I like to think I’m savvy and a smooth operator, most of the time, but I had a bit of a bitter pill to swallow yesterday, when, on my way back from Scooba (perish the thought!), I had to stop and get gas.

This is hardly a new thing for me, but unlike my usual stop-and-gos at the Scooba Junction gas station, I had neglected to look at my gas gauge until I was in Brooksville, about twenty minutes north. I had no choice but to pull in at the only other gas station on Highway 45 between Starkville and Scooba.

I can’t remember the feebly-attempted witty name it had (Kountry Korner, or some other god-awful collective rape of the alphabet), so I shall refer to it as a vortex of evil. But, that’s as far as I’ll go because, oddly enough, I’m not here to talk about the gas station itself, other than this last thing: they overprice Every Thing.

No, what I’m here to talk about is the elderly black man with his walker pumping his own gas, which he somehow did by propping the pump itself in between the upper and lower handles of his walker. He left it there, and got back in his car. 

I swear I need to get a digital camera.

I had finished pumping my gas, at this point, and as I drove away, he looked up at me.

So, I smiled the same smile I’ve been giving all people-I-don’t-know-but-I-want-to-appear-like-a-decent-human-being for years. He returned my smile with a look that was, if I do say so myself, dismissive and impolite.

I need to frame the rest of the story first, though.

No snake eyes for me.

I have a tendency to turn the rearview mirror onto myself when I drive. It’s silly and a bit narcissistic, but it also makes me feel less alone when I’m on the road. I’m not much in the way of this world, but I can be a fun traveling companion.

Also, I like looking at myself.

And, I’m not one bit ashamed to admit it.

I’m not gorgeous, it’s not that, I just like to see someone I respect looking back at me on my sojourns.

I say that to say this (a lovely phrase for so many cliched reasons), when I offered my smile to this man, I was actually able to catch my own reflection of said smile, in the process.

I’d never noticed this before, but as I drove past him, mulling over his look of disapproval, I, for the first time in my entire life, actually saw the smile that I gave him. The same smile I have given to thousands.

And boy was I in for a shock.

What I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles (but only the King James’ ones) was a sweet, how-do-you-do smile was in fact, a smirk.

I saw it, myself. A bona fide, certified smirk.

To be honest, the big one on the bottom scares me.

All this time, all these years, I thought I was giving a kind, acceptable and welcoming smile and instead, what was coming across my face was a holier-than-thou-even-if-there-could-be-a-week-of-Easter-Sundays grimace of sorts.

I looked as if I were a snooty man whose sole purpose was to drive through evil gas stations and through nothing but the sheer force of my facial expression alone moderate comeuppance to others.

I couldn’t believe it. I hated that look on my face, and above all, certainly because I wasn’t snooty.

Or, was I?

Because the little niggling doubt in the back of my mind is that I have a somewhat solid foothold in the belief that there’s a direct line of truthful communication between your subconscious and your face…even your head.

The Japanese hold to a belief that the head will always tell the truth, no matter what the voice is saying, that’s what Makoto told me.

So, I tried it, and it worked. Try it, yourself. Next time you ask someone a question, like, Do you think I look fat in this? Watch their heads. They may say No, but their heads will nod yes. Afterwards, jump down their throats for not telling you the truth.

Time and again, U.L. has said, Be mindful of your face. It’ll often say what you won’t. Head, face, it doesn’t matter. I need to get better acquainted with them both.

The horror is I think I was doing just what U.L. said, yesterday. God knows, I don’t mean half the things I must subconsciously think, but it’s hard to escape an upbringing. It’s hard to get away from your “home culture.” And part of our “home culture” in the Deep South is thinking, to some degree, that we’re a little bit better than other people. At least, those people at the end of the street, right?

And, who knows, maybe I was thinking that yesterday, without realizing it. Offering what I believed was a smile, saying, in effect, Hey, sir, we both get gas at the same place; we’re not so different, after all. But, my mind was apparently saying, I don’t have to use a walker to pump my gas. Ha, ha.

Thus, the smirk.

Would you trust this man?

I’m a bit upset by this. But, my only alternative would be to show my pearly-whites from now ’til kingdom come, and that just won’t do.

I’d look like an idiot.

That’s what I said to Siciliana.

She came back with, ”Yeah, but at least you’d be an honest one.”

Can’t argue with that.

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And this is what my small (though at one time it was) visual delight consists of:  a faded tent, no doubt purchased “as is,” from some desperate funeral home, I imagine. Beneath the tattered green fabric sits a cheap a la Fred’s-Giving-Away-the-Store-again! plastic table precariously atop four brittle fold-out legs.

Adorning this table is a wide array of accoutrement which might slip unnoticed to the average passer-by were it not for the handmade markered poster that is taped over where I assume the name of the funeral home would be, in the middle of the awning.

The sign says in multi-colors: Christian Things.

