I burnt down our bathroom. Almost did the apartment too.
My idiot parents were separated, soon to be blessed with a divorce they’d need to survive this shit world of theirs we all lived in for now. If ever there was a pair of people who should’ve been separated so they didn’t hate fuck each other to death, it was those two.
The four of us avoided them daily in a decent-sized Hoyne Avenue apartment up on the North Side. Two bedrooms; one for the juvenile parents, one for my baby sisters, and a sunporch for me and my little brother.
I was tired all the time, worn out from dropping my eyebrows at the fights they had on the other side of the walls, not because I was disappointed in them, which I was, but because they only fought at night, whenever the old man decided to traipse his drunk ass through the back door, and I always had school the next morning. The daily dodges and intricacies required of a twelve-year-old gangbanger were exhausting. The last thing I needed was a fucked-up home base. I was years asleep, eyes wide open, until my grandfathers dreamed me awake, saved me. If I was going to live, I’d have to celebrate the day that came when I knew my parents’ struggles were strangling us and I, at least, could find some peace and focus. It’s when I started to actively root for their divorce if not their demise. Kids should not have kids.
It was a munky-ass apartment, had weird smells and a weirder landlord’s kid. Sat on the corner and dearly paid for its location when a station wagon (probably a Buick Roadmaster or some other ’70s tank) drunk drove into its basement windows one night. The gaping hole it left behind forever smelled like raccoons and possums had used it as a convenient shitter on their way to better places in the neighborhood, and the landlady never really closed it up, just kept the insurance money for booze and smokes. The stench, of course,
floated up into our crib, and though we were on the second floor, it seemed to make its permanent home in our apartment.
§
Sure it reeks, but it’s home, so yeah. Laying up in the back room with a minute alone, the old man not home, ma in her room on the phone with whatever other pill-popping neighbor who’ll yow out with her all high on blue and clears and six pots of coffee and Vivarin and twenty-eight smokes an hour with two in the ashtray at once, and it’s like trying to put those feelings into words when you hear a song that takes you out of the back of the bus or the el or your grandma’s car, when they finally pick you up after promising for two years to take you the fuck out of here, to somewhere not here, but you don’t have Jose Feliciano’s sad, slow guitar to accompany you, to add that flavor, those salty tears, that urge, the color your words need, so it all plays behind your eyes, but you can’t share because you don’t know how and no one would care if you did? That’s when you sit on your hands and chew the inside of your lip and tell yourself someday, you’ll be able to say it, express it, share it, even if today ain’t that day.
The neighbor comes down, ma’s in the middle of her rambling, shit-talking day, Marlboro 100s whirling around her head, and he says to her, hey, we re going camping. Would love to take the kids.
She don’t know this fucker from Adam so of course says yes, sends us away with this hippie and his weird hippie wife. What the fuck does she care? NO KIDS.
Well just the boys, he says. The girls are too young.
He says it a little strange, but sure, she thinks, consigns us to this giant weird Viking-looking fucker, name DJ. It’s your parents never so happy to be dropping you off with some people you ain’t even know so they can get their freak on or pop some pills in peace or whatever they’re into. Thanks. Doesn’t even ask where we’re going.
But you might.
So yeah, we’re fixing to go camping in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, Wisconsin, USA.
Dude. I’ve never been camping in my life. Seems to me one of the objects of life is to not have to sleep outside, but ain’t nobody listening to me.
Kinda cool though, I guess. This guy DJ knows what the fuck he’s doing anyway. Brings all the gear. Pitches a couple of tents. Has us dig trenches around them in case it rains, and those’d take the water away. That seemed smart. I had thought about a whole lot seeming not smart as I sat in the back of his old rickety-ass Volvo all the way to Wisconsin, the first time I’d been west of Cicero Avenue and north of Davis Street in my life. Saw signs for the Dells; made me wonder about Tommy Bartlett’s Water Ski & Jumping Boat Thrill Show for years.
About ten minutes after we dig those smart trenches, we hear an explosion. Not like an M-80 or a quarter stick, but like a wet one with a loud bang, like a right-away shot when someone takes a .38 to the meat in the leg or something. We head out from camp, want to take a look around. DJ’s red beard wiggles, a mouth in there somewhere says let’s check it out.
