May 2006

Realist

Posted on May 21, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

While, as I have said, my father was no philosopher king. He did say four things in my presence, if not directly to me, –folk or class wisdom, I guess I would call it—that stuck with me over the years and that have given me reason to ponder in an attempt to understand my father’s zietgiest as well as my own.

Once, he sang:

Skeeter fly high, skeeter fly low worker
If that skeeter bite my peter
That skeeter ain’t gonna fly no mo

Well, this isn’t wisdom exactly, but I pondered it wondering when a person would give a skeeter a chance like that to bite his peter. We forget so easily! Our own Heritage. These are the verses of a people accustomed to pissing outdoors in thick skeeter country. Like Orlando, Florida, in 1955. The land of a thousand lakes, or as we dubbed it on our swing through in 1955, the land of several trillion skeeters.

He also said:

“Same shit, different bucket.” This is a saying of rather universal dimensions, seeing that it can be applied to any two things—or pieces of shit—that are the same but have different packaging. This might be said for example of whatever difference there is between a Big Mac (piece of shit “a”) and a Carl’s Junior burger (piece of shit “b”). Or of most so called celebrities say, Brittany Huston (piece of shit 1) and Hilton Simpson (piece of shit 2). But I feel it most effectively applied, as my father did at the time he spoke it, to the two political parties. It bespeaks, when coming from the mouth of a working person, the great distance he feels between the affairs of his daily life and the mucky-mucks up there on capital hill who cannot tell shit from shinola.

Additionally:

“Shit’s like cream. It rises to the top.” Considered aesthetically, the co-mingling of turd-like brownness with milk like whiteness (along with the suggestion that one might accidentally drink a turd along with one’s milk), this statement is somewhat disgusting. But it is a point well made, even more so in our present day, where well packaged shit dominates the movie industry and men of the lowest, shit-like qualities, appear to run the country and the globe. In fact, the theory expressed in this saying seems so representative of experience as to be irrefutable.

Finally, and mostly sadly and stocially:

“Life is making the best of a bad job.” In the literature I have read, working class people are, over and over again, described as realists. This saying would certainly take the wind out of the sails of any idealist. And once again, the distance of the working class person from the forces that control his destiny is suggested. He works a job he did not create. He did not plan it, he did not finance it, he will make no money from; he knows moreover that the job is ill-designed, tossed together, constructed from inferior materials, and probably completely unnecessary. The one hope one has is a personal hope. If one is not to be irrevocably stained and ruined by the bad job, if one is not to lose all dignity, one must do one’s best. If there is any honor, that’s it.

Perhaps along with my tooth pick legs, and my great regularity, I inherited from the old man, as representative of his class and times, a dark realism that when brought into contact with my idealism produces an admixture of rank pessimism.

Who knows?

Lower Back Pain

Posted on May 20, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I heard the old man’s truck pull up on the gravel out front. It was about noon on a work day. I had never known the old man to come home in the middle of a day unless it was raining. But it was summer and it wasn’t raining. So thinking something might be wrong, I went to the front window as the old man tried to walk down the slope of the driveway—the house being set down below road level—bent over at 90 degrees.

lowerback His back had seized up he said, and he couldn’t straighten up. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and ate his lunch from the paper bag because nothing was going to disturb his routine. He munched in his Fritos while old lady called to make an appointment with a doctor. He came back still bent at 90 degrees. The doctor had said that the only thing to do was to get him on his back resting in traction. The doctor said it might take 4 weeks, even longer for him to straighten up.

I am not a fucking ingrate. I might not have much positive to say about the old man as a human being; but he was a good and steady worker. Seeing him knocked out of commission like that made me feel vulnerable and rightfully so. He was the bread winner. The old lady hadn’t worked since WW2 and she didn’t drive. Also according to the old lady, we were always teetering on the brink of destitution. She was an expert at poor mouthing, and if you asked anything about the family money, she wouldn’t tell you or she would lie.