I take this as Improvement. The first time I came across this dandy jewel of self-enterprise, the sign read: Christian Stuff.  And was written only in black magic marker.

Use this on paper, not in your nose.

I used to love smelling those when I was in fifth grade. I don’t know why. They certainly didn’t have the odor of authenticity that the “candy” markers did. I may well have had a slight addiction to the purple one through most of my junior high years.

Grape is as grape does, though, right?

Anyway.

So dead is what’s left of Scooba that I take perverse pleasure in driving past the nine storefront buildings that comprise its Main Street, though it’s not named Main Street. It’s named Railroad Road, no lie. This is because only one side of the street has buildings; the other side is, as you might guess, a railroad.

Though I’ve never seen a train.

I’ve never really even seen people on that street. Other than this once, I saw two kids throwing rocks at one of the empty storefronts, but as soon as I turned fully onto the street, they took off, running.

I often drive down Railroad Road out of a morbid desire to get lost somehow on my way to the office, which is simply not possible to do. That’s a real indicator of how small or dead a place is if you can’t even get lost in it.

There are, to date, only five ways to get to my office, after you turn off Highway 45. Only five. Just so you know.

If the truth is to be told, I was for the better part of this semester, merely an average passer-by, myself. I’d see this earnest man under his funeral tent, several times, with his various and sundry accoutrement, and I’d drive a little faster, to be honest.

Like everyone else who commutes to this den of education, when my classes were done and my office hours met, I wanted to get the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks-That-Couldn’t-Find-The-Puck-If-It-Was-Glued-To-The-Blame-Stick out of town, too.

The other day, I had a different feeling about it, on my way home. And I can tell you exactly what that feeling was: guilt.

That happens to you a lot down south. You see the word “Christian”, attached to anything, and the very guilt you tried to drink into oblivion rears its ugly head and you’re compelled to pull in by the defunct fire house and get out and “peruse” his wares.

It’s time like these that you should remind yourself that God is God because He keeps quiet. Man isn’t because he wants to make a dollar.

The Other Almighty.

Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s just my own personal upbringing, but it’s impossible for me to continuously drive past any sign that has the word “Christian” written on it and not feel guilty if I don’t try and contribute in some way. In this case, I was under the pretend-impression that the man was an out-of-work Jesus Freak trying to support his wife, three kids, and her sister, recently recovering from an addiction to both deadbeats and ham.

So, I pulled in. I got out of my car, thinking I’m doing a good thing here. Not even two steps toward the tent and I realize I’ve been had…or I’ve gravely misunderstood what constitutes a Christian Thing.

I was confronted, as it were, not with back-ordered Bibles, as I’d thought, or Witness Wear, a popular form of T-shirt in this buckle of the Baptist Belt. I wasn’t offered multiple copies of old Carmen CDs or the latest from Sandi Patti. There wasn’t even one of the gajillion books written by Bishop T.D. Jakes available.

No, what this man was passing off as Christian Things included several inflatables of Dora the Explorer, alligators, and what I think was, at one point, a skeleton, as well as several vinyl records, one of them from Grease, which I would have bought had I not already stolen my sister’s years ago; there were also several assortments of novelty salt-and-pepper shakers, and postcards.

Not all of which were from Mississippi.

There were, to be sure, T-shirts for sale. But they were emblazoned with 1980s tours of Whitesnake, Poison, and get this, the Oak Ridge Boys, from a concert they gave, oddly enough, in Jackson, Mississippi, one of three concerts I’ve ever attended in my life. Off in the corner of the fishing line, on which they hung, was a Tupac shirt; they seem to be ubiquitous.

Not one item was Christian, in the least. Not one thing for sell was even remotely “of the Lord.”

I don’t know if I was feeling brazen or just gleeful that the day was over and I was headed back to normal people, but I asked him where the religious paraphernalia was.

Faith is still free, right?

“What?”

I should have realized that paraphernalia might not have been in his vocabulary. I should have just assumed.

I took a breath, “Where are the actual, you know, Christian Things? Do you have any Bibles, or I don’t know, hymnbooks, or something?”

“Nah, I don’t have anything like that.”

“But, this is called, I mean, you call this, Christian Things, right?”

“Yeah, I know. My name’s Christian…and these are my Things. If you want, I’ll give you Dora and the alligator for one price?”

I politely refused, but it wasn’t that easy. I’d forgotten, Christians, both in faith and namesake, are a haggling breed; I should know.

I managed to get away inflatable-free, but the damage is far from done.

See, he’s right off Highway 45, the one turn I have to take, regardless of which of the five ways I drive to my office.  And this naturally, makes it less of a delight to see, on any given morning.

I’m afraid this battle has just begun.

And so, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Ok, well maybe a thimbleful is left of the mayonnaise.

The thimble in repose.

Ms. Frankie, the sweetest neighbor I had while growing up, God love her, thought it was because people really liked to look at the birds, that’s why they all had binoculars…and that anything other than Blue Plate was sacrilege.

