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Sapped
Yesterday, after a christening near the West Virginia line, Lorina's girlfriend, with the glow of her 24-hour baby delivering labor not only lighting the room but also being like a hundred shiny nickels in a sock (its a weapon now), swung that sap-sock with an innocent and sincere querying strength and hit Lorina right upside her head, which had already been lately reeling from the shattering numerical force of her girlfriends now with babies. She took the hit like a middle-weight contender while I looked on sucking all the juice out of a Heinekin bottle, and guarding my flank from the roving guest of honor, the projectile-vomiting newborn.
On the way home through Front Royal we finally found the elusive parking lot for that Bookstore and two years past my initial introduction to the store, entered. Of note on a shelf was an Anthony Burgess sandwiched by a Bukowski on one side and a Burroughs on the other. I picked up a used Russo, Risk Pool, for a buck, and a Straub/King collaboration, Black House, hardback, for two-fifty. Lorina got a couple for herself and I took the four books to a counter in the back and laid them down and was told to pay up front. Coming in I had not noticed a place nor a person to pay. I said to the woman, "there is an actual human-being up there?" She assured me there was and that that person would answer to the name, Susie.
As I walked to the front of the store with the itchy heat of embarrassment in my armpits, I thought, how nimrodic of me, is there an actual human...? What, may I ask, is up with that phrasing? What the hell did I mean by that? I get to the front and I see the L-shaped counter right near the door and how damn lucky for me, there is a cat lazed on the counter like is requisite for the independent bookstore but which I must have walked right on by upon entering. That, the cat, is what I could have meant by that, if only, I had in fact, been aware of the cat. I put my face into the cat's flank and said, Susie, hellooo, Susie? until the presumable Susie showed up from behind a curtain, told me the cat's name is Willa, and took my money in exchange for the books.
Doodlebugger
I found something in the back of a drawer this morning and I'm wondering if you can find lost memories the same way, just rooting around. I lived in Austin more or less for 8 years and when I run into old mates from those days they will often tell me stories about myself that I have completely forgotten, so I guess the Austin drawer would be a good place to look for something I've forgotten I had. And the added bonus to this exercise is that it gives purpose to staring in space. I'm not just staring into space, I'm looking for something that might be important. Is it that...I had to postpone that last sentence in favor of getting up to clean the thing I found, buffing it up, removing old smells. I then put it away in another drawer.
I was out of Austin for months at a time over a year and a half period, living in small East Texas towns as a doodlebugger during the early eighties oil boom. I swung machetes, carried cables, detonated explosives, and drove tractor-like vehicles with giant tires and brush guards across pasture and through the woods, knocking down small trees in the path of our purposeful search for oil. I slung pipe, too. I befriended rednecks and bikers and college graduates, and dropped acid with them in the woods at work and fell asleep behind the wheel of their personal vehicles. When they fell asleep with their faces in their beers I helped them to their cars parked in the mud lot behind the honky tonk and hoped they didn't wake up when the car slid and slung wildly back and forth, narrowly missing other parked cars as the drunken good ole boy in the 4 wheel drive dragged us much longer than necessary at recklessly high speed out of the mud hole we were stuck in. The next day I offered to pay for the bumper repair. I swam in stagnant bogs of brown water, water teaming with moccasins as thick as my skinny wrist and alligators everywhere. I scratched tick and mosquito and red bug and banana spider bites until they bled. I rubbed them down with Lysol when it seemed like the accepted treatment. In motel rooms I watched guys lay down coke or crystal meth or blotter acid or crushed up pills into spoons with water over flame, and then suck that heated liquid up through cotton balls into hypodermics and inject it into their veins. I drank beer and shot pool at eight in the morning when that was what came up and once, that I know of, I swallowed a pill that made me forget a whole day and even though I had the day replayed to me by others, it is that day I wonder about most because it examples a break in my personal time/space continuum and I have to wonder did I survive that loss of time or am I still experiencing it or does time interrupted continue along the same path once its been interrupted. I listened with smiling sympathy when my Vietnam Vet roommate told me of being discovered as a youngster with a needle in his arm by his steelworker father and how his father had dealt with it by grabbing the wrist of the arm with the needle in it, and without removing the needle, putting his other calloused hand on my roommate's upper forearm and then slamming that log