Ten

My son turned 10 this week and the number burned wildly in my brain like a Klan cross on the frontal-lobe yard. And running from the scene into the black of night were all those clumsy delusions of life in white robes with funny cone-shaped hats. Delusions never stay for the aftermath, they simply are there to provoke, or incite. I no longer see my son, for reasons I will not explicate if only to stay content in my neutrality of myself, high on my imperial dopamine, anaesthetized to things I no longer have the power to affect. Lying in billowy-pillowy clouds. In truth, I don’t remember why. It was before my mind warp, done unto me by the good folks of Echo Planet 9. Or the federal government, the way they did Kennedy, kind of. Or the large brain tumor that casts an imposing shadow over all intelligible reasoning. I have nothing anymore to explain things, my history, only flashes like sparks from the silver-metal Woolworth ray gun I remember when I was 10. You had to watch it long enough, stare into the silver barrel and squeeze the trigger simultaneously like you were shooting yourself in the face. What an extraordinary noise it would make for such a spark.

Do I remember 10 ― some three decades removed? Yes. When I am half asleep on the COTA bus I drift there. I remember playing with GI Joes, imagining that little three-inch hard plastic men, Made in China stamped on their asses, bendable banded arms, permanent expressions, with tiny plastic weapons were capable of restoring order or creating anarchy in whatever hell or hostile situation I put them in, suddenly thrust in and out of volatile scenarios with breakneck speed, rapidly changing, adapting like a true elite squad of soldiers. They put down mass shootings because I had heard a guy went into McDonald’s and shot up the place. Beneath the coffee table aircraft, a sea of treacherous carpet rife with hungry rubber sharks and crocodiles the size of my arm swimming through the weave, aspirating a blood-curling wheeze. A mountainous cabinet television, Mt. Magnavox, Mt. Zenith. A linoleum-tiled desert. A couch fort with secret passages. An acid toilet torture chamber, rescued at the very last moment by the fish scoop, or not. I flushed a few doubles down in my God-like mania but they invariably came back when my mother was on the toilet. I didn’t consider their view, or her fright to see tiny men floating in her golden piss stream. She washed them and returned them and they were taunted by the other men. A bathtub sea of acidic Epsom salts. A jungle shag carpet rug with scorpion cracker crumbs. They were once real, as I was real, as my parents were real, even when I used my father’s cigarette ashes to pretend they were nuked. Scattered Joe Camel embers across the leveled plains of Turkey ― the kitchen table. It turned out to be a clever ruse by the Joes, and Cobra paid the price. They always paid the price. They were as real as my older brothers. As noogies, and Dutch rubs, as pink bellies and smear the queer. I was often the queer.

And when I put them in their box, a beat-up tackle box that smelled like old rubber lures, they were only sleeping, awaiting my omnipotent authority, to be again whatever I commanded them to be when I cracked the lid open. And they would die and live and die and live and perform incredible feats of heroism and remarkable acts of valor or cowardice and betrayal. Prisons made from hamster cages and torture devices from the briars of my mother’s rosebushes. I hadn’t the heart to melt any of my old Joes, or even Cobras, just as I hadn’t the heart to dispose of my old stuffed animals when a seam split and white stuffing bled and bled. I was a pure imaginist at ten, lost in blissful delusions, my brain humming on all cylinders, when it could do such things as to have a battle for all of human existence in the universe of a house waged between plastic men with disproportionate plastic aircraft and amphibious assault machines on a ceramic-tiled moon with a lunar-metallic backsplash and pink sponge alien lifeforms capable of sucking the life from anyone they touched, or rather, anyone who touched them. And the only cure was a green dish soap antidote as rare as the platinum of which this particular moon was rich, the desire for which created this terrible war. This one war of a thousand Saturday afternoon, Sunday-after-church, vacation, holiday wars.

Those wars, those places are now in the chronicles of time, my time, and only when I am intoxicated do I think in those terms, but only slightly for my oil is dirty and this engine doesn’t hum the way it once did. The rods knock and the clutch sticks. And I can never be so neutral about myself anymore. I do not feel pure or blissful. I am not naïve or young. When I was 11 the light went out and all that remained was a smoldering black cross, charred and lifeless on a burnt-brown lawn. There is life in fire. How wonderful Nazis once seemed to me, how comical Klansmen were when no one was capable of anything evil in my universe. The man who molested kids on the next street only gave candy and had an A-Team cool van with pink polkadots. How frightened I was of ghosts, bats in the streetlight, and the monster in the closet. I built a perimeter of stuffed animals around me every night. It was when I knew better that everything went wrong. It is how I knew I was dying and how everyone I knew would die in time and never come back, never to be reanimated in a microwave oven like Snake Eyes. If I could see my son I would say this, hold on to your imagination for dear life, boy, and don’t stare at the world.

The other side of town was across the universe, a puddle was a lake, a sparkler was a stick of dynamite, and there was a haunted house waiting for me to have the nerve. And, perfectly, it all made no sense. The future was limitless. But now the future is the past and all there is to do is to take a pill and count to ten and breathe for the anxiety shall pass, it all will pass, and be satisfied with the modest consolation that someday every asshole you ever knew, who killed you at age 10, will be in a box.