We hustle a bit, looking for the source of the sound, me surprised by all these trees and shit. It’s kind of raining too, so I think good on me for for-real digging all those fucking trenches. It drips away on us. I got a hoodie on so I’m ok, but after a while, the rain slow drips on my face. I’ve never seen this many trees in my whole life. We’re walking like there’s a murderer out here and we’re gonna find him. I ain’t about it, but I’m stuck with these people. My little brother sulks along, eternally pissed at the world.
He forever had a storm that played around his head wherever he went. Like Pigpen’s blanket, but little thunders and gales, lightning and dust skirled in front and back of him. I’d watch his eyebrows come together, who knows what thoughts roiling behind his folded brow. He was scary as a kid; his perpetually unemployed adult ass is likely off the charts. I don’t really know; I haven’t seen him since he tried to cut my head off with a Tizona Cid I bought in Spain thirty-five years or so ago. Fun night. They say people are afraid to merge—that’s something to think about anytime, sure. But applied to your own family, it makes it come alive in the saddest of ways. I’d say I’ll see him on the other side, but I won’t. You know how you meet people in your life you’ve known before? Yeah. He ain’t one of them. I’ll never see him in ten lifetimes. He was like an alien dropped into our lives on a cosmic bet.
But off we go, in search of that sound.
We find it at a campsite about a hundred woods yards away.
The four of us roll up on this olive-green pup tent site, a dude looking deadass like Mitch Hedberg about to launch into his Dufresne Search Party bit, army jacket and all, covered in SpaghettiOs.
He looks up at us through oversized, yellow-tinted aviators and says
“What the fuck?”
DJ goes, “What happened, man?”
“I was cooking a can of SpaghettiOs and they exploded,” he stares into the fire.
“How the hell did that happen, man?” DJ taps out finger exercises, eyes never leaving Mitch’s dripping head and shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Mitch shrugs, little O’s rolling onto the log he’s sitting on.
“Explain the process, man,” DJ pushes his glasses up on his nose.
“Well, shit. I got the fire going—”
“Yeah.”
“—and then, well what the fuck,” more O’s roll away.
Ellen looks at us like we ain’t never heard the word fuck before. I just grin.
“So yeah. When did the explosion happen?” DJ was losing his patience.
“I put the can on top of the fire. Shit, man. I built the Boy Scout pyramid thing.”
“Yeah…wait.” DJ holds up a finger.
“What?” Mitch glares at it.
“You just put the can on top. Did you open it?”
“What do you mean?” Now Mitch was getting pissy.
DJ’s big red beard tilts back and splits open with enough laughter to shake the last drops of rain off the big pines.
Mitch looks at DJ like he stabbed him with a butter knife.
“You didn’t open the can first?”
And let’s be real, I’m just thirteen waiting here for my seventeen-year-old self to arrive, ’cause there ain’t no self like it, the one lounging on the park bench early in the morning, waiting for the day to burst full, one with warm and not-too-humid air, sun flaring just over the field house while you’re reading a book from your back pocket and later in the day two chicks are gonna fight over you and you’re just pulling on a brick of Richard’ s Wild Irish Rose at two in the afternoon and you’re fixin’ to live forever and goddamn if the Creator ain’t just smilin’ down on your summer-brown ass in the middle of the city going about its business all around you in this neighborhood cradle that hugs you, its favorite son, and rocks you in its quiet-at-5-then-loud-at-9-a.m. arms, cars screeching with wild shots you never worry about, drive-bys by Kings that’ll never hit you, while you make deals with Spanish Cobras and hit the weed eyeing the utility box behind home plate at the back of the third baseball diamond you’re gonna sleep behind if you can just get a couple of tall boys that’ll help you through the night, never cold enough outside to need a blanket, you and your hoodie calling it good around four in the morning or so. Summer is the real deal in the city. Ain’t nothin’ like it nowhere.
Until “Africa” pops on the boombox and you think of what could be, of being anywhere else but here.
But right now, Mitch is talking.
“No. Why would I do that?”
I can see DJ wants to lecture him in fluid dynamics or some shit like that.
“Well, man,” he starts.
“What the fuck, dude, ” I say. “You gotta at least pop a hole in the can.”
