door with a broom up my ass with fear, hoping that I never for a second doubted the inherent "transcendence of human freedom", that humanity was progressing upward with at least a 45º angle.
And not forgetting the other buffoons and imposters and long
cavalcading line of idiots who wandered into my view-screen, this Shakespearean
stage who evidently were
"credible specimens" according to our ass-rag of a pandering liberal press,
carpet-bagging off of America's destruction. But with enough smoke n' mirrors,
and the fact that the presence of a crowd will always attract a bigger crowd,
even if it be something so barbaric as the sacking of our cultural capitals,
"one can be fooled" into denying their senses in the name of
counter-intuitive "sophistication" when the question is, "who are you
to say?" and always taking the side of the criminal, if not Lucifer as
"the
devil's advocate" of muddied issues and equivocation and a paralysis to act.
But how was I to know this, barely a teenager? "Think for yourself" but the mass mind was already made up like riots and looting in the street. . . . . and poopy-faced magazine spreads.
*******************
Here I was. . . . . stranded at summer camp off in Colorado with the other young generational heirs of this received post-cultural wisdom. The main lesson, imparted like a stay in state prison, was keeping quiet and staying out of their storming way as behemoths of older kids ruled the hill like a herd of Velcioraptors & Tyrannosaurus Rexes. I was big enough like a socially-awkward Iguanadon, but they were tons meaner and quite carnivorous.
Basically, it was a lordship of military school delinquents whose Texan stockbroker parents unwittingly sprung them on the woebegone attending this place. This point was proven, I think, when they found a cow skull in the neighboring creek bed, dressed it in a blue bandanna, and mounted it up on a stake like something out of "Lord of the Flies".
The girls were no less rotten.
Petulant bitches they were, raised on MTV and Diet Coke (®). They placed their "sincerity of character" on open display. . . . . how they "related" to tortured, arrogant alt-rock idols with spiky names like Trent Reznor, how they talked their best friends out of swallowing a jar of sleeping pills, how they had slithering, gay friends of the family who were radical members of PETA, or describing any other lisping, limp-wristed character of their trendy, planned, celebrity-friendly communities. Yes, as lunk-headed, River Phoenix-lookin' characters with slightly-crossed eyes pumped their fist in the air at a rally to close down mink farms and run a boycott of Kentucky Fried Chicken for "cruel and inhumane treatment of animals" without seeming to pick up on how they treated socially-retarded Iguanadons who were the real ones who were the risk "of becoming an endangered species" and not these trendy pinheads of the '90s.
One sure-fire tactic the older boys of Maroon Bells cabin (-- "Maroon BALLS", someone quickly coined like a snickering imp!) used to get sympathy from them was to act suicidal.
"You like, shouldn't do that" replied the girls in shocked disquiet; crossing their arms in fashionable social concern. A rotten "beach babe" staring off into the surf in vain self-abnegation, thoughtlessly not thinking about the author who would gladly share everything he had in an extreme bid to be accepted and to find mystical, existential completeness, if not nebbish sexual conquest, among these bone-headed bitches.
There the teenaged party would sit, the camp's version of the popular aristocracy. Your version of Stephanie Seymour and Axl Rose with all the drama, all the references to "Melrose Place", all the skinny boys with thin legs and green ball caps named "Dustin", all the big moose with arms like baked hams, all the "leave me alone"'s (-- a lost teenage cry, calculated for sure) as the girls chased them down with a "hey, wait!" like a scripted MTV video-- Alicia Silverstone in "Cryin'" as Aerosmith carried on like a bunch of middle-aged monkey-men still singing about high school, but offering "no bridge" to those who stood on the precipice and gulped for mortality's limits.
I never got a hug, though. Being a little young, I was never invited. I may have been suicidal, but never had the guts to pitch myself off a rocky Colorado precipice-- those dangerous spots on the property, half-buried by foliage and neglect-- and probably no one did, come to think of it.
One found no salvation in their younger peers. . . . . jaded little monsters running about obliviously on the thick, green grass. Blank stares; the elfish inattention of the young. Creative minds stunted
and stretched no further than the corporatized expanse of Nickelodeon's "Ren & Stimpy",
a subsidiary of MTV that had them eating out of their palms like conditioned,
seed-pecking
pigeons of ignorance, waste, nihilism, and doom spelled out on America's brow
like "The Scarlet Letter" of
My contemporaries in Shingle Peak cabin-- 13, 14, or 15-- were mean as rattlesnakes and hung out at the teenage party like it was no big deal. In "the grotto", reclining on the bunks, they told stories of neighborhood drug dealers and disturbed rich kids who laid flat on their roof of their homes and shot kids off their bikes with BB guns. One time, a backpack of marijuana was stolen from unguarded shoulders by a swift opportunist, and just how much that backpack had to be worth no one could say. Their upper middle class neighborhoods sounded like war zones of rich, neglected kids-- privileged waste, nihilistic debauchery, and MTV-"there-is-no-God-but-Kurt-Cobain"-induced destruction. Absolutely ferocious and merciless where the meek were pulled down by a rolling ball of wolves, eaten, and shat out for the beetles rubbing their forelimbs together at this tasty, delectable treat of your rotting corpse.
******************
Occasionally, I would stop by the lair of "Dave".
He lived in a cabin on the boy's hill all year
in a run-down set-up. One part administrator, one part middle-aged "charity
case", he mostly tagged around with the younger boys and seemed to relate to
them better than he did with adults. Other than that, he was "the clown" who
liked to perform in front of the dining hall like Mark Twain.
Looking back, I wouldn't be surprised if the man had Asperger's Syndrome and was never diagnosed and had fallen into this gig because he couldn't "hold down a job" anywhere else. But the thing about this man, was that he used "humiliation" to keep people in line. . . . . especially me, who kept wandering outside of the realm of what he saw as "acceptable behavior".
I was always one to take a joke too far "because I didn't know when to stop". I'd rough-house too hard, or break something in a minor provisional emergency that needed to be fixed. Many a time, it seemed as if the machine of expulsion was half-turning in order "to get rid of me" because I was more trouble than it was worth. The camp did not want to be bothered with my problems, "my special exceptions", "my tales of woe", and still seemed to operate with the assumptions that it was "Brady Bunch" and 1977 and not dangerously, perilously "1994".
I sensed in Dave a confidant, that somehow-- some way-- we shared "the same take on the world". One night I sought him out because I wanted to confess something. There he stood with a brown mustache, a blue cap like a deer hunter, eyes that shined glassily like a bug's under the Coleman lantern late when the boy's hill was "10 minutes from lights-out". I had something urgent to say, something that had been bothering me and attempted to speak in a grave, grownup demeanor that tried to belie seriousness, trying to be older, trying to be a man, trying to gauge the world with an even hand. There was his grave, grown-up demeanor turning into awkwardness as he kept refusing to make eye contact, struggling to listen to my words now that he was "put on the spot" like a pinned insect under this weighty presence. Otherwise he was the very Dave who led water bucket fights and was the camp's mascot.
But here-- behind the curtains-- behind the scenes-- I made him strangely uneasy.
We stood on the doorstep. Behind him, a kayak paddle on the wall. Photographs. A bookshelf. A TV/VCR setup. This was the place where kids ducked out to watch "America's Funniest Home Videos" when they should've been sweeping up for cabin inspection. (-- Out here, 10 miles from town, this could have been the funniest show on the PLANET!)
Stiffening up, I confessed how I learned a lot from the previous summer-- trying to explain how the experience had built a lot of character-- and how part of my motivation, unable to put it into words, exactly-- was to return and honor my masters with an apology, that they had turned me into something greater than what I was, even though that "Michael thrashed in his high-chair, dumped his bowl, and made them disgusted". In that sump of shame, he had realized he was wrong and had come back to say so.
But Dave, literal-minded and struggling to end the conversation as quickly as possible, misconstrued my message.
"That's a lot of money to say you're sorry".
The awful truth, was that no counselors had returned. It's the secret that Dave knew, and I had found out upon arrival. The job was so unpleasant, so burdensome, so low-pay, that nobody ever came back. That is, except for pulp-rotten campers and Dave-- who lived here anyway and jammed-down by life circumstances in a way that "he didn't have a choice".
Sometimes I'd complement him on the cabin, "a swell little set-up"-- just to make conversation, and then he'd frown down and say, resentfully, that "you have a big house to go back to".
Don't envy me, in other words.
All that I knew at the time was that I happened to be skating on the outskirts of a deep, dark dysfunction that I shouldn't inquire too closely about-- if I knew what was good for me.
Go-- and leave this man in peace.
