Monday, January 4, 2016

Chapter Eleven.

     So, there's this new thing called "The Holidays," and I forgot to post another chapter last week because I got swept up in The Holidays. And also a shit-ton of Scotch, and food, and Scotch. And now I'm sober, and all "New Year New You," which means I got up at the crack of a rooster's ass this morning and worked out, and I'm already thinking that little adventure will have me literally paralyzed by dinner. Which will make it exceptionally hard to reach the Scotch bottle. SO, before I go completely rigid (not in the good way), here is the next chapter in my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Enjoy, Happy New Year, and if you don't hear from me in a week, somebody better come and fucking check on me. Seriously.

Chapter Eleven
Doing My Best, God and Country, Law of the Pack, and Stupid Fucking Crafts

Exhibit A. Stupid Fucking Craft.

Here is the only thing I ever learned in the Cub Scouts: a potato decorated like a turkey is a shitty self-defense weapon. I stand by that statement.
     After my dad returned from the (not so) dead, it didn’t take him long to figure out that everybody on Mom’s side of the family pretty much hated his guts. (Except for Mee Maw, whom I suspect always had a soft spot for bad boys.) Unwilling to face the consequences of his actions, he returned to the tried and true Brantley Method for Dealing With Adversity: leave town. Only this time he took us with him, which was a refreshing change. We left Austin and landed in Houston, and shortly after that my mom decided that I needed to be in scouting. It had to have been Mom’s idea. Even at seven or eight years old, I cannot see myself actually requesting to be in the Cub Scouts. Even if I had been drunk at seven or eight years old, I surely would have requested something like the merchant marines. Or Hell’s Angels. But not the Cub Scouts.
     The only badge I earned as a Cub Scout was the Bobcat badge, which I’m pretty sure they gave you if you could correctly spell your own name and were no longer wetting the bed. Our scout troop met in “dens,” and by “dens” I mean “other people’s apartments that frequently smelled like stale beer and boiled cabbage.” It was a terrifically awkward social situation, as I was thrown in with a bunch of other boys who were naturally curious about who I was and where I’d come from. But I’d also been told explicitly by my mother not to divulge too much personal information, like the fact that my dad had faked his death and run out on the family, but he was back now and my mom’s whole side of the family despised him, and that’s why we moved here to Houston. So I started making shit up. I believe I actually told my Cub Scout brethren that my dad was either a spy or an undercover cop, which they were skeptical about until I also mentioned that he owned a black motorcycle, which in the minds of eight year old boys is proof positive that you are probably both a spy AND an undercover cop. No, I said, I didn’t get to go with him on missions, but that’s why I was in the Cub Scouts: it was like an early training program to get you into spy college.  I was there to learn about living in the woods and making fire with two sticks, and knot tying (which would come in way handy if I ever needed to take a prisoner), and possibly learning whether twine or piano wire was better for strangling a Commie. Also, I was given to understand that I would be receiving my very own knife.
     The knife was a crushing disappointment. Not because it wasn’t sharp; it was wicked sharp, and I sliced myself open pretty frequently. It was a disappointment because it wasn’t a throwing knife, and I know this because I threw it at everything: walls, watermelons, the occasional stray cat. I never stuck that knife in anything by throwing it, and that’s when I abandoned my dream of running away and joining the circus, because a knife-throwing act was cool, and usually involved a pretty female assistant. But no way was I going to be a fucking clown. (I still hate clowns.)
     At every den meeting there was a craft. I have learned to hate the word “craft” with the kind of intensity usually reserved for sectarian conflicts. Boys do not want to do crafts; they want to fight and pillage and set fires and lay waste to things. Oddly, the Cub Scouts seemed never to have figured this out. And that’s why instead of running through the woods with my knife out, with war paint smeared across my face and doing battle with other “dens” for the honor of my tribe, I found myself making a turkey out of a potato. This was our Thanksgiving craft, and is supposedly what the Native Americans did to honor their white brothers, and to thank them for whiskey, and all the blankets laden with polio.
     I worked on my turkey all afternoon, with the fierce intensity of a boy who does not give a shit about crafts. Which is to say, not very hard. My potato turkey looked less like a turkey, and more like a giant turd that has suddenly sprouted eyes and a wattle, and a construction paper tail. After every den meeting I would walk out to the apartment parking lot and wait for my mom to come and pick me up in the car. As I was standing there, looking over my feeble attempt at a Thanksgiving totem, a fucking WOLF came barreling around the corner of the apartment building, gnashing his teeth, red eyes glaring and full of hatred, rabies foam flying from its jaws, coming straight at me. I knew I was probably going to die in the next second, and I’d never get my little girlie, non-throwing pocket knife out in time. So I used the only weapon I had: a giant turd-turkey that the Native Americans used to ward off rabid wolves. I flung the thing as hard as I could, missing the beast by a mile. I closed my eyes and focused on not soiling myself before I was torn to pieces, so that I could at least die with some dignity, when someone yelled, “Rex! Come here!
     When I was not immediately gutted by wolf fangs, I opened my eyes and saw a German Shepherd sitting five feet away from me, tail wagging happily. My first thought was that the dog had frightened off the rabid wolf, then some angry man with a potato in his hand walked up to me and held it in front of my face. “What do you mean by throwing this at my dog?” he asked, rather angrily. I was about to explain to him that I had never thrown my turd-turkey at his dog, but at a rabid wolf who was here just seconds ago. But my inner sense of self-preservation told me that this guy might not believe there was a rabid wolf, and it told me to make some shit up – fast.
    “I didn’t throw it at him. I was trying to soften it up. Our den master said these would make good baked potatoes, but not if they’re too hard, so I was throwing mine on the ground to make it easier to cook” – and then the inner voice told me that I really needed to shut up now, but I was committed to the story and so I kept rambling, and then the inner voice said that if I just kept blathering on maybe this guy would think I was crazy and walk away, and then I asked the inner voice if he thought I should go ahead and soil myself anyway, just to give the crazy angle some credibility, and that’s when my mom showed up.
     I ran to the car and jumped in, the tears already welling up. When Mom asked how Scouts went, I told her I thought it was stupid and I didn’t want to do it anymore, and she didn’t even ask me why. She just said “Okay,” and that was the end of it. And I never went back to scouting. But I still do love baked potatoes. As long as they’re not dressed up like turd-turkeys.

     Next Week, Chapter Twelve: Conroe, Rabid Were-Beasts, and Shitty Detective Work

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