Hungry

Mrs. Vernon hated you. Or at least in my 8 year old mind, in which every other student thought my thoughts and brought ham and cheese sandwiches and Ectocooler for lunch, she hated all of me. Every morning that she called my name on the roll, I saw a woman of 60-something joyless, tired years. I imagine now that something must have kept her teaching 4th grade. Maybe she had some decades-long friendships with other women in the school. Sharing lunch period, inviting them over for bridge twice a month. I can think she loved pretty blondes whose parents made them wear dresses to school: American little girls. But I had an unpronounceable name and I liked to talk a lot and bring toys to hide in my desk. She didn’t count me among her favored, chose me rather as one of the invaders of an otherwise indefinite childhood. Nobody likes an invader’s face, regardless of what kind of expression it conveys.

I have long since cleaned out my brain corner full of elementary school memories. But here’s a thought: we would have Pollyanna every Christmas at Glen Acres Elementary School. My mom would usually get me markers or sea shells (“shells, mom?”) to wrap and give away. This year, fat Mark Lyman, who joined us midway through the year because his family moved from Pittsburgh, got sick with something bad, like TB or Mono, but came back the day before Christmas vacation without a gift, so we had one less to go around. Who would be the fall-kid, singled-out by getting a special gift--a logistical solution from some closet in the school--delivered personally, embarrassingly, in the middle of the classroom?

Who else. I was prepared to accept this destiny, blushing like a soldier exposing his burnt ass to a class of would-be doctors. I felt their eyes on me as I walked up to the table to pick up the gift. And she said, as I slowly unwrapped it, “I think you’ll like this book.”

Why did you think the situation called for that, Mrs. Vernon? It lasts with me now like I wonder it did for her. Did her son, at my age, 30 years ago, enjoy it as much as I? Was she impelled to retrieve the novel as much by grace as she was by her memory of seeing his body laying on a bed, excitedly immersed in reading? Why did she step forth to deliver a consideration for my own affection, instead of just a “this is a good book”?

I forgot it in my desk over Christmas break, but returned in January to open it up in homeroom. It was called My Side of the Mountain. Mid-century: a young boy goes to live in the Catskill mountains in New York to escape society; mid-Sandro: a young boy tries to hide his reading in math class to escape 4th grade.

I read it over the next week, staying after class that Friday to finish it and almost missing the bus. Mrs. Vernon, ignorant that this sight--one of her mediocre students engaged in a book--was one of rare autodidactic distraction, interrupted my reading to tell me to get out. It was at this moment, convicted of not escaping the classroom, that I glanced at a Barry Manilow cassette tape on her desk. I stared at it for a second before hurrying out.

I had heard of his name somewhere; I guessed he was a singer that old people like. It was strange to think that Mrs. Vernon had a life outside of school. A youth. A first name. Maybe she had children. A husband, soldier in the war. What did she see in me to confide that I might find something of importance in the novel? A bored expression on my face? Was I a good candidate for flight from the sticky suburban mediocrity? Was Mrs. Vernon, now gross and old, once a young, pretty girl who lived in sight of the mountains? Did she hope to find her own Barry Manilow, to seduce and run away with? She would take his hand and run past her own desk, run to the family farm to hollow out an old tree and live while he sang to her.

But she never once mentioned the book at that moment or after. Even as I tried to keep in mind her nominal trust in my reading comprehension, I saw only a vulture; avian maiden in a grizzled, sexless coat. Bird custodian. “The vulture knows and waits,”’ we think, witnessing it most in images that feature its scavenging gaze, a metonymy of filthy wisdom. It might have been prettier once, but lost its crest of feathers for a bald head that could better wend through blood and fat.

I never again looked at the book until a few years ago. I hear Mrs. Vernon was eaten by her young.

Depth

What's the only way to recognize a repressed memory? When it floats up into your head one day, buoyed by nervousness or drugs.

Twelve. I went through a comic book phase this particular year, tending toward solitary activities in place of sports that I once enjoyed with my now-crosstown friends, before we moved. Comics were the antidote to Language Arts class--they interested me as much as anthologized stories, but I didn't have to write anything about them. Writing was consistently an act of failure for me.

Study skills. Reading skills. Summarize this passage. I can't remember my teacher's name now, but I remember her bright lipstick, blouses, wrinkled face and cigarette smell and the way she regularly reminded me how disappointed she was in my performance. Fuck writing and fuck you, I thought. I still think that last part.

I hated 7th grade so much, but I didn't know it. One morning, my dad turned down the radio on the way to school and asked "what ever happened to you? You used to be so nice."

At this moment, the 13 year old in the passenger seat searches for gravitas. Flattened brow, scrutinizing the windshield. The crackling political banter cuts into the grind of an idle Chevy Nova. I say nothing and open the car door.