*******************
Toward the end of the session, I was taken aback when the older boy singled me out one night by the washroom. He was a smaller kid, bookish, with glasses and blonde/brown bangs who didn't strike me as a particularly ferocious contender in the "Maroon Bells" cell block. I sensed that he barely held his own, but not very well. . . . . perhaps a smaller, fine-boned herbivore who was quicker than this socially-retarded Iguanadon.
At that point I was lost, lonely, alone, scared, frightened, anxiously-depressed. . . . . virtually disassociated from all of humanity, contemplating the rapture of death-- like a lost boy zig-zagging aimlessly along the docks down by the wharf-front when he approached me one night in knowing, confidential tones as if we spoke exactly the same language.
Something told me there was something patently dubious and unclean about this. . . . . like the time a teenaged friend of the family tried to turn me on to pot like the emissary of skateboarders and punk rockers and dodgy Bohemian slackers who faded away every time your respected pal, "Officer Friendly" walked by and tipped his hat under his shaven-headed crown in a caricature of wholesome community policing. Or when some black kids from the desegregation program fell down to one knee on the middle-school bathroom floor and starting gambling with a pair of dice, the dollars flying like temptation slapped down in high-octane excitement.
Or for that matter, any of the 25
¢ poor boy's sociology in an early '90s video arcade that was a combination between plug-ugly "street tough" themes, a sharks-in-suits Republican political culture that "played to the cheap seats" like a Guns n' Roses concert at the ball fields, and a classic caricature of an Irish drunk out of money sitting in a puddle of his own urine outside the pool hall with the myth of Casey Jones at bat who ultimately struck out.Over and over. And then over again.
And the occasional fracas that would break out as some bigger boy shook down a smaller kid for quarters as people either half-looked on from their games, or stood by, but all shrugging and did nothing as Billy & Jimmy, "The Double Dragons"-- or even Ryu, Zangief, Blanka, E. Honda, and the sweet and delicate Chun Li, if not a stupidly wandering caveman "Trogyldyte" in the worst knock-off of "Pac Man" that no one ever played-- had no comment.
Such, such were the days. . . . . on this side of pre-internet HELL. Wayne & Garth are stamping up and down with their hands up to their noggins, having a "freak-out".
To circle around a bit more, Metallica and Guns n' Roses went on a stadium tour together in 1992 despite the changing music industry as "the last great hurrah!" for Reagan-era metal, like that scene toward the end of "Conan the Barbarian" where Ah-nold, flanked by his sly, mustached Mongol thief of a sidekick (-- actually played by a Mexican) had a monologue with the swelling music behind him when he prayed to his God, who he had never prayed to before, to grant him and his friend victory and even if this was to be washed away "in the sands of meaninglessness" to remember that "TWO stood against many".
And if that God would not listen, "THEN TO HELL VIVTH YOU!"
It sounds much like George Bush and his running mate, Dan Quayle who subsequently lost the November 1992 election. It was a rout, a triangulated Clintonian butt-fuck as James Carville "carved 'em up" like a sashaying New Orleans queer, but the point is. . . . . . they tried.
The older boy challenged me to a game of "truth or dare" where the stakes "kept getting higher" and it gradually descended from that point into a strange mixture of fear, loathing, curiosity, temptation, anticipation, pleasure, shame, and disgust as he finished "his side of the bargain".
As it came to my turn "to go down on him for 30 seconds", I thought of everything I held dear. The tanks rolling toward Baghdad in '91. . . . . to chase away "a bad man in a beret". Whatever you want to think of that squalid little spat, followed up with Noam Chomsky's "The Manufacture of Consent", America had "stood proud and tall" as bugles played and F-15's swept over the White House in glorious triumphant formation even if "Gampy" Bush was a tweak-voice wienie.
I thought of these things, everything that I had ever held dear to my heart-- whatever the mockery of these snide sorts who told us that we were all cockroaches in a dead, profane, wasted age-- whatever the beef-- er, CHICKEN of "paradigms" or "Euro-centrism" or the shrill calls for "pluralism" as the weaker, bitchy side of the coin or whatever the morbid, antsy Jewish-jangle-feeling that focuses in on the nervous, gelid eyes of a fly, as it fucked, shat, and rubbed in a pile of shit-- a Kafkaesque recipe for stark college radio existence that was so strangely "other" than what I knew-- and I could not snuff out the stubborn light of my instincts that told me "all of this was supremely ridiculous and unworthy of my time".
I drew back my head where this boy was laying flat on his back on a hilly incline and stuttered out that
"I couldn't follow through with it". Even if I was giving up the opportunity for virtually limitless pleasure each and every night "still remaining" with a willing & able "fuck-buddy", I could not trade honor for comfort "and sell out my principles" like that.I liked women. I knew that much. An erection strong and American and true-blue and pure as "Superman" bending over to kiss Lois Lane, or perhaps a stultified Clark Kent in comically-chaste situations as "the knight deferred" from his feisty all-American girl who kept him "checking his watch" like a mild-mannered "straight arrow".
That was my life course, and I had made up my mind.
The older boy was disappointed, but understood.
We were both outcasts, misfits, freaks despised by our peers-- but of a different breed skulking around the outer wall but for different reasons. He had "sized me up wrong" and could always find someone else to tap along the docks.We departed and the next day in the washroom nodded silently and had "our understanding", never speaking of it again like two ships that had anonymously passed in the night.
*******************
However, my credentials as 100% American beef were not assured forever more.
The camp dance was coming soon, and I was "running scared like a chicken".
There was a rivalry going between me and a 17 year-old over a girl-- the nicest, kindest, sweetest "being of light" you could ever imagine-- and I was losing to "the stronger".
He came from the wilderness explorer program, the place for boys and girls who glowed with a quiet confidence and not for we sick, weak, twisted fucks on the standard program who had about as much fun as a tuburculosis patient. This other group ran on their own schedules of easy-going, less-structured maturity. . . . . the kind of well-mannered children of our nation's privileged who went on archeological digs in Mexico and joined the Peace Corps out of a sense of higher calling, a blue bandanna wrapped around their toussled hair and a flask of Evian bottled water at their hip.
Like young Greeks in sandals in hilly pastures, instead of the decadent Romans wretching in vomitoriums and "partying down" at the coliseum or lured by hook-nosed "fish-mongers" into brothels. Otherwise known around here in St. Louis as "Old Country Buffet", "The Riverport Amphitheater", and "the girlie shows" over the river.
One breakfast I sat across from Courtney, the girl in question, and found an unwelcome visitor beside her. It seemed he and I shared a similar, unspoken interest and then it occurred to me that this wolf had "grabbed the meat" and "ran off with it", leaving me to stew like a coyote in its own needy, tuburcular juices.
So there I was, as I prowled over to the rec room and thunked on the piano I couldn't play. I felt like the Phantom of the Opera, repulsive and isolated. In the story, Christine, his true love (-- cherished from afar) inevitably picked his more handsome rival no matter how much this misfit tried to impress her with the nooks, crannies, and oddities of his secret underworld, all that was creeping and subterranean and impure
as he silently howled his trouble to the late afternoon clouds like soft cotton
he could not touch with the indifference of thermal currents and scraggly
hillsides to a 13 year-old's concerns.
And that night the mess hall became the dance floor. Tables pushed aside, a silver ball that was covered with what looked like fish scales revolving around, glancing off our anxious eyes. The darkened cafeteria outlined the hunched shadows of boys & girls. The kitchen was lit behind the counter, yellow paint reflecting brightly, the dull gleam of kettles & pots; the excruciating white-wash glare of the wall in places. I truly wondered if the camp director knew what was going through our minds.
This was not the sappy '70s of disco-happy medallions and washed-out Brady Bunch "okayness" that proved to be as rotten as the carcass as Carter as the tabloids reveled gloatingly in those "Where are they now?" pieces and revealed sagging, alcoholic, crow-eyed wretches who were dead or worse, making the cycle of those "infotainment"-type commercials like freeze-dried leftovers that had gone bad with freezer-burn and were disgusting as they were "glopped out" for our transient consumption because we weren't too busy "making money" or "fucking" like true celebrities or tycoons or the teenager you wanted to be.
(-- Such as it is, even as your internet scribe types out these words for your merry fun)
This was making conversation with bystanders--
what you could call half-fanciful, half-serious-- to distract oneself from the pain of
being half-grown, when our our attentions were really drawn to the center all along. A whirlpool, where the beautiful and the handsome (-- and the confident!) found each other,
and made us pine for a mystical future, "an end of history", where all
contradictions would be magically ironed-out in one flinging, upward, ripping
motion as God himself intervened in this lost, wicked world.