“Yeah. I think you’re right, little dude,” Mitch shrugs off a whole clump of SpaghettiO’s.
DJ folds his arms, breathes out through his nose. Ellen puts her arm around him.
Little brother squats down, throws a fat cream-and-brown toad he just found onto the fire.
Mitch takes his aviators off, starts wiping at them with the corner of his red-and-black flannel.
The wind dies down, the slow dripping pine forest shakes its head at us, sighs.
§
We picked our way back to our own campsite assured Mitch knew how to cook some motherfucking SpaghettiOs without hurting himself or anyone around him. We were none too sure about the thing with the toad but wasn’t nobody talking about that. Little brother was melting into his hoodie, hands jammed into his pockets, keeping them away, for now, from any other potential fuel for the fires burning inside him, any thoughts he might have on the subject known, thankfully, only to him. I thought about how cold it was getting, worried about keeping warm later on.
Surprise, too, I was wondering what we were gonna eat. Normally I didn’t think too much about it, never ate a whole lot anyway, but here we were in some fucking wilderness and survival shit was kicking in. I pulled my black hood up over my head, thought about how to get away to sneak one of these two smokes I had hidden in my sock.
Even though it was almost full dark, I didn’t worry about getting back to our campsite. This DJ dude was pretty fucking woodsy, knew his way around. It ain’t easy to count on grownups for much, but we were so far from home I didn’t have a choice. Sure enough though, after about twenty minutes, I recognized the trenches I had worked so hard on digging.
Maybe it was the cold, maybe the country-ass air, maybe all that walking through the woods, but I was dead tired. And hungry, too. Shit, I even woulda wrestled Mitch for a couple bites of SpaghettiOs. Little brother wasn’t talking, as usual.
“Hey man. You hungry?”
Little clouds, maybe some lightning danced under his hood, crackled along his brows.
“Guess so.”
“Shit. I hope there’s some food here. Prolly gonna have to eat some granola or some shit.”
“Whatever.”
Yeah. That was about all I’d get out of him for at least a couple of hours. I’d take it.
“Well, I’ll see what’s up in a minute.”
Low thunder under the hood.
We got to camp. DJ pointed out the little pond that had collected downhill from the trenches we’d dug.
“Yup,” he assessed.
“Yup,” I said.
“Yup,” Ellen agreed.
“.” little brother added.
“Well, I guess we should eat,” DJ offered.
“Mmmmhmmm,” I replied.
“Let’s get the fire going first,” he said, looking down at our own Boy Scout pyramid.
I had no idea how this worked, hadn’t even seen him build it. Must’ve done it while we were working on the trenches.
He bent down to the fire pit he’d lined with rocks. Pulled a handful of peanuts out of his pocket.
I bet he ate those when no one was looking. Who knows how many he had in there?
“Ever seen this?”
Shiiiit, I thought, I seen peanuts. What the fuck is he talking about?
He put the peanuts in the middle of the stack of wood, on top of a bunch of leaves and bark and shit.
“Peanuts burn and burn. They’re full of oil.”
Okay, homes, I thought. Do you, brother.
“Watch this.”
He pulled out a book of matches from the side pocket of his cut-off army pants, lit a couple, and set the pile of peanuts on fire.
Holy shit. It worked. I didn’t think you could burn a peanut. What the fuck kind of hippie black magic is this?
“Yup. They’re a great fire starter if you ever need it.”
Okay yeah, we do Molotov cocktails and shit, but sure, I’ll remember, if it makes you happy, man. Whatever. But sure enough, in about a minute, shit was starting to burn. Pretty cool, I guess.
“All right. Now the fire’s going, we should eat supper.”
Now you’re talking, I thought, said,
“Yeah. Sounds good,” wondering what the fuck supper was going to be, after the whole peanut thing.
“I’ll be right back.”
Ellen sat in a folding chair, stared into the fire.
Little brother threw kindling and god knows what into the pile, the flames flaring higher every time his hand flicked forward.
I tuned into my life four or five years from today, marveled at what was coming.
§
DJ used his elbow to slam the back gate on the Volvo wagon, dust puffing into the air even after all this rain. His arms were full of food I could smell from here. He made his way over to the campfire, sure-footed sandals slapping in the mud.