of bone and flesh against his knee so that forearm broke in a fashion known as compound fracture. That's when the bone sticks out of the flesh. A kid too young to be working with us (although only 3 years younger than my 19 years), a son of one of the bosses, drowned in a snaky, vine-ridden, pond after getting tangled in the vine. This was what I did for awhile after dropping out of the University of Texas. Three different times, three or four months at a time. I would come back to Austin feeling strong and virile and clear-headed with what at the time seemed like lots of cash and I would luxuriate with my slacker friends until I felt myself getting stuck in the boring repetition of aimless slackerdom and I then I would go back to the oil fields. But by the third stint I had used up all the magic available and knew my days on the seismograph crew were over. So, considering the relatively short period of this time I guess I'm not forgetting all that much about the period, although technically the oilfield drawer and the Austin drawer are separate. I can only get the Austin drawer so far open and it may be that what I can see in the partially opened drawer is all there is to see. I spent a lot of time in my Dallas youth in Sunday school or youth group activities and I can't seem to access all that much of that either. I wonder am I tired of my memories or am I just impatient for new ones? What? Oh yeah, be here now, for sure. The experience creating memories takes care of itself.
Think Brown And Flaky
I was born at the Methodist hospital in South Oak Cliff way ahead of the cool curve, just a few years before Oswald shot the President and officer Tippet and tried to hide out in the dark of a theater somewhere near the house I was in coloring a snowman on fire while listening on the combo radio/45 record player to the news of an assassinated President. Its not that scenic where I grew up, then or now, an area just barely fighting off the blight pressed upon it by the nearby snaking Interstate 35, which constricts the hopefulness out of the neighborhoods into which it carries the hopeful.
A year after the assassination we packed up and I'm not saying we rode that snake out of there because that sounds nasty. We jumped in the station wagon and relocated to the edge of farmland that is now the middle of North Dallas. If you left from that house today looking for the edge of farmland you better gas up first.
On the construction sites that were my playground I fell in infrastructure ditches full of chocolate rainwater and floated on discarded lumber in my heavy winter coat while waiting to be rescued. I traveled for miles underground in storm sewers during the Vietnam War only I was doing it in North Dallas, finally exiting onto the brown hillside that overlooked the earth movers creating the LBJ freeway.
My friend and I dug a hole in his backyard and I could think of nothing else during the Sunday sermon at the Methodist church than getting back to the digging of that hole. The preacher would later divorce his wife and his son was rumored to be gay and as long as it could last we all felt fortunate to know about such things without having the stain of similar impropriety on our own happy days. My friend had been on the grassy knoll that day the bullets whizzed by but we never talked about it. We were old enough to know better but we fantasized about maybe actually getting to China if we dug long enough. We hit a gas pipe many days into the project and I can only guess his parents were relieved because the hole was considerably deeper than was necessary for the tree they had intended to plant there, which now couldn't be planted there at all because of the gas pipe.
Before everybody fenced in their properties I pedaled between houses at full speed on my purple Schwinn Stingray with banana seat and slick rear tire, crossing blindly the paved alleyways that ran behind our houses, only once getting hit by a car.
Footballs soared and I reached up casually during full stride and pulled them to my chest, never slowing down until crossing somebody's driveway marking the end zone of our imaginary greatness. I had a Leroy Kelly jersey and I just loved it because while wearing it I not only looked super cool, I was possibly in possession of supernatural talent. The day it ripped during a tackle was like days that would follow, only harder, for the lack of the cumulative experience which becomes our perspective.
This morning things have gotten to the point where all I'm thinking about is food and each successive check proves true the same reality, that I have very little to eat here. I could but won't eat the garbanzo beans, the black beans, the chunk light tuna, the refried beans, or the can of soup, for breakfast. I did have a bowl of cereal and could have another one but I feel saddened by the prospect of that. What I will eat apparently, is the microwave spaghetti and meatballs. Last night I had a can of soup from the bighouse cupboard and then went out to the 211 Quickee Mart and got me a pint of Ben and Jerry's NY Super Chunk Fudge chocolate ice cream. I felt so good when I first dug in that I decided to just eat the whole pint and see what happens. And let me tell you something--what happens is near death, so be careful with that, you ice cream addicts.