You reach out with your fingers to feel the empty air, the throb of the bass through the floor, to confirm that surreal fact that you were standing in the anonymous dark with your bunched-up anxieties threatening to burst.
Courtney's face was nuzzled fast to my rival's shoulder and I called her name, trying to get a crumb of acknowledgment, so I could give her a thumb's up sign. At least happy for her happiness, though my heart was breaking. She didn't hear or notice. . . . .
Finally Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" blasted through the speakers.
The teen boys lost ourselves in an orgy of wild slam-dancing, this "anthem of our generation" that all the magazines and announcers kept "buzzing about" over and over like a marketing scheme that was gradually losing steam, as "Hootie and The Blowfish" would take over by fall.
Yes, like a pandering voice on "Fox" trying to connote fame & Hollywood glamour from "the
bottom up", like it's "real" and "belongs to the people" with a smarmy
"everyman's voice" that's too oily to be believed, that "everything is going
to be O.K. for EVERMORE like JASON confessing his feelings
for BRENDA on Beverley Hills 90210".
Yeah. Right.
We were the lost children of a wrecked and wasted era. A suicidal downward spiral into the void, where T.S. Eliot could show you fear in a handful of dust but he couldn't necessarily do anything important for you, like "get you laid with somebody remotely desirable".
Then the cook caught my attention. I grabbed hers. She was an immigrant from Belgium who spoke in broken English. She was tall, shapely, with pretty features and blond hair. 27 years old. In previous days I stood around a bit bashfully as I went inside the kitchen to fetch an orange,
as she smiled my way and winked at my puppy-dog anxiousness.
Tonight was looking around in disgust at all these petrified young men who
weren't dancing, let alone with her. She asked me with a sure sense of absurdity if I wanted to.
How could I not?!
I took the beautiful cook's hand and walked out on the dance floor, my hands half-hesitating to touch her hips, bumbling like Richard Nixon.
"You can touch me, you know"
she blurted out with a laugh and I did. The feminine mystique. Stockinged feet, airy bosoms, cotton panties. . . . . a warm, moist vagina like a secret. She put her arms around my neck.And we danced in the dark. . . . .
I could feel her warmth, smell her scent.
I will never forget this. . . . . it was like roses and soap.
In the dark, I felt my childhood slip away like a mist. The confusion, the doubt, the anxiety about being a young sapling was dying and in its place was rising an oak tree, seasoned and strong. In those few minutes I became a man. Which itself was some kind of answer in this age of wicked, slurping, cotton-candy values. . . . of rat-meat and dick-suckery and vowing to keep this "scandal" buried forever. It was the greatest gift anyone could have given me, as I peered into a life of golden things if we only work hard, get some self-respect, and take chances.
And that was the rite of passage!
********************
At least for that time in my life.
I would be thrust in situations where "the world" was not attuned to my stubborn sense of honor, and would not understand would I apparently, out of sheer idiocy, would wander into the lion's den like Daniel wearing a necklace of sausages like in some kind of crazy cartoon gag and inevitably get shredded. When he didn't speak with as much conviction as he wished he could as he tried to break up an orgy around "the golden calf" and had to literally run from a stone-throwing mob, hiding out in a cave and eating roasted bats. When aiming for martyrdom for artistic reasons-- wanting to be like River Phoenix or Edward Scissorhands-- is futile when "the blood of the martyrs" only flows for oneself. When one hopes to confess their feelings to a girl, but once again "tries to lift the entire steak off the plate" and scalds himself instead of cutting away with "little steps". When you fail at a girl in your league (-- a 9th grader) and instead reach for "the big game"-- one of the most beautiful, sought-after seniors no one has "the nuts" to approach and flutter around like her impotent male friends.
You take a running leap with a Valentine's Day note marked "from your secret admirer", come to the foot of the abyss, slow down, stop for a second, then make a tentatively half-hop that causes you to go tumbling down and lie broken at the foot of a bunch of craggy, sand-washed boulders as your peers, teachers, and all of society, even-- asks
"how can that boy be so stupid?!". When he thought that the infinite grace of "that angel without wings" would come down and bless him, offer up a cool dipper of water to his parched, bleeding lips as he lay mortified and splintered like your mother's hand-crafted chair she bought off a kindly couples' porch in rural Virginia but fell off the moving van and was busted by a honking semi-trailer "just like that".But alas, she did not come "to glue me whole" like a wool-spinner's daughter.
No one came in this cruel, Paleolithic, post-industrial society across the icy, windswept streets of stark self-reproachment, and he had to crawl back to his side of the cliff like a war victim, a refugee, a suitor whose vine had broke when he had tried to swing across-- quite nearly killing his heart in a day of hint, insinuation and horror as he was tracked down and exposed like either Andy Kaufman or a sex pervert. Her attitude toward me was pissed-off and sullen, as I ate my heart out in shame.
So it was at the coffee shop down the street from my alternative liberal arts school. Crossroads was mostly a place for bug-eyed, developmentally-disordered cretins with either learning disabilities or personality disorders, and that's usually "the way it cut".
Whatever you wanted to say about we bastard children of McGovernik parents, we were a sorry lot. We were "spawn of vomit" on the outskirts of Sodom, otherwise known as "The Central West End" of revitalized bourgeois-bohemian frippery on this toilet earth.
Most of the kids went here, because they would otherwise be torn to pieces in publik skoolz. Awkward honkies too stupid for magnet schools in the city, and not streetwise enough for the homies. And too degenerate and atheistic and rebellious for parochial education.
Crossroads was their dozing preserve for "jerking off", and I had foolishly attempted "to find transcendence" among toking slime.
Slackers who pretended to be "workaholics", chin-stroking posers who typed-out "punk-rock" manifestos without bothering to run "spell-check". Point out their flaw, and they'll pull your Eddie Vedder stocking-cap over your eyes and caper away with crackpot justification whose silence is the only answer with the swelling emptiness of the Shakespearean echo:
"There is no absolute truth"
(?!)
"We're tolerant of everything except for intolerance"
(?!!)
"Society did it, man!"
(?!!!)
Tell it to "The Nazis" of the business world though you're gonna have to be far more vigorous to survive in "the-publish-or-perish" world of "The Communists"-- otherwise known as academia and just about as emotionally and intellectually honest. Even I myself "tore off down the road" when it seemed like I would actually have to do work. . . . . let alone stay in the company of these geeky, snail-eyed losers who didn't know different. And Michael, being a warm-blooded creature, finds it "a little creepy" when he sees a bunch of awkward, fish-lipped losers switching their arms back-and-forth to a Cuban mambo in some long archived 1960 filmstrip.
This boy desired the sunny world of Ferrais, and pizza, and Led Zeppelin, and a stained-glass lamp hanging above a stone-brick pizza palour in 1982 as he played "Ms. Pac Man" and "Galaga" and drank neon-green Mountain Dew, and had a pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl at his elbow who looked like the chirpy heroine in a Cold War-era comic book. . . . . . not this shit.
Sp there Leanne sat "on break" around the table with "we wastrels", the others vegetating ungiftedly in ethers of crud scraped off the inside of a bong and eaten because either they were so broke or stupid. "Chess" was their game, where they whipped around the pieces with a Jedi's understanding I could not easily grasp and felt very dumb. This, as the smoked cigarettes-- Leanne included-- in order to feel more "grown up" and "bad". There my "all-American" homecoming "belle of the ball" was, who was drawing away with a withered, sour "nicotine suck" which wasn't doing her beautiful, well-drawn features any good as the tray piled with dead, gray ashes.
My conception of her had changed within the course of two days. She was "the popular girl" who walked around in a cowboy's leather jacket, stone-washed blue jeans, and a slight step of a feminine "oh" as she put her hands in front of her to rummage through files in the back archives of "year book" club that would have done the feminine race of secretaries proud, that make men feel heroic and necessary.
That-a-girl.
I could never think of "profaning" this girl by sexually fantasizing about her, and didn't. My levels of sacred, immaculate conception of how she lived, breathed, sat in class, did her homework, or even "passed gas" rose to operatic levels of holiness with singing angels and babies ogling the audience while holding up a wine glass in salutation. . . . . it was so picture-perfect.
And here she was. . . . . fallen like a Babylonian fleshpot.
