Role Model

There is a boy. At a young age, he witnesses the murder of his parents, the rescue of a small child, the burning of a building, the hitting of a homerun, the flight of the Valkeries, or Hamlet suffering. In the meantime, he falls in love with an angel, a whore. She is unattainable because of class, cultural, familial, or racial differences. Also she’s married to the king who is a villain. One day the boy and the angel / whore cross paths, have an argument, avoid each others’ glances, giggle because they brush hands when they both reach for the same comic book, or sneer at each other; subsequently, falling deeply inexplicably painfully in love for (let me repeat) no real good reason. He’s kind and gentle, rude and obnoxious, patient but realistic, romantic and inept, desperately pleading “For God sake notice me,” strong and silent, clumsy and adorable. He rededicates his life to earning her love. He lifts weights, runs thousands of miles, meditates for weeks on end, climbs the tallest mountain to find the rarest flower, practices swordplay and boxing marksmanship and martial arts and playing poker and flying the starship and enduring pain. Eventually, the villainous king leaves on a “hunting trip” but really has an affair with a lecherous woman married to his brother, who thinks so highly of the king that when he finds out about the affair, he kills his cheating wife and himself after writing a short poetic note regretting his never being a good enough brother to the king, but that’s all beside the point. When the king returns, he discovers whatever it is between the boy and his wife, and he decides to kill them and their families, etcetera. But the boy says, “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?” The boy says, “Say hello to my little friend.” The boy says, “Fucking A, man. Are you talking to me? You gotta ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Yippe-kai-ai, motherfucker. I’m coming for you, Murdoch. I’m gonna save the fucking day. This is this; this ain’t nothing else; this is this. You can’t handle the truth. I must break you. You shut up, and don’t you fuck with me. I’ll bleed you, real quiet, leave you here, got that? I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Yes, it’s true, this man has no dick. Wait’ll they get a load of me. I’ll be your huckleberry. I will have my vengeance in this life or the next. Get your patchouli stink out of my store. All right you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. Get the hell off my spread. Get your damn paws off me, you ape. Losers are always whining about doing their best; winners go home and fuck the prom queen. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” So the boy rescues the angel / whore by swinging in on a vine, jumping out of a helicopter, holding his breath underwater for a very long time, walking to hell and back, jumping into a helicopter, winning an unwinnable hand, driving the bus faster than 55 miles an hour the whole time, saving the planet from nuclear annihilation, or punching the king until he collapses; subsequently, bringing the king to justice. Needless to say, the angel / whore is impressed. Nonetheless, we know very little about how they spend the next thirty, forty years.

Play: River: Need

A___ and I promise to quit drinking and smoking and chewing and pills and pot and coffee and overeating and impatience (where applicable). We draw up a plan, which reads largely like this: we get in a canoe with two fishing poles, a tarp, two paddles, some worms, a flashlight, and some matches in a ziplock bag – our homemade detox.

We put in up above Tionesta. That first night, the sky closes in fast and we’ve never seen so much rain, and, once we hit the island, we can’t decide whether we should make a shelter first or build a fire. We can’t decide whether we should wade out in the deluge to find some crayfish for dinner or whether we should eat the worms. The short version of the story ends with us hungry and soaking wet, wrapped up in the tarp like so much meat inside a big blue burrito. In the middle of the night, I catch a fourteen-inch Maglite with the back of my head, because A___ woke from a dream in which I was a bear, sleeping in his tent. An honest mistake; we think no more of it. Next morning, A___ catches a crayfish and we can’t agree whether we should eat it or fish with it. In the meantime, I notice a Maple tree about two feet in diameter, shaped like a U, the trunk running horizontal for about twenty feet along the ground. A___ cannot fucking believe I’m worrying about trees at a moment like this – seconds after he’s baited his hook and I decided we should get on the river. We get on the river and there’s not a cloud in the sky, not a drop of sunscreen in the universe, and the minute I get my hook baited, Ange decides we should try to row like hell, the forty or so miles downriver to the camp. We throw up our hands in frustration. A___ decides he’ll agree with whatever I want to do, and that pisses me off, because I need his input, not his fucking approval.

