The Ant In My Pants

I'm not sure why, but recently I've had wave after wave of childhood flashbacks. I think that I may be dying. I have a strange mark that has appeared on my left cheek. It's like a freckle but bigger. I'm thinking skin cancer and I'm very comfortable with this. I've been visiting the tanning bed for the last year in hopes of getting cancer. I think that it gives you a good excuse to lay down and expire. Don't you? And it's much less traumatic on loved ones. I mean, a self-administered load of double-aught to the cranium usually comes as a surprise to everyone. Whereas: "Hey, I've got cancer." kind of prepares everyone for what comes next. You know, it sort of lets them down easy. Just kidding! I'm getting the freckle looked at next week so relax. Anyways, I thought I'd take advantage of this acute hindsight and write down as many of these childhood memories as possible. Enjoy.

As I mentioned in the previous post, my cousins more or less lived with my sister and me from the time I was four years old to the time I was nearly seven. My aunt would drop them off at our house in the mornings and we would spend our days together riding Bigwheels, drinking apple juice, licking the contents of the boogie truck, and pretending to be The Dukes of Hazard and the Super Friends. We also amused ourselves with other more interesting and less conventional activities. Videlicet, after we were all potty-trained, Paul, Phil, and I would congregate at the toilet where we would "sword fight" with our piss-streams. This activity was not very popular with Mom, whom the task of mopping up misdirected sword-strokes fell to. There were other aspects of the sport that irritated her. If you've ever watched young boys attempt sword play (with toy swords and not piss-streams), you've likely noticed that the coup de grâce ( death blow ) is never dealt. In fact, their blades rarely touch their opponents and when they do, it's usually unintentional. Instead, proper sword-play from a boy's perspective, is accomplished when the swords are bashed together repeatedly until one or both parties are sufficiently exhausted or become completely bored. Paul, Phil, and I, however, pioneered a form of sword-play wherein the object was to slash one's opponent with the blade instead of simply slashing his blade. My mother failed to see or appreciate the genius of this as she was the one who had to wipe us down and change or shirts and britches after the fight.

We, being the perceptive and thoughtful boys that we were, noticed Mom's frustration and sought to lighten her burden by taking our sword-fights out into the backyard. This we felt would spare her the trouble of mopping up after us. And, to further reduce the collateral damage, we stripped down to our birthday suits before each fight. But there is no pleasing some people, chiefly my mother; who upon witnessing what would be our final skirmish, came screaming down the back steps and dispensed a very potent dose of corporal punishment. In hindsight, I can see why she reacted this way because at that time, we lived on a corner lot with the backyard facing the corner which happened to be the intersection of our street and a major thoroughfare. There, the respectable citizency of Bluff Park were subjected to the sight of three little boys in nothing but cowboy boots micturating upon each other and laughing.

As you can imagine, our activities warranted frequent bathing and, in an effort to thwart the mounting utility bills, Mom developed the habit of tossing us all ( my younger sister, Emily, included ) into the tub together. Later on, Paul and Phil moved to Florida after my aunt and uncle remarried (each other!) By that time, I had a little brother, Joel; and the three of us, Joel, Emily, and I continued this bathing tradition. We continued until I was about ten years old and a long squirrelly hair appeared on my scrotum. Emily found this to be quite humorous and she pointed it out to my mother who, with a constrained smile and suppressed laughter, informed me that thenceforth I'd be bathing alone.

Since we are on the topic of scrotums, I have to tell you about the time that I constructed a tent in the backyard by draping a sheet over an old semi-circular stone enclosure that had once been a barbecue pit. It was summertime and I crawled into my tent with a blanket in hopes of getting some unnecessary shut-eye. Things were going splendidly until an enormous black carpenter ant took up residence in my little cotton jogging shorts and decided to make a tasty snack out of my right nard. I didn't have any relevant words like "shit" or "fuck" in my vocabulary so I just screamed and started punching myself in the balls frantically. And that's how Mom found me. Of course, by that time the ant was quite gone.

