"I Am The Wad"

From a very early age I knew I was different. . . . . cursed even.

Most children at a nascent stage of development run around with a cheerful, oblivious screech, but at the age of five I had a problem-- a tattered, faded pair of "Popeye" overalls that my Dad wanted me to wear to nursery school like a garbage scow steaming into the harbor as the sailor in dispute chewed his corncob pipe and winked with a smug grin like a spinach corndog at the carnival of hokey puke.

God knows where he found them. . . . . probably at "Good Will" with all the po' folk shuffling around, old black grandpas in caps and the discount, flea-bitten antelope heads hanging in the window quiesently with glazed street-eyes like the beat-up wheeze of the blaxploitation movement-- what, with Reagan cutting funding to health & human services. You hold on to your pride-- one hand on the bottle, the other a shaking fist like L.B.J's scrunched-up remorse. Or play dead and sit on your stoop with a cheap sack of salty peanuts like a mumbling sharecropper tellin' the chillun's not to dream big as he slowly and methodically broke 'em out of the shells, shaking his head in earthy reproof like a decrepit Washington Carver goin' toothless with a lined mush-mouth.

Or whatever you wanted to call the early-to-mid-'80s in a low-fi, busted-television, afro rabbit-ears dumpster-block-feud like white and black apes fighting over a dirty stomp-hole of a trickling creek known as peanut-grinnin' Federal aid. And Hershey kisses to Carter bunnies known as art teachers, holding up the red clay of wooden Tolmec masks of grinning irony in a wrapped-vine thrust to the jungle of modern times like the leer of the jaguar-- honing in on the rear-end of the dumb tapir nosing for roots like a liberal social Democrat.

In bursts the Ronald Reagan hordes like tight-lipped, prune-faced order in a "Rawhide" lasso of bone, blood, steel, and boots-- if not mink-stole tax cuts with a finger-flurry of diamond rings and old Hollywood insincerity like faggots and blacklisting and a Vatican-connected banker found hanging from a bridge in a trench-coat with rocks in his pocket "to cut off the windpipe" as Mobil Masterpiece theatre "bommed" out its pompous BBC video graininess.

And dredged up from this global/cultural/spiritual/General Quadaffi platter o' dinge was this pair of hick overalls. . . . . I just about shit.

I didn't know much, but something told me in my lordly self-consciousness and nagging feeling of shame that those Popeye overalls belonged in the dank recesses of someone's basement, best forgotten. And unfortunately, that happened to be my dank basement I couldn't escape from-- nor from my plodding "Atari Democrat" father and fluttering leaf-- that is, of a high-strung ball of flakes bundled with nervous, fun energy known as my Jewish mother. . . . . as crazy as sprinkled sugar on corn flakes so she wouldn't have to pay full price for "Frosted Flakes".

Cheap-asses.

In the summer of '85 McDonald's was giving away "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" posters in their children's "Happy Meal" boxes. I got my cheery poster of this otherworldly, stump-like, underground-lookin' misfit who found a normal all-American home-- looked at it once, and insisted that Dad hang it up someplace. Naturally, he tacked it up in the dank basement where I made my play area with the beetles and spiders and yellow fluorescent lights, if not moldy foam padding reeking of late '70s decay and the malaise of Sesame Street like the rotted turkey splatter of PBS "Thanksgiving". Well, then it rained and leaked through the walls and soaked the poster to shit. Dad tore down the floppy mess and trashed it before I could make a survey, even as the garbage bags waited for pick-up out on the reeking street.

This was local neighborhood revitalization in "The Central West End"-- like struggling lichens making a home on a slab of moldy granite with the parsimoniousness of natural process, when you could picture the modest neighborhood being the site of a war-zone or house-to-house fighting as the kids ran around playing "laser tag", or whopped each other with the ultimate "He-Man" sword like rambunctious, bug-eyed heathen. You didn't leave your toys out, however, because someone might run off with it. . . . .