I decide to act like I’m the only person in the world on the river, and I’m not sure what A___ does for the next couple hours, even as I steer us to shore under a bridge and watch him walk up over the hill. Now I’m the only person in the world on land, and when he gets back down the hill, I don’t know A___’s opinion about us carrying the canoe up to the road, and when D___ gets there I act like I’m the only person in the world tying the canoe to his roof, sitting in the car, walking into the restaurant. We smoke D___’s cigarettes while we wait for our omelets, acting like we’re each the only person in the world in that booth.

D___ asks us how our trip went. We stub our smokes and don’t look at each other and don’t talk about that canoe trip for more than six years at which point we’re good good buddies again, chewing tobacco and drinking our beer and smoking our pot and popping our pills and drinking our coffee and impatiently overeating (where applicable) and having a laugh about the tenure of our friendship, and A___ says, “You know, sometimes, when I think about that canoe trip, I still get pissed at you.” I set down my beer and lean forward a bit and say, “You? Get pissed? At me?”

Lineage: Generations: Drill Rig

My mom, my sister, and I ride along with Dad to Ohio on a business trip. We stay in a motel room while he works on oil rigs – he’s an electrical engineer for Chicago Pneumatic Tool, and very hands on. The drive from Reno, Pennsylvania to the other side of Ohio takes four hours, but people back home are not travelers, vacationers, roamers, so this part of Ohio is the other side of the world. It’s a whole other planet. For instance: channel three is on channel eight, channel twelve doesn’t exist. Further: the sky turns green one night and a bright white squaw line roils in from somewhere, no hills to shield us from the ever-expanding horizon. New weather patterns to us, and this one, the radio says, could lead to a tornado.

A tornado! That’s the neatest thing my sister and I have ever heard. Mom, on the other hand, seems distraught, despite our six- and seven-year-old reassurances. We watch some big old hail in a dark midday. Some rain washes a couple weeks worth of dust off the world. The wind picks up. The wind dies down. The air clears. Rain falls.

During which time, we tire of waiting for a tornado, and turn instead to the motel television. The sky outside grows lighter and eventually dark with late afternoon. Dad comes home earlier than we expect with a gash on his forehead above his right eye. New excitement after a bust tornado warning. He’s been hit in the head with a hammer – I plan my vengeance. He’d been hit in the head with a hammer by accident – I postpone my vengeance. The company asked him to go to the hospital to get stitches. He and the hammer-swinger went to the bar instead to get gin and tonics. At the motel, he’s brighteyed, and when we ask what happens, he says, “What this? Well, I was sorting bobcats and I got a hold of a mountain lion.” He puts a Disney bandaid over a gaping wound, and we said, “But doesn’t it hurt?” He said, “Oh, it don’t hurt.”

Moments like this, we pick our heroes.

Work: Stone: Boss

The mason that A___ and I worked for called me his Big Mean Bitch. I’d sling two sixteen-foot planks over my shoulder instead of one. I’d pull the mixer out of the way rather than bother hooking one of the trucks up to it. I’d throw twelve-inch blocks four high onto the scaffold. He meant it, I know, as a compliment.

Somehow, each day, I thought that if I could push just a little bit harder, carry just a little more weight, work one extra hour, that my boss would be happy. I thought that if I were just a bit tougher and stronger that the jobs would go well, and he’d stop motherfucking his crew, his clients, Hebrews, his wife, his kids, the weather.

It also feels good to walk through the hottest heaviest days of the year, dripping sweat, spitting tobacco in swirls of mud and oil, and chasing away onlookers with a stare the way I imagine a bigger, meaner dog might chase away a smaller, smarter dog.

Work: Steel: Scar

Purple and wide. Sometimes yellow, pink some would say. Roiling, bumpy, a costumey pastiche of cauterized flesh on flesh. In the pit, where the bars are two-hundred-fifty feet (still white hot, snagging on the old, old rollers), the guys sometimes walk away from a month’s worth of raking carrying a design like they hired someone to burn their lineage into their forearms in a forgotten hieroglyph.