If you ordered up an apple-cinnamon Danish, she could get that for you. . . . . taking it out from under the counter and laying it out on the table on a ceramic plate, provided that you parted with the hard-bitten cash. She might even sit down at the table, though this girl "was definitely not our mother". There the Danish sat, yours for a price, sickly-sweet and glazed-over like my world of kitsch that had died. This vale of tears and booted-in-the-ribs logic was nothing like "Sesame Street" with it's multicultural inhabitants, because the owners who ran "this diner" and the grocery mart next door were hard, cruel men from Pakistan who declined to be interviewed for my junior cub newspaper reporting feature, "the man on the street" as they carried on imperiously like either a Saudi oil sheik or the owner of a harem when they deigned to tell me
"that Leanne was not working that day" like an exotic dancer in the back room of fans and veils "and daggers held to your throat" if you got too "touchy-feely".Like the girl "in the typing pool" who sooner or later would catch the eye of either a greasy sheik "who had a preference for blondes" or for an ornery old toad like "T. Boone Pickens" playin' poker with mergers, acquisitions, and take-over bids, I found myself "getting hot under the collar".
It reminded me of the time, back in elementary school when I was eight or nine, when Mrs. Timmons gave us a math exercise in the stock market. The pot of gold "in some far off place" was a theoretical trip to DisneyLand if we children-- amateur sod-busters-- invested in our own crops and brought them to market. Yes,"through the sweat of our brows" like peasants hoeing the earth in futility, like something out of "Deliverance". Unless we raised the stately fund of $100 the deal was off and our dreams dashed. What was apparent about this exercise was not easy, apple-cheeked reward like Campbell's soup kids but the struggle involved-- dirt farmers standing there hollow-cheeked and slack-jawed with the prairie dust of a bitter harvest as a flea-bitten dog scratched behind its ear in the yard and flies buzzed around an outhouse.
Well,
I invested heavily in watermelons for no particular reason except that they were
cheap and you could buy a lot of them, and "struck gold" like an oil man holding
his suspenders as "black gold" spurted from the earth in jets. My good fortune, even if it was imaginary, made me mean and
flinty in a fashion, and I turned into a real prick.
I was the elect, I was the big-bellied small town sheriff breaking up labor unions, I was the boot in the ass of Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie. I was the strong-arm of the company town enforcer collecting debts over some yelping family man with his arm twisted behind his back.
As a joke, he would throw down some silver dollars just to watch people "scramble for 'em" and burst out laughing. All I needed was a black man-servant turning a steer on a spit. . . . . and It was great while it lasted, but soon the exercise was over and I was back on "Square #1" as my lonesome, pathetic self.
And your perspective is "quite changed once your ass is "IN THE CROSSHAIRS" and now you're the beggar at the foot of two entrepreneurs who will only tolerate you so long as you buy something, a pretty girl who knew that she wasn't gonna get ahead on her I.Q, and a couple of cretins who apparently "had the edge over me" in logic upon "this chessboard of life".
For what it was worth, I was on "the losing end of evolution" as my tank rolled and stopped uncertainly like a plodding rook psychologically "tabled" by its own issues. This wasn't "beef" or even "chicken", but something gray and stringy. . . . . like rat-meat.
At one time, I believed there could be "a heaven on earth". If there was just enough knowledge, enough enlightenment, if we all just "worked together". If just everyone "was on the same page", and realized that we all didn't have to be thrown off this pukey "Tilt-a-Whirl" of life with no seatbelt. If we all just cared for and looked out for each other, then we could overcome.
That seemed to be the mindset of our school when they gathered everyone together on the floor during Tuesday announcements-- everyone from clueless dweebs to flitting black girls to lisping goths carrying on like snakes-- and put us through a mental exercise. They divided the school up into theoretical "continents" representing populations and comparative distributions of energy consumption by handing out candy. There was not enough measly little pieces of hard candy to go around the world as the suspense built, until they came to North America and the adults started handing out sacks and sacks of chocolate in plastic shopping bags to illustrate our flawed American ways. Everyone laughed heartily at this broad, generalized socialistic lesson and this rich bounty was passed around in an equitable manner like a clearing in Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood's "Merry Men" tapping their quarterstaffs to the ground.
For all our romantic populist notions
, here we were like a bunch of gobbling turkeys staring at the manor and plotting a coup, thinking that if there was just enough government programs out there through socialist legislation, then everything could be fixed. It was an article of faith that the system was perfectible if only enough voters got involved, if there was just enough enlightenment.But turkey shit collects, and ain't washed away if folks keep pecking around the barnyard like self-indulgent idiots. And there was "Turkey Revolutionary Command", hammered out of such politically-correct materials as adobe mud, tin foil, and balsa wood as naive grotesques shrieked "humanity is good!" and the underlings carried on like bird-brains sashshaying around and growing soft with $5 Mocha espressos. . . . . with sprinkles.
And now "the turkeys" had taken a turn for the cruel, immune to calls for "right action".
Growing up, we kids had been inundated with so much anti-tobacco and anti-drug propaganda that smoking and pot to me seemed unthinkable. It came with the anti-drug "Just say no" campaign, whipped up into an anti-smoking frenzy by motivational speakers trotting out before an auditorium of cheering elementary school students gunning for "a smoke-free 2000". Right and wrong were laid out between us like a clear-cut fork in the road.
But what was wrong with this picture was spreading like a black oil stain as I looked from face to face. There the wastrels would sit, saying nothing for 5 minutes at a time, soaking up the atmosphere of grown-up "badness" as if they were anything other than evil doofuses, inhaling and exhaling like squatters around a fire in a hobo's jungle like stray trash fish from a Tom Waits song.
Each would stare me in the eyes with long, empty, hollow expressions. . . . . and blow smoke in my face in turn like a tribal rite. I didn't know what to do. . . . . being too timid and halting and self-conscious to flip the table with a roar-- with courage, with conviction WITH FURY-- even though I was bigger and stronger than all of them put together.
It was "the strong" preying on "the weak" in reverse, a sick relationship only possible in modern civilization, as I stewed on in self-loathing. . . . . untaught by my father how to be anything else but a modifier, a compromiser, a social democrat "who didn't rock the boat" or "cause trouble".
I was emotionally gang-raped that day. . . . . as I would be "over and over". But I didn't know "any different" but to come back "and try to be friends" even as they shook you off with low-slung contempt. In this fashion, "trying to be strong" by being "high-minded" or "weak" only puts you in a worse and worse position as you lose everything, living in dark, shadowed places like either a conscientious objector, green party activist, or "prison bitch" being mentally, emotionally, and physical penetrated.
If I had only been "a snappy tough guy" who patrolled my perimeter than this would have never happened. If only I had cut my steak up into little slices I would have never been scalded. But I was "trapped in a rut", where the more I struggled with "my programming" conflicted with unkind dregs whom only reflected "the law of the world", then the more doomed I became.
When I was around "the living waters" of successful people, I in turn became more successful. But when I tried to emulate the flat, canned example "in a record" or "a movie", I failed completely because life, as it is, does not groove "in the mojo" of an Aerosmith video no matter how ultimately redeemed when Alicia Silverstone jumps off the bridge, the boyfriend arriving to the precipice "too late", and the girl swinging by a bungee chord "giving the camera a blurred-out finger" in ultimate, teenaged-minded vindication.
And "how lost I was". . . . . disappointed that life was not like "a music video" or "a movie" or the uncanny energies and impressions through which my instrumentation inside "the tank" funneled the world through it's "view-screen" with titanic drama and "a quirky universe of logic" that no one had ever fully appreciated before, so otherwise it may not seem as distorted and incomprehensible as I impulsively shot off my mouth and class and was hissed down into silence by slower, dumber, "less creative" peers with shorter fuses than the teachers who liked what I had to say, when a one-page paper didn't have to turn into three densely-packed scribblings of intense verbiage.
But alas, my bright and open self was soon to retreat into a diseased, shivering coyote of fearfulness and resentment who became ever more hard-core and reactionary and right-wing as result of "the unspeakable defilement" he had seen happen in his society, particularly right in the shadowy corners of his own school-yard. Why some people were "rewarded" for being decadent, "out & proud", and stupid while if he attempted such things, expressing "the looseness of who he was"-- whether genuinely clever or "grossly self-indulgent", he was emotionally-savaged or worse.
If this had been a prison, I have no doubt that a eventually a black blanket would have been slipped over my head from behind and I would have been sexually-abused, the dynamic was getting "that ugly". That's why I don't laugh at "prison rape" jokes because I can relate to a situation bordering on something that bleak when those in charge "avert their eyes" because "they really don't know what to do". My mother repeatedly told them about the savagery, I would go in with little tête-a-tête talks with the high school principal (-- who actually was not "the top banana") but that was like trying to remediate the howling jungle of the human heart "with pesky do-gooder'ism".
You can set up a fence, but the jungle vines over take it. You can put the inmate in "protective custody", but "he has to come out sometime". And if he doesn't know how to defend himself because he was never taught how, then "he's buzzard meat".