The Boogie Truck and the Gorilla Mask

My aunt and uncle divorced shortly before my fourth or fifth birthday, I forget which. What's important is that my cousins; Paul, a year my senior and Phil, a year my junior; came to stay with my sister and me on the week days when my aunt would work. And this, of course, was a catalyst for a great deal of mischief. But the anecdote that I am about to relate happened a year or so prior to that. My cousins had a Matchbox Fedex truck. Nothing fancy, simply a die-cast boxy-looking truck, painted white with a Fedex logo on either side and a pair of black plastic double doors in the rear. What set this particular truck apart from the myriads of pointless trinkets that passed for toys was what was inside of it, for it carried a priceless cargo. We had spent months and months, which at that time amounted to a sizeable portion of our lives, depositing our "boogies" in the back of that little truck. It was really very exciting. You would pick the truck up and and pry the little doors open and see that it was packed to the rafters with boogies. Yeah, I know. But it gets worse, trust me. On evenings when dinner was late and our little tummies growled, we would force the doors of the truck open and pass it around and lick the boogies for salt. I know, its repulsive.

This was around the time when my father learned that children can be remarkably savage when engaged in fight-or-flight mode. It was a brisk October evening and my sister and I were in the bathtub sporting our Johnson & Johnson mohawks. Yes, together in the bath tub and yes it was innocent. We were very young and we had plenty of bath-toys to distract us from playing with each other's no-no's. So relax. As I was saying, we were in the bathtub with little toy tugboats, rubber duckies, and Fisher Price people bobbing up and down around us. The bathtub was set back in the wall, obscuring it from the bathroom doorway and thus we could not see our parents who were out in the hallway, nor could we hear my mom's frantic whisper as she pleaded: "Bud, oh Bud, don't do it! Don't you dare do it!" My sister and I were completely oblivious as we were entirely engrossed in a mock tugboat-disaster that was unfolding before us. Oblivious, also, to the fact that my father had stopped by Kmart on the way home from work. And after walking past the seasonal aisle on his way to the hardware section he had somehow decided that he desperately needed a rubber gorilla mask. And this was no ordinary gorilla mask. It had wrinkled gray skin, bloated features, and tumorous growths everywhere. The eyes were cut out and the entire face was framed by a matted explosion of greasy jerry-curls. It smelled like my nightmares and tasted like earwax.

My mom's hushed pleading and Dad's stifled laughter and the sloshing of our bathwater and suddenly the lights in the bathroom went out. My sister and I looked up. We were still smiling innocently when Dad came bursting around the corner with his gorilla mask on. He had his hands raised ominously and his fingers were curled like claws. He gave a terrifying roar that I could never duplicate for you phonetically. If pressed to describe it, I would say that it sounded more-or-less like wookiee getting an unexpected enema. As you might have guessed, we screamed. And not just any ahhhhh-ok-you-got-me scream, these were death-screams. Our little hands were playing invisible bongos as we emptied our lungs over and over again. We, my sister and I, were about to be devoured by a vicious beast, of this I was certain and I resolved not to go without a fight. Somewhere in the darkness and the confusion, my little pink wrinkled fingers found and closed around the prow of my Fisher Price tugboat and I lifted it and hurled it with all of my might. The little boat's flight was a brief one. It traveled no more than twenty inches before it connected solidly with Dad's gonads. The impact was punctuated by Dad's consternated "oomph." And he sank to his knees and crawled to the doorway before collapsing in the hallway, whereupon the lights came back on and my mother, rushed in to console us. She was laughing hysterically and this only confused us even more.

We eventually learned that it was a mask and after a month or two, we even made a game of having Dad put it on and chase us around the backyard in the evenings. This went on for sometime until the neighbors called and said that their little girl had witnessed this activity from her bedroom window and had grossly misinterpreted it.

Plastic Flowers

Preface: This post has caused a great deal of confusion and I've received numerous emails as a result. To clarify, no one died, and I have never impregnated a woman much less sired a child. The end of the post is a flashback to my undergraduate research. When I wrote this, I just let it flow. I'm sorry of some of you took it seriously. For those of you who have made a hobby of psychoanalyzing me via my posts *Jen cough cough* go ahead and knock yourselves out.


