I Could Be Wrong, But...
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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
©2008 David Boyne
PART ONE: FAMILY
(click for Part Two: Religion)
(click for Part Three: Death and Taxes )
This summer, I was induced to leave the Land of the Lotus Eaters, Encinitas, California, to which I hold a Permanent Resident Visa, and fly to the place on the opposite end of this continent where I was born and raised. Call it Nutmeg.
Nutmeggians smoke a lot, which they have plenty of time to do, as they talk very little. Legend has it that the word taciturn was coined by the loquacious New Yorker, Walt Whitman, who, traveling through Nutmeg, was conversationally frustrated by the Nutmeggian belief that they have been born into this world of forms with a predetermined and severely limited number of words at their disposal, and so must parcel out each word with great care, lest their words run out before their life.
When I arrived at my hotel, I passed a lone, large woman costumed in brown polyester neo-Colonial dress, slouched against the wall beside the hotel entrance, smoking an unfiltered cigarette. As I passed, she nodded without smiling and coughed at me.
When I reached the front desk, seeing no one there to greet me, I rang the bell on the counter. As if the bell were wired to her and had sent an electric shock to her, the large woman slouching and smoking beside the entrance of the hotel said, “Fuck!” She then took one long inhalation of her cigarette, flicked the burning stub on the postage stamp lawn, and came down the hall, disappearing through a door in the wall, and reappearing at the front desk across from me, exhaling a hazy cloud of cigarette fumes while asking, “How you doing?”
I made the mistake of answering, “Wonderful!”
This caused what minute facial expression she had shown up to that point to be instantly displaced by an impenetrable wall of icy distrust.
(Tourist’s Note: “How you doing?” is the national greeting of Nutmeg. The proper response is to answer the question by repeating the question, “How you doing?” This is one of many Nutmeggian koans that a sophisticated tourist would be well advised to become familiar with. Here are two more. To conclude any conversation, discussion, or argument, simply say, “Am I right? Or am I right?” Then walk away. Should a Nutmeggian come up to you and tell you that they have just killed their husband with an axe, or have been arrested for drunken driving for the fourth time, or have won the lottery, or have been accepted to Yale Divinity School, the correct Nutmeggian response is, “There you go.”)
As I believe that Full Disclosure should be practiced in essaying, as well in political advertisements and in bedrooms, I will now go on record to state that the reason for my journey to Nutmeg was to attend a family reunion. This explains why all of my brief stay in Nutmeg would be spent, not with the power elite, the Ivy League educated, the insider traders, but with the proletariat folk, the poorly and publicly educated, the outsiders who traded nothing of higher value than a Chevy pickup for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, both vehicles in need of undetermined but extensive repairs.
The rallying cause for family celebration was the rare event of a nephew of mine having graduated high school. This particular nephew is an anomaly in the family gene pool, not for having graduated high school, since others of us have already soared to this lofty height, but for having graduated with honors, without a police record, and with a fact-checkable résumé listing everything from Class President to varsity multi-sport athlete, including Captain of the lacrosse team. (Tourist’s note: In recent decades, lacrosse and archery have mysteriously arisen as the national sports of Nutmeg’s youth. Don’t ask me how. When I was growing up, helmetless, jockless, merciless tackle football, played on rock-strewn fields, in foot-deep mud after two days of torrential rain, was the sport of choice.)
I attended a celebratory cookout on the two-acre backyard of my brother’s 5000 square foot multi-level house. (The peasants of Nutmeg, rich with the natural resources of granite quarries, Puritan work-like-a-slave-ethic, and native ingenuity, are a prosperous bunch.) I had many conversations with my uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews, many of whom I had not seen for nearly 20 years. I would say, “How you doing?” To which they replied, “How you doing?” The largest expenditure of words came when a large deer and her fawn chanced to wander out of the surrounding woodlands and to walk calmly across the freshly mown lawns beyond the volleyball net. Every Nutmeggian male present, from the age of 13 to 77, exclaimed in perfect unison, “Geesh, if I only had my gun with me.” To which I made the safe reply, “There you go.”
