Chapter XXV: Der Kommissar

Chapter Twenty-Five: Der Kommissar

Madame Bleacher was on the phone when we arrived at my father's parent's two-story layout in Queensland. My grandfather was in the kitchen burning link sausages. My father set about to sort their mail while I tried to hide in the living room. As I walked through my grandmother's bedroom she waved a wrinkled paw at me and pointed to the phone.

“It's that art school I was telling you about, sweety,... Pardon me?...he just limped in...yes, poor boy, as I said, he is a very talented painter...oils and acrylics...very talented...he just needs direction, can you provide that? Good. Good.”

What art school? She never told me about any art school, not that it would matter. I threw my arms up and mouthed my intentions not to speak on the phone. My grandmother ignored me.

“...He's terribly shy...yes, it is such a waste...he dropped out of college after just one semester...he went all the way to Alaska to drop out and then he was a Janitor in Washington or Montana or one of those states...”

Does California ring a bell?

“...yes, terrible...a terrible, terrible waste...he injured his feet...So much potential, just wasted...I don't know how...he tore his Achilles tendon and not one doctor can help him...we are all so sad for him. So. Very. Sad.”

I silently begged her to stop talking. My injury was the most embarrassing subject I could imagine. Mack Wynter had been too young to feel ashamed or embarrassed by the inconvenience he caused, but I was plenty old and would rather talk about anal herpes before talking about my Game Six syndrome. The thought of a complete stranger learning about this disability was humiliating. It hurt far more than the injury itself, and what could some Art School admissions person do about Schiraldi's 0-2 pitch location? Nothing!

“...Yes...yes, he is such a poor boy to have had so much pain in his life...his parents divorced at such an early age and he was never very sturdy...his father tried, he did try, but...well...Ogden is just a lost boy. A wandering Jew.”

My father said, “Thank you, Mother,” from the kitchen. My grandfather grunted and turned the black sausages. I made slashing motions to my throat that only managed to move the smoke her cigarette was making.

“...Yes, he probably does have material for a book, but he isn't much of a writer. One can scarcely read his handwriting. He likes to paint, though I told him there isn't any market for visual arts. He is stubborn...yes, that stubbornness led to his injury...the poor, poor child... Yes, very sad. Sweetie, how did you hurt yourself?”

She hardly turned away from the television to ask me this question. I considered telling her some crazy lie about mountain climbing in Alaska, but stuck to the truth.

“When the Sox lost in '86. How many times do I have to tell you? It's the Syndrome.”

“Oh dear,” moaned my grandmother. “He doesn't know why he is hurt. He doesn't know much. He dropped out of college and became a janitor. I know. The first one in the family. So sad. Then his poor brother went to war...yes, The Gulf War...he was a journalist like myself...we were all very proud of him...yes, very sad...then Ogden stopped eating meat and went all the way to Ecuador to be with his poor mother...yes, South America, I believe...I don't know...he claims he painted while he was there but he hasn't shown me anything...terrible, really...then he came back and left again for Florida...yes, one place after another...on and on...he seems to be searching for something...wandering...Does he what? I don't know. I'll ask him.”

With the phone still next to her mouth my grandmother looked at me.

“Sweety, the woman wants to know if you are on drugs.”

I threw my arms up and covered my face. Why not ask if it hurts when I urinate or if I used condoms when I have sex? Why not just take my shine box and smash it in the street? The Timewraiths didn't need to torment me. They just sat back and laughed at my misery. Why was my grandmother doing this to me? Why couldn't she be like my mother's parents? Grandpa Scotts said things like, “Well, Ogden. We shore are proud of you. You just keep doing real well in school and you'll do fine. Is there another slice of pie, mum?”

Grandmother Scotts would answer, “Yes, there is. Yes, there is. Let me bring it out. I'll bring it right out. I will. Shore I will.”