One hot summer afternoon the old lady told me to go into their bedroom and collect the glasses in there the old man had been using. He loved canned lemonade. So I went in. The room was close and hot and stuffy, and the old man was asleep with his big belly sticking out from under his t-shirt and half of his old, pale and gnarly looking penis hanging out from under the stretched out elastic of his underpants. He was snoring and drooling. Flies buzzed over him because of all the sticky lemonade glasses around.

I got this horrible feeling that he was never, ever going to get. The guy had just died and gone to pig heaven. I don’t mean he had died really, but he had found pig heaven right here on earth.

But after about six weeks he got up and went back to work. His back never seized up like that again. But when ever he sat for while, the back would stiffen up. When he got up, he would give out a groan and sort of launch himself out of the chair. About half way across the room he would straighten up, and if he knew you were watching and he had it in him, he would let out a fart.

Farting was his highest form of humor. He was a good farter, so why not. I remember hearing a comedian say if something makes people laugh keep doing it till they stop. I had stopped laughing a long time ago, but if his farts irritated the old lady, I still enjoyed it as a form of masculine bonding, I guess. About the only thing I inherited from my old man, aside from my toothpick legs, was a vigorous and robust bowel. I am incredibly regular. Once when I was constipated and couldn’t shit for three days, I thought I was going to fucking die.

The Insanity of Lawns

Posted on May 18, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

The old man was no philosopher King. Once they were on my ass about something I had done or hadn’t done or did and shouldn’t have. Lord knows what. But they could make a guy crazy, so this time, I don’t know why, I launched into my existentialism trip and started neurotically nattering on about what was the point of it all, sure you do this, so you can do that, and then you get a job and work till you die, and could they tell me what the point of all that was. Was the point simply to do whitehouselawn whatever came next? Whereupon or thereabouts the old man put his hands over his ears—like the hear no evil monkey—and said, I can’t think about this shit. If I had a shotgun right now I would shoot myself.

And let me tell you what, more than once I wished I had a shotgun to give him to see if he was as good as his word.

When I read Waiting for Godot I decided that Beckett must have been in our house or lived in some stinking suburb in sunny SoCal. Where nothing fucking ever happens. Instead people plant lawns—can you believe it—and then the grass grows—well, what do you fucking expect—and when it gets TOO long—whatever the fuck that may be– and then you fucking actually CUT the lawn—in my case with a totally non-powered push lawn mower—so that it is the RIGHT LENGTH—and then the fucking shit GROWS RIGHT BACK. And sweet god in heaven, you have to cut it again, and again, and again endlessly until you or the fucking lawn dies, whichever comes first.

Whoever thought of the so-called lawn was fucking insane or had a lot of servants to do his dirty work. Because not only was I required to cut that little piece of fucking shit assed lawn, I had to pick up the DOG poop from it. I hated to pick up that fucking dog poop. Keeping a dog in a tiny little lawn area is another idea dreamed up by some fucking stupid person. Where else then is the fucking dog going to poop but on the fucking insane lawn? I ask. And you have to pick it up because the DOG poop actually kills the grass. And if you have a female dog, her piss will kill the grass.

And then in the winter, the lawn would die out, after all my work, mostly of its own accord, and I would let the poop just sit there till sometimes it became covered with green fungus. There’s no sight quite like green fungus on dog poop on a dead lawn. Our neighbors had a better idea. They had a dog but they didn’t have a lawn out back—like us civilized people; they just had dirt and in the middle of that dirt they had driven a spike and attached to that spike was a chain about twenty feet long and attached to the other end of the chain was their dog. A bull dog.

It would lie around in the dirt sleeping or licking its own ass. And every once in a while it would walk to the end of its chain, point its asshole away from the spike and poop. I would look over the fence and see in our neighbor’s backyard a perfect circle of dog poop. It was quite amazing, that circle of dog poop. That dog knew his geometry.

Brick layer

Posted on May 17, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I can say authoritatively that the old man never talked to or with me about anything. Not about politics. Or cars. Or women (thank god for that!) Or even sports. Come to think of it he wasn’t really interested in sports. That may be because he never played any. They had sports in his high bronx brick school; the basketball coach asked him to try out for the team because he was six feet tall. But he couldn’t do that. He was needed at home to work. He was not graduated from high school till he was 21 because he got kicked back three grades; not because he failed but because he missed more than 30 days of class per school year. That was a law they had to stop farmers from keeping their children at home to do field work.

