by Elliot Reed
When someone tells you “we need to have a talk,” you can be sure that trouble is on the horizon. If the person telling you had something simple to say he would have just said it to you rather than alert you to the fact that he plans on saying it to you in the future. Most times, “the talk” will occur in the office of the person who requested the talk. Sometimes when you go into the office you will find just the principal, other times you will find a group of official-looking people who stop talking when they see you and who pretend they’re happy to see that you’ve shown up. “The talk” will be a one-sided affair, though they will pretend to care about your opinion. They will not, in fact, need to talk with you about anything because they’ve already decided something, something big, and they’re telling it to you because it has to do with you and your future. Sometimes the initial talk you are forced to have will not involve expulsion, termination, or imprisonment, but you can be sure that the third talk with the same officials will result in an irreversible change of life for you. For example, let’s say you are told by the principal at your school or the warden at your bunkhouse that you need to have a talk, and when you go into his office he says, “Did you put a snapping turtle in Ernesto’s bed?” you are not, in fact, being asked a question. You might well say, “I was there when the turtle was placed in Ernesto’s bed, but I was only there because I was trying to stop Sasquatch from placing the snapping turtle, which Sasquatch had found in a drainage ditch, in Ernesto’s bed,” but it won’t matter because you’ll be deemed incorrigibly delinquent anyway and expelled from the bunkhouse. Don’t even try asking “Where am I supposed to go?” because those doing the talking will either have no idea where you’re supposed to go, or they will have a plan for you and that plan will stink.
MATING
What animals do in order to make more of themselves. Mating refers to the animal sex act, but not to the sex act between humans. Different animals mate in different ways, but usually the mating act involves a male animal stacking itself on top of a female, rubbing its body against the body of the female, and releasing the fluid sperm which mixes with gelatinous eggs that the female has produced. If you’re interested in beholding the act of mating I suggest you find the nearest body of stagnant freshwater that’s shaded by trees and not often visited. You’ll know you’re on the right track if the ground begins to slope downward and the undergrowth begins to thicken. As you near the place of mating, you’ll start to smell the plants rotting in the stagnant water and you’ll start to hear the sounds of the animals mating. The best mating ponds have a green skin through which leaping frogs will pierce holes when you near the bank. PLOP, PLOP, PLOP, you’ll hear as you near the pond, and you’ll see the green skin healing where the frogs went in. When frogs mate, a frog wraps its arms around a bigger frog and the two float around, embracing like this, all night long in the mating pond. The word for the mating position of frogs is AMPLEXUS, and it’s as peaceful as it sounds. After they’ve floated around for a while in amplexus, the bigger frog, the female, releases a thousand little eggs, which the smaller frog, the male, feels sliding out beneath him. That’s when he releases his sperm, which fertilizes the eggs, and then the eggs sink to the bottom of the pond or tuck themselves between stones where they wait to become tadpoles. When stray cats mate at the mating pond it’s a much less peaceful experience and it happens inside the dripping culvert that feeds the pond with runoff. There is nothing luminescent about the sex acts of other animals. Nobody knows why animals mate in such dark and secret places, but it’s probably born from a desire to be alone. Dogs, however, are an exception, and they love to mate in public. It’s possible they do this because they enjoy being squirted with water hoses in the act.
MEETING FORTUITOUSLY
Meeting fortuitously is a thing that happens and results in a good outcome you didn’t anticipate. Say you’re drunk beneath a bridge, alone, and you’ve decided to get into a stinking, flooded river just to see where it takes you, and a figure from your past appears and advises you not to carry out your plan: this is meeting fortuitously.
