Category: Life

Evil always wins.

Let’s say three roommates share a house. Everybody has jobs and schedules, places they have to be, people to meet, things to do. They are just trying to get over. Two of the roommates, because of their upbringing, or their moral superiority or guilt or whatever, do their share of household chores. Nothing too intense. They take out the trash, vacuum occasionally. The third roommate – the evil one – never helps. He never does the dishes or sweeps the kitchen floor. He gets peanut butter out of the refrigerator, eats what he wants and leaves the rest of it out. He spills potato chips on the sofa at night while watching reruns of Saturday Night Live, and the mess is still there in the morning, after he has risen and left the house for the day. The other roommates cover for him, because they are trying to maintain modern civilization, but he blithely goes on in his slobby ways, oblivious to the fact that his roommates are acting as his servants. Eventually, and here is where evil wins, the two roommates give up and stop taking care of their clueless brother. At this point, the house begins to smell funny, and the carpet crunches when you walk on it. Before long, all three roommates are slobs. Dates enter the house, their upper lips curl in revulsion, and people are not getting laid when they should. Pure evil, winning again.

Or consider a bully on a playground. He steals your lunch money, knocks your book bag to the ground and sometimes just bops you for the hell of it. You and the rest of the kids try to appease him, but this doesn’t satisfy him. He steps up his demands, telling you to get more lunch money, or else. As you can see, evil is winning here. After a while, you decide to challenge the bully. At this point, I have to warn you: Contrary to what your Uncle Dick told you when you were little, bullies don’t fold and run away crying just because you stand up to them. Sometimes they beat the shit out of you, and make you their bitch. But whatever the outcome, you and the bully have escalated the situation into open warfare. If you beat him up, perhaps you will become the bully. Or maybe he will beat you up. Either way, violence and terror are now rampant on the playground. Evil wins.

Maybe you work in a sales job, on commission plus bonuses. (In case you haven’t noticed, almost all jobs can be sales jobs to some extent.) You believe in your product, and you are convinced that it is beneficial to most of your customers. You tell your clients the truth, and in some cases the truth prevents them from purchasing, because you help them to understand that the product would not suit their needs, or perhaps they cannot afford it. You lose a sale and a commission, but this is OK with you, because, after all, you are helping people, and you don’t have to close every deal in order to put food on your table. But Slick Rick – the evil salesperson on your team – doesn’t feel the same. He feels that every client can and should be closed, whether it is good for them or not. Because it is good for him. He leaves out any information that the customer “doesn’t need to know,” and sometimes obscures the long-term financial consequences of his clients’ decision to buy, if that’s what it takes to make a deal. Because of these and other shady tactics, he is the top producer, lives extremely well, collects most of the bonuses and sales incentives and is the darling of management. Customers are hurt, but it is possible to prove that they signed the documents of their own free will, so the attitude of the company is “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” You, on the other hand, are repeatedly called in to the manager’s office and asked what’s wrong, is there trouble at home, we’d really hate to lose you, but you’re just not keeping up. Eventually you get fired (evil wins), or you quit in disgust (evil wins and you blame yourself) or you adopt Slick Rick’s methods and start shaking down everyone you see (you lose your self-respect, more people get hurt, the integrity of the company is compromised and evil wins big time).

You see how this works?

Or you are a candidate for political office. You and your opponent strongly disagree on solutions to the challenges facing your constituents, and you vigorously present your well-researched and prepared proposals at town meetings throughout the district. Your opponent may have good ideas too, or he may not, but he realizes that the public is unconcerned about the wonkery of good government, and voters won’t or can’t be educated. So he attacks you personally on the ground that you smoked pot in college, or one of your aides was busted for drunk driving in 1979. Since you bailed him out, you are “soft on crime,” and cannot be trusted to deal harshly with child molesters. Blindsided, you deny the charges and say that you hate those kid-rapers too, but it’s too late. Your tough stance appears phony, and your supporters abandon you. Evil has won, and in the election you go down 59% to 37%. Your political career is over, unless you jump on the personal attack shitwagon in the next election.

Try to be good, folks. But watch your back, and don’t expect too much from the rest of us.

If I were a loving husband and doting father of two I would certainly have these things on the back window of my SUV:

That would be me there with the bowtie, beaming and waving at the world behind my big V8 Expedition/Navigator/Tahoe/Armada. Doing a little jig, too, because I am so happy with my little stick-on family and my 420 cubic inch engine.

