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thisroadleadstoheaven-blog · 6 years

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Ode to a kid who is screwed, as told by another who is

I figure as good a place as any to start this blog out would be in the past. Christmas was enough to get me back in the room I grew up in, and among adolescent trash and pins I made out of bottlecaps I found a lot of old writing. This in particular I still found compelling, though lord knows exactly why.

Flowerboys

“Out from a cluttered den on wheels I emerge into the scene of childhood: family scattered about a park in the daytime, wrinkled flesh next to new.

But it isn't my childhood any longer.

No, the honor of this place has passed onto another, a little girl whose hair is a third the height of her body. Her cheeks plump around that unbelievably optimistic child's smile with all the newness of life, with all the substance by way of fat and mirth given of a loving mother.

Granted, her mother standing above her and holding her round little hamsteak hand is also plump in the face, but with even less of the newness of life.

Well, as of today life is less new for this young thing as well. It's a 7 year engagement now. It loses its value with every passing mile. But damn if the novelty isn't wearing off for her yet at all, as she chirps greetings in only slightly less highpitched tones and plays with all these people she wouldn't know very well yet even with the aid of an older memory.

Gathered about her are more than a few people. The usual suspects are here: the mostly mute child of the trucker-and-fat-townie-wife couple who will start melting down over nothing and acting out in 20 minutes, the lone young pretty girl who has already had as many years of spoiling as she has years of life, and...In the place of my young mousy cousin, there appears this 16 year old, thin ravenette of a girl with long dark hair, pale skin, and a thin waist. And then there's some guy with facial hair, who cares.

I spend a minute or two in disbelief, sidle up to my sister.My first words to the birthday girl's mother:

"Since when is that cousin so cute?"

"Oh, it had to happen sometime, I suppose. You do know she has her boyfriend here, right?"

I pretend not to.

Finally I approach her.

"Hey uh...."

"Chris, you've met me before."

She's wrong, but best not to explain how.

And now that my goddess has spurned me for my insolence, I'll get back to the Highly Important Happenings.

After all, I said something about an honor to this place.

What is the honor?

Good time to ask.

It's only as I tread out on the woodchips you get stuck in your sock from blasting off the swing, only when I see the same sets of cousins and friends-of-coworkers my sister has dragged here for her progeny (they may be different friends and cousins, but aside from that slight difference, it's all the same) as they dig between my toes that it quite registers.

Allow me to explain this to you, as I do to myself. If you've ever been around someone who likes to pretend to read more than they have (you have, and if you haven't that's because you ARE that person), you're bound to have heard that we only use 10% of our brain at any given time.

Obvious enough, right?

The implication usually is that we just suppress the parts that are really SMART and DEEP normally, and that's why people glide along like zombies so often.

But let me remind you that humans are also neurotic monkeys. And so while some people might really really HAVE a stealthily camouflaged physics department that just refuses to register as well as the parts that tell them how juicy that steak or that ass looks, more likely they have a mental ward in their head.

Luckily, sometimes it's both.

The mark of the noncrazy, I think, is to be able to keep most all the raving, incoherent, lusty and violent denizens of the ripples in your being suppressed, buried in the trenches as up above some mundane, stoic-faced asshole dressed in a labcoat and smug satisfaction strides on, only pays them dues when inspecting them, listening to their bitching every so often.

Going mad is having those wretches so long denied and ignored that they revolt, torch the place.

When you take the loonies on a bus (or well, a minivan in this case) and bring them round where they spent their childhood, though, it's hard to ignore them.

'Neath my skull I feel a troubled child travel guide coming on, myself. And he says this is the place where you sit and you're shown off by your parents to people you don't know, and in turn they show you their kids, who you will get to know for the space of an hour, until next year, when you do it all again. In the meanwhile: presents.

So, within 12 years of birthdays like this, you ALMOST get to know these people. Except the moment before they let you know anything deep about themselves, you jump a year in the future, they grow 3 inches and gain testicles, and you have to start all over again. But you don't bother because now instead of blocks you have a toy helicoptor to contend with.

They're the speed-dating relatives.