There was a mythology unit. I wrote a report on Thor and his magic goats. (The goats drew his chariot.) Thor's goats were possessed of such maternal concern for Thor that they let him slaughter and eat them once a day, after which they would spring back to life at some point. Their only provision was that Thor not break any of their bones, because they could only repair flesh. A fine dinner; then, rage: one of his roommates breaks a goat femur to suck out the marrow. Thor is quick to rain down justice upon on his friend but needs Odin's help to restore the goat.

I wrote this the night before it was due, and I made up some of it. Then I put down the pencil, but I didn't think my report was finished. I wanted to leave the class with an illustration of Thor's power. So I took my latest issue of Thor (the comic) and copied his likeness from the cover. (I solved the minor problem of the stylized half-Thor/half-Beta Ray Bill by doing my best to invent a replacement Thor-half.) I stayed up until 10 that evening portraying the the mythical hero proudly wielding his might hammer, Mjolnir.

The drawing turned out a little weird. (Someone would later ask me, "is he drunk?"; I didn't know what to answer, since the only drunks I had seen were cartoon characters, and Thor didn't look funny or melodramatic, just slightly unfocused in his gaze.) Thor looked creepy at 10pm, but my mom, still awake, saw me finishing the drawing. "That looks AWE-SIM," she said to me, recalling the way I would say that word when I was 5. She would often say things that were helpful but oblivious to how an adolescent can become crazed and embarrassed at minutiae like reminders of one's stupider, earlier self.

And so I believed her. "Really?" I asked.

"Yes, of course it is, honey."

I taped the smeared portrait of Thor and his mighty hammer to the cardboard on which I had affixed my essay. The next day, I would proudly hold the drawing in the air as I read the goat report.

This is the part of the story that I can't tell. I can only remember the previous evening's preparation and something that happened after I got up in front of the class. I wonder if I'm repressing the memory or if my brain made the decision ex tempore to not mix the chemicals to anthologize this particular event. Or maybe the remembered event was flagged as recyclable.

But I do remember one image pretty clearly. After the presentation, someone has taken my drawing and displayed it on the heating vent across the room, propped up in one of the slits at eye level, to remind the class that we are all under drunk, weird Thor's cross-eyed purview. I am trying to hide my face, nervous that I might cry.

I can never forgive my mom for her unrelenting support and positivity. They were such fragile gifts to me; forgeries with no redeemable value. I wish she would have been more honest; told me Thor looked like shit.

Now, Thor, back to the deep you go.

Bessemer processes

My father had an old aunt and uncle right outside of Pittsburgh. Once a year he would go visit them and watch tv. Barbe Beppo was confined to a wheelchair, and Aunt Tilly was confined to soap operas and Parliaments.
I would accompany my dad for about 4 years in a row, usually once a summer. I think 1984 was the first time I went out there. I was 4. By 1987, Barbe Beppo had died away, and Tilly was left by herself. At this point, she was on her last few puffs.
Two parts of these trips stand out in my mind as blurry but significant memories of my early youth. The first was that my dad would put on talk radio in the Nova on the drives across Pennsylvania, and I would fall asleep in the back seat. The conversations he would
have with the radio were urgent and understated. They were made up of a muttered phrase here and there, and threats. The theatricality of these dialogues, and the fact that neither party could hear the other, never bothered him. In fact, I think that's what he liked most--his
audience would never disagree, my dad writing their presence with his voice as a believable fiction.
The second thing was that, absent of my mom's watch, he would take me to McDonald's as many times as I wanted, as long as it was less than twice a day. There, I would get a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets. The product name's capitalization still doesn't escape me, as I
remember these bits of chicken as a recipe of novelty and vacancy of the European-ness that infused itself into my mom's cooking. McDonalds and parenting, to my dad, demanded a stern approach punctuated by occasional fits of lawlessness. The territory outside
of my mom's survey--the tacit and manly expanses of weekend travel, lawn care, and electronics--invited exogamous infidelities we would never report back home: fast food, dinner for breakfast, PG-13 movies, maybe an expensive Lego set to keep me occupied.
I don't remember much of Aunt Tilly. She was caught in the last stage of emphysema by the time I had developed enough of a consciousness to contemplate her mortality. Not to say that that was on the top of my activities list. But by the last trip out there, I had come to regard
her as the closest extension to my dad's side of the family. As his only relative here in the states, I decided that she meant something, something about my place in the world, and my dad's place, even if I couldn't figure out what that something was.
She never said much to me. She never said much to anyone, mostly because she couldn't. She was stuck to the couch, hooked to an oxygen tank except to smoke. But I liked her. There I would sit, television illuminating the near-lightless apartment, eating a slice of
store-bought pumpkin pie. Night time at 3pm. She would take a break from Phil Donahue to talk to my dad so I couldwatch cartoons in the after-school time slots.
Breathing apparatus hissing, my dad's soft voice trying to maintain a conversation with this dying woman, I force myself to eat the piecrust. Even the lawless need some discipline.