He was out picking peaches one summer in that sweltering heat, working his butt off I imagine, and he fainted. They revived him and he went right back to work, but it happened again the next day. He was working the orchard of one of the big land owners in the area, and this man, I forget his name, said, “Damn, that boy ain’t cut out for farm work.” And he offered to pay the old man’s way to Clemson if he would major in engineering. So off to Clemson went the old man who up till that time had been studying by the light of a kerosene lamp, and he flunked out immediately though he got an “A” in blacksmithing.

That was the extent of his education. He did read a little in later years, mostly detective fiction with a little smut in it and Zane Grey western type books. I don’t know if he could write. I got one hand written letter from him and that was it. According to the old lady it took him three hours to get those couple of pages down. He couldn’t spell for shit. When I last saw him, he was demented and said God had been giving him spelling quizzes and then he said a word god had asked him to spell and then he spelled it incorrectly. I can only hope God was not a harsh grader went it came to spelling.

Every boy wants to look up to his father and not because the father feeds him but because of some quality in the father like, maybe, being a good father. But my father wasn’t one of those. Or maybe the boy will look up to the father because the father is real strong or because other people look up to his father because of what he does or his place in society. My mother told a story that Queen Elizabeth had sent a messenger down to Dorset requesting that my mother’s grandfather come to court to be the Queen’s blacksmith. He didn’t go but sent his son. And I remember having a fantasy that the President would call upon my father to do some special brick work in the white house. Because as I said, a boy wants to look up to his father. He wants to be able to say with pride, “That’s my dad.” But the President never called.

I remember driving through the Bronx in the mid-80s. All over the place they were knocking down old ten or twenty story apartment buildings. Many of them were actually made out of Brick! Twenty story structures, brick from top to bottom. It hurt in a particular way to know those buildings were going to be knocked down. Those buildings will never be replicated. Not because of the cost of the brick, but because of the cost of the labor. It hurt to think that all the human energy compressed in those buildings would simply disappear into thin air with one blow from a wrecking ball.

Monkey Shit

Posted on May 17, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I’d be out back watering the garden of an evening, and Mr. Hunter would come out and amble over and lean on the fence and start to talking. One evening he has just seen something on the news about drug dealers crossing the border, and he launches into a harangue about the evil of drugs, and said that what he would do, should he catch any drug dealers crossing the border, was line them up and shoot them on the spot.

chimp Most of the time, when he launched into one of his idiotic opinions, I was not inclined to say much of anything because, as I said, he was six feet six and weighed about 320 and really there’s no point in making trouble with a neighbor over the USA’s drug policy. But if I didn’t say anything at all, I worried that he might think, since he knew I had a college degree, I felt too superior to even respond to his idiotic opinions, and I didn’t want to do that because I knew he had a severe inferiority complex. So I said, well, lining them up and shooting them like that might be a violation of their civil rights.

He goes like, huh?—like that idea had never crossed his mind. Well, then, what would you do? He wanted to know. I said I didn’t have the foggiest though lining them up and shooting them on the spot made good sense except for the civil rights issue.

While talking to Mr. Hunter about political issues made me nervous, he could be a good talker if you got him to telling stories. Nowadays I can’t find people who tell good stories. I guess people are in too much of a rush, and Mr. Hunter’s story telling skills were developed and polished down in Mississippi where people had time for such things. Now you just have to get to the point ASAP, as people say, but his stories were all about taking as long as possible to get to the point.

Working at the zoo, he had a chance to observe all the animals and the people there. He liked to tell one story about the monkey cage, and he would describe the monkeys that lived there and then he would talk about the tourists who came to see the monkeys and then he would—apologies to the ladies if any were present—talk about the monkeys throwing their shit at the tourists. And he went on and on about this one monkey—chimpanzee for those more technically inclined–that was one sure shooting shit slinger (apologies to the ladies). He was one dead eye dick and especially did not like having his picture taken because he payed special attention to people with cameras.