Next to me is Mrs. Jones, in a demure calf-length skirt. Mrs. Jones is happy, too, because she just took a whole handful of Prozac. She’s got those telltale Prozac eyebrows, doesn’t she? But, oh-oh, what’s this? Mrs. Jones has no tits at all! No stomach or intestines, heart or lungs, either. Well, I guess that’s how the little vixen keeps her weight down. Good for you, Mrs. Jones!

Then there are the kids. Little Madison with her polka dot skirt and that adorable crooked smile. She’s got her mother’s tits, don’t you think? Somebody’s got ’em, that’s for sure!

And my boy Justin, the apple of my eye, always scaring the pigeons, that dickens. His mother picked that name. I wanted to name him Ken, after Kenny G. “K-Man!” I’d say to him, “whassup?” But Mrs. Jones said it would always remind her of Kenneth Starr. I was happy to let her give him a fairy name. Because I am the loving stick-husband and she gives me stick sex if I don’t ever contradict her. Secretly, though, I call him Ken.

But I would never put these guys on the back window of the big ol’ rockin’ SUV:

Because if a stalker followed me home, or some hoodlums intent on committing a home invasion, I would want them to think that it was just me and Mrs. Jones and our beautiful children. Then, after they tied us all up (but before they fooled around with little Maddy, bless her heart), out would come good old Rex and Fluffy, snarling and hissing, and rip those home invaders some new butt-holes!

That’s the way I think, because I am Stick Man, and I take care of my stick family.

Molly the Cat was sitting motionless on the back stoop.

She’s the first cat I’ve ever had, having grown up more of a dog person, so she is teaching me all about cats. One of the things I’ve learned is that cats often sit motionless for long periods of time. When they are not sleeping, I think they are trying to demonstrate what they might look like stuffed. Most of the time, they’re sleeping.

But I am standing quietly behind her, in the kitchen, watching her through the screen door, when I detect a slight variation in her stance. Her body tenses slightly, her ears swivel toward a certain point in the backyard and her feet gather up under her as she slowly lowers herself into a crouch. Her back legs tense and flex a few times. I am about to learn something new, firsthand…

I know a girl, her name is Kristin. She’ll never see this, so I am using her real name. She is a beautiful child, just eighteen years old, or maybe seventeen, a fresh, vibrant new bloom. She is my niece’s best friend, has been for a decade. They are rarely apart. They might as well be sisters, for all the sleepovers they have had at each others’ homes. They have studied together, played together, caroused around Southern California together, and I have no doubt have drunk together and started to learn about boys together. Last week, just last week, they graduated from high school together. They rigged it so they could walk together in the procession, and then they partied together until dawn.

As long as I have known Kristin, she has lived alone with her mother, in an apartment, just the two of them. I talked to her mom twice. Once on the phone when I took the girls to Disneyland (naturally I had to be checked out), and once when I found an unrecognized phone number programmed into my cell phone. It was hers, and we spoke for a minute, not knowing each other. She figured out who I was first, before I could solve the puzzle, so I thought she must be pretty smart.

I missed the graduation ceremony myself, and I still had not met Kristin’s mom when I made a little photo slide show of the affair, using what was on the memory card of someone’s digital camera. One shot that I included was of the two graduates just after the ceremony, posing in their caps and gowns, holding their bouquets and flanked by their two proud mothers. Smiles of pride, joy, relief and mischief. Just a week ago.

Kristin’s mom was a waitress, so it can’t have been easy to get the kid through high school, and who knows what might come next? We sometimes think we know, but we don’t, really. Last night, coming home from work sometime after midnight, her car was struck by another, and she was killed.

She was two blocks from the apartment, making the last left turn. The other car rammed hers broadside and pushed it at least a hundred feet down the street, into a tree, where it stopped and caught fire. It must have been all over in a matter of seconds, and the other driver fled.

There are some older sisters, but they have been out of the nest for a long time. So Kristin won’t be completely alone. Just more alone than she has ever been. I try to think how I would handle this myself, at her age, and my mind just won’t look at it. We think we know, but we don’t, really.