This, as liberals stride around in earth-tone khakis with a romantic view of "progress", trying "to avert their eyes" yet not trip over the boy's rotted skull grinning like a rictus of mortality. This, as a howler monkey "whoops" and the natives-- "The Zulus" in the surrounding "disadvantaged community"-- peer in from all sides with warriorly spears-- mollified, for-- who knows how long? Keep your women "out of sight", and stare 'em "right in the eye" like a pointed finger of a Green Berets training video they don't teach you in the dainty, laced "ass-fuckery" of the United Nations diplomatic corps working in Geneva behind mahogany desks.
In a word, I was around a very un-warriorly place. If my Dad had failed me at home, then these $20,000 bourgeois-bohemians or at least their cruddy 1970's hanger's-on who, quite frankly, weren't QUALIFIED to work anywhere else like the sleaze of Soulard, a trashy area of South St. Louis where people put "KISS" figurines up on their fireplace mantle like heirlooms-- weren't exactly Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" either.
One character I remember in particular was a moron named Bixby, a flighty, ADD'd wretch of an art teacher and baseball coach who was as piss-poor of a manly mentor as I ever had-- yes, in that world of booted-in-the-ribs logic that doesn't make a boy "rise to his feet" but makes him "lay there" like a self-hating Asbergerian slug. Like Dave up on the boy's hill at summer camp, he was another misfit who had fallen into something "because he had nowhere else to go" and had a hard time making eye contact or functioning on a level that even I would consider "acceptable".
Also like "that wretch up on the hill", he controlled people through "humiliation".
He frequently dismissed my clumsy attempts at "art", my dumpier performance out on the athletic field when I tried out for the baseball team and out of tribe of 11 players "who didn't stand a chance" against anyone formidable, was always made "to sit on the bench". His plan for me-- which was a definite "can't" translated into my deliberate "won't".
I hated him. I hated myself. I hated the world. And sometimes, he would gather the entire team around him and tell stories of his youth, late '70s stories of upper-cut's and "getting the girl" and how back then "they were really in shape" as if things were eternally better in that strange country called "the past"-- which could not take account for Bixby's current station "of where he ended up today" looking as he did in this paint-can of a school.
But I wanted to believe. . . . . I had to believe. If my present was shot and my future seemed as bleak as "Death Valley", then the only thing he had was "the past" which is another translation of "can't" and "won't" as a man rattles an empty tin can of modern-day irrelevance.
Looking around in this poverty and hypocrisy, Michael finally developed the nose-twitching temerity "to speak up", to point out the blistering poverty and bankruptcy of "this private school hell". But a chirpy, preachy woman-- a portly English teacher with a big mouth "and ears that would not hear", even as she taught a class on "Utopia" and visions of the past that did not come true--threw down the gauntlet in blousy, yet well-punctuated exasperation that if I didn't like it here, "then you simply shouldn't come back".
But the miserable coyote was too diseased and sick and unconfident and scared "to go anywhere else" and it is always said
"that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't".To be honest about it, there was no future.
But then he had a vision of the past that came to him like a propaganda film-strip when he dusted off his old "heavy metal memories", of Superman and rockets bursting with red glare, of the American flag lifted out of the cesspool of Carter indecision and Clinton dubiety, cleaned off with mountain spring water, and lifted up the flag pole with heroic, methodical jerks.
The ultimate "FUCK YOU" to the left. The ultimate "FUCK YOU" to the system they infested like nattering, ineffectual parasites. The ultimate "FUCK YOU" to punk rock and Soulard scum and scuzzy, fish-eyed bastards who needed to be burned away with "FIRE".
I had gone daft. . . . . I had become a Reganaut.
And wasn't it the saddest sight in the world, when old, hokey "Bob Dole"-- a man who I liked and related to immensely-- there with that Kansan meanness and withered arm lost in an honorable war under unspeakable circumstances, of woebegone crippledness-- yet coming back with his cagey, bleak asides. . . . . lost to a gelatinous cheeseburger, the fat gorping mouth working around around the sandwich like he was having oral sex with it, my anxiety and fear about the human vagina, the radical pro-choice league wandering around in the street with signs, a banner that screams "THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES" in big, vulva-red letters on a yellow background of flashing caution, talking about the hidden, the censored, THE OBSCENE.
Yes, one big "Pussy Party" the Democrats were, a bunch of "momma's boys" controlled by mouthy women like Barbara Streisand, in turn, my own Jewish mother, and myself-- helpless-- emotionally gang-raped in high school prison by the scuzzier facts of life that Oprah and Rosie O' Donnell would never have on their show and any man with sense would sooner crawl under a bench and drink himself to death, commit hari-kari, rather than go out there and confess his feelings or even admit "what was bothering him".
Passive-aggression? Bomb Hanoi back to the stone age 25 years later in an undeclared "secret attack"! Now you have an idea of how "some of our minds work" with hay-wire thinking that never knew "how to throw a punch".
And I knew I had no future if I did not act. . . . . and silently drafted an eloquent "draft of war".
But no one knew about it, but they sure "found out" when I flipped a kid over for using my back as a casual "punching bag", a petty but understandably obnoxious thing a 14 or 15 year old would do "who thought there were no consequences".
Well, I was hauled in front of the head. They could scarcely believe their ears, that my action had been methodical and deliberate. In their puttering minds, like men set on "clearing the jungle", was that there could be no jungle and the only thing they could understand in their Marxist tinker-toy conception of the world was action-reaction of a logical/deterministic universe.
In other words, they would have found it far more understandable and acceptable if I had lashed out in an uncontrollable rage. But the fact that I had exerted a will, a firm will, a right-wing will, a Nietzschian will, disturbed them so much that they decided to expel me-- not announcing the fact until I came in rather innocently the following Monday with my mother to hear the verdict.
The high school principal, the most reasonable and human out of "the high council" of three brains, looked like he was about to burst out in tears. But he didn't dare oppose the majority, because there was a question in the air of how indisputably necessary a position like his was.
The head wanted me out. The guidance counselor didn't care, shrugging in her chair like a grayer, more crinkled version of "The Whistler's Mother". But Ray was on the spot. He has been onboard at least since the early '80s, had a plump, joyous wife who taught literature there, had a dog named "Hank" who was the school's mascot who ran up and down the halls for attention. They had just adopted a toddler and Ray was spending his summers getting the degreed qualifications so he could teach at a real school and have more job security, because the axe was drawing closer to his vulnerable, dovish neck like so many gelatinous life choices like a chainsaw ripping a bust of Jello.
He made his decision. . . . . . and betrayed me out to the cold, empty street with my weeping mother, but not before first escorting me to my locker to get my books. I could not meet his eye, because I would break out crying at this dubious, squishy butchery taken in part by a former friend who was bound and gagged and too dependent upon a gray, miserable, rat-meat existence "to do the right thing" and defend me from evil. He was not going to be thrown overboard with this living, rotten corpse-- a meek, frightened, helpless boy who didn't know the power of his own strength when he decided "to get serious" and in a tentative stage, "had overreacted".
Whatever the failure of our fathers in society that had produced such weak, spineless men who overcompensated for "what was missing" by either being "too hard" or "too soft". . . . . even in the interplay of politics, the pendulum of domination and submission among the so-called "adults" who looked over us and were supposed to be "the grown-ups", remember that "nature always keeps her books". . . . . even in this cruel abomination you wanted to call 1990's America.
He told me that "I could call him if I needed anything", but that would not be happening. When Caesar was stabbed by a mob of former friends he did not wail for help, or beg for mercy as the men panted with the stained blades, but rather died like a man with
"Et tu, Brute?" on his lips with fantastic Shakespearean portent. If anything, I had a sense of the dramatic. . . . .********************
In my wounded manhood, no amount of revenge was "enough".
I typed up a 50 page document, entitled "Operation Dynamite" and sent it straight to the Republican National Campaign headquarters to give them "the dirt" on everything I had seen and heard in the trenches, updated with new material every four-year election cycle with extra tidbits and links and factoids all the way up through the 2008 season-- in fact, up to the day I die.
There is the urge to maim, kill, destroy, mutilate-- just as I gruesomely tore up my sports letter, a big "C" for "Crossroads" that I earned from my half-assed days trying to catch pop-flies in right-field. I had a feeling that if Bixby and I had looked at each other, recalling tales of "upper-cut's" and "being the hero" then he would have simply looked away as I burst into tears.
I reasoned that if we are both turkeys and roosters, and destined for "the farmer's table"-- the overlords of "Wall Street" and "globalization", death comes to us all anyway as I leap in and tear with my spurs and get "my pound of flesh" and "keep my honor" as I beat back the ignorant, snail-eyed, shrieking Marxist hordes who are too bird-brained to see "what we're turning into".