MOAT
A river that protects your fort. A good castle always has a good moat—one with hippos or alligators or huge snapping turtles in it. If enemies come to attack the castle all the king has to do is raise the drawbridge and let the animals do the work. El Hondero and I had a river protecting our platform under the bridge so technically it was a moat but it was a double-edged moat because if we weren’t careful we’d roll off and fall into it while we were sleeping. One time one of the guys who hung around the library had a natural moat form around his fort after a hard rain. He told me that the moat was good for a while, that it was almost like magic because a thousand worms got pulled out of the earth and became a floating ball of worms in the water of the moat and he put the worms in a can and used them to catch fish later, but then the moat got too big and it washed away his tent fort and he had to climb up a tree for safety. In the letter I got from my uncle he wrote about a concrete moat that surrounded the jail he was living in. I wanted to see the moat, and I wanted to see my uncle, but his letter said he couldn’t see me. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t mad at him anymore and that I hoped we could get another mansion together, one with a moat around it, so I sent him a letter back with a diagram of my dream mansion and numbers beside important elements of the mansion, the number one beside the turret, for instance, and included a glossary of the terms, but he must not have gotten my letter or else he didn’t like it and tore it up.
MAN NAMED HANGING FROG
Hanging Frog was a Seminole Indian, and he was a prince in his tribe. One day, in his youth, colonists from Europe raided his village in the swamp and killed his whole family. Hanging Frog managed to escape by disappearing into the wilder parts of the swampy landscape, where no one alive had gone before. Three years later, on a hot day in the middle of the summer, three men commanding the force of raiding colonists sat swatting bugs off their skin and drinking rum right in the spot where Hanging Frog’s village used to be. All around them were European-looking buildings and miserable white-skinned pioneers who had come to the swamp looking for gold. Right at the moment when the hot sun hung like a broiler in the center of the sky, Hanging Frog and five other Indians came silently across the swamp in a canoe and caught the heat-exhausted villagers by surprise. They scalped the colonists, each and every one, and lost none of their own party. Once they’d run what white men remained off the land, Hanging Frog returned, for a while, to his past habits of leisure. See MOONTAMING AND OTHER PEACETIME DEEDS OF HANGING FROG.
MOUND BUILDERS
One of the greatest of all mysteries is the mystery of the mounds. Everything I know about the mystery comes from El Hondero, author and metaphysician, hobo-archaeologist. He gave me a Casio watch and taught me how to catch squab. That watch, the clothes on my back, and my bookbag with some notebooks in it along with a set of Ned’s clothes his mom had given me were about all I had left after the fire, but that was just about all I needed. El Hondero didn’t have a lot more. He lived what he called a “Spartan existence,” but his mind was always overflowing. He would hold forth for hours about the mounds, and I would never tire of listening. Most people have heard something about a mound at one point or another: a finger pointing from the window of a moving car, a sign on the highway, the word MAN-MADE used in reference to the unremarkable spot of vaguely raised earth you’re standing on . . . A few people have dug deeper into the evidence coming from the many tens of thousands of mounds that dot the landscape of the United States (more in Canada, more still in Mexico). These researchers can be recognized by the way their eyes glow and their hands tremble when they speak on the subject. Some Appalachian tales hold that the Mound Builders themselves had eyes that glowed in the dark, eyes you can still see flashing today. And who knows? If you want to believe that the souls of ancient American builders of mounds carry on in the bodies of lightning bugs, that’s your right and nobody can disagree with you. One of the tho
ught exercises invented by El Hondero, which he guaranteed would allow you to enter a state in which the golden age of mounds could be lived in the mind’s eye, went something like this: imagine you’re standing on the top of a cliff overlooking a tree-filled valley stretching all the way to the horizon. Imagine you’re so high up that you can see buzzards floating the thermals below you. Now imagine that valley dotted with treeless hills rising high above the surrounding canopy like bubbles in a pot. Imagine all those painted or hide-covered people padding around their camps in the trees beneath the mounds or floating on a river so thick with fish they can catch them with bare hands. Imagine the bodies beneath the thatched roofs and the cloud of sweet smoke from an indoor fire, the barely audible sound of twigs crackling in the muffled light, the birds calling in the breezy canopy, and the mounds looming high and quiet over everything. This was how El Hondero told it to me, under the bridge on the night he came down to the river’s edge after he’d spotted me wading into the current. Sometimes there were bodies of important people at the bottom of the mound, and sometimes the bodies were wearing jewelry made of something called mica which, when it’s shaved thin, is translucent and luminescent. My mother, in her box beneath the earth, could have been wearing anything. She might have been covered in flowers or jewels when they closed the lid. I never thought to ask what she was wearing underground.