She had a pair, herself, but they sat on the mantle after her husband died and became some sort of an un-dustable relic. And she was sort of correct, about the birds. Some people did really like to look at them. But, that’s only because they were in the way of the neighbor’s house.

Ironically, we had neighbors whose last name was Byrd.  But, they were good, God-fearing people. So, why spy on them? They also lived a little too far down the road.

My Uncle Jum kept his pair on the arm of his swivel chair. He went crazy eventually, so who knows what he saw when he looked through them. U.L. keeps his pair in the cabinet over the oven. But, I probably wasn’t supposed to tell you that.  Aunt Sally’s pair weren’t really binoculars. They held bourbon; the lens caps unscrewed to reveal, ta-da, circular-shaped flasks.

I learned this the hard way. As a child, visiting her in Texas, this was during my Dr. Who-meets-Sherlock-Holmes-and-Jem-Is-Truly-Outrageous-Truly-Truly-Truly-Outrageous phase. It was an awkward time for all, though, it didn’t really get me in trouble until we went to Idaho later that summer.

Anyway…I found her binoculars, oddly enough, in the liquor cabinet. She was nearing 100, so she didn’t bother to lock it anymore…what with “arthur” and all in her hands.

I took them outside, found something innocuous to stare at, like tree bark, something that didn’t really require binoculars, but then that’s not really the point of binoculars, is it?, to a kid…and when I lifted them to “mine eyes,” I poured bourbon, or it might have been liquid fire, straight onto my eyeballs.

“Arthur” apparently inhibited her ability to tightly screw caps back on things like binocular-flasks.

U.L., when he’s not waging some silent war of angry stares at the neighbor on the other side of the road (she sometimes forgets to wear pants when she mows the grass…so, cut him some slack), he actually enjoys bird-watching.

Not just any birds, either.  And never a jaybird. No, he likes to watch for the turkeys.  He particularly enjoys watching them in their frantic and mostly unrequited attempts at flight. Usually over the road.

On his acres of land live many creatures: coyotes (pronounced cow-yotes), racoons, deer (though they’re about to be put on the neighborhood Endangered Species list if they don’t stay out of his hosta), gray foxes (when they scream they sound exactly like an ingenue being murdered), and the lumbersome centerpiece of every Thanksgiving dinner: the wild turkey.

Maybe that’s what Aunt Sally drank.

This is not the pretty part of the turkey.

On a few occasions, when I’ve been back at home, he’s shown me these turkeys in repose, except they’re not at rest. I just like the word “repose.” And I have to be honest: when the falling sun hits their tail feathers, it’s a rather beautiful sight. The underwings of the turkey, as well, are quite purpled with irridescence. I found myself staring longingly after them through the binoculars. It didn’t even matter that they looked like turkeys.

Which are, you have to admit, an odd lot of birds. They have a vulture named after them, for crying out loud. And Ben Franklin…remember him?…tried to outvote the eagle in favor of the turkey for our national symbol of freedom.

Personally, I would have written in a vote, if I’d been there:  for the guinea.

Old Man Caser, and this had to be back when I was six or seven, lived across the road, directly in front of U.L.’s house. He was a nice man if “different,” (as in when his wife died, he didn’t tell anyone, and so there she stayed in the chair up against the front parlor window – also, I met his sister, after he fell in his house from a heart attack. He died. But, get this, so had his sister, like almost ten years earlier, back in 1978. I’ll save that story until Halloween. Nana was there, with me, that time, but she’ll never admit it. Never).

Old Man Caser had a hobby of collecting guineas. He had over the years, until the county took them all away (the ones that cars didn’t take out from running over them, that is), varying numbers of guineas…but never fewer than thirty, I would imagine, at any one time.

He had a great deal of land on his side of the road, and on that land were many, many trees, but the guineas seemed to prefer the most dangerous one: the water oak that grew over the road. Right by the mailbox.

I’m not sure, but they might be the dumbest birds that have ever lived. (And they didn’t live long in our small church community of loose youth in love with drag racing and little old ladies in Cadillacs).

From the top of the water oak, they got a pretty good look at the inside of U.L.’s kitchen, and I don’t know why, but they were forever trying to cross the road to get into it. I used to think it’s because he has such a large picture window over the kitchen sink, and the way his house is designed, with larger picture windows framing the den (these windows go all the way to the ground), it appears, at least to birds, that they can swoop down and fly through it. 

Or, they could have just wanted some cornbread dressing.

I buried probably, like, a million birds as a child, though, because of those windows…birds that had lost their lives to the glass-trickery that was U.L.’s kitchen-and-den architectural combo. Heck, I’d even walked into the windows, myself. Now, add to that, the fact that from the southside of the den looking toward the kitchen are three identical doors, each right after the other: one to the carport, one to the utility closet, and another to a separate part of the yard, out back of the house. People came to visit and stayed a whole extra day because they couldn’t figure out to leave the house. 