Well, that was like a snack, the spaghetti and meatballs. Hey, let me tell you something useful, finally. If where you shop offers a sale on Stouffer's frozen dinners, like 5 for ten dollars or something, go easy on the spaghetti and meatballs and instead try the chicken pot pies (the lasagna is an ok value too). You are thinking oh my stove doesn't work or oh I don't want to heat up the kitchen for one little pot pie and the microwave browning technology offered by that silver cardboard stuff in frozen dinners is whack, hey, no, no, they finally got it down, at least with the Stouffer's frozen pot pies. Trust me, think, brown and flaky. Think brown and flaky. And now, having improved your life just that little bit, I bid you adieu.
Killing Rodents
Like a warrior come from the battlefield here I sit contemplating the stain of death all around me. From an inside connection at the compound of a local radical feminist octogenarian playwright I have procured a better mousetrap and the kill rate of my only remaining pets, the cute, furry, heretofore skittering farm mouse, is astounding.
I started in earnest on this nascent campaign of death after various failed attempts using the standard wooden based spring catapult/guillotine-type mousetrap that you would be familiar with if you ever came out from under that rock.
While failing, I considered the various rationalizations for living in harmony with bubonic plague carrying rodents. Life is sacred. They only come out at night while you sleep. The dimensions of the doo-doo they leave behind on your counter tops is small. Their urine trails can only be seen in the dark under ultraviolet light. As a kid you used to keep one as a pet (until the one Mr. BC kept eviscerated yours and you came down the stairs crying, Willie is dead, Willie is dead, while your brothers snickered over their cereal bowls). The plastic spatulas they gnaw grooves into can be replaced.
While I ruminated for days and days over these things I met other locals who would look at you like you the devil's little brother if you mentioned killing a snake. Life is sacred, life is sacred, life is sacred. A mouse is less threatening than a snake so I kept the mouse-killing campaign secret from those I suspected would ostracize my efforts.
Over time the poop piled up in corners and the urine trails got smear-wiped with Windex now and again and I stopped killing snakes and I looked on benevolently while deer decimated my garden and groundhogs dug tunnels under the 40 acres because you need a permit to fire a gun on the half of this property that is in town limits, and, while I say I don't need no stinking permit I am at least casually interested and observant of the laws of our land.
That groundhog, there's not just one but, that groundhog, the biggest rodent out here, stands erect on its haunches eating the only Cherokee Purple tomato that grew from the plants eaten to near death by the deer, and, juice and flesh bits matting his fur, shoots me the finger, before running off to hide under the barn, its fleshy haunches undulating from side to side reminding of that fat cat Herman who used to keep me company out here, before he died a horrible death at the veterinarians office.
I would earnestly ignore the fruitlessness of my attempts to kill mice with the aforementioned wooden traps and convince myself if I just smeared the peanut butter better (you have to be a veritable word craftsman, a damn word smith, to get the words "peanut butter better" together) or lubricated the parts or located the traps differently that I would achieve the success that eluded me.
Because I believe strongly in education continuation I would read books about Rats and watch strangely compelling made for TV type B movies, like the one called The Rats, which features in one movie the same swimming pool, once with rats swimming in it and once with all the water let out, the rats just coming from the NY sewer system to fill it up with all their horrific rat-writhing potential and then...I ain't gonna ruin it for you. Like Joe Bob says, check it out.
You poor desperate soul who has read this far to find out what is the new improved mouse trap I'm talking about, and I'm not shittin' you, these traps are stupendous killing machines, affordable, and reusable, and the only down side of these traps is how they throw in your face, before you even know it, your propensity for killing. Of course, given the right conditions, propensity for killing is something even the most ardent pacifist will come to, or so I think.
Oh hell, I'll give you a hint. I still use peanut butter to bait the new improved traps. That should get you there. Now, get out there, and kill some rodents.