They weren't faking their simplicity any more than Grandma Bleacher was pretending to be invasive; It was authentic. While Der Bleacher was the umpire who squeezed the plate of my life, The Scotts were the content fans, cheering whether I hit a home run or struck out with the bat on my shoulder. “No, I don't think so, though he is often upset. I don't see why he can't stay where he is, it's so nice here and we give him so much...I know...we try...Now he's back from Florida and who knows what he's up to next...he's such a sad child, he always was alone and moping...he is just a poor boy... Would you, please? I'd be grateful. You've been very helpful.”

She hung up and looked at the television through the haze of cigarette smoke.

“What's that sound? What...stop grinding your teeth, Ogden. After we spent all that money to have your pretty teeth straightened you should learn to take care of them.”

“What in the name of John McNamara are you doing, Grandma? I don't want to go to art school. Where did you get that idea? They'll crush any creativity I have left. That is what schools do. They'll destroy my shine box!”

She didn't look at me.

“You need a new pair of dungarees. Why do you wear those run-down, ratty old things? Let me give you some money. You go buy yourself a nice new pair of dungarees at the Mall. You'd like that.”

“Is consumption the only answer to our problems? I buy everything at the thrift store. It conserves resources. It saves energy. See? Americans take up six times the space available for one person. Six times! We use about two hundred times the resources as the rest of the planet. Did you know that if every human lived the average American lifestyle that we would need seven planet Earths to survive. Is it impossible for anyone to understand that I don't like buying new products?”

I said this loud enough for my father to hear this but they both ignored me. Grandma B. reached for a checkbook on a nearby table. I watched passively as her struggling caused the checkbook to fall to the floor.

“Pick that up for grandma.”

I crossed my arms and stared at the television.

“Maybe I will and maybe I won't.”

She glared back at me with the icy stare of Darth Vader's boss, the Emperor of the Empire.

“How's your foot, you sad thing. How is your poor foot.”

She was obviously goading me to a fight. She knew how upset I got when people talked about my Syndrome yet she never failed to bring it up.

“It's fine. Perfect!”

She didn't deserve the truth, which was that my foot caused me great pain.

“When did you get so mean?” she asked. “I'm trying to help. I've worked hard all my life and I deserve to be able to buy you things. Why do you have to be so stubborn? I'm just trying to help. And when are you going to shave that...thing on your face?”

Another attack on my facial hair. When had foot-long beards become so unfashionable? The guitarists in ZZ Top had them and sexy girls in fishnet stockings flocked to them in their videos. Girls flocked!

“Just let me wear what I wear. And I'll shave when the razors biodegrade in fewer than a million years. I used to play Capture The Flag on a big mountain of disposable crap your freshly shaved generation graciously gave to mine. Thanks! If we all just limited our consumption just a little...live simply that others may simply live.”

“Easy for you to say living off your father,” she sniffed. “Easy for you to say when we are the ones paying for your hospital bills.”

I chuckled to myself because she assumed I wanted to live with my father. Did she think I was getting away with something? Did she think I was taking advantage of my father by sleeping on his couch, fighting for a banana each morning, shitting in the toilet, and repeatedly watching my team lose on the most miraculous two-out comeback in the history of baseball? What a deal! What fun! This was the life I had always dreamed of, and now I had achieved it! Good for me. She ignored the fact that I had tried to escape no less than four times in the past two years.

“For your information, I didn't want to come back. I didn't want to go to the hospital. I never asked to go. I'll never go again and I am trying to leave. Just as soon as Schiraldi...”

“You poor boy,” she cut me off. “You're just drifting around, flitting though the world. You poor, poor boy. How is your poor foot now? Tell grandma how much it hurts.”

I said it was fine again.

“What do the doctors say? You have to get it taken care of. You know that. Your father won't be around to take care of you forever. You're so thin and tired looking. Do you get enough sleep and take vitamins?”

Thanks to Vance, I had only slept for 13 hours the previous night. My batteries were running at half charge.

“I can take care of myself,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“I can...”

“Apparently not. And why do you have duct tape on your shirt? Can't you dress normally for one day?”

I had placed a piece of duct tape over the brand name of cigarettes the T-shirt advertised. Doesn't everyone do that?