It happens so fast I hardly believe it. Molly the Cat rockets off the back stoop, and in about a second she is at the cinderblock wall at the distant end of the yard, 60 feet away. She looks into the bougainvillea there for another second, then stands on her hind legs and bats something from a branch to the ground, floomp. There is the momentary peeping and shrieking of the baby mockingbird, and then Molly the Cat is running, bird in her mouth, into my kitchen. In those ten seconds, she has brought mindless, meaningless, inexplicable death, but she has done nothing wrong, nothing I can punish her for, and she is confused at my raised voice.

We think we know, but we don’t, really.

Jesus X. Fucking Christ in a gypsy cab, I am tired tonight.

Last week I drove to The University of California at Santa Cruz for the graduation ceremony of my goddaughter. If you’ve only heard about godfathers in reference to Mafia bosses, be advised that a godparent is supposed to be responsible for the spiritual upbringing of the child if something happens to the bioparents. Due to a warp in the time-space continuum, I was picked to be a godfather twenty-four years ago. Luckily, nothing happened to the girl’s parents, or else by now she would probably be a Hong Kong call girl. Regular readers will know that I am a deeply spiritual person, but during her formative years I was, shall we say, otherwise occupied.

The girl grew up to be a pretty good young woman, but I was never convinced that she would graduate from college. Frankly, I didn’t think she wanted to. A few years after I myself finished college I had a lot of friends who were still attending. Most of them never accomplished enough to trigger a graduation ceremony, and some of them are taking classes to this day, with no graduation in sight.

I thought that would be the path my goddaughter would take. I mean, when she traveled to Spain to study, it was only a matter of weeks before she moved out of the safe boarding house arranged by the university and into god knows what dive. Then she stopped going to classes, and instead joined an itinerant street theater troupe. When I got the news that she had broken her arm falling off the table she was dancing on in a Madrid bar, I was pretty sure I’d never be attending a graduation, and, spiritual guru that I am, I became one with that.

When she returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Santa Cruz, the Hippie Campus, I still felt I had nothing to worry about. I mean, the school mascot is the banana slug. Need I say more?

But life has its twists and turns, and eventually she found a calling and not only earned a degree, but with honors, and a job offer to boot. And the whole procedure took less than seven years, which is less time than my friend Mike took to pass English 1A. (Note: I am jealous, because I am still looking for my first job offer related in any way to my major, which was Semantics.).

Since it costs the same to fly to Santa Cruz from L.A. as it does to charter a jet to Antarctica, I decided to drive up there for the big weekend. So I had a nine-hour drive the Friday before last, including three hours of traffic jams in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is what central California looks like. I don’t know why there would be traffic jams when we were so far away from anything that we could see the curvature of the earth, but there you go.

To add to the fun, all the rooms in Santa Cruz and environs were booked, so I had to be smuggled into someone else’s motel room for the weekend. The last time this kind of pajama party/sleepover was actually fun was Cub Scouts. But I was 35 then, and a lot of things were more fun in those days.

The town was alive with freethinking and strong coffee, and I got very little sleep, except during the graduation ceremony itself. Governor Schwarznegger, our answer to Jesse Ventura, did not speak at this affair, which took place in an open meadow, so the quiet drone of the various valedictorians and faculty members combined with the hot sun and a lazy breeze to create the perfect nap time, and I nearly fell off my folding chair three times.

Following the ceremony there was a forced march several miles up a steep hill to some sort of quad, where we attended a reception, which, I think, was mainly a chance for our rather large group to get separated from one another over and over as we kept telling ourselves that we were leaving as soon as Uncle Jack (or cousin Mildred) came out of the bathroom, or got back from the food concession, or had their picture taken in one previously untried permutation of relatives, graduate and friends.

When we finally overcame this inertia and got the hell out of there, we had to wait for a shuttle bus to take us back to the parking structure concealed some miles away in the redwoods. When the bus arrived, there were too many people at the bus stop, but we all got on anyway, and the little tram got as crowded as a municipal bus in Baja. I must compliment the manners of the students who were on that tram, however. One of them actually stood to let me have his seat, although it is possible that he was influenced by my Crazy-Eyed Killer stare. Still, he got out of my way, and that’s what counts.

Then there was a drive to another small town nearby, a dinner at an Italian restaurant with heavily accented waiters (no Mafia bosses, though), several toasts, a session of gift-opening, a great deal of earnest after-dinner conversation and a drive back to Santa Cruz where I was re-smuggled into the room for a refreshing four hours of sleep before getting back on the road for Southern California.