Anyway…so, we’d be sitting there quiet as can be, watching Wheel, or Lawrence Welk (please note that I never watched Lawrence Welk, but family time was family time, period), and Whomp!

Into the shrubs would fall another bluebird, or cardinal, and one time, a very angry, disillusioned cat.

But nothing whomps a window quite to the same tune as an 8-pound guinea trying as eagerly as the turkey to get off the ground.  Even without taking flight, a guinea with a well-intentioned run can kill itself by hurtling face-forward into plate glass.

This particular unfortuante guinea hit the window so hard it dropped an egg. 

Yet, I was fascinated by them. The best part, I think, was how loud they were. I mean, these are some noisy fowl. They were quite handy when company you didn’t prefer came over. All you had to do was pretend to be very interested in working in the yard, and after a few minutes, most of the time, the company just got tired of talking over the flock, and left.

Oddly enough, it looks a little like a turkey.

Thankfully, the guineas never really did anything by themselves…ever.  Every now and then, one might cross the road alone, but he always went back to the tree with the rest of them, if he didn’t get caught under the tires of a Buick. And, I mean, one could make some noise, by itself, I imagine, but you really needed the whole kit and kaboodle to get that delicious cacophony.

It’s an unusual childhood memory, I’ll give you that…and there’s a lot more attached to it, but still, I miss those birds. I miss nothing about their avian qualities, per se, but they were a definite freedom-encouraging symbol of my upbringing: make your own kind of squawk, but keep your family near; live on the edge but keep to the shade of the tree, you know cliche things like that.

I told Amanda and Erin that these fowl had impressed their birdy ways onto my core, my psyche, and because of them, one of my grown-up dreams was to, one day, own a small publishing firm. I said I was thinking of calling it The Guinea Tree Press, and just as I was about to show them the logo I’d put together on Adobe Illustrator, Amanda informed me that “guinea” was an ethnic slur against Italians. So, probably, I’d want to re-think my name.

I just looked straight at her, and then straight ahead, and you know what I did?

I said, “Damn.” I’ll have to go back through all my of my childhood and wipe it clean with a politically correct cloth because, all my life, I had no idea about the history of the word “guinea” as a slur.

Plus, now I’m worried sick that “hoop cheese” is next on the list.

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Caffeine: my new frenemy.

I guess it’s just “what I do” before I teach class, to get in the “zone,” with today’s youth. I think that’s what I tell myself: it’s caffeine; you’ll need that. These students have never lived without computer access. Email was “old-hat” by the time they were born. You’ve got to keep up with them. Caffeine is your friend. 

But, I rarely get the kick I need from the caffeine in a Diet Coke. Mostly, I just get gas.

Today, right in the middle of my lecture on trochaic feet in poetry, I burped. It was so long it was almost a sentence.

It was also loud. I had no idea I had it in me to sound “like one of the boys.”

I do.

I scared myself, though. I didn’t sense a burp coming, ahead of time. I mean, somehow, this entire summer term, I’ve managed to drink a Diet Coke, every morning, and control the acquired gas that often accompanies the carbonation.

That changed, at 8:49 AM.

And so did something else: my belief that every person in this country is full of good intentions. (Well, to tell the truth, they didn’t happen at the same time. I was just being dramatic. To be more exact, the change in “my belief that every person in the country is full of good intentions” occurred, closer to, like, 7:50 AM).

I’d never noticed this before. I guess I was always more interested in putting money in the vending machine (again, it’s not really an interest of mine as much as a necessity if I actually intend on getting the Diet Coke). But, I rarely looked at the slot where your coins go other than to make sure I wasn’t dropping coins on the floor.

Because that’s a real hassle, isn’t it?  Never have I loved a nickel so much as when it has rolled out of reach, under the behemoth that is the Coke Machine in the lounge.

For some reason this morning, though, I paid a bizarre amount of attention to my ritual of depositing coin after coin down Herman’s throat. (Herman, that’s his name, I pretend I’m feeding him, and that he doesn’t like anyone else but me. I get mad when others feed him, too – it’s the little things that get me through my day. God knows, I owe Herman).

Anyway, so when I’d placed my last coin, it was a dime, into the slot, I noticed a flashing sign, if you will, underneath the slot. Right below it. Black screen with those menacing red dots that light up, you know?  I hate those flashing signs the most.

They are never consistent, those flashing signs: sometimes their shapes are a jumble of lower-case and capital letters. That drives me crazy. And sometimes…sometimes! they look like the shapes of numbers that are trying to “pass” as letters. We used to do that on our calculators, in sixth grade, on the old interface that calculators used to have, remember? You could type in 55378008 and spell “boobless.” Mrs. Cotten was never amused at that. I only did it once and never again. I couldn’t; she took my calculator. She probably still has it, too.

Yeah, she's looking at you. And she's not happy.