Curiously, during my 20-year absence from the land of my birth and breeding, religion, like lacrosse and archery, has also arisen. A fundamentalist evangelism, its essence contained in bumper stickers phrases such as, Make War Not Love, Don’t Tax Me Tax My Brother, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, has subtly and deeply altered the Nutmeggian mindscape I had spent my youth stumbling across. To wit: There was no beer, no alcohol, served at the high school graduate’s celebratory picnic.
This is why, by the peak of the long, hot, humid, smell-impregnated summer afternoon of Nutmeggian revelry, I was desperate for a cold beer. With my 75-year-old father acting as my Sherpa, guiding me in the land I had once known but was now a stranger in, we set out on a walk. I asked my dad, “How you doing?” He replied, “How you doing?” I said, “Think the Yanks will catch the Sox?” To which my dad said, “Where’s their pitching? Huh? Am I right? Or am I right?” Our Nutmeggian heart-to-heart thus neatly ended, we continued our walk in silence. My father, knowing well the Nutmeggian propensity for mixing their alcohol with their driving, led the way along a half-mile line of cars parked on the rural road. When he noted a distant car, of which the trunk lid was lifted, he pointed to it and said, “There you go.”
And there we went.
And there we found Mike and Jerry, two of my adult cousins. Inside the open trunk of Mike’s muscled-up 1980s Chevy Nova, was a large cooler. Inside the large cooler, each one heart-achingly marooned in an arctic sea of crushed ice, were two-dozen bottles of beer, awaiting air-sea rescue. The beer was Budweiser, but still, I beamed an ingratiating smile, and greeted my Nutmeggian cousins, “How you doing?”
They replied, “How you doing?”
“I’m not old enough to drink,” I said. “But I brought my dad, and he is.”
This unprecedented volume of verbiage vexed my cousins. They looked to my dad, as an elder Nutmeggian, for enlightenment. My dad, not spending a word, eloquently shrugged. Somehow, the telepathic shrug of my father, conveyed the explanation for my odd behavior, and nothing was lost in translation. Mike said, “You live in California now don’t you?”
I said, “There you go.”
And then Mike plucked two bottles from the icy sea in his trunk. He handed one to my dad and the other to me. Then the four of us performed a ritual that Nutmeggians have in common with every other culture on this planet; we drank cold beer on a hot summer day and talked about the Past.
PART TWO: RELIGION (click for Part Three: Death and Taxes )
As noted, in Nutmeg, no stranger to puritanical obsession, evangelicalizing evangelicalism has risen. Again.
On the evening of the celebratory cookout, I attended my brother’s church, located on Main Street of an emotionally depressed and economically distressed town in central Nutmeg. The large and proud congregation would be gathering for a service honoring those of its members who had just graduated high school. My over-achieving nephew would have a speaking role.
Other than the town’s 27 liquor stores, which Nutmeggians mysteriously call “package stores,” or to save a word, “packies,” the church that my brother is a member of (and that everyone in his family is a member of, and that everyone everyone in his family knows is a member of) is the only prospering local business. Although, as the packy owners banded together to indignantly sing out, “But they don’t pay taxes!”
As I approached the church, the large marquee over its entrance was one of the few relics of the building’s past life, when it had been a burlesque theatre. The marquee no longer shouted the name of the headlining exotic dancer in town to perform for three nights only. Rather, it shouted the message, “Jesus Saves!” And displayed a local phone number.
Apparently, as change, the one constant in this world of forms, flowed along, television had come, Playboy magazine had come, a cornucopia of pornographic videos had come, and the burlesque theatre had gone, taking along with it the cottage industries that manufactured tasseled pasties and sequin-laden lingerie. The big theatre on Main Street had remained empty, unused, decomposing and depreciating, becoming the proverbial “eyesore” to the town folk, until the church, flush with handfuls and envelopes full of cash dropped into baskets passed around at every daily sermon, purchased the large building for a psalm. And the Greek chorus of packy owners sang out, “But they don’t pay taxes!”