You’d think that sitting in a comfortable car seat for eight hours would be easy and restful, but there is nothing like hurtling down a freeway in a vibrating steel box at ninety miles per hour, a hideous death only seconds away if you lose your concentration at any time. There is nothing like that to get you all stressed out and fatigued, which is what I was by the time I got home on Sunday night (the Sunday before last).

It was a wonderful weekend with great sights, the electric buzz of young brains and a pretty coed who wanted to discuss Linguistics with me, and I can have no complaints, but jeez, the driving and the eating and the speeches and the not sleeping, well, it wore me out. And I was only halfway through the graduation festivities. The following week (this past week) I had another graduation, this one right here in my town, with me acting as the host for out-of-towners and throwing a party for the graduate and her rowdy teenage homies.

But I see that I have been typing so long now that probably no one is still reading, so I will just say that I have survived two graduations in a row, I am thoroughly burned out, and I am thankful that I have no dad and I am not myself a dad, or else I would have had a Father’s Day thing added on. Luckily I started back to work today, so I will be getting some much-needed rest there.

As always, my heart overflows with tender joy and bittersweet affection.

Remember, tomorrow is the first day of Summer, so the deadline for the revision99 Protest Song UnContest looms. You still have time to submit lyrics and song ideas to vent your rage against The Establishment (or whatever pisses you off). Details can be found here and here.

Will you dance for me, if I play the music just right for you?

I must have forgotten how you liked it, the music. Before I saw you, before you had me, it must have been nearly perfect, else how could you have been drawn to it? That summer I made the patterns, and the rhythms. It was a trance, those hot nights, and I was in it.

You danced for me then. How did you do that thing, that look where you are shy and suggestive at the same time, innocent and nasty? All the gyrations and shimmies, the little halter, the bare brown skin, but it was that look that took me. Later you said you were a belly dancer, and maybe you were, but you would never give me a private show. You said it was too nasty. Only tramps do that, or a woman for her husband. It was the only thing you wouldn’t do, and it became the only thing I wanted.

That first night you gave me your phone number, and I had it in my pocket for months, and I still can’t say why I didn’t call. I waited until it was too late, the moment was long past, the scribbled note a dead leaf in my jacket pocket, flaked and crumbled. I could squint and read the number, but you were gone from me, and, to be honest, I was afraid, the way I am when it matters.

You wouldn’t remember me. You’d found a boyfriend. You didn’t want me to call. The number you gave me was fake, a way of getting rid of me.

How many times in these reminiscences can I get away with saying I was young and stupid? I think I’m pretty smart, but when did that begin? Surely sometime after you happened, precious dancer. I was young, but you were younger, and wiser. The second time I saw you dancing, I couldn’t believe my luck. But it wasn’t luck at all, was it, sweetheart? You simply came back and got me. Sent your girlfriend home with the car and told me I had to drive you, somewhere way the hell down Mulholland Highway, out into the Valley.

I made the music. You made the magic. I can see your storm of black hair flying as you spun, later spreading on the sheet. It wasn’t rock’n’roll sex, there was no cocaine or absinthe, no leather. You were kind of new at it, but you gave yourself so sweetly that I almost cried, and you really did cry, and we tried it many times that night, and many nights that summer.

The whole thing collapsed of course. My fault. Young and stupid. Your mother may have been right: if you pursue, you are a tramp. A piece of ass. Sorry, babe. I am so, so sorry.

I’d give anything if you would dance for me, one last time.

We are powerful and brave.

We are angry, afraid and greedy. We always want more than we have. We are ingenious.

We have invented so many superb ways to show our strength, to assuage our fear, to give vent to our anger, to take what we want.

We will hit you with rocks. We will maim you with our sword and our battleaxe. We will blow holes in your soft flesh with our blunderbus, our musket, our carbine, our pistol, our machine gun, and the life will drain from your mortal body, while we take what we want from you, your family, your home.

We will blow up your buildings, your public places, your railroad tracks, your factories, your electrical generating facilities, your airports, your roads, the very houses you dwell in.

We will organize ourselves into huge armies, and these armies will be the grandest achievements, hundreds of thousands of us in uniforms, training, planning, arming. We will tell ourselves, and you, that we only want to protect ourselves. But in our fear, our anger, our greed and our hatred, we will move to dominate you, to subjugate you, to take your treasures.