“I don't want to advertise commercial products. Name Brands kill the soul. I think that is normal enough. I don't want disposable razors and I don't want ten percent more free! I don't want a better way to clean my oven and I don't want new and improved Chicken Nuggets! I don't want a sleek hairdo and I don't want to advertise sweatshops in Thailand. I know your generation was obsessed with new products and marketing, but it just so happens that the planet is in sort of a pickle now. Humanity is kind of doomed.”

Grandma B. looked over at me through her time-wrinkled eyes. She sighed heavily as though I had finally broken her spirit.

“It's these Jews you've been hanging around isn't it?”“

She rolled her eyes. Her cough was clearly that of a dying person and I didn't care at all. I thought of my grandmother Scotts, the one in the Clipper Home who passed her time scratching at a glass door.

This is what becomes of us all once the Youthfires burn out. Dread the passing ages, Oggy. Don't you see what our struggle prevents? Don't you see?

My father's mother wasn't always a shrew. For our decadent Christmas gifts, she used to give my brother and I rare silver coins. The tree in her living room would be nearly covered with piled colorful presents and she encouraged us to play in the near the fire place while pies and turkey and cranberry sauce were paraded onto a banquet table.

My mother's mother loved playing Scrabble and baking muffins. When I had visited them in Florida in 1985 she bought me fizzy soda and ice cream and took me to Disneyland. Then my grandfather gave me a fishing rod, my first, and patiently described how to throw a line into some nearby swamps. It grew harder to remember these pleasanter times as the four of them started to look like the villain from Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger.

“What are you going to do next then?” she asked.

I normally hid plans from anyone so they would not have a chance to criticize them, but I just wanted to change the subject.

“Mexico. I'm going to Mexico to paint. I'll do portraits in the park. They appreciate artists there.”

“You could go to school, a real school for artists. You could meet friends there. Maybe get a job in advertising. Look at Brooklyn. Look at how much he could have done if he had gotten out of the Army.”

My Grandmother shared my father's delusion that my brother was dead.

“He did get out of the Army. He's living somewhere in Virginia. I saw him a year ago when he gave me a ride to Rose McCorley's university. Why do you mourn him like he is dead?”

She sighed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “Poor Brooklyn. Why can't you just get a good job as a reporter like your poor brother did before he...”

“Listen. I'm not Brooklyn. I don't want the high point of my day to be finding a parking spot. I will never work in mainstream media. I will never support the one industry responsible for America's addiction to useless plastic crap. There aren't enough resources to keep wasting them. I'm leading by example. I'm not just talking about conservation. I'm living it.”

“You live like a hobo.”

“You know, America has only 4% of the world's population but we create 40% percent of the pollution and use 30% percent of the world's resources. We use a quarter of the World's oil but North America only has 3% percent of the total oil on the planet. That can't go on.”

Her generation and her children's generation had blindly embraced consumption and wasteful progress, yet she still judged me. How? As far as I was concerned, her generation's legacy included the disposable automobile, Freon, Ballistic missiles, The Cold War, and toxic waste, not the Apollo spacecraft or the Polio vaccine. Her generation would, or should, be remembered for turning America down a path of insane mass-consumption and military escalation that would have the Klingons pleading for a peace treaty. If her generation had had its way artistically, cool bands like Kajagoogoo and Quiet Riot might never have recorded the “devil music” that my generation adored. We'd still be listening to Pat Boone, Dean Martin and Cliff Richard. I did credit her generation with developing the mass production of pornography, thank god, but the good didn't outweigh the bad.

Grandma B. coughed something from her lungs and smacked her lips together. Then she sighed and shook her head as the filter of her cigarette burned.

“So young. So young and full of ideals, “ she moaned tearfully. “When I went to school we learned more than how to recite trivia. We learned skills, not principles. Where have your principles gotten you so far, Mister?”

“I sleep at nights.” Actually I sleep during the day, but why split hairs?

“I recall picking you up from the Break Island jail. Is that what your principles include? We had to pay to repair that stone wall.”

“Get your money back. They never fixed it.”