Now, here I am, twenty-some-odd years later and I’m standing in front of a flashing sign, with those red lights, making me think of fifth grade, which I didn’t appreciate.

It read: “Press.” I was intrigued, but not shocked.

Then, immediately after, it read: “Bend down.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen that last part. Because I wasn’t even sure what it meant, exactly, so I bought another Diet Coke, and sure enough, after the last coin, this one was a nickel, was inserted…there flashed the “instructions.” Again.

I figured out that that must be what they were. Instructions. Telling me to press and then bend down.

Press and Bend Down.

I don’t know if it was the heat (it was over 90, again, today, and we’re still a week or two away from True Summer), or if it was the fact that I’m actually adjusting to teaching at 8:00 AM in the morning – perish the thought – but I was immediately offended at this vending machine. (Herman, why?)

I know how to get a blame Diet Coke out of one, thank you. I don’t need to be told to Press and then Bend Down.

My first thought was this flashing sign was the result of some lazy idiot, one afternoon, who stood around trying to think of a way to squeeze a few dollars out of our lawsuit-riddled capitalist economy. Though, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how one would go about suing Coke for “negligence for withholding liquid despite the obvious.” I mean, surely to god, they’d know how to retrieve a soft drink from a vending machine.

They’d hear it roll down the chute if nothing else. They’d have to be deaf not to.

That’s when I finally got the full foot all the way into my mouth. Obviously, this is why the machine flashes a sign. Right? I told myself that as a means to explain away the ridiculousness of having a sign flash at all, on a vending machine.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no deaf professors in that department, either.

I unscrewed the cap off, took a long, satisfying sip, and sat down to finish grading a few papers. But, I couldn’t push my first thought far enough to the side of my brain, and trust me if you’ve already gotten idiocy on the brain, grading Comp. II papers isn’t going to help you much.

Because I knew, I had convinced myself, already, that there was another, probably more genuine and legally-bound reason for such “instructions” to be progammed into a vending machine. Poor Herman, the number of idiots he must have to put up with everyday. The ADA was just a cover; what Coke was disclaiming was the fool who would think he’d been robbed because he paid for a Coke but couldn’t find it.

There are dumb people all around us, and somebody somewhere would have found a way to take advantage of this had a flashing sign not been ready and waiting to alert the consumer that it would take just a little more than one arm’s elbow grease from putting a few quarters in the machine to get their Coke, or Dasani water.

They were going to have to bend down, too. (Is knee grease a term, as well, or is it just disgusting to think about?)

Other signs own up to this testament on every product. I know you’ve seen them. They’re both a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America today, and also, they’re funny.

Board games like Life and Monopoly, are forever warning us that game pieces are for the game not our mouths. Coffee filters are constantly reminding us that the plastic wrap around the filters is “not a toy;” toilet paper’s kind enough to tell us this, too, and further, that if we put the plastic wrap on our heads, we will probably suffocate to death. 

Baby seats are doubling up, more than ever, on their duties to make sure we read on the box that “children have to come out of the car” with us by “unbuckling the straps that have been securely placed under the child’s arms” when we get to Wal-Mart; they can’t stay in the backseat, alone, even if you’ve got a portable DVD player. Hair dryers are absolutely dead-set against the idea of blowing your hair into a perfect Farrah Fawcett, or chicken wing, while bathing. 

A hair style and supper.

My favorite, still to this day, is the simple, age-old phrase: Some assembly required. (I like it so much because it’s an equal-opportunity instruction…found on boxes ranging from Big Wheels to Lego castles to Target bookshelves that look like ladders when assembled - and it’s also a little sweet in the way it offers its suggestion. Only “some” assembly is required; it’s like they attempted to take a small amount of pity on us, the consumers, and put some of it together, but then gave up after a few minutes. Just like we do when trying to learn how to program our DVR).  

I’m not the first to ask this, I know, but I bet I’m the first to put it the whole question in bold: Where did “common sense” go?

You get 5 bonus points if you guess Corporate America…and 5 more, if you say it’s in the top desk drawer of that little man in the back corner whose job it is to design the Warning labels about the plastic wrap, game pieces, and hair dryers.

And I bet his name is Herman. It’s just a feeling I have.

Or, maybe that’s gas, again.

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We did our civic duty, after Max had attacked him, this poor little kitten, in our backyard. At first, we thought he was dead. But, Amanda, who was the brave one, stepping forward and retrieving him from Max’s jaws, saw that he was breathing…barely.

Me, Sugar, Max, and, a gin and tonic.

Breathing enough, however, that he was more than agile and able enought to bite Amanda solidly on her finger. Not long after, she found herself in the emergency room, receiving a Tetanus shot. 

You may recall that we were turned away from the Vet School at MSU, and abruptly sent to another Vet’s office, way down 82 – the older version of the highway used mainly by elderly men who are never in a hurry and golfers who are.  The kitten, that we’d named Rasputin for all the obvious evil reasons, was left under the care of a Dr. L; I can’t tell you his whole name because I can’t spell it. It’s a little bit exotic a la Bulgarian and a little bit Willy Wonka a la Willy Wonka.