I passed beneath the strident, yet reassuring, marquee, and opened one of a long bank of darkly tinted glass doors. Entering, I almost bumped into a tall, gaunt, chalky-skinned man in his 70s, who wore a black suit, skinny tie, and immaculate white shirt, and whose face looked as if it had not moved, other than the occasional slow blink of both eyes, for 30 years. Being navigationally challenged, and entirely capable of getting lost between my bed and my bathroom when I get up to pee in the middle of the night, my first thought was that I had entered a funeral home, and he was the undertaker. At that moment, the gaunt man looked straight in my eyes, and the wooden jigsaw puzzle of his face rearranged itself into a beaming smile, and his veteran smoker’s voice croaked, “Welcome!” And he meant it. And he even, ever so slightly, bowed to me.
As I crossed the lobby, with the old man’s beaming smile of greeting having been transferred to my face, like a candle lighting another candle, I was gently buffeted by swirling eddies of people, all talking happily, greeting one another as if they were long lost brothers and sisters being reunited at last, although, from what they said, it was clear they all had been at yesterday’s service. No one seemed to notice, or to care, that I was attired in California-style evening clothes, i.e., black shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals, while the men around me wore dark suits and somber ties, some carrying wide-brimmed felt hats in their big-knuckled, calloused hands, making me think of black-and-white gangster movies set in 1950s New York. The women around me wore pastel dresses, or dark skirts and white blouses, and were bedecked with bracelets and faux-pearl necklaces or large brooches, and many of the dark skinned women among them wore bright white gloves and complicated, multi-textured hats with wispy veils that seemed to float above their heads like halos. The boys around me were dressed like the men; the girls around me were dressed like the women. The only difference between the adults and the children was that the children, as all children do, no matter how dressed and groomed, emitted a pulsating vibration of energy seeking expression, any expression. I imagined that, should all the adults suddenly be disappeared by some Rapture-type incident, the children would break out in spontaneous games of tag, chicken fights, spin the bottle, and seeing who could slide fastest down the curving, polished brass banister along the stairs to the balcony.
The tide of the flowing crowd carried me up to one of the dozen ushers standing at the inner set of doors. This usher, also tall and thin, but a half-century younger than the first usher, and with creamy, coffee-brown skin, saw me coming and thrust out his hand. I hesitated, wondering if I needed to give him an admission ticket, then realized that he wanted to shake hands. As we shook hands, he looked straight in my eyes, beamed a smile, and with a clear voice uncomplicated by nicotine tar, said, “Welcome!”
I asked if he knew my brother.
“Everyone knows Brother Boyne.”
“Can you show me where he’s seated?”
“At the moment Brother Boyne is presently upstairs in the business offices attending a private meeting being conducted by the board of directors of which he is a member.”
Stunned by the sheer number of words this young Nutmeggian had spoken, and by the elaborate structure of his run on sentence, I asked, “Huh?”
Increasing the wattage of his beaming smile, the usher said, “Follow me.” I did. He led me, not upstairs to the business offices, but into the theatre-church. We passed beneath the very high ceiling and down deeply carpeted aisles, and stopped somewhere in the middle of the acre of rows of seats where my sister-in-law and a 12-years-old niece rose to look straight in my eyes, beam smiles, and harmonize, “Welcome!”
As I dropped into my seat beside them, my outer-Nutmeggian voice said, “How you doing?” My inner-California-voice gushed, “Dude! What a trip this is!” And my deeper-inner-Manhattan-voice raged, “Yo! They start passing out Kool-Aid—you run like a motherfucker get your ass on a plane and don’t even think of stopping to call 911 until you’re somewhere over Indiana!”
The theatre-church was already two-thirds filled with hundreds of politely voluble people. I sat in my seat, terrifically thrilled to be a spiritual atheist vacationing in Nutmeg, a witness to, and participant in, the buzzing electric energy surrounding me. Beaming a smile of goodwill that would have qualified me for a job as an usher for the church, I stared at the full, semi-circle balcony, filled with people, above and behind me. Then I stared forward at the big elevated stage behind a proscenium arch of blood-red velvet curtains. I noted the sophisticated sound and video systems. To complete my survey, I slowly turned 360-degrees in my seat and stared across a sea of church members and their guests. It was then that I vividly imagined I could see, leaned against the aisle walls, smoking cigarettes, and sitting in pairs in the few empty seats scattered around me, filing their brightly polished nails, the ghosts of buxom women who had once danced on the stage. These ghosts, adorned with false eyelashes and full stage makeup, their ample breasts supported by civilly-engineered under-wire bras hidden beneath colorful silk dressing gowns, snapped their chewing gum as they shared casual, catty, incisively detailed assessments of the dresses and figures and carriages of the real-life women around them.