Failing that, we will kill you. We will take you in our hands and we will blacken your mind, stop your heart, wring the blood out of you, and all your kind. We will scorch the earth you live on. It is within our power. It is within our hearts.

No one of us can remember when this started. We have always done this, even before we invented our excellent weapons. Every day we teach our children to be ready for this. The marching, the taking, the killing. We do this to our children.

There is no place on earth left to hide.

This is my memorial to all of them who died. To all who killed. To all who are dying and killing even right now, as I think these thoughts. I weep for you and myself, and all who will come after us to continue the carnage. Bring glory on us. Bring your wrath and your fire. Bring peace through devastation. Bring it to every town, to every street, to every home, and we shall have peace, and our heroes at last may rest.
**************************************************************
Joe Frank has made an eloquent audio statement on this subject.
You can listen to it by clicking here.

I confess herewith to a not-so-secret lifelong love affair.

My Uncle Ralph, a truly magnificent Irish drunk, played the ukulele. If you could sing it, he could accompany you, and I made him play every chance I got. Sometimes when I was very young he would let me try to play his ukulele, but he was not a teacher and I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. He encouraged me, but he didn’t know what to say to make the instrument clear to me. In those interludes when I was holding the thing, the fun would stop, and I would get self-conscious in the deafening, expectant silence. Each time I would sheepishly hand it back to him, and the sing-along would resume.

So I made myself content to watch. I watched his fingers on the frets, moving around in some incomprehensible musical braille, while his other hand strummed and plucked. The strumming and plucking made more sense to me than the fingering. I could feel the rhythm, and I could move my own hand in time with it, but I knew from my few attempts that both hands had to work together, each doing an independent job at opposite ends of the instrument, or it would be no good.

For various reasons, the jam sessions with Uncle Ralph came to end when I was ten years old. Not long after that I went by myself to a matinee movie at the Paramount Theater in my little town in southern Minnesota. I sat alone in the dark under the starry ceiling of that old monument, and my future was revealed to me. The movie was “Rock Around the Clock.” Bill Haley and the Comets, and they weren’t playing ukuleles.

The music and the electricity was so powerful it was all I could think about for days. I even tried to build an electric guitar of my own. Actually I tried to get my dad to do it, but he wisely declined, realizing that, on the off chance that we succeeded, neither of us knew how to play it. For five years I dreamed of that movie, that sound, that excitement, and I asked my parents for a guitar at every gift-giving occasion.

When I was fifteen, I got my first guitar.

I started late, I guess, but I caught up fast, because I didn’t put the thing down for about two years. Before the first year was up I had started a band, my first of many kid bands. I learned by listening to records and copying what I heard. I had a turntable that could run as slow as 16 RPM, so I could slow down the difficult parts and work on them out of real time.

I played it until my fingers stung from pressing on the strings. After a few months my fingertips were hard and impervious to pain. I taught myself how to do most of the things I wanted to do. When I touched the instrument, put my hands on the neck and the strings, it cried, it moaned, it screamed and whispered. When you see guitar players making faces as they play, they are not putting on a show. They are feeling the music as it flows back and forth between the player and the instrument.

If you want to hear some of the playing that inspired me and made me fall in love and kept my heart a happy prisoner all these years, click on the guitar above, or just press “play” here:

A lot of what you will hear was culled from old vinyl, so don’t be judging the sound quality. Just dig the licks. These are guitar solos only, except for one vocal phrase I left in, and yes, I know it’s raw. Frankly, it was the violence that attracted me at first.

Who can name all the songs? (Hint: One of them is in there twice.)

Sundays we played volleyball.

Looking back it feels like we played the game for years, in the bright sun, under the gray sky, on still and humid September Sundays. We played. But it couldn’t have been years, could it? People came and went, the energy surged and waned. We paired off and disappeared, sometimes forever. But everything was forever then. How could there be an ending to those holy days, those brown and beautiful bodies, those perfect visions?

I can still feel the sting of the ball, its heft as I dug it out just before it hit the grass. I can see it spin up again, two more chances. We could fly in those days, before we found out about the things that are not possible. You have to keep it in the air. It can never touch the ground, but you can’t just grab it and stop it. You could save it that way, of course, but it’s not allowed. The rules of the game. What makes perfect sense, you can’t do that. You must serve, dig, volley, set, fake and spike, defying gravity, the rules of the game countermanding the laws of physics, of life, of the natural order.