“And you slept a night in jail because of your hunger strike last year at Thanksgiving. Did you sleep well then? Is that what I paid to have you learn?”

How she reasoned she had paid for my education was a mystery. She paid taxes in another school district and my mother contributed the two grand for me to go to the University of Alaska. And who said I learned anything at either school?

“When the government is unjust,” I declared, “the only place to sleep is in jail.”

“You went to jail while your brother fought in the War. So sad. Your poor father. He's gone through so much. It's just like the Civil war. At least you aren't in your 'four-legged' phase anymore. And you have gone back to wearing clothes at least. I'm thankful for that.”

“That's why I want to go to Mexico. I can do what I want there. They might respect the fact that I got the high score on Galaga.”

“ Suit yourself,” she said, “Just go. You'll come back even worse than you are now. I promise. Do you want to hurt your foot again? Do you?”

How could I hurt my foot again? The whole problem was the 0-2 pitch to Ray Knight.

“Yes. All my injuries have been for your amusement. It's how I have fun.”

She reached for a cigarette, but could not find the lighter. I saw it at the end of her bed, but it gave me some satisfaction to say nothing. When my brother and I had been kids she had sent us on a short mission to get the matchbook for her. Now the tables were turned. I watched her hunt for the lighter and when she finally saw it I was delighted she could not reach it. She reached again and again but could not get it. She reached once more for it and then shuddered and fell back with her eyes wide. She looked at me as though acknowledging that she knew I could see what she wanted. But she didn't ask me to get it. She just sat and then swallowed a big white pill on a nearby lamp stand before muting the television so we sat in silence.

A moment later my father came in and she asked him to get the lighter. He did not hesitate to grab it, and he even lit the cigarette for her. Then dinner was served on foldable trays so we could all watch the news television. A few scattered oil fires still blazed in Iraq, but Kuwait had been liberated. Everyone but me clucked their tongues when it was announced a serviceman from Texas had died “In the defense of Freedom.” By steeping on a land mine (probably manufactured in the U.S.) His remains would make it back to Texas in time for the Holidays. Refugee camps near Turkey and Iran were considered disaster areas, but the bands Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty By Nature, and Nirvana weren't organizing any charity album with songs titled “A Kurd Christmas Carol” or “The Twelve Days Of Jihad” or “Sand In My Stocking” or “Santa's Stealth Bomber” or “The Red-Nosed Reindeer from the land of Devils” or even “All I Want For Christmas Is Depleted Uranium”. Six year earlier, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson wrote “We Are The World” to benefit starving Ethiopians, and that crisis wasn't even our fault! In 1991, the song could have been rewritten as “We Are Destroying The World

I asked the room, “How are you defending freedom by liberating a nation that doesn't allow women to vote, and is located on the other side of the planet? How? I'm not safer. The water I drink isn't cleaner. The food I eat isn't less contaminated. The Sox still don't win. So how...”

“How's the meat, Ogden?” asked my grandmother as she muted the television again.

“I don't know. I'm trying to cut down on my consumption of animals that run and play in the grass. It's just me and my crazy ideals again.”

When my grandfather stood up to try to make me some dehydrated potatoes, I declared that I was not eating in America again as a protest against the Embargo against Iraq that was only going to harm the children of Iraq and create a power vacuum. Iraq couldn't even defend Kuwait City, let alone threaten Freedom. How were they going to develop weapons of mass destruction.

“It'll be just like 1930 Germany,” I continued. “Someone needs to take a stand before another Hitler appears. Our country is murdering people everywhere. We've got blood on our hands! Blood!”

“So what do you propose to do, Ogden,” asked my father with a tone of voice normally reserved for the scum of the earth.

“No more clothes!” I announced. “That's it! Back to basics. Back to the three-part plan!”

As I unbuttoned my pants, my grandmother threw her fork down.

“Not again! I can't take anymore. Get out! Get out of my house!”

If there were a passage in the bible written about me it would read, “Wherever two or three are gathered, they will either be laughing derisively or arguing.”