While I was lost in this pleasant fantasy, the usher guided Rachel, my date for the evening, and two of her four children, to take the seats beside me. Louis, age 8, and Beatrice, age 6, and their mom, all had wide-eyed expressions of happy wonder and comfortable uncertainty that no doubt reflected my own. I wondered if they could see the exotic dancers, too, but never got a chance to ask them. Long ago and far away, Rachel had been a short and buxom brown-eyed brunette 18-year-old Catholic girl growing up in the same Nutmeggian town where I was growing up. Rachel had performed the most merciful of miracles, for which I will forever be infinitely grateful, when she relieved me—Praise the Lord!—of the heavy burden of my virginity. The miracle took place in modest, mundane surroundings, as most miracles do. It happened on an unmade bed in the half-finished basement of my parent’s house. There, close to my Gretsch drum set and prized Zildjian cymbals, my cobbled-together stereo blaring the nihilistic doggerel of Jim Morrison and The Doors, and my taxidermied silver fox, who stood sentry atop a faux rock base, into which I had cut a hole just large enough to stuff a plastic bag containing my stash of marijuana, Rachel had changed me from a horny boy thinking of nothing but would he ever get laid, to a horny man thinking of nothing but would he ever get laid again. In a handful of years to come, Rachel and I had reproduced the miracle in countless other modest, mundane settings, from the front and back seats of her father’s Oldsmobile, to a stall in the men’s restroom of the Town Hall, to the appropriately named “head” car on the Metro North train into Manhattan, to the sand dunes on a small island in the small harbor of our small town, to swimming pools, and dew-covered fields, and old barns beside peaceful reservoirs. Then, both having moved independently to Manhattan, we had, nearly 20 years ago, gone our separate ways. Rachel, while still short and still buxom, now had gray hair, a smoker’s voice, and was no longer Catholic, having converted to a former husband’s religion, Judaism. (A Note to Tourists Contemplating Traveling Through Life: In order to fully appreciate Life’s best practical jokes, you have to live a long time.)
The service began with music, and the music never stopped.
The music, none of it recorded, came from a 17-piece orchestra on stage that included an amplified grand piano that a college-aged over-achieving niece of mine was playing. As a large chorus on stage swayed while singing a meandering generic gospel song, a fat, balding, middle-aged man in a tight powder blue suit, no tie, and with the top two buttons of his white shirt undone so the gray matt of hair on his upper chest could air itself, separated from the group, stepped up to the microphone at a lectern positioned downstage left, and rambled into a rambling sermon. My brother, who spent the entire service upstairs in the business office in attendance at a private meeting being conducted by the board of directors of which he was a member, later explained to me that this man was the Reverend, and that he, and his sister, who was also called Reverend, ran the church. Their father, also called Reverend, had been a fat, balding man fond of tight brown suits, and had founded the church and built the church to its now prosperous height, before returning to whence he came. (Tourist’s Note: When a Nutmeggian family’s business is a church, rather than a package store, the preferred title for its owner is, Reverend. Although I have witnessed elder Nutmeggians, under the influence of alcohol-induced disorientation, or wicked irony, stumble into a packy and address the owner as “Reverend,” or to stumble into a bar and address the bartender as “Reverend.” And when an elder Nutmeggian says, “Reverend, pass the church key,” they are asking you for a bottle opener.)