A couple of days ago, though, after the kitten had been gone for over two weeks, Amanda received a phone call.

“Your kitten is ready.”

“Excuse me,” she replied.

“That stray kitty that you brought in, with the collapsed lung? He’s fine now, completely fixed and ready to come back home.” (I still get tickled when adult people use the word ”kitty”).

“Oh…well, you see, we, uh, we thought…I mean, we don’t want another kitten. We’ve got a dog and a cat already, you see, and so…you know. We just wanted him to be healed, and make sure he was all right.”

The response to that: “Well, he is…and he can’t stay here.”

It was a short drive that took forever, going down 82, right to the county line, where devil kitty was. We pulled into the driveway, in Amanda’s black Fit, and nearly had one ourselves. We were nervous, anxiously snacking on our fears.

Genuine fears, I should add.  Ever shrouded by her Ivy League wisdom, Amanda suggested we assess the situtation.

So, we did. Here are the things we knew about Rasputin: 1) he was half-wild, half-evil, and a quarter kitten – was that too much?; 2) he was a quarter kitten, half-wide, and half-evil – was that enough?; 3) we didn’t want a kitten; 4) it was impossible to be half/half/quarter, anything, ever. Math just didn’t work that way…

…and 5) what if he weren’t cute anymore?  Cuteness is pretty much the most important factor in kittendom.

Two weeks was a long time, especially in the feline world; a lot of things could have gone wrong and vastly so. Chances were he’d grown even more feral while at the Vet’s, and no doubt, that would show, wouldn’t it?  His hair would be bristled, his eyes shot and angry, his claws…oh god, like midget hypodermic needles, and of course, further chances are he would remember us. Bitterly.

We couldn’t sit in the car all day, one way or the other, staring out at the pasture, where we’d temporarily cast our fears for better visibility.  There was plenty of room to lay them out in that pasture; nothing out there but a horse, what might pass for a cow, and the remains of a ’57 Chevy, minus the backend of the truck.

So, out we dragged our feet and headed to the front door.

Customer Service, 24/7, except on Mondays-Thursdays.

Inside, the Vet’s office, though, let me tell you, was cleaner than most human doctors’ offices. I was pleased with that. It was the first time I’d actually seen the inside; I didn’t come with Amanda when she bravely brought the kitten here.  I was surprised that it was missing that animals-come-here-daily-with-vicious-sick smell. I approved of its absence, and yet, was somewhat suspicious of it, as well. Over in the corner stood what may very well be the smallest Yorkshire Terrier I’ve ever seen, of the four Yorkshire Terriers I’ve ever seen. He didn’t move, he didn’t growl, he didn’t bark.

He stared.

That made me very nervous. I don’t like it when dogs appear to be thinking. And he did appear to be thinking. All the while he was staring at me. I tried to stare back, but I was unable to. Instead, my neck became a bit like a bird’s, pivoting back and forth between the Vet Assistant at the sliding glass window/check-in desk and this minute Yorkie security guard.

Amanda had to pinch me to calm me down.

Enter the Vet, himself, the wizened old man from the Bulgarian Chocolate Factory. He was ridiculously interested in Amanda’s finger: did she get the shot, did she go immediately to the emergency room as encouraged, how was the finger now, could he see it, and so on.

He was pleased that she was somehow still alive and then said, “I didn’t want to scare you before, but one time, Charlie, who used to work here was bitten one time by a cat and I told him to rush to the hospital and get a shot, and he didn’t, for several days, and then when he did, they had to chop off the tip of his index so the bacteria wouldn’t get into his blood and kill him. Because that’s what the bacteria would do, from a cat’s mouth, anyway.”

A small pause.

“I’m so glad you listened.” He smiled and I’m sure he meant it, and Amanda was…well, quiet about the whole thing.

I was, naturally, riveted, at this point in the lecture. I knew rabies was bad, but my god, it could kill you? 

I worried extra-hard then about every stray animal I’ve ever touched, rescued, or looked at, despite the fact that I was apparently rabies-free. I also felt extra-sorry for that poor dog Atticus has to kill in To Kill A Mockingbird, but dear god, people back in his day had to have all their fingers…a lot more than people in my day seem to do…hell, all my students would need to hold onto would be their thumbs so they could text during class.  Or Twitter, I guess that’s the new “it” thing, right?

The lecture went on: Amanda was fortunate that she was bitten by a kitten and not the finger-destroyer that is the large, adult cat. The reason for this is that the kitten was too young to have eaten much. (What?) Adult feral cats would have collected unhealthy, bacteria-ridden tartar and plaque build-up on their teeth. That’s where the danger lies.

I didn’t even want to think about what all a feral cat would put in its mouth.