So Mr. H. one day saw this fellow fling a piece that completely covered the camera of this Japanese gentleman and also got stuck between this his glasses and his eyeballs, and the monkey did this all without even breaking his wrist. And the point or punch line to the story, aside from paying tribute to one straight shooting shit slinger, was Mr. Hunter’s complete confondation and utter amazement that the monkey was able to achieve such accuracy and force without even breaking his wrist. Mr. Hunter’s consternation, almost childlike amazement, at what he had observed served somehow to infuse and to conceal the fact (apologies to any ladies present) he had been telling a story about a shit throwing monkey.

I have observed since, watching the Discovery Channel, that chimps can be just sitting there and suddenly heave a rock with considerable force underhanded without even breaking the wrist.

Home Sweet Asylum

Posted on May 14, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Much is written these days about the breakup of the family, all the divorces and alternative family styles. But I must say, from my very limited experience, that the old way was not all that hot. I would be out of an evening for a stroll up and down the street enjoying a postprandial puff, and I’d look into the windows of the houses as I passed and observe the dim light of the TV flickering in the living room, and think that each one of those places was a god damn insane asylum. What’s ham that song, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors?” Well, thank god for that.

For example, while Mr. Hunter had a sunny chain jerking story telling side, he was, according to Mrs. Hunter, a fucking bear to live with. He had rages and sometimes would pick her up by the shoulders and bang her against the wall. This was no small thing because Mrs. Hunter was six foot two and thick boned. Also, poor Mrs. Hunter had not only the big baby to attend to but four little Hunters all with orange red hair, red freckled faces, and big bones. She said that she would put a ham down in the middle of the table and when dinner was done the whole damn ham would be gone except for the bone.

Mr. Hunter was your nuclear family type and for a long time resisted Mrs. Hunter going to work it being a man’s duty to bring home the bacon or, in their case, the entire ham. But the more you fed the kids the bigger they got and the more they needed to keep growing and it sure did look like every one of them, even the girls, was going to top out well over six feet. So Mrs. Hunter, who had a nursing degree, finally had to go to work at a nearby hospital.

Eventually, she made more money that Mr. Hunter because, while he wouldn’t have put it that way, he was pretty much a glorified animal janitor. He told a story and made it sort of funny by saying the gorilla compound had been made for gorillas and not people because the only way into the place was up from the bottom through a trap door and every time he opened it to go into the compound he had no idea what manner of gorilla piss and shit was going to come pouring down on him. If you think about it for a minute, a job that involves getting covered in gorilla shit and piss cannot pay much.

So to preserve his manhood Mr. Hunter insisted Mrs. Hunter sign over her pay check to him. And when they went to get groceries together, as they always did ever Saturday morning, he would be the one to pull a wad of bills out and pay the cashier. At one point Mrs. Hunter went to a counselor to try to save their marriage, and I was happy to hear that but not so happy when she told me she was going to a Christian Counselor and what they did was sit on bean bags and pray together for God’s guidance.

The T-Shirt Incident

Posted on May 14, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Richie White, the kid everybody beat up on the Boy Scout camping trips, was the kid nearest to me on the hill that was my own age. So sometimes I would go down to his house, and we would go to his garage that was filled up from one end to the other with this giant Lionel Train layout.

Actually I had never quite grasped the attraction of the Lionel train; once you set it up and run it a couple of times to see if you could get it to run it got old pretty fast. But Richie would insist on running hi setup a couple of times; it was pretty amazing. Trains cris-crossed all over the place, and Mr. White had made little houses and stores and trees. After that we would do some Boy Scout shit together. Richie wasn’t so bad as long as you weren’t trying to beat him up and didn’t mind the snot running out of his nose all the time.