But this rooster, "had to learn things" even if in the Chinese calendar he was born "in the year of the cock". And a stubborn dickhead was I. . . . .
At my new school, a substantial amount of the football team sat around in my English class, taught by a goateed Samurai of a gravel-voiced teacher who was obsessed with human darkness and "pushing it to the limit" significance with a wolfish, unblinking stare. Occasionally he would take to laughing, tossing his shaved head back, and the girls would flit their wrists and laugh with their beautiful faces leveled down close to their desks and say
"You look so, SATANIC". Indeed, Satan laughs as your paper rots with a "B-" until you "push it up" to his level of satisfaction upon this Hellespont of "the world of the dead", your college entrance exams.The jocks respected that. We all did, to the extent that some of squirmed around like a squashed turd under "somebody's thumb". But it was not enough, not nearly.
To the extent that the jocks threw down their helmets and cradled their heads in their hands when they badly bungled the regional play-off game, one step away from "state", the mood was somber and moping like little boys who had their fortress kicked in by stronger rivals who ran off with their secret comic book stash. "The flag lost", a shattered goal, "For Whom the Bell Tolls".
The morning after the big game I didn't even ask "who won", but interestingly enough it turned out to be the girls who were the strong ones and told them they would have done better if they stopped feeling sorry for themselves and got over their shattered machismo like lost kids without a realistic outlook on manhood.
Where "grays" were not discussed, something beyond the archetypical Mick Jagger swagger, John Elway pass, corporate junk-bond sweep, Bill Clinton blow-job excess, or something like "Hagar the Horrible" upending a keg of grog and emptying it to the bitter dregs of the very worst of modern man's instinct vomited in a splash of Gatorade at their bellowing coach's foot.
"Run laps, you pussies! That hole in your defense was bigger than my wife's mouth! What the fuck were you bone-heads thinkin'? I need your defeat like I need a bleedin' asshole! Now, go, Go, GO!!"
Ah, lovable Coach Frost.
To the extent that in the forest, in the film "Planet of the Apes", in fact-- you had the big, strong "silver-backs" who got things done and then the smaller, geekier intellectual-types who might as well have been from the planet "F"-- standing for either "Fanciful" or "Fuckin' Faggot". To the extent that the bigger, angrier gorillas pound their hands against the ground and chase off the fine-fingered spider-monkeys from the water hole. . . . . the geeks, leftists, Star Wars fans, computer nerds, and San Francisco inhabitants perhaps confirms a very comforting fact of the universe; that nature keeps her books. Be it unfortunate that Bill Gates is now the richest man in our tech-driven economy, but eventually the jungle will reassert itself like a red, bloated sun swallowing the earth and then exploding into a violent super-nova.
Such, such is man.
And as I stared across the classroom I saw an unappealing figure glaring on. Her politics were 180º opposite of mine, like the toughest, butch bull-dog you could ever imagine. She was like PFC Vasquez from "Aliens", the tough cropped-haired marine chick who nearly outlasted them all, especially the loud-mouthed, gung-ho "fly-boys" who most certainly "cracked under stress" once they lost "the home court" advantage and were trailing by 30 points as creatures clawed and hissed and kicked down the door in a barbaric rage with a clawed H.R. Giger foot.
She didn't cotton to my "Rush Limbaugh" act.
Yes, that overweight, blustering, pill-popping tweaker and sorry excuse of a "Father Coughlin" whipping up the crowd to "sic" his enemies like a soft-bottomed prince of the microphone-- shy, awkward, secretly ill-at-ease around people, looking only for the aura of attention to fill the sadly deflating bladder of his self-esteem like so much huffing & puffing up the stairs when he couldn't catch the elevator or thumb a ride to work. . . . . a very sad, desperate fat man "whose time was running out" across this aching desert of what you wanted to call radio booth announcing, a very dessicated "ham" in his early days of gruesome struggle, peering up at the ceiling at night and wondering
"why, me?"It's what happens when you feel as if you're walking through a cave, a giant shadowed vault that reaches high up to the ceiling, and zombies of people walk by-- neither hearing nor seeing as you attempt to talk to them, getting them to hear about your plight. But alas, they "shake you off" and continue on "their dead sleep" of work, life, raising a family-- neither noticing nor caring about your increasing desperation as you struggle like a drowning victim, petrified by your own abundance, too scared to move "and break through walls" like a self-actualized human being.
I was in a rut. . . . and took it out on "Butch". Leaping at her with my talons in a flurry of feathers and scratching, having an image of all those fat, greasy, disgusting black women swarming Billary at a political rally--
"Clinton, Clinton, Clinton!" except it sounds more like "Clanton" as they wave their arms out and stick their tongues out like goggle-eyed, fat retards which seemed to be a portent of what this nation was becoming. . . . . far removed and away from "The Right Stuff" and Chuck Yeager gnawin' on mule meat. Yes, "a big, fat, black, 'stanky' mammy pussy drooping down six inches like some kind of water-logged muskrat from the Mississippi Delta.I needed this like I needed a tattooed sun on my belly-- looking like something vague and Tarot-like and "Renaissance", like a side illustration on one of Gallieo's astrological charts usurping Catholic authority and conventional wisdom. Yes, by any woman vaguely singing and tooting on about "Fruit of the Loom" underwear on the morning airwaves of a mighty nation that once stood proud and tank-like against the dark, snowy capitols of Moscow.
In short, I needed this like I needed pot legalized and "went a little crazy" in my desire to reduce "Butch" to ashes, a shrunken caricature of a whipped bull-dyke that barked on my command as I led her around on a leash like a subsumed beast-thrall.
But she was impervious to pain, immune to insult, her gaze fixed on the distant horizon like "The Shores of Tripoli". She regarded my constant saber-slashing with minor irritation, widening one eye and looking my direction like Pluto's nemesis in the old Walt Disney cartoons.
We quarreled, we battled, and if it weren't biologically-unsuitable we would have fucked.
We were burning each others' faces off with flame-throwers, like hot-wired mechanoids on a far distant planet "fighting to the death" in battered hunks of metal and drooping cables like something out of a crazed video game. "Who made who, who made you?" as that AC/DC song went on the "Maximum Overdrive" soundtrack.
Finally the two of us were laying down on our bellies in the arid, dessicated sands breathing hard in this grueling "fight to the finish". And let me admit, I was the one who turned my head her way and gasped out, "I hate you, you bitch!". But it was like trying to break the will of G.I. Jane, a movie by Ridley Scott ("Alien", "Thelma & Louise") that I would have sooner cast in the fires of perdition if I only had the power of my namesake.
I began getting so wild and inappropriate and Nixonian and underhanded that Mr. Lockhart took me aside by my elbow and said "Stop". But I could not stop, I had a war to win and was pulling out vats of lethal chemicals, cackling as I did-- swirling around the mixture like a chef cooking noxious dog-food in a gas mask.
"Dinnertime, Butch!"
"Stop".
But I could not. I had to win. At any cost.
"Stop".
What of my plans of world conquest, to turn "The Central West End" into a parking lot and to nuke Cuba?
"Mike, stop".
Finally I looked so ridiculous with my glaring Aspergian faults, if not kooky, crankish tendencies that I had to flee the room with tears in my eyes. Once again, I was the failure. . . . the weak one, the wrong one, the accursed one "who didn't know how to be a man" and once again was caught "trying too hard" in an entirely fool-headed notion before a Samurai I respected.
In front of Mr. Lockhart, I had "lost face" and was about ready to commit hari-kari! But yet he had an abiding "fear of death", and soon after "quit school". There has been many a time when I had attempted "to open up" about some of my issues, but he didn't want to hear it. . . . . so convinced, he was, that he knew everything there was to know about young people.
"Cope",
was his decree.And I did. . . . . by fleeing the scene of an accident, the ultimate sump of my social dysfunction that apparently no one knew what to do for in the matrix of "can't", "won't", and "fucked". Master and student, locked in darkness. . . . . unable to communicate out of the students' shame. If there had been "a test", I had most certainly failed it. And he was not quite sure whether it was out of "lack of character" or something else.
At some point during the Rush/Butch war I had sat down in a comfy chair in a bookstore and was browsing through a book about some of my favorite heavy metal bands, obviously not intending to pay "shit". A feminine figure sashayed across the store and took a seat. The movements were unnatural, the energy strange, and soon I looked up and saw a trangendered man with his legs crossed, swinging his foot with great nervousness in the poorest expression of mixed masculine/feminine signals I had ever seen. It was "a he", though he had felt conflicted enough to attempt some kind of freakish, permanent reconstructive surgery to reverse his "male-ness" but hadn't done a very good job and was fooling no one with his attempt to be otherwise. What book he was reading, I could not say but I only gaped at this strange person. He looked up, and caught me looking and gave me a haunted glare of such persecuted intensity that I will never forget.