In the unjust cycles of childhood, when you were strapped into a car seat, "voyages" to bright, happy, plastic McDonald's were few and far between-- like a junk shuttle flying between planets on it's monthly rounds like a forsaken oyster schooner. I was big and fat for my age, a product of brooding inertia and learned helplessness, and pretty soon they wouldn't let me even jump in the balls at the McDonald's playpen anymore. . . . . which didn't betell good things for my dreams of signing up for "Space Camp" in Huntsville, Alabama to become an astronaut of derring-do and a clean-cut life away from this. Thin, normal, healthy kids with gap-toothed chirps of glee and no complications riding on the flight simulators with rocking fun and having their photos taken for the brochures while I would-- in all likelihood-- have to frown on the sidelines like a pouting, heavy-jowled behemoth with a bloated disposition, like a gaseous, fly-blown woodchuck.

Besides, my parents were "practical" (-- i.e. skinflints) and wouldn't spring for such a luxury mainly geared toward the sons of Reagan-voting Aerospace contractors and not squishy Mondale-voting social workers who puttered around in an orange V.W. Bug, as if their clunky, garish decade wasn't gone forever like so much pea-green shag-carpet and the potent, hairy stench of John Denver playing guitar in a tee-pee like so much mop-haired impracticality on a bunch of old 45 records that even I knew "stunk". The next best thing I could settle for was the local science camp, where we were supposed to build our own model rockets and study outer space like junior over-achievers, hokey as Will Wheaton on "Star Trek: The Next Generation".

I was not particularly good at engineering, what to me felt like picking up grains of sand with a tiny set of tweezers as I fell irremediably behind. . . . . all while some hokey, flap-lipped representative from McDonnell-Douglass in a rumpled, beige suit gave motivational speeches about "the mission"-- anywhere from 10-15 years away--  waving on hyped, mayonnaise-thick blandishments to "the promising" who could think in such uppity, four-square terms instead of the cynical decent into "instant gratification" and the spread of indulgence like lard on a biscuit, jam on an animal cracker, a wedge of slobbery cheese jammed in your mouth like Biblical "Goofus" being warned away from the sin of "Gluttony" while "Gallant" grew up to join the Astronaut Corps and be swarmed by girls and be awarded "The Presidential Medal of Freedom".

Some kids could momentarily escape from responsibility as they let the counselors piece their rocket together, yet "snap back" easily enough. However, I went off into my irregular, erratic orbit and would never really "come back to earth", like Eastern bloc vacuum tubes superceded by the snappy transistor as this hunk of junk drifted out of the solar system into parts unknown.

My status was locked in, like a mass of wadding that stuffed up the pipes like a clog of shit.

Watch and learn. . . . .

Some kids could slide down a chute and come out the other side at the water park. It always seemed that if anyone would get stuck, it would be me. . . . . holding up the line, the officials scratching their heads like NASA spotting a malfunction as steam rose from shut-off valves, the pressure building and building and building, until finally I'd be ejected with this gurgling, farting sound that would belch me into the pool below with a resounding belly-flop as everyone stopped and stared at this atrocity of self-consciousness, like a tragic-eyed, half-Jewish "Dumbo" hacked up for barbeque. I think it was a portent to cite that when it was my time to be birthed, I was coming out "ass-first" and had to be C-sectioned by "special exception" lest I "jam up the machine" like a bad load of wash that would otherwise cause the works "to fly apart".

Anything I'd try would backfire disastrously. . . . .

I'd punch a kid back, I'd get caught.

I'd slap an inflammatory bumper sticker on a hated principal's car, and a neighbor would always see me tip-toeing off through the shadows (-- I wasn't hard to pick out of a line-up).

In conclusion, I've learned that some are "slicker than owl shit" while I am not.

I am the wad. . . . .

And I can live with that, motherfucker.

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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!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

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("I heard that, Missy!")