One time we were doing some sort of Boy Scout shit that involved pocket knives because I was hacking at something, slipped, and stuck the blade right into the fatty ball of my thumb. For a split second I can see all the layers of different types of skin and muscle all laid out in nice, neat rows, and then the thing fills up with blood and then the blood overflows into the cup of my hand. So I walk up the stairs and kick the screen door to the kitchen a couple of times, all the time for some reason holding my hands together to cup the blood, though at about this point the blood was overflowing. Mrs. White opens the door, grasps the situation, says not to worry about dripping blood, drags me over to the sink, turns roaring hot water into the wound, followed by something that makes me want to scream, wipes the wound and then lashes the sides of it together with a butterfly bandage. That should do it, she says, and you won’t need stitches either.

I got to hand it to the woman, but she did a good job. Straight forward, absolutely sure of what she was doing, and quick about it. And she was right about not needing the stitches. But I was maybe the only person on the whole hill who had anything good to say about her. Her little Richie, she let everybody know, was a genius. He had crawled early and walked early and talked early and read early and then they tested him and he came out Genius. He was going to be a Genius scientist, so they bought him all sorts of science stuff, like chemistry sets, and microscopes, and a real nice telescope for examining the stars. Her life’s purpose was to defend and protect her little genius.

One day she hears this screaming and yelling and knows, because she has heard it a number of times before, that somebody is beating up on little Richie. She comes out just as Mr. Hammet, who lived in the house a little down the hill and across the street from hers, was trying to pull the boys apart. He has little Richie by the scruff of the neck, and she, screaming don’t you dare lay a hand on my boy, leaps right onto Mr. Hemmet’s back. He jumps and she slides off but not before getting a grip on his t-shirt and, as she fell to her butt, nearly ripped it clean off of him.

Such behavior did not endear Mrs. White to her neighbors. They all thought she was loony tunes. And this wasn’t the only time. Another time a father had been trying to pull his son off of Richie and she bit him in the thumb. He said she had actually broke the skin and that he was going to sue her or something for assault with a deadly weapon. But he never did.

lionel train

BS Oath

Posted on May 12, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

Being a Boy Scout required some memorization. For example, I had to recite the following oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

I don’t think I gave a second thought to what I was saying, though now I can see I was completely unqualified to be a Scout. I did think about the Scout Law because it was difficult to keep straight.

A Boy Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

moses I kept forgetting parts of that or the order of it anyway. And it seemed like an awful lot of things for a person to be. I already had to deal with the Ten Commandments. And even back then I could see I had problems in the Obedience Department, also in the Cheerful area; being Thrifty was easy since I didn’t have any money. And as for the Clean part I have always had problems in the personal hygiene area maybe because I spent the first ten years of my life without a bathroom.

Mostly though Boy Scouts was about going on camping trips three or four times a year, and having Monday night meetings in the cafeteria of the local elementary school. One year I was the boy leader of the whole damn troop. During this time I began to develop my particular leadership style. Sometimes, I would have to get the whole damn troop stand in a line. So I would be upfront and I would order them to stand in line and I would do it in such a way as to suggest: really I don’t give a good goddamn whether you stand in line or not but “they” have told me to do this and if you don’t do it I will get my ass in a sling, so please stand in line.

You give some people a little power and it goes straight to their head. They think the power is their power (even thought it has been given to them) and actually get upset if somebody doesn’t respond to “their” power. Petty bureaucrats act like that; without the power they have been given, they would be like nothing but a zero. So in my first year in college, we could only get one piece of meat, whatever it was, for dinner, and if you went back and asked for a second piece from the server ladies they would get their panties in an uproar because you were challenging their power.

Power always comes from above and if it goes to your head it infantilizes you.

Old Man River

Posted on May 12, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I got as high as Life Scout in the organization; nobody knows about that rank because it’s the one below Eagle Scout. I couldn’t ever become Eagle Scout because you had to have a life saving swimming merit badge which meant jumping in the water and pretending to save drowning people. eonoree I wasn’t likely to get that because I couldn’t swim. Actually, I shouldn’t have gotten beyond 1^st class scout because I couldn’t swim. But my parents actually paid for swimming lessons for me, and the guy giving the lessons finally had mercy on me and let me get the swimming merit badge by doing it on my back rather than on my face like I was supposed to. No way was I going to be able to save people while swimming on my back.