Sometimes we get cut in awkward places, I mean, like, now-just-how-in-the-living-hell-did-you-end-up . . . ? And sometimes we need stitched up, but we’re not even sure if we brushed up against anything sharp, like being at the mill is reason enough to bleed, like just one more pain on top of another on top of a whole pile, a life, a religion of pain.

Doug comes into the Corner Pocket while we’re shooting pool one day, slams the world’s littlest manila envelope on the bar and says, “Buy a drink for the guy just lost his last tooth?” A couple months shy of his fortieth birthday.

We don’t get sent to shrinks, nobody thought that far ahead. But, like I say, you can see the neon lights of the Corner Pocket from the breakrooms of three different departments, and, though it’s a short stretch from the shower to that stool, you can do a damned awful lot of recovering once you get there.

Play: Home: Woodchuck

D___ and A___ tore off across the field with a single rock between them. The woodchuck was a good long ways out there, farther than you’d want to run carrying a rock built for two. But A___ or D___ had said, “Let’s get him,” for no real good reason except we’ve never needed a reason between the three of us to do much of anything. I stood there in the middle of a pre-plowing spring cornfield, the trees budding on all sides, the woods so thick and the sun so bright that I couldn’t see the world for the sky and the land, holding the box of white zinfandel and three plastic cups, yelling, “Kill that fucking rat.”

A woodchuck’s job is to keep himself between you and his hole. He’s always got a backdoor. Always. And he can move pretty damn fast when he’s getting chased by something. On the other hand, get him cornered, he’ll have your thumb faster than you can say, “I wished I’d a stayed home today.” D_ and A___ got up there and the woodchuck hadn’t run off. Rather it looked up at them, didn’t bare his teeth, didn’t hiss or peep, didn’t waddle off or scurry. They hesitated, looked each other in the eye, and didn’t have any reason to mash the woodchuck or even real desire. But, well, for Christsake, they set out across that field to chase something beyond themselves, something that by all rights should be elusive, and here it was. Without a word, the rock went above their heads and down on the woodchuck’s spine. His tail might have twitched a touch, but he had had it.

To this day, I wouldn’t mention this to them if I was you. By all rights the woodchuck should have hustled off to its hole, should never even have been threatened. But there it was. And D__ and A___ have to carry this around with them now, one more thing shoved deep in their guts that makes them, every once in a while, pound their fist on the steel and stone of their respective lives for, what you might say in looking at them, is no apparent reason.

Work: Oil: Walk

D__ and I get hooked up with an oil-tank building crew over in Rouseville. They work all over the country, but the boys are back home to put some tanks in there just between Oil City and Titusville. Our crewchief D.R. picks his feet almost up to his knees when he walks, and that might look goofy at first, but he never stumbles or stoves his toe in a very busy workplace, and you might even laugh at the walk like he’s doing it just for your amusement, but you get the impression that he could probably rip your arm off and beat you over the head with it with an overzealous handshake. So you start to adopt the walk yourself and hope someday to be six-four with a mustache like a pushbroom and boots the size of Volkswagons.

D.R. tells how great it was working for Matrix in the seventies. He’d just started there and ended up in charge of a crew. His boss said to take the boys out and show them a good time on the company. D.R. bought the boys six bottles of liquor, three cases of beer, and called in a professional. D.R says, “So I’m supposed to account for every dime we spend. You should have seen the secretary’s face when I turn in my receipt and ask for reimbursement for eight blow jobs and two round-the-worlds.”

The reason I like D.R. right away is, well, just that: I’m afraid he might pat me on the back and my spleen will end up on the other side of Oil Creek in a pile of sawdust. Plus here’s this guy who is a local high school’s all-time leading scorer, the head of a fairly prestigious tank crew, a world traveler, and an all-around big boneshattering mother fucker, and if called upon, I imagine he could castrate me with a couple of simple sentences or just a look out of the corner of his eye.