Yet there the girl of the hour is, hugging them and squealing at their very presence, young blonde hair showing seethrough in the summer sun swaying round as she gitters around excited at all that is happening.

She is either susceptible to bribes or having a collective 7 meet and greets has actually left her acquainted with the other kids, and her perpetual babyfat face shines to all, even as the pretty girl steals turns during their game. Young Buddha, if only not for the fact she certainly is enjoying her cheap presents.

And cheap they are. Watercolors vis a vie Walmart passes a sketchpad passes a plastic mutant Stawberry Shortcake doll, all into eyes that light up with a degree of gratitude and excitement that I no longer remember feeling over literally anything. The privilege of youth.

Suddenly a boy I don't recognize pops out, hands her something. Put next to the fat children of fat townies he's striking, a waify thin 10 year old who was just sitting silent, gives her his present equally silent, leans back behind others hiding once more.

She rips it open less silently. It's some book, but the packaging is more interesting: a brown paper package, wrapped old-fashioned with cord and patterned with..

"Are those dinosaurs printed on in ink? Did you get that somewhere? It's really nice."

"Uh, thanks... Actually we ripped apart grocery bags, used that paper and.."

His mother leans over him, a willowy girl about 35 that you could spot as a librarian a mile away even if it weren't for the fact she's my sister's coworker.

"We printed it on, just cut out foam and made stamps."

"Huh, it worked fairly well."

Meanwhile the slow child of my mother's townie friends begins wailing incoherent because people aren't paying attention to him, the pretty girl pouts, and my goddess runs off with some rinkadink highshool boy.

And in the background here sit two mousy, unassuming people I don't know, not making noise, aloof. The roundfaced star of the day is left alone with a stack of plastic and MADE IN CHINA. And a single tastefully executed present, wrapped in DIY...

Who the fuck are these people?

I ask my sister that, in slightly different words, and I learn the obvious: she's a coworker.

"Her son's name is Zander. You've seen him before."

"Maybe..?"

Then for something else obvious:"

Anyway, she's good people. She homeschools him, they tend to keep to themselves."

"I can tell."

Zander is a 12 year old boy. From the front. From the back meanwhile he's thin as a rod and has a long ponytail trailing down the back of his neck, held in clips in one or two places. He speaks when spoken to, and has noticable anxiety being among the wails of the simple, and among their rituals, is lost behind the wailing, jiggling crowd and perfectly alright with that....

Yeah, I can tell both those things alright.

I mentioned taking the loose wires and the erratic sparks they make strewn about your head on a field trip into memory, yeah? Well this I do again over the next few minutes.

As the trucker's wife waddles her wailing spawn away out of earshot, as the remaining kids play games, I stare at the boy.

And I feel genuinely bad for him.

Because I know what he is.

At no point did I have to ask whether he had a father around anywhere. He can barely react to an illiterate potato of a 7 year old crying over him by doing anything other than edging away. And if you animated him, some nerd would probably find him attractive.

Not that any of this is unusual or significant. Not that what he is is rare or significant: a boy raised by erratic, anxious, neurotic estrogen.

Really, he's simply a future contestant in an increasingly popular gameshow: Let's Raise Boys Like Flowers and Laugh when they get Stomped.

I'm transported, looking at his wandering eyes and conveniently obscured face, back to my own childhood. Back to realizing in my first classroom that I had no clue what to do around people. Nor did I know how to write the letter to my parents explaining I had no idea what to do around people.

I remember hating myself for not knowing what to do around people. I remember resenting the lack of masculine figures around..

And I'm not a willow bowled over like wheat to any healthy breeze.

He gets up, wanders behind a tree, and I follow. The mantra of pain that he's sure to expect becomes desire to let him in on his fate.

But then I'm there, looking down on something utterly innocent and frail and sweet. And my mission is to tell it how hard it'll get the shit kicked out of it come the time it has anything other than it's mother to turn to for guidance. A unque kind of burden.

And as I wonder to myself how he'll react (would he interpret a warning of bullying as bullying? Whose place is it to do this?), his mother swoops, eager to let it all remain a mystery awhile longer.

So it is. Let cute be cute, and the mental issues that accompany it develop on their own time.

#goddamn19yearoldme #writing #childhood

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