We were out of college, all of us big boys and girls, starting our real lives, looking for our places in life, the ways we would make good, change the world, build the future. We were artists, con men, housewives and whores, makers, buyers and sellers door to door. We were learning the rules, making the rules, breaking the rules. Twenty or thirty of us, this is the way we partied, every week. Hard-fought games in the sun, Mexican beer in the coolers, whiskey, wine, music and drugs under cover of night.

I met you there on that field, and we played that game for all it was worth. After a while I told you that you had a nice set, and you cast your lovely dark eyes down, but you knew exactly what I meant. Then we played a different game, a game that didn’t have such easy rules, or maybe there were no rules at all – I never knew for sure.

I thought I was so smart. I thought I could play you, and you let me think it was true, while you volleyed and set me up, in the game where you made the rules. I thought I was winning you, but I was losing myself.

What a prize I was, brown and lean and smart and hard. What an ass I was, young and thoughtless and cruel. I guess you got what you were after, although I know I didn’t give you what you wanted. I guess I took what I needed from you, and I thought it was love. For a moment I held your heart in my hands, and you gave me indulgence and forgave me my sins.

Now I can’t find you anywhere, and I am certain that I never will. I catch glimpses in dreams, and I cannot speak. But I have learned the rules of the game, and now is when I need to confess to you, and now is when I need one last absolution.

I bit my tongue at lunch today.

And I mean I got the back part of it caught between the molars, back there where the jaw has the most possible leverage, in the area I usually use for crushing diamonds, and chomped down on it good and hard. I was eating at my desk, like a pig. Worse than a pig, actually. I was eating fast, stuffing food in faster than I could swallow, getting it on my face, on my desk, on the floor, everywhere. Luckily I was alone in my office. I was doing something on the computer and answering the phone, and I just got that big ol’ piece of tongue-meat caught in my teeth and before I could stop pigging I had bitten it so hard that I almost cried. I had to stop all activity for about a minute. This is not a pretty picture, folks, me sitting there trying not to weep or drool, my mouth filled with half-masticated salad, unable to close it.

I was able to finish my lunch, because I am a pig, but much more slowly, and within the hour the pain started to spread downward so it felt like a sore throat (it still does, eight hours later). For several hours the pain radiated as far south as my sternum. Just a moment earlier I had been pain-free and lovin’ life. Now I was crippled in the mouthal area. Like a toothache, it was all I could think of, and I know it will be with me at least all through tomorrow, when I have meetings.

I didn’t want to bite my tongue.

I wanted to bite your tongue.

I wanted to put my hand on your shoulder and begin slowly to draw you toward me. Trying in vain to look you in the eyes, I’d be seeing only your mouth. When your face came close to mine, I’d brush my lips on yours, just a whisper of a brush, then I’d use my lips – only my lips – to gently push yours apart. I’d slip my hand around to the back of your neck, the better to hold you still, and I’d use my tongue to tickle just the very corner of your kissy mouth, that edge where the top and bottom lips dissolve into one another, first the left side, then the right, then back, two times, maybe three, my tongue starting to stroke your luscious lips with each pass across them.

I wanted to make love to your wanton mouth with mine, softly bite and tug that pouty smile right off your face, taste that space just behind those lips, run my eager tongue along your teeth, meet your own soft and sexual tongue in the wet darkness there. I wanted to devour you, be inside you and all around you, starting with your beautiful, hungry, lascivious mouth, the only part of all your gorgeous parts I can think of tonight.

And all I want from you, all I will need tonight, all I ask, is your hot breath, your pliant lips, your open mouth, your searching tongue and your dirty desire.

Can you give me that?

Ma, send me money now, I’m gonna make it somehow…

I convinced myself at an early age that I had no artistic ability. I don’t remember doing this, but somehow it must have happened, because there exists no evidence of me ever trying anything creative as a child. I didn’t fingerpaint on the walls or go out in outlandish costumes on Halloween. I choked in the sixth-grade Christmas pageant. I was Joseph, and I screwed up my lines.