MEDICINE PEOPLE
You can’t always heal by yourself. What if you start coughing one day and can’t stop? If you live someplace cold and winter is coming on, you better hurry up and find yourself somebody with healing powers. This can get tough if you don’t have money or anything else to trade. Modern America is a place where a boy with a bad cough and a fever, if he has no money, is basically the walking dead. Put it this way: there’s a game going on and he’s not allowed to play in it. If you find yourself in a situation like this, first try to relax and remember that many others have been here before you. Feel their hands on your shoulders in solidarity. Don’t allow yourself to become overtaken by panic. Next you must rally yourself and stand up, walk down to the run-down part of town and find yourself someone who has healing powers. If you’re lucky you’ll happen upon a gypsy caravan or a gypsy parachute house. Once you’re confident that you’re in the presence of an actual folk healer, you must offer yourself up to her completely. You will know her by the pervasive sense of calm she seems to give off. Her voice will be soft. She will be dressed simply. When she touches you, and this is the biggest giveaway of all, you will feel a sensation of healing come through her hands.
MOLDING PAPER MATTRESS
A sleeping pad made from layers of pulp products such as newspaper, cardboard, and egg cartons, which has been left in a humid outdoor environment. To fall asleep on a molding paper mattress, try thinking of something good like the treasures deep in mounds. Picture the glowing mica schist. There are a thousand good thoughts that will lull you to sleep, but thinking about strange rocks seems to work very well. Picture weaving your way through all the razor-thin layers. Soon you’ll be sleeping like the man with his mica, deep beneath the colored clay.
METHODS OF THE HUSTLE
A hustle is a way of making money without having a job. For fifteen-year-old orphans in the non-care of the government, the job market is severely limited. For some reason, people seem to hold it against the orphan that he is poor and parentless, and he’s basically seen as a burden to everyone. People look at orphans and see future news headlines with the word MURDER in them. It’s like the people around you are just waiting for you to freak out and start throwing things at the wall. It’s different for baby orphans who are still cute and completely blank in the head—they have a chance of making it out of the whirlpool. Either way, the good news is this: if you are particularly resourceful, have a little charisma, follow your own code of conduct, and have at least some training in things like common courtesy, empathy, and risks not worth taking, you probably have what it takes to become a great hustler. The classic hustle is the lemonade stand. A more advanced, more lucrative hustle is the collection of valuable metal and subsequent sale of the metal at a scrapyard. A subvariety of scrap-metal hustle: the slow progression of people silently walking up and down residential streets filling shopping carts with cans and then carefully inserting the sticky cans, one by one, into the crushing machine outside the grocery store. While it’s slow, tedious work, if you compare it to having a Daddy breathe down your neck while you drain hot grease from a deep fryer for five bucks an hour, scrapping cans is way better. The gypsies have a hundred hustles, one of which is hail-damage repair. Lots of people are doing the easy hustles like cans and the best hustlers are the only ones doing what they’re doing, like for instance selling ancient mica artifacts on the black market. This was what El Hondero was doing when I met him, and he was pretty good at it, so good, in fact, that he needed a digging assistant on a mother lode of mica he knew about and asked me if I wanted to join in on his hustle when the time came.
MESH-BAG HUNTING
The act of catching pigeons by hand, often done on iron beams beneath bridges where pigeons doze in the hot summer sun. Down at your local Asian market is a guy or girl who has eaten pigeons before, knows how good they taste, and will buy the dead birds off you for at least a quarter a head. To be a successful squabbist, you need to not be afraid of heights and you need to be extremely limber. Here’s what you do: First you wait until it’s the hottest part of the day or the middle of the night. Then you climb up from beneath a tall bridge to the network of rafters and catwalks under the bridge. Be careful not to smack any of the rafters—they carry sound, and will scare off the birds. Even the slightest thump will ruin your squab hunt, so stealth is key. The upshot is squabs are dumb enough to return to that same rafter after they fly around for a while in a panic. Have a good-sized mesh bag on your hip when you go, and take your shoes off because, for one, bare feet are quiet and, for two, you get the best traction on the iron rafters—all that’s keeping you from falling to your death while squabbing. NOTE: ENTRY IS UNFINISHED.