He continued: That’s what could have resulted had this kitten been older (he was barely 3-weeks old at the time), Amanda could have overlooked her festering wound (this is highly doubtful) and it could have gotten into her bloodstream and caused something that sounded like Acinetobacter or acetaminophen or some A-word…and probably died.

Well, thank god, the bite hurt. Otherwise, she may never have known. I mean anytime I get bitten, I just ignore it unless it hurts.

After class was over, Vet Assistant A brought out a carboard box that somehow was to be folded into a house, A-frame style. Emblazoned on the side of the box was CAUTION!  PRECIOUS CARGO HEADING HOME! I think this is when it hit me. There was no turning back, now. Ugly or cute, cuddly or wormy, lovable or satanic…we had a new kitten.

A kitten named Rasputin.

Then, Vet Assistant B rounded the corner and in her hands was a small pile of striped fur barely mewing above a whisper. She turned him around and I finally looked into his eyes, for the first real time and I fell. Head. Over. Heels. In. Love. with the blame thing.

Here he is. Nothing but a pound and a half of sass.

His ears were too big, his eyes green and creamy, pulling away from his lower lids, were two black as mascara stripes that made him seem distant and romantic like Errol Flynn or Casanova. And right above his brow, were these two vertical lines that veritably screamed, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Demille.” He was, I could tell, a lover of the arts.

I only had to hold him a second. Amanda…she needed a little more coaxing. She was, I’m sure, recalling the whole trauma of the event from a perspective I didn’t share. Rasputin, as if sensing this trepidation, crawled over onto her shoulder, found a perch, and snuggled up under her neck.

The end was near.

After gushing, Amanda made an astute observation:  How could we continue to call this sweet, innocent, doe-eyed kitten, Rasputin.  

This kitten who was mean as the devil, bit everything in sight, couldn’t be tamed, wouldn’t be loved, hadn’t he all but died from meanness?

“Yes,” she said, “But he came back. And so, we should call him Lazarus, instead.”

If he hadn’t purred, right then, from his shoulder perch on Amanda, I would have hesitated.

Next, of course, came the real challenge: re-introducing him to Max, the dog who had nearly severed the small bridge of tissue between Lazarus’ lungs and esophagus (they’d hardly be willing to hang out together); letting Sugar set the routine for the household (she was after all the Alpha Cat and I was sure they’d hardly be willing out together, either); and getting him to transfer his kitty-aggression to a banana. (Amanda had already bought a selection of toys, a catnip banana was among them). When he starts in at the ankles, or the hands, we encourage him to “transfer to the banana.”

We’ve started using that phrase now on our friends, if they “get out of line.” Only two have, as of the publishing of this blog. 

And, so far, so good, sort of. He certainly has some anger-management issues to work on.  My ankles bear the initial verdict. But a re-trial was called, at the last minute, a governor’s reprieve, if you will, and…well…

…that jury is still out.

But the kitten…or I should say, Lazarus (Rasputin), he is still firmly, entirely, and safely in…the bathroom, for now.

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I admit it: There’s something beautiful in a martini glass; something so achingly elegant in the way a champagne flute plays its score.  And I know it must be in my blood because I wasn’t brought up to drink, it was never glorified, and certainly not encouraged, not in a Baptist household.  (At least the Jews in my family drank wine, but I didn’t know them very well, and they always seemed to be committing suicide or losing a few children in Oklahoma or some such dramatic thing as that which didn’t lend itself very well to summer visits). No, at Uncle Larry’s house there was no alcohol, of any kind, ever, except that one time Aunt Ruby came to visit from Memphis and left some peppermint brandy, for her nerves she said, in the cabinet over the stove.

Oh, but there were stories about alcohol.

Grandfathers forever sneaking off, in the middle of the night which seems to be between 10:00 PM and 11:00, and involved Bingo Halls, I’m thinking, and running cars into ditches…almost making the driveway, definitely making the Yaupon and Boxwood. Mothers ruining church cantatas by showing up late, and wearing running shorts and sun hats under which her pills were kept, dangling on the arms of men with names like Churl and Bud. And fathers. There were fathers in there somewhere, I don’t know how I know it but I do.

And there were sons, too. Sons who drank despite, to spite, the parable(s).

I’ve never been to a meeting, never had counseling, like two of my brothers; they told me their experiences and I adopted them as mine.  Never had the privilege of rehab, like the other two, though it was appealing on some level to have known people, and smart people too, who went to rehab. I’ve certainly stood in the family pulpit and made pronouncements on them all about their vices, but unlike the rest of my siblings, I seem to be the one who inherited the Key to Managaeability, often disguised as moderation.  A good alcoholic can hide right out in public, cloaked in gin or vodka, if he stands very still and smiles as if he’s got a secret confidence. The right amount of teeth shown can convince anyone.