With all my senses busily sorting the music, the throng of swaying singers on stage, the intricately stylish hats of the well-dressed African-American women seated around me, and the dogfight battle of their clashing department store perfumes in the overheated air, I was experiencing a pleasant disorientation. It was a lot like the way I had spent my high school years in Nutmeg; stoned. As the Reverend rambled through his sermon, I had a momentary flashback to my last visit to my brother’s church, nearly 20 years earlier, on the day of his wedding. The present Reverend’s father had performed the ceremony of holy matrimony between my brother and his 17-year-old bride on this same elevated stage. I now saw myself, in the museum of my memory, filled with dismay over my brother having, it seemed, surrendered his sovereignty to a cult. Yet, now, nearly 20 years later, my dismay was gone, and in its place, was a detached delight that perhaps only Mark Twain could capture in words. I can only offer, that I have traveled long and far in this world of forms and have come to see that we are all of us in this together. And all roads lead to where we are going.
Sometimes, the flow of events carried me toward semi-consciousness, and I would listen to the Reverend’s sermon, as he spoke of a future filled with prosperity for the recent high school graduates. He used words like “fight,” “compete,” “difficult” “seize,” “war,” “enemies,” and “vanquish.” He did not use the word “smite.” It just felt like he did. The Reverend’s sermon rambled on, and the next time I swam toward it, he was speaking of a future world filled with peace for the recent high school graduates. He used words like “fight,” “compete,” “difficult” “seize,” “war,” “enemies,” and “vanquish.” He did not use the word “smite.” It just felt like he did.
After the Reverend’s sermon faded away, a radiantly beautiful young woman of 17, who, of course, was my over-achieving nephew’s girlfriend, as well as a member of the church, and as well as a newly graduated (with honors and no police record) high school student, gave a short, impassioned harangue on how she had overcome the trials and tribulations, not to mention the pernicious peer pressures, of high school, by turning her Life over to Jesus, and to this church. She was here tonight, she said, to tell others, “If I can do it, you can, too!” To convey this message, she used words like “fight,” “compete,” “difficult” “seize,” “war,” “enemies,” and “vanquish.” She did not use the word “smite.” It just felt like she did.
Then, a fat, balding, heavily perspiring man in a tight suit, no tie, and unbuttoned white shirt, who at first I mistook for the Reverend, until I realized his suit was brown, not blue, came on stage. He perched on a high stool, clumsily strummed a guitar, and plaintively sang off-key. The song he sang, which he had also composed, told a disjointed tale of an anonymous lonely soul being lost in and wandering through this world of forms, experiencing a deepening and darkening sadness, until the very moment this soul had surrendered himself to Jesus. My outer-Nutmeggian voice muttered, “There you go.” While my inner-Californian voice gushed, “Dude! What a trip this is!” And my deeper-inner-Manhattan voice raged, “Jesus! Please get that guy laid so he’ll stop his self-pitying whining and shut the fuck up!”
After that, my nephew came to the microphone at the lectern downstage left, and spoke. However, I was so numb by then, I cannot recall a word he said. My nephew was followed by a trio of solidly fat, black-skinned women, all decked out in tight skirts that hugged the voluptuous curves of their hips, and tight sweaters that hugged the voluptuous curves of their breasts. These vast breasts were so divinely immense that any one of the three women could have suckled and consoled every traumatized psyche in the Middle East and North Korea and Utah. But they were here, in central Nutmeg, and they were singing their hearts out. With spotlights glinting off the bright jewelry adorning their hands, wrists, arms, necks and ears, and vigorously backed by the suddenly reawakened 17-piece orchestra, which had been forced to sit silently while the fat man with the guitar had keened, these three women raised their strong and complexly colored voices in a medley of gospel songs I had never heard before, but the message of which, “It’s great to be alive! Thanks, God, for the gift! I’m gonna enjoy every blessed moment of it!” I would like to have filling my ears at the very moment I leave this world of forms and return to whence I came.
Every soul in the packed theatre-church was standing now, clapping, singing, swaying, and holding both arms straight up, palms turned toward the singers on stage. Rachel leaned close to my ear to say, “Look at everyone up and juking around with their hands up in the air! It’s like a rock concert the way they’re dancing around and holding up their hands instead of cigarette lighters!”
I leaned close to Rachel’s ear so she could hear me say, “They hold their hands like that to symbolize Christ being nailed to the cross.”