The scrub-clad courier of death, with the paper mask bunched up under his chin, and the sharp hospital breath. My imagination had been off by one shade of brown in his eyes, raw umber, and the sandpaper stubble on his face. His voice was like sandstone, it came with the shrill ringing grind like a door to a hidden passageway in an Indiana Jones movie; and the chilling detatchment in his stare could not be far from the musty stillness and emptiness of a tomb full of bleached bones. The divots on the sides of his nose were still purple from the weight of the glasses. He never knew her and yet he got to watch her die while I sat out in the corridor with the silly blue paper booties that looked like shower caps, pulled over my shoes. With the cheap sconces and dusty plastic flowers. Buttercups the color of banana Laffy Taffy. Here. The years had deposited me in here in this moment with fake flowers to mock my turmoil. "We lost the baby..." His words echoed off of the corridor walls. The plastic flowers listened eagerly. We lost the baby. And who's "We?" Because he's telling me that they couldn't stop the hemorrhaging. Iestyn. We'd fought over what his name would be. And now he was like a forgotten dry-cleaning order. I'd never even know where they buried him and I'd never care because he killed her. She's gone. He's telling me she's gone, serving it up cold on the roughly hewn slab of sandstone. Did I want to see her before they took her down to the morgue. Did I want to see her.

She always got surly and irritable when she was hungry. She let it slip later that it had something to do with bloodsugar. Theretofore, I'd taken it personally. She'd come home in a fowl mood and I'd just go into the kitchen with her words following me, gnawing on my heels like rabid min pins (miniature doberman pinschers, the dumbest and meanest dogs ever bred.) I'd just cook something for her and she knew what I was doing and she hated it. Always the shame and downcast eyes and softness in her voice after she had eaten. I never minded. There's always a reason for people's bitchery, even when there's not an excuse. Always a reason for it. And if you know them well enough, you'll know their reasons and you'll just smile sadly and knowingly inside of yourself when they send their min pins to gnaw on your ankles.

We used to go down to the basement of Ramsey hall, down where Suhling's labs were. Dr. Tippur, Medhat, and I. We had a huge optics bench down there that was the size of a large billiards table. It was covered with what looked like a hap-hazzard game of chess with the beam-splitters and lenses and mirrors that stood waiting for the green laser. All configured to produce a Coherent Grating Sensing Interferometer, per Dr. Tippur's scrupulous calculations. And we had a pneumatic ram for shattering the fracture test specimens. The ram's tup had a strip of copper tape fixed to the leading edge. And copper tape on the top edge of the test specimen, too. When the ram came crashing down, the copper tape on the tup would touch that on the specimen and the circuit would close, sending a signal to the shutter to expose the film. The film in Dr. Tippur's fantatstic high speed camera. A dinosaur of a camera that looked like a relic from a battleship with the gray bumpy flecked paint like you see on vintage slide projectors, the kind that smell like an electrical fire and burning cardboard. It was so big that it had wheels. 2000 plus frames per second. And all we had in it was a thirty-frame roll of 35mm film. That'd buy us 15 milliseconds of footage. And that was still sloppy because we were filming a crack that was propagating at nine-hundred and eighty million meters per second squared. That's ten to the eighth times the acceleration of gravity. I know! I was shocked also. The lights would go out and sometimes on cold days, you could see the lazer if Hashem and Yassir had been smoking inside. I'd stand in the corner next to the CO2 tank and twist the valve open when Tippur gave the signal. The instrument panels glowed like Las Vegas. I always wondered why we never had an oscilloscope in there. One of the old ones with the green and black display monitors. Because it never feels like science without an oscilloscope in the room. The air hose would writhe and hiss and the turbine in the camera would whine as it spun the mirror up. And I would get chills because I thought that fracture mechanics was what I was passionate about. But later, grad school would just be another bad descision and so would marriage, so would all the times I never went on the 0.40 caliber, 145-grain, jacketed hollow-point diet.