I was…still, am, at times…that kind of alcoholic, and I’m using that term because that’s the point of this blog.  I was always fun, always funny, Wildean wit, a Williams flare for the quip, when drinking.  It made me sharper, and I think there’s a research study in there somewhere. I think it’s absolutely true that liquor does this for some of us. And I didn’t want that to stop; I’m a writer, I needed it, I needed my brain to click over so I could save myself from the Thousand Thoughts.

Unless I’ve been drinking whiskey, Bourbon, any of that family, though, that wasn’t pleasant.  My blood can’t take it. My mouth can, but the man I turn into after a few tumblers is not a nice man. So, what do you do? 

You just stop drinking whiskey, is what I said, and did. Or… 

…or you do it when no one’s watching.  Except Aristophanes. She’s very open-minded and nonjudgmental; she’s also part bobcat. And still, I didn’t have her declawed. I didn’t agree with that.

I had a dear friend who used to hide bottles around the house, mostly vodka, that was her crutch. I never did that. We weren’t hiders, no. We drank right out in front of each other; on my father’s side, we did. If you were going to stare at us, you were going to get the whole picture. It made a life more honest, and also, a lot damn harder to love through. My mother’s side drank too, at least the women did. But not Uncle Larry and not Nana. They had a different size of shoulder. 

I get so tickled at people, though, who believe that so long as they make the admission, any admission, that they can use honesty as a defense. That’s not how honesty works at all. The point of honesty is to keep the bridge afloat, not charge a toll. And, for me, I guess that’s what made drinking so glamorous; I could just ignore the toll with a glass in my hand.  Hell, I could ignore the whole bridge. I would just drink myself into Who Cares Anyway, and laugh at some personal joke instead, happy as a potato, right in front of the bridge and devise some other method of Getting Over the Creek. One that usually involved driving.

I never drank out of rebellion. I didn’t drink because I wasn’t supposed to. I drank because it was within reach. It was as easy to grab as the fork, or napkin. (But not the bill…ugh, the bills).

To show the whole total would just be too gauche.

I didn’t start drinking until I was 21, living in Orlando, working at Disney on the College Program. No one pressured me into it, no one did anything, and so the mystique became the idea of its privacy. I wanted a secret as much as anyone else did. I had no idea, honestly, that it’d make so much sense to me to drink. I couldn’t possibly be the Total Sum of a Family Tree; I couldn’t be That Root, not when I didn’t grow up with them, or know them, not when I was transplanted at the age of three to a smaller Eden, born away to a great uncle’s house in Mississippi. Not a thousand miles from Home in Orlando.

But, I was.

It wasn’t until My Indiana Years that I fully slipped. I’d used alcohol as a coping mechanism before, yes, but Indiana was the tipping point. I worked solely to drink, to escape the relationship I didn’t really want but took and kept because it got me out of Mississippi. It was easy to drink, and the bloat that seeped into my face and stomach and chin told the story a lot better than I’m doing now. It was a gross story. And, I’m sure, in time, there will be people to thank for the actions they took. But, that’s not now. And, so you know, there’s a good chance that that Time is kept on a watch I gave away accidentally last Christmas.

Time heals all wounds, dries all alcoholics sober, but nothing comes with conditions quite like Time.

I used to say, in jest, that I had to drink until I was drunk enough to drive. Why God saved me from those nights, I don’t know.  They were long and shameful nights, the next morning, but never during, and that’s where the intoxication comes from. The things I’ve said, and done, while drunk, are best left unmentioned for two reasons: 1) those stories belong to other people, now, and 2) I can’t really remember them anyway. I hated realizing I’d had a blackout, but god, I longed for them because I was a terribly, privately depressed young man. And if alcohol was a disease, then the blackout was your treatment. To be given the right, or to take it, to forget because of a blackout…that was a blessing.

It wasn’t until last summer that I decided to cash in on this old world and trade it in; I didn’t get that much for it. But, at the same time, I don’t blame anyone for my drinking.

I do blame a select few for making a bar a better bed than my real one.  

Still, I don’t drink some liquors at all anymore; I limit my nights out, a social experiment, I suppose, which is appreciated most of all by my wallet, but have I stopped drinking? No.

A fish can’t change his fins. But he sure as hell can keep them to himself and not muddy up the riverbed.

And to be honest, as I still struggle with this everyday, and this being as close to a microphone about it as I’ll ever get, I’m more than a little frightened. I didn’t realize that twelve years had already passed, until this morning, twelve years.  I’ve been an alcoholic longer than any job I’ve ever held, or all my years of college and graduate school combined. If only I could find a creative way to put that on my resume to prove that there are some things to which I’ve been faithfully and gainfully employed. If only there were some way to highlight that commitment.

The last interview I went on, they took me to dinner…and drinks. (Sigh).

Over a third of my life has been spent with alcohol, and what scares me is that I won’t like who I am without it. But, that’s what I’m doing, that’s what I’m trying, and if nothing else, my trade in gave me enough money, at least, to pay the toll.

So, I’m gonna pay it, for the very first time (again) and see what happens.

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