Rachel leaned back from me, her face moving through a montage of expressions that began with “you’re kidding me, right?” and ended with stunned horror. Instinctively, she put an arm over the shoulder of each of her two children dancing beside her, and pulled them close to her sides.
Long after the three divine mother divas had rocked the house and marched off the stage to resume their seats with us mortals, the applause finally quieted. Then a fat, balding, heavily perspiring man in a tight gray suit, no tie, and unbuttoned collar on his white shirt, came on stage, sat on the high stool under the spot light, clumsily strummed a guitar and plaintively sang off-key his version of the Lost and Found and Can’t Get Laid song.
PART THREE: DEATH AND TAXES
Nutmeggians love to eat.
The quality of the food they eat does not matter; quantity matters. They will eat just about anything so long as it is overcooked, on sale, comes in a can, is served fast and in super-sized portions, and is not a fruit or a vegetable. (After all, it was not a 40-ounce porterhouse steak that led to the loss of Eden. It was an apple.) Nothing offends the Nutmeggian gourmand more than small portions. Should a restaurant’s portions be anything less than what a college lacrosse team would live on for three days, they are deemed “skimpy,” and the restaurant has lost not only that customer, but all the prospective customers in that Nutmegger’s family, church, work place, and packy, as the Nutmegger copes with his post-traumatic distress by telling everyone about his experience.
The morning after the night Jesus saved me, I joined my brother and father for breakfast. We would be going on a drive of one-and-a-half-hours, and needed to be sure we had enough energy to carry us the distance, should a multi-state power failure put all deep fryers in the region out of operation. As my brother eased his super-sized Chevy SUV into 1.3 parking spaces, he told me that the restaurant he chose for our pre-journey meal met and exceeded all Nutmeggian standards. This was subtly confirmed when I sat beside my father on a wide yellow vinyl banquette seat, bolted to the wall, and found that our table, bolted to the floor, was three feet away. While this great divide inconvenienced a few people, forcing them to lean far forward and awkwardly prop their elbows on the table as they sipped their coffee, it provided the vast majority of Nutmeggians with a comfortable fit. It was evident that any restaurant with narrower spacing between its booths and tables would have gone out of business, or into emergency remodeling, within three weeks of opening.
The one-and-a-half-hour drive to our destination was smooth and uneventful, allowing us to store all of the 4,000 calories each of us had feasted on, those fat cells available for use should sub-Saharan famine someday reach Nutmeg. During the journey, we also conserved our words, burning fewer than 15 of them, all of which came from my brother, who, when an SUV larger and newer than his own cut in front of us, was moved to exclaim, “Big expensive car like that and it don’t come with turn signals.”
Knowing that all roads lead to where we are going, I was nonetheless thrilled to be going where we were going: a graveyard.
When I was 17, like many teenagers, I became keenly interested in my family’s history. My urge to know something of my ancestors arose from a deep adolescent desire to know from whence I came. But. When I attempted to mine my parents for stories, family lore, their autobiographies, and the names and biographies of our ancestors, I ran into a silence so loud it would have rung the ears of the most aloof Nutmeggian. While I had by then encountered many of the dumb lies that humans tell, and had added more than my own share of whoppers, this was my first encounter with the dumber secrets that humans hold, often in death-grips. I sought only to know something about the people who had, through a long chain of sexually transmitted Life, brought me to be on this holodeck called earth. But my parents reacted as if I were the proverbial Bad Cop giving them the proverbial Third Degree. They seemed convinced my desire to know about my Past was really so I could assign blame, and punish them with an angry revenge.
Yet, I persisted. I hammered away at the parental wall of secrecy and managed to break off a few chunks of rebar-reinforced anecdotes, like the first folks who took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. These broken-off pieces of bigger secrets, were seemingly disconnected and without context. Yet, when I viewed them as an anthropologist might examine the shards of a clay urn from Ancient Greece, they yielded a clear, if fragmented, impression of my parents’ Pasts. What I saw was not a pretty picture.