Well look at this. A serious motherfucking treat. KFC. A whole-ass bucket, and this is the ’70s, so old-school red-and-white-striped bucket, off-color pic of the old man hisself, big ol’ biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy, honey packets, holy fuck. Maybe they were crunchy hippies, but this chicken was the truth. I ain’t had KFC since my grandma and grandpa and some aunties, uncles, and cousins drove down from Michigan to visit, stopped by the Colonel’s ’cause she never did trust my ma’s cooking, and she was right about that. She wasn’t being shitty, even if my ma always thought she was, just grandma’s got a certain sense about things, and she was right. My mother couldn’t cook to save her ass.
Dude. We grubbed. It was luscious as fuck. So good. Me and little brother used our dog teeth to crack the bones and eat the marrow. DJ and Ellen gave us some looks but didn’t say nothin’. Much appreciated. We didn’t get out much, me and little brother, and we didn’t get a whole lot of chicken, so we took care of business when we did.
We finished eating, threw the little bit of gristle and hollow bones left over into the fire. I needed a smoke bad, shot my shot, asked where the can was.
“There’s an outhouse down that path about a hundred yards,” DJ said.
“Cool. I’ll be back in a bit.”
I headed off. The path seemed alive, things in the brush off to the side waiting under the moonlight for your ass to trip up. Looked back at the fire after a minute. DJ was staring straight into it, Ellen looked conked out. I reached down and hiked up my pant leg, pulled out one of the Marlb 100s. Dropped off the path behind a tree and lit up. Daaaaaamn. That’s a good smoke, outside in the woods, pitch black, after a KFC feast. I blew out the smoke in a semicircle around me, mosquitoes flitting away in the still air. I smoked half, knocked the cherry off into a pile of wet leaves, blew out the dead air, and stuffed it back in my sock. Hopped back onto the path and headed toward the outhouse. Looked over my shoulder to see nothing at the campsite had changed at all.
The rest of the night was quiet. No SpaghettiOs exploded, no dogs howled, the forest barely rustled. We sacked out in the tents; musty sleeping bags never felt so good. Crazy enough, we got up early and, no shit, went fishing.
§
DJ rented a boat with oars and a small outboard motor. We puttered out to the middle of the lake. Little brother and me had never been fishing like this before, so DJ had to show us how to do everything, thread a worm onto the hook, use a bobber, all that shit. It was… interesting. Seemed like a useful thing to learn, anyway. And fishing was cool, just gambling really, when you got down to it. Folks tell themselves they got a system, and maybe some do, but yeah, seemed like a lot of luck and using the force, yeah?
After a couple three hours, nothing was happening. Maybe I got bored, maybe little brother got unlucky, but I winged back my little Zebco to cast a deep one and bam! hooked my brother deep in the arm. Holy shit, I had to laugh, couldn’t help myself, but that fucker was buried in there. Blood was just running. DJ looked, shook his head.
“It’s all the way through.”
Yup. The point was just sticking out a little ways from where the shaft went in.
“Gonna have to cut it.”
Little brother said
“What the fuck do you mean?” a look in his eye like maybe DJ meant his whole arm.
“I mean we’ll have to nip the barb.”
“I don’t know what that means, but you need to fix this,” he said, his lips ashing indigo.
“Yupyup. Don’t worry about it.”
DJ pulled a gnarly old multitool out of one of his many pockets.
“Hang on, man,” I offered.
He cut the hook just above where it poked through little brother’s skin, pulled the whole rig through the backside in one motion.
“There we go.”
Little brother was a bit clammy and paler than usual but seemed OK. He cast his line back into the water like nothing had happened at all.
Jesus Christ.
After a while, I landed a bluegill. Hey, pretty cool. First fish ever.
DJ hadn’t caught anything all day, seemed kinda pissed, but he was chill, ’cause hippie.
The sun beat down. I got browner by the minute; DJ pinked up so bad I could smell the blisters. We drank pop, ate chips, listened to the deerflies head our way from the shore.
§
Little brother got a bite on his line. A real fighter. Holy shit.
He’s really freaked out. I laugh.
We get it up in the boat. What a weird-looking fish.