Maybe it was an incident in first grade that closed the book on my creative efforts. We were “working with clay” one day. The teacher handed out lumps of brown clay. Everybody got a lump, and we all messed around with our lumps for a while. The teacher was going around the room, making sure everybody had a lump, and, it seemed to me, making sure that we were all comfortable and enjoying ourselves with our lumps of clay. After a tough hour of “See Dick run” I was ready for a little R&R, even though reading came naturally to me.

So I was bashing my lump of clay around on my desk, or maybe we were sitting at a table, I can’t recall, rolling it into a ball, flattening it, shaping it into a cube, when the teacher finally got everyone settled and went back to the front of the classroom and made the announcement that she wanted each of us to make an animal with our clay.

I was stricken with horror. An animal? I couldn’t make an animal. How do you make an animal? I had no clue. I stared at my pancake of clay in front of me on the desk, trying to think what to do first, my stomach in a knot and my heart sinking fast. I tried to complain about the assignment, tried to explain that this was just too difficult, that there was no way, but the teacher smiled in that bitchy, patronizing way they have and told me to get to it, of course you can make an animal. Just go ahead and make one, any animal will be fine, we’re not here to judge.

Perfect. She couldn’t see the panic I was feeling, and she was going to force me to perform for her. This is probably why to this day I look for tall, dominant women to tie me up and – wait, that’s another story.

Anyway, I made a snake.

While the rest of the class was shaping legs and ears and tails and antlers, the little bastards, I took my clay and rolled it into a thin tube about a foot long. I tapered it a little at the back end, but I doubt if I had the herpetological expertise to make a hood, the characteristic mark of the cobra, or even a mouth. So I probably didn’t. This is all a little blurry to me, as I am just recovering this memory now after all these years.

I had found a loophole. Legally, a snake was an animal. She didn’t say “mammal,” or “any animal except a snake.” She had said “…any animal will be fine.” So I had her, and I was off the hook.

Of course you know what happened. The snake didn’t fly. I remember clearly when it was my turn to show what I had made, I held it up and said “I made a snake.” Even though I knew I was in compliance with the letter of the assignment, I had a lump in my throat, because I knew the snake wasn’t going to cut it. And it didn’t.

Her smile turned into a sneer, then a small, derisive snicker escaped as she told me that a snake wasn’t good enough. Oh, she didn’t use those words, of course, but her meaning was clear enough: “You are a rotten kid. You have tried to slide by on this assignment, using a technicality. And you are not getting away with it!” In sympathy, the rest of the class laughed uproariously at me and my snake. My face burned, my vision blurred, my heart palpitated. If we could have found a hole, we would have crawled into it, me and the snake.

She forced me to make something else, and I think I made a cow, taking care to make the worst cow ever sculpted, to prove to her that I had no aptitude for this, that I was right and she was wrong, and she should never have tried to make a sculptor out of me. As soon as she saw it and half-heartedly approved, I destroyed it violently. And I never tried to make anything out of clay again.

In fact, for many years my nickname was Snake, because I always tried to slide by on technicalities, hoping some strong woman would take me in hand and – no, no. Other story. I remained The Snake until I played in a softball league with a guy named Ed who weighed about 130 pounds but whose amazing sinuous swing was good for a home run about every third time he batted. He actually wanted to be called The Snake, and by that time I was glad to shed that skin, so to speak.

I carried the trauma of that horrible first-grade play-time humiliation into adulthood, although it was effectively repressed and I seemed normal. Until one night on the living room floor at the home of some friends with young children. We were playing with some of the thousands of toys that kids seem to accumulate these days, when somebody brought out a couple of cans of Play-Doh.

And handed me a lump.

The memory of that horrible first-grade embarrassment came flooding back. The kids were making animals. Handily shaping their lumps into whatever the hell they chose. And I made the decision that I had to stand up and fight my demon, or it would torment me forever. I determined that I was going to make an animal, or die trying.

Here is what I made:
There’s a bigger version up at the top of this post, for those of you who are stunned by the artistry and want a closer look, and who missed it while you were up there the first time. I made it completely from scratch, without a picture or a model to work from. I just closed my eyes and saw elephant. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it was an elephant. That would make you no better than the kids in my first grade class, who laughed at me and my snake.

Since I made this elephant my self-esteem has been sky high, and women frequently tie me up and have their way with me. Yes, I have learned an important lesson. And that lesson is this: Play-Doh smells real good, but it tastes like shit.