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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