“What the fuck is that?” I ask. “Is it a catfish?”
“It is. Called a bullhead,” DJ says.
I got no idea what that means.
“Oh, yeah,” I say.
“Here,” he says to little brother, “take it off the line. Snatch it behind the head.”
He grabs it. One of the spines sticks in his wrist, and then it twists around, bites him in the crotch of his thumb. He shakes it from his hand. It flips and twists in the sun, dangling from his upraised pole, angry hide throwing water all around, slow motion droplets and rainbows flash in the molten sun that lights everywhere, on the water and the weathered steel edges of the boat.
Hahahaha. Shiiiit. I laugh my ass off.
“Fuck you,” he gives me the look.
“God damn,” DJ says.
We get it off the hook, land it in the bottom of the boat.
“Now what?” I say.
“This,” DJ says, pulls a big Buck knife out of one of those musty pants pockets, holds it backwards, and smashes the butt down on the bullhead.
It thrashes, tries to bite him.
I laugh some more.
“Jesus Christ! This fuckin thing!”
Little brother laughs too, having tried to grab the fish, pulling away his three middle fingers covered in pinprick bites that well up with blood. He says,
“Let me see the knife.”
DJ hands it to him. Little brother flips it around and stabs the fish in the back of the head.
“There.”
There, indeed.
The fish is now dead as fuck.
Dark brown/black, skin slick and scale-free, he flips it over.
Its milk-yellow belly shines in the sun. A long pinkish scar cuts down the middle of its chest.
This fish has been caught before, speared, and thrown back. Probably on account of its ugliness. Or bitiness.
“Well, it’ll taste pretty good,” DJ says. “Had a lot of fight in him.”
I figure it’ll taste bitter, all that hate in one fish.
“Fuck him, ” little brother says. “We’re gonna eat his ass either way.”
“Let’s call it a day,” DJ says, yanking the pull cord, firing up the little motor.
The bullhead gets dumped in our tiny, unambitious creel along with my crappie from before. I thought it was a bluegill, but DJ says crappie, and what the fuck do I know? It’s the first fish I ever caught on a line. Sure, I’ve been smelting on the pier down at the lake back home with quarter sticks of dynamite we used to stun perch we pulled out with nets, but that ain’t the same. That ain’t fishing, I suppose. Anyway, he eyeballs his dead cellmate down there in the water off the side of the boat, flips his tail, and slips over to the edge of his cage. I feel kinda bad, but not bad enough to forget how delicious he’s probably gonna taste in a bit.
We bring the boat back to the rental place. The old dude in the Badgers baseball hat goes through the motions, did ya catch anything, how’re yer bug bites, ya know we sell bratwurst so’s ya can bring some dinner back to camp, hahahaha, all that country rube horseshit for the city slickers, but DJ is a big dude and is all, oh we put a bunch of fish in the car already so we’re set thank you very much, and Horst or Reinard or whatever the fuck this two-toothed huckster behind the counter is called says, yeah OK fine den, and gives him his deposit back and I buy some Hot Funyuns while DJ grabs two lemons and we’re out.
The drive back is quiet. Ronnie Milsap almost rocks me to sleep as I feel the stored sunlight vape up out of my skin, shirt off, head thrown back on the weird square rest in the front seat of this decrepit Volvo. DJ hums along but doesn’t know the song. We hit a big pothole in the road and I look back to see little brother passed out, chewing the inside of his front lip. I settle back in for the ride, kinda wild since my parents have never owned a car and this is pretty cool. An epiphany I’ll get some day later hits me as we bounce along. What I don’t think we realize is that the Carpenters haunted our whole-ass childhood, a fact made even more fucked up because we didn’t know it until we were in our thirties, forties maybe.
§
Before I know it, I’m waking up and we’re at home base. We’re on our second day of camping, so shit’s pretty routine. Still, weirdly enough, I’m comfortable hopping out of the car, grabbing our shit out of the back, and strolling over to our tent like I go camping every weekend or something. I set down my shoes, which I’ve taken to not wearing out here in the boonies, unzip the flap, and throw my rolled-up t-shirt inside. Little brother stumbles through the opening and throws himself down on his borrowed sleeping bag, determined to finish his nap. I look over at the fire, where Ellen is sitting on a log, drinking out of a tin camping cup. I don’ t know if it’s whiskey or tea or coffee. Maybe it’s all three. They’re hippies, after all. DJ seems a little pissy, but again, hippie, so I can’t really tell. Ellen rolls up a doob and they get high. I shake my head; weed ain’t really my thing, but to each his own, yeah?