I recognized that expression. It was a caricature I felt inside as I tried to make my way around life as someone terrified that "he would be found out" that he was different, "wrong" whether by upbringing or by birth, desperately living a hidden life that he didn't want others to see. It was the face of a scared cat backed into the corner by bigger stronger creatures pointing and laughing and making emotional mince-meat out of what he was, or tried to be. We can cope by becoming overly grave, overly flippant, or some kind of unholy combination above that ignores both the essential looseness and dignity of life.
Oswald Spengler was a very grave man who wrote "The Decline of the West" and would retire to his study to drink laudaum, his sole conceit-- whirling around with a monocle to see if he was being watched, and then slowly sip. Incidentally, he never had sex. Some people are born twisted. Other people get twisted.
Oscar Wilde was a champagne cork of whimiscalness but also a foppin' faggot who died of syphilis after being publicly "outed" and humiliated for "his ways" in about the worst way imaginable, leaving this vale of tears broken and impoverished.
To the extent that part of me is recognizable identifiable in these tropes (-- minus the faggotry) could I not keep the strengths while losing the liabilities?
I think of other human beings who were forced to live constrained, awkward existences in the shadows-- ever afraid of the low-down curiosity of people and how it almost seems DEAD CERTAIN that the rotten truth gets out sooner or later because knowledge strives to be free, to be released, as certain as the life force in "the jungle" overtaking all fences, buildings, stabs at "protective custody", and denial of death and renewal in the great recycler of the universal consciousness. Nothing can stop it, not even the release of J.D. Salinger's unauthorized autobiography that told the truth about this man and would perhaps offer some comfort to those who think that everyone is normal but them, that the outside is an unfractured monolith while they themselves are so "impure" and "unworthy".
And what a struggle it is, as we learn to cope. And hopefully with the gift of the written word, it will be "less so". But it isn't for all creatures.
I will now introduce you to my friend and yours, "Mr. Boo-Boo" the cat. Watch him as he laps up the water. He lifts his feline head, looks around, and goes back to the bowl. His fur is black, like a tuxedo, like a governor perhaps, decked out in white dinner gloves, spat shoes, and a furry, immaculate suit as he greets constituents with a reverent portliness.
In any case, our little statesman prowls through our neighbor's shrubs at his chance "to get away from it all". However, it is interrupted by me, your beloved author and owner who shovels his shit from the litter box as I try to bring him inside.
"Boo-Boo",
I whisper through my teeth.(He wasn't hard to find)
"Get back here!"
Caught mid-step, head whirled around over one shoulder, he looks back at me with wide, staring eyes. Seconds elapse. Then he dashes off into the brush with a rustle. If public life is a stage he feels neither compulsion nor obligation to "go on" tonight and tells me "to fuck off".
However, he'll be the one whose yowls we'll hear in the middle of the night when he scratches to be let in. . . . . either because he's on the run from a bigger tom-cat or more likely, he's hungry. You hear "a cat-fight" and a shooting rustle through the bushes when ole' "Boo-Boo" has to learn how to fend for himself, when bigger, stronger cats move in. Your option is either "fight" or "flight" and remember that "Boo-Boo" is a tame house-cat who's been "de-clawed".
If that is "our state", we must learn "to make the best of it" and "be noble" to the best of our abilities. We must learn, that if someone holds up a mirror and offers up unkind distortions of "the truth" like some kind of crazy, whacked-out "fun-house" caricature that we neither completely deny it's us, punch out the mirror in a rage, or run from obscurity to promises of greater obscurity. I don't want "to break the plate" of poor-off people on the fringe who can't do better, living lives of dark, shadowed secrets and bordering perilously close to the ultimate act of self-destruction when they can't "get over themselves" like a man wrestling with his shadow.
In my own life, I've had to come to terms with the hard fact-- weighted down like an anchor of heaviness around my neck-- that no woman of quality particularly wants to go out with a goofy fat man. Usually, such traits belie a low caliber of self-esteem, self-discipline, and actual character. Whatever my story, whatever my reasons for why I acted as I did, one had to learn to be far less self-indulgent. I've had terrible moments of insight when I've glanced over at "the customer service desk" and seen huge, huffing men come up to the counter and try to "lay down the law" of why they are entitled to an instant refund.
And behind the register, is a scrawny, stick-like woman 1/3 his size who holds him off by being made of stronger, sterner, more-disciplined stuff. To the extent that the man blusters and flushes and points his finger, he is essentially "a blow-hard" after instant gratification with little or no risk and once the little woman explains that it is absolutely "out of her hands" and he'll have to take it up with "a higher authority", taking down a number out of phone book and calling at home, the man lumbers off visibly defeated with a glazed, flat fish-eye.
Don't let this be you. And I pray to God that I haven't been mistaken for this. Where there is a crevice, ooze-- fat, shit, slime-- whatever will slosh in like warm, gelatinous filth. Though filth is inevitable in this universe, far better to live with "less" instead of "more" by being honorable and disciplined. There is no way around it.
It was the same reason why I was 20 years-old and "chickenshit" when 9/11 happened, feeling that deep, cowardly corkscrew feeling in your gut when you were self-indulgent, overweight, and didn't have hair on your balls for very long like the emotional state of much of the nation nowadays, if not the kind of conservatives, not real conservatives by the way-- who directed our troops-- the real men-- into the clanging, roiling Persian Gulf inferno that was all wrong from the beginning. . . . . in timing, reasoning, and methodology.
One. Big. SNAFU.
Most men don't know anything when their 20. Hell most men don't know anything when they're grown-up's because they were never torn down and "built back up again" like the true creed of conservatism dictates and not the soft-bottomed, unchallenged world of the neoconservatives who, like me, were at one time young idealistic Jewish communists to one degree or another "who had been mugged by reality" and did a "180", though perhaps being far less creative and more snail-eyed than "yours truly" to ever kick it up to a higher level of consciousness and self-awareness.
A very warped facet of sociology I can relate to intensely is "the Israeli commando" fantasy, a result of feeling trapped, neurotic, and weak. It's when your tiny scrap of territory becomes a fortress, a citadel, no less a potential "Masada" as you face issues of decline no less dire and morally questionable than South Africa but only made muddier with bombings and opposition demagogues and third-world mobs howling in the streets with rifles and clenched fists, denying your story. . . . . your narrative. . . . . the revolving key of your life.
No one "with sense" wants to get involved in this bloody "sand-trap", much like the conflict between "Butch" and I, because it gets involved with accusations of anti-Semitism and what the West was doing during the Holocaust and the remedial "tootsie roll" of what mid-century colonialism could do for you and withered feelings of collective world guilt that are beginning to weary of the lobbies that is no less "a gorping mouth" than the Palestinians', but bigger.
Water will seek it's own level, and the subject is no less appetizing than loose water on a boiled egg as a Passover celebration as angry, uptight people jealously walk down the sidewalk-- holding on to what's theirs. But there is a point beyond which "we let go" and find ourselves "in the gutter", when I myself was caught up in the disability system (-- and still am, by the way) collecting a check to my medicine can be paid for by "Uncle Sam" instead of out of my parents' raw pockets, because I no longer can pass as "a dependent" anymore at the bright, old age of 27.
Though one sure doesn't like to, they raise a turkey leg in a pair of shit-stained overalls and somewhat reluctantly sing the praises of FDR and Eleanor and the social welfare state with all those fat, greasy, disgusting, google-eyed women. . . . . some who work down at the social security office. H.L. Mencken during the '30s once produced a column that solely consisted of a swarm of 30,000 pestiferous dots and each one was supposed to stand for the leech of a Federal "New Deal" employee. I snicker at that, and one time nearly "tore the head" off my Negro mailman as the neighborhood "crank" though I haven't quite considered putting his Filipino surrogate in a choke-hold like crazier right-wingers I have known. This, as Mexicans continue to cross over the border with trash bags over their heads so they can't be identified by security cameras while grizzled, angry white men are prosecuted "for trying to do something about it".
Yes, sir-- this country "is going to hell in a hand-basket". When we're not stretched out to the greatest limits of human ingenuity, but "maxed-out" to the wall of credit card debt and irresponsibility like all kind of home mortgage dodgers being rewarded "to be worse" by this government we live under. But I'm frequently told that "I have no right to say anything", because I take a dipper full of chili too.