MOTHER LODE
A whole lot of something, usually something desirable like squabs or scrap metal or precious minerals, a mother lode is where you stock up. The mother lode of crushed beer cans is a tin mountain surrounded by barbed wire a mile or so down the river from El Hondero’s bridge. Someday, in the distant future, someone will loot this mother lode for crushed cans he thinks are precious minerals. The mother lode of clues about my missing dad was the box of old photos I found beneath the enlarger in my uncle’s basement, but the most important clue didn’t come from the mother lode, it came from the book El Hondero found in the library, the photo that told us my dad was probably somewhere on this river, near that bridge in the photo, downstream.
MERKIN
Temporary wig used in the pubic area, popular among prostitutes, made of human hair or beaver pelts, often discarded in storm drains, sometimes used by squabs as material for their nests. It’s hard to tell whether or not what you’re dealing with is a merkin once it’s spent some time exposed to weather. Could be any kind of hair. Could be a merkin. Could be a chunk of head wig. There is no market for the merkin or wig you find in a gutter or storm drain tangled up with sticks. The mother lode of merkin has to be in an osprey’s nest atop a telephone pole or bridge strut.
MENTAL DADDY OF THE SELF: L’APPEL DU VIDE
Literally THE CALL OF THE VOID in French. Most definitions describe it as the feeling you get when you’re standing on a high spot, so high it would kill you to jump, and when from nowhere you experience the nervous sensation that your body is about to actually jump itself off into the void, to its death, and you aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. People will often grab hold of a nearby railing or get down on their bellies to widen the distance between possibility and reality—of course, there’s nothing necessarily suicidal about the sensation of L’APPEL DU VIDE. It’s a completely normal feeling and, ultimately, is a basic realization in your
gut that you exist as a living human being, L’APPEL DU VIDE is an escape from the voice inside your head. L’APPEL DU VIDE is also a sign of the brain mechanism known as THE FREE WON’T. As far as D. D. Bayez, psychologist and author of several self-help books, is concerned, FREE WILL is either a complete myth or flimsier than a half-deflated balloon on a windy day. What actually drives decision-making is the FREE WON’T, the voice that says NO to the swarm of things you think about doing, the bad ideas that pass before the mind’s eye at any given time. No, don’t jump off the bridge. No, don’t call your new friend a bad name for no reason and then spit on her in the middle of a perfectly enjoyable conversation, because doing this would be to jump your friendship into the void. Another example: once, El Hondero hired me to help him pour concrete. This was when he was working the concrete hustle, which was a two-part hustle, the first part being the excavation of the ground and looting of buried artifacts, the second part being the pouring of the concrete into a wooden form. On the day I worked with him it was brutally hot outside and El Hondero made me do all the digging so that he could have time to identify potential artifacts I’d dug up. All we found was an ancient axe-head made from chert. It didn’t look like much to me, but El Hondero said it would fetch at least fifteen bucks on the black market. I mixed the concrete in a wheelbarrow as El Hondero polished the axe-head. Then I poured the concrete and El Hondero came over to smooth it as it poured. After he’d sculpted the quick-setting mixture so that it had a perfectly flat surface, just as he was skimming the last corner flat using a precise little spatula known as a trowel, I was overcome by the urge to create destruction. I took the shovel I was holding, brought it high above my head, and slapped the blade right into the middle of the setting slab. I instantly regretted it, and could hardly believe what I’d just done. El Hondero looked over at me, expressionless. I collapsed onto my knees and prepared for the consequences. We would have a talk, and then El Hondero would banish me from his life, I knew it. Instead what happened was that he pointed a finger at me—I will never forget this—he stood there, his fountain of black curls falling across the upper half of his body, his eyes covered by the dark sunglasses he wore most of the time, his tanned face slowly breaking into a smile and him saying, “The spirit of the wild slips through a chink in the wall.” As it turned out, El Hondero knew exactly what had happened because he himself had been fighting the urge to destroy the perfect surface, and he knew that my wild outburst was a failure of the FREE WON’T, a victory of L’APPEL DU VIDE. I had heard the call and had answered it.