I walk around, still freaked out by all these trees, but more disturbed by how the forest has moods. This late-day sun streaming through evergreens, unfiltered and highlighting every bit of dust, every speck of pollen, every mote, every spore, and clouds of gnats ain’t nothing like the caul that yesterday’s rain cast on your eyelashes, made them itch with anticipation for the next drop, made you pray for the lord of the woods to decide one way or the other to either downpour or cast off the low-lying clouds that clung to your face, made it hard to breathe whether with anticipation or apprehension, neither mattering when the hail came, smashing leaves and spattering the glass of windshields, nature’s unrecounted power a reminder of your shivering self in the timbers that laugh at any anchor you try to give yourself that you think provides any purchase in a world giving far less than two shits about you or your sad human dreams, all you have praying at that moment you don’t drown standing in place or are found by your family face down in the mud, a page-five footnote about how you died in a freak storm off the lake, a tiny statistic in some writer’s research grasping for a half-decent country ghost story, or worse yet, a rural noir footnoting your death as dreary background for a lakefront bar meet gone wrong.
We eat. I learn how to clean and fillet a bluegill. Little brother does the catfish, something that doesn’t have scales. I didn’t know you need pliers to pull the skin off, but he seems to, or at least relishes the job. DJ slices up the lemons and lays them across the fish in the aluminum camp pan, sticks it over the fire. Shit, he even pulls some hunks of butter out of who knows where. A little salt and pepper and this is just as delicious as I thought it would be. We eat and head off to bed. DJ and Ellen stay up, smoke weed. Years later, little brother told me DJ tried to do stuff to him that night. I have zero memory of that, don’t even know how it would’ve/could’ve happened. My brother and sisters have all told me stories like this, how adults had done stuff to them, but I have nothing for my siblings, even less for myself. Maybe my brain shut it all down, but isn’t that what you do, what your spirit does? Isn’t that how self-preservation works?
About five o’clock that morning, I got up to take a predawn piss. I’m not sure of the exact time, but I’m exactly sure about this:
I walked out of the tent
made my way down the soft dirt path
no shoes
no worries
and I stopped in my tracks
to see what looked like an ottoman in the lane. Not a Turk, not a footrest, but a solid, solid piece of something that looked like it should be at the end of a couch in front of a TV. My city ass thought well that’s a weird looking dog, but it looked, it still looked like an… ottoman.
And then its tail (yes, the Ottoman produced a tail) flicked and it walked over to the garbage cans lined up, metal sentinels against the trashing of the earth, and it reared back one right-handed paw and laid a can open. Trash spilled everywhere. Not like comic books, but like real life, like butter; metal slashed and guts laid out, and this ottoman gave not a single shit, cared not for the trash on the ground, just sniffed and walked on.
This fucking wolverine said no not for me not today, and I made my way to the pisser and did my business and didn’t think about it until this day
So
here we are
Me
You
and this
wolverine.
§
I never told anybody about it, never mentioned to red-bearded DJ or mouse-brown Ellen or to my chain-smoking mother or my ever-furrowed little brother or even anyone I ever met subsequent who was from Wisconsin but yup, it was what I saw that day.
When we got home from our trip, the one where so much unspoken happened, all I wanted to do was smoke this last cigarette that had made the odyssey with me.
I went into our bathroom, stuck my head in the linen closet and lit it with a match, blew it out, and threw the match in the back of the closet, because that’s what you do at twelve years old. I finished the whole smoke and went out into the neighborhood, ’cause that’s also what you do. I told stories about our trip, but none about the wolverine, ’cause you do that, too.
When I got home, there was lots of smoke, plenty of smell, and a thoroughly pissed-off ma.
I had to ask myself, did I do it on purpose, did I try to burn the house down?
But that wasn’t really the question I wanted to ask.
What I wanted to know
was
Does tragedy bring people together, even if it’s to beat your ass?