But I tell you that I have the right to say anything I want, especially in this nation of backsliders and cowards and weak men who never made any kind of attempt to better their circumstances, whose "won't" turned into the free pass of "can't". Even if I strive mightily and fall flat on my fat ass, I DO SOMETHING ABOUT MY CIRCUMSTANCES. I don't settle for the easy conceit of defeat, crippled forever like "half-a-man".
Yes, in this world of publishing where he isn't aloud to have an identity as various whiners battle it out in "the ethnic" section of our nation's bookstores. On the bottom rung you have "the southern gothic" where Forest Gump types get so "down-home" and greasy with hog-belly that they almost slip right out of the long, tapering Fu Manchu fingernails of the Amy Tan "Joy Luck Club" Asian experience novel. Then on the next level you have the Mexicans skipping a humble "hat-dance" around a Sombreo before they pull a knife out at the scowl-faced Irish who go in presupposing black-oath brogue with their fists up. Nyahh, let those Catholics each other. Especially the French & German-descended ones in Soulard.
Then on the first tier you have blacks and Jews-- the premier Billary plantation tit-suckers gobbling up government jobs with sob stories-- either with dumb, fat, pouting mammy lips typically several cuts below Toni Morrison's or piteous victim's eyes that will never get to the bottom of life's scaly neuroses. Misery is a cold non-Kosher hot-dog as the blacks smack down on theirs like stray dogs overturning a peddlers' cart and Jews move out of the neighborhood just like my mothers' folks did with everyone else.
I'm like "Dirty Harry"-- I'm an equal-opportunity hater. . . . . And I shove my combat boot of hyperbole up the ass of pussified New York City publishing that denies my story.
I have little doubt had the earth been tilted a fraction of a degree different, head things been more bleak and unaccepting at home "with nowhere to run", had their been ready access to weapons, I think I could have very well have been a school shooter.
Just why the nuclear reactor melted down at Cherynobyl while fizzling out at "Three Mile Island" is a story of American exceptionalism which could have only been created in the minds or producers or by the benevolence of God. That, or "tacked up" to forces that have no name.
In my life I've had moments when, as a cripple exposed, I've figuratively crawled out of "my wheelchair" with dead stumps of legs and tried to stab a guy, though that's probably the high drama of my self-embroidered imagination. "When that much face is lost", when neither pity, fear, gawking, nor a thin sheen of avoidance can address life's darker corners. . . . . I don't doubt that it can turn lethal when a man inflicts hari-kari not only on himself, but the entire world in the ultimate revenge of "the passive-aggressive" who was never taught how to be a man.
After one such incident at a college where I darkly hinted at such a thing "to save face" before knocking it off the table with a bit of comedy, someone came up to me and apologized for how she treated me when I was so obviously struggling in my off-kilter dysfunction and clearly drowning in the rut of my own excess like a man "out-of-control". Though it was "too little", "too late" out here on a cold winter night a year after "the incident" that put the school on "Defcon-2" and perhaps myself on "a higher level" of alert, I shook her hand warmly and told her that I had joined a 12-step program, about the most useful thing I had ever done for myself. There you meet with God and converse with infinity and find that your baser instincts are exactly that, unworthy of eternity though a little bit of ooze, fat, shit, and slime-- in moderation-- may never let us forget that we are still men and entirely human. And the question is-- "a little more", or "a little less".
And I still wear the Confederate lapel for a reason, the notion that "this flag would have never left you there" in a system run by the egotistic, finger-wagging crowd who may have won the Civil War like a pesky social cause of self-congratulation, but have now fallen into the discredited "sump pit" of loserdom with cynicism and a hedonistic world-denial that fundamentally avoids the sterner truths of "the jungle" and can't seem to understand that man can beat back its puma roar "for only so long" until the electricity is shut off and you find out you're lucky to have as a neighbor.
The sterling example of our country in rot was the fraud behind J.T. Leroy, who was essentially a cynical, bored, manipulative New York City mental patient/phone sex operator who played up to the flip side of "the southern gothic" updated for modern times-- weakness, effeminacy, gayness, self-indulgence, weakness-- the image of a 900 pound beach-ball of a man featured on "The Jerry Springer Show", so heavy that he can't leave the house and workmen are cutting away the wall so he can be hauled away to freedom, presumably "to get his life together" as Jerry counsels him in mock concern. There he is on his belly, like a fat seal, dabbing on "eye make-up" as perhaps the world's fattest female impersonator with his soft, flutey voice made all-the-more snuffy by his bulging quadruple chin and plump, sausage-like fingers as he cries out with a piteous fear of his own transient mortality.
No better, no worse than my junior high school principal back at my original "jail" who turned out to be a child molester, plunging yet someone else into a dark, shadow-world of shame. I speak for the record; that boy was not me. The story broke some time after I left and I was as shocked as anybody. This principal, with his plump features and long curly hair trailing down to his shoulders-- having the soft, ingratiating manner of Bill Clinton who would kiss your wife and then, with a wink, perhaps bugger your boy.
"FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!"
Though I will freely admit that I am a half-Jewish "bullshit artist", at least I never sunk to THAT.
I live in the emotional state, if not our 23rd one contiguously touching 9 others whose motto is "SHOW ME", where. . . . .
An assault rifle is a sacrament, a shrieking purple-haired lesbian a sacrilage, and the very last passenger pigeon blown out of sky is food on the table and PBS stands for P.utrid B.ull-S.hit.
This is my land. . . . . and to me the 1960's baby-boomer counterculture was a big CIPHER. Turn the six upside down and you have the 1990's which were even more worthless and degenerate.
This is "The Show-Me State", and I stand around with only the bottom half of my camouflage pajamas. "Show up" on my doorstep and "I'll show you". . . . . by pointing down at my crotch like some kind of Austrolipithicus, or maybe a red-scruffed orangutang standing in the woods, telling the world to crawl forward on it's hands & knees and kiss the scepter of unapologetic self-justification!
When he trolls for singles ads in the world of "online dating", looking for "some poontang" like the cover of Ted Nugent's "Crave-man" which is just a take-off of CAVE-man, sometimes he gets a message from a mystery woman feigning "interest" in him who turns out just to be really a cruel-eyed prostitute inviting him to her dubious shadow world with a waving, hooked finger.
Well, he gives her an honest assessment about "her line of work" and tells her "to be careful" instead of being transfixed inside the neurosis of "scholongs" and "monkey dicks" and a Jainist temple of swarming rats as he stands outside a white-painted duplex in a low-rent neighborhood with a line of the other shy, awkward, sexually-obsessed Jewish geeks.
A curious note appears in his "in-box", apparently spam-mailed by some kind of male hustler who can only be construed as "a cocksucker" as he felinely purrs, half-insinuating, that he'll come over and sit on your couch and play with your balls "if that's your thing" and "don't take it wrong if it isn't". Michael snickers to himself and sends out a smarmy e-mail that tells him he might be biting off the other end of "Satan's tallywacker" and be pulled down into the flames of "early retirement" where he will dance sweltering, Satanic glees upon stones shaped like the mushroom-heads of penises that erupt with ejaculations of lava and brimstone and HIV-infected bile as he wishes "he had loved his mother a little less".
Some obnoxious bit-player, living out in southern California and trying to get discovered in "Hollywood-land" with a feral cable-access show about three cuts below "Wayne's World's" basement (--and twice as grungy and low-rent and subhuman) sends me an e-mail saying "that you're a whacked-out guy, Mike. I'm betting that you watch SheMale rape videos on BetaMax! Now I'm going to go off and feast my attention upon some passed-out beer sluts!"
I send him a graphic that is a collage of his picture and a group of ugly, clawing "SheMales" and I ask him to point out "which is which".
And I thought of "Butch". . . . . and a lightning-bolt of inspiration went through my mind like a man gruelingly bench-pressing 1,000 pounds on his 7th rep . . . . . going for "10".
"She'd never BREEEEAAAAK. . . . . she'd rip your cock off in her TEEEEEEEEEETH. . . . ."
It's like that scene toward the end of G.I. Jane where the sergeant is singling her out for special abuse, brutalizing her with hard-handed slaps, drawing blood, making her spit out teeth in twisted perversions of pain, and then finally she starts chanting:
"SUCK MY DICK, SUCK MY DICK, SUCK MY DICK!"
And then all the men are joining in the war-cry and the spell of sadism is broken.
Even if writing this piece is practically some kind of warped, extended 18-hour effort like some sort of grenade-biting stand-off in the black winter of '43. Maybe "Ah-nold" needs to take less steroids or else "his head will explode". . . . . and we don't want him scraped off the insides of his home-office tank. On the road to Baghdad, '91 ho!
Fuck your parents!! Watch this
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"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!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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