I really don’t know what the fucking big deal was about swimming. Back in South Carolina nobody knew how to swim. We were landlocked and nobody had swimming pools. Maybe getting me to swim was a way of raising the status of the whole family or something. I just couldn’t put my face in the water to do the crawl. Once back in SC we had gone on a family outing. A rare thing. Because it was blazing hot they took us down to the Enoree River near Clinton to cool off in the water. This was a very old river that twisted this way and that.

I took about 10 steps out into the old Enoree River and whap I fall into a hole made by its swirling currents. I went straight down, and I felt like I do today when I fall; I just sort of relaxed and went with the flow because there wasn’t much I could do about it. I mean I didn’t know how to swim. I sort of knew the situation was dire and then I was distracted by my life passing before my eyes just like they say it does when you are drowning. This didn’t last long because my life was pretty short. I was about 4 and then things went dark and before I knew it somebody had grabbed me by the hair.

A guy had been standing there with this pants rolled up to the knee, and he had looked over and seen me, and then he had looked away for a while, and then he looked back and saw I had disappeared, and then he saw what looked like movement under the water and he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me straight up.

And the way the old lady acted you would have thought she was the one who nearly drowned. It was boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo, and she wouldn’t stop so once again I had fucked up. I remember sitting in the back of that car and saying, “Mommy, Mommy, I am all right. I am all right.” But it was still boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo.

I spent way too much energy over the years trying to make that woman feel better. But she was like that hole in the Enoree River —bottomless. You could try and try to make her feel better but it didn’t do a damn bit of good.

And that’s why years later I couldn’t put my face in the water to get that fucking merit badge.

Green Eggs

Posted on May 10, 2006 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I don’t know how I got in the Boy Scouts. I am pretty sure I was not consulted, and when the old man got involved so he could go hang out with other adult males on the camping trips, doing whatever the hell they did in their big tent, I was stuck.

tenderfoot The high light of the camping trips—aside from getting to crap in the great outdoors which brought back fond memories for me—was somebody or other beating up on Richie White. Like the whole Troop or maybe it was Pack took turns at beating him up. He was short and scrawny and wore glasses and had a greasy lank of black hair that flopped across his forehead that made me wonder if Hitler as a kid had looked like that. Also he was constantly snorting, with snot running from his nose, and when he talked he sprayed.

And he was sneaky and perverse. In Boy Scouts you get merit badges for doing things like tying knots or cooking a meal; getting those badges is how you move up in the organization. So one time Richie’s turn to get his cooking merit badge came around, and somehow he managed to cook up green eggs. So first, Richie denied they were green; they were maybe a little “greenish.” So kids started like yelling look at the fucking things. Greenish! My ass.

And then he said it wasn’t his fault something must have been wrong with the eggs. And then people said like fuck it man you cooked the fucking eggs and they came out green. And then he said they were good to eat even if they were green. And people said, well, fuck it, then, you eat them. Go ahead and eat. So Richie stuck his fork in them but he couldn’t eat them he said with everybody looking at him.

A couple minutes later you hear this screaming and yelling out in the bushes. Somebody is beating up Richie. And there was one of my Patrol, I guess it was, sitting on Richie’s chest and beating him about the head and shoulders because, the guy said, Richie had said he had eaten the eggs and then the guy saw the eggs lying right there in the bushes. So he had decided to beat on the lying mother fucker.

I was the leader of my Patrol, a smaller group within the Troop; every Patrol had its own name, like Wolfs, or Bears, or something. I don’t remember the name of my Patrol but I was the leader of it. So I said, we can eat cereal instead because I knew we had those little boxes of cereal and I knew we had milk. So we sat around in the dirt and ate cereal; that calmed down things a bit. But they decided that since Richie had eaten all the eggs himself that he wouldn’t get any cereal. So Richie sat there and started to holding his stomach and groaning that he had a stomach ache. I really understood why the guys wanted to beat on him.

Richie was the kind of kid you catch with his arm in the cookie jar, and he would say, you were mistaken. His arm was not in the cookie jar, even though he was standing there plain as day with his arm in the cookie jar. But you play that game too often and you can start believing it yourself.