I learned that my mother’s father was a Puerto Rican Catholic, one of 18 hard-scrabbling children in a San Juan family. As a young man he had, once upon a time, been in New Orleans, when a brother of his, meeting him, had for reasons lost in the Fog of Family War, stabbed him. I learned that my dad, raised in an Irish-Catholic family, began his journey into this world of forms when his father (my grandfather) began beating his mother (my grandmother), who was pregnant with my father. Reading a newspaper or watching local television news programs has since revealed to me that this primitive technique for inducing labor is still widely practiced both in and outside of Nutmeg.
Another shard of story I broke off The Wall told me how that same Irish-Catholic grandfather of mine, a construction laborer who could calculate in his head, even when thoroughly drunk, the exact board-feet of lumber needed to complete a structure, was driving his car—while thoroughly drunk—and possibly calculating board-feet in his head—when he crashed his car into an inconveniently situated telephone pole. Protected by the airbag of his drunkenness, he then got out of the ruined vehicle, pocketed the keys, stumbled home, and phoned the police to report his car as stolen.
The last story I managed to sledgehammer off The Wall, was the one in which my paternal grandfather, drunk again, as it seemed he spent most of his once-in-a-lifetime Life being, crashed another car into another inconveniently situated telephone pole. But this time, the young boy who would grow up to be my father, happened to be riding in the front passenger seat. The crash forced the body of the boy who would become my father through the windshield of the car, and sent him arcing across the cold winter night, and dropped him onto the frozen ground beside the dark road. Since hearing that story, I have carried in my mind an imagined picture, in which the young boy who would somehow survive to become my father, is lying face up in the weeds and litter beside the dark road, with the shards of glass embedded in his smashed and bleeding face glinting from the headlights of the crumpled car. In this imagined picture that I carry in my mind and quite possibly in my DNA, the boy’s eyes are open, unblinking, and staring straight up into the black winter sky salted with glittering stars. I wonder what he is seeing there. I wonder what he is thinking. As the image fades to black, I hear the boy gagging and choking, coughing up some of the many teeth that have been forced down his throat.
When I was 17 and bullied my father into relinquishing this fragment from The Wall, it sent my mind reeling backward into my own Past. I saw myself, as if I were a director following myself around with a camera, when I was a boy of five. I film myself getting out of bed on an early sunlit morning, the first person awake in the quiet house, and going to the bathroom to pee. And I watched myself, in this film of myself, as I stare, sleepy yet wide-eyed, at the glass of water that was always there on the sink ledge. In that glass of water were my father’s false teeth. The teeth fascinate and repulse the boy in this film, and he cannot keep from dipping his fingertips into the glass of water. Even now, as a half-century-old man directing his 5-year-old self in this movie-memory, I bring the camera close to show how the water-refracted light bent my small hand so oddly, as I traced my fingertips along the slick white of the teeth, and the pale pink of the gums, and the hard silver of the wire fastener.
But the work of hammering on my parents’ Wall was difficult and depressing. Even for a teenager. Unlike those folks who hammered away at the Berlin Wall, my freedom did not seem to lie on the other side. Soon, I was drawn to other, more promising, pursuits of happiness. I dropped my sledgehammer and picked up drumsticks, playing in a blues band with college-age musicians. Every summer I hitchhiked every which way, both to get out of Nutmeg, and to see the world; going from Canada to Florida to New Orleans. I smoked marijuana. I read everything I could find on wolves, and read Thoreau, who, if a wolf could be a man, would probably be a lot like Henry David. I read “the Russians,” like Tolstoy and Turgenev and Dostoyevsky (all of whom I strongly advise no American male under the age of 33 read). And I read Jack Kerouac (who should be required reading for all American males over the age of 47). With Rachel, I joyfully exercised my innate power to create many transcendent miracles, in a variety of modest, mundane settings. I did all this and much more, as the river of change flowed on. And in the blink of a cosmic eye, decades had passed and I was just days away from my return to Nutmeg this summer, when I was shocked—shocked!—to be told that I actually did have ancestors. And more, that several generations of them, back to pre-Civil War times, were buried in a small graveyard in the far northeast corner of Nutmeg. And more more, that my 77-year-old father wanted to take me there.
TO BE CONTINUED...