A MARKED MAN The Misspelled Ramblings and Pointless Poems of Christian Slander

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Saturday Night With the P.W.P.

(Parents Without Partners)

Our house was at 2417 East Clarke Ave. Old man sun would tear slowly across the summer sky over what seemed to be right down the middle of our street, simmering smells out of the lemon blossoms and jasmine. I'd sit under shady bushes with stray cats on the cool dirt and wait for the first arrivals of the PWP party my grandmother was famous for giving every second Saturday of the month. I was six years old.

Stan was sure to arrive first. He had a mad crush on my mother so he'd try to impress her by going on beer runs and starting the barbecue and such. Stan drove a metallic green El Camino, he was gigantic, about 6'4, 220 and his last name was Blood. Stan Blood of short silver hair, huge forearms and hands that were steel strong and wrinkled and rough. Called me, Chris The Great" and was always trying to convince me to get a degree even at six years old. He drank Coors tall cans and when he got tanked he started hugging and kissing anyone within three feet of him, male or female. Your basic textbook lovable drunk, and obnoxious to boot.

About 6:30 pm Bill Rydell would show up unrushed and ornery as an old grey donkey. He was wrinkled and thin with a big Karl Malden nose. He was a bigwig executive at Ford Motor Company and drove a beautiful '55 T-Bird convertible, red with white interior and I'd get in and pretend to drive. Bill had been a friend of the family for years. He was my grandmother's boyfriend, more or less. He chain smoked, drank light beer out of a glass and always had a hard ass remark for me, when I came around and asked my mom for money, for example: Get a job you little puke, what 're you crippled? or, You eating again, fat ass? Yes, old Bill was as cold and mean as the city of Detroit which is where he was from, but he had a great car.

Next to slither up was Dan. Now I'm not sure what he did for a living but judging by his looks he was probably directing or producing porno. He was a real sight, even for 1978 he looked creepy. He had jet black hair like Wayne Newton and was short with a weasely face and laugh to match. The tip of his nose appeared to have been ripped off and poorly stitched back on. He had a mouthful of teeth a priest would find suspicious. And when he pulled his thin, pale lips over them to give you a big, rat faced smile you thought one thing, PERVERT. That and the fact that he couldn't use one sentence without the words naked lady in it. For instance, I'm hotter than a naked lady, or, This sofa is as soft and comfy as a naked lady, or, This beer is as tasty as a naked lady. But when the words naked lady came out of his greasy mouth you didn't think of a pretty naked woman with shiny hair and airbrushed skin. You thought of a woman of fifty with greasy red hair and a big fat dimply butt, smoking a cigarette and grimacing at you as if to say, C'mon fucko, get it over with. To be more specific Dan reminded you of the type of guy that would end up getting his ass kicked in a place where he'd have no business getting his ass kicked, like a swap meet or church. But no one would care or try to help him. Real yucky.

Next to stumble by was Pat Lee who was and still is the most consistently drunk and thoroughly obnoxious lush of all time. Imagine Phyllis Diller on Valium and whiskey chasers. She was thin and yellow and screeched every word she spoke. Old Bill hated her but was always civil for the sake of my grandmother who needed another female to team up with when a drunken political argument would erupt, which was inevitable.

The strangest of this motley group were the Herrings, Jack and Mary. Now what could be so weird about a couple named Jack and Mary, you ask? Well, they were a married couple that joined singles groups like the PWP. Jack was a butcher and easily weighed 320. He was bald and had a false front tooth that he would remove and fiddle with his tongue between sentences. His wife was a gin slurping slut who loved to flirt with Stan or Dan or any man and hubby Jack would lend a hand saying, I like it that way, understand? flickering his eyebrows and fake front tooth.

This being prime barbecue season Jack decided to provide the goodies, being a butcher shop manager and all. He stole a whole pig from the freezer at work for what he called a, South Pacific luau picnic. Undoubtedly a title he picked out of some cheesy meat buyers catalog at the shop. So he and Stan started to dig a pit for the sacrificial suckling pig of summer. They plowed away at the ground drunk and sweaty laughing at some crass remark about really getting things swinging, if you know what I mean. Pounding out dirt frantically they squealed with excitement like a pair of hyenas burying bones and raw meat in the bloody afternoon sunlight.

Long awaited and all too slowly the evening sky began to stain the sunburned blue day with cool, crystal darkness. Inside stomachs were being cooled by beer and chilled carrot sticks and oysters with lime on ice. The pink brick walls that enclosed our backyard glowed red from the sacrificial suckling pig pit dug in the middle of our lawn. And the palm tree which had glowed red many times before, being that it had been there since my grandparents had bought the place, and was now 30 feet tall lit up like a red lion's mane looking down, doubting, feeling pity.

By this time my mother emerged from the bath, the angel that she was, all soapy sweet and softly dressed. Blue eyes lighting up the otherwise dismal room. All the men beginning to sweat and stutter at the sight of her. All the women turning in their seats and cursing her fate in their ugly minds, though they all loved what she was in one way or another.

Well hello baby sister, said my grandmother, everyone's here.

Oh boy, my mother said nervously, almost sarcastically, knowing she would be at the center of all the men's lust and all the women's envy. Not because she had to but because she wanted to give herself. That's the way she was and still is, sacrificing her sobriety and opening up her heart for people to hide in.

Beer caps cracking, bottle caps twisting, liquor spilling into anxious glasses and uneducated sermons on unimportant matters and loud laughing. Soft light on end tables that always captured the smoke rising off green glass ashtrays so hauntingly. Jack sitting in the middle of his wife and my grandmother on our love rocker next to the raging pit of pig meat outside the window. Dan squeals in repulsive delight as my mother spills a drink on her soft white blouse. Sheer pure soft laughter and a leap to her feet to go freshen up, much to Dan's protest, Oh we all spill a little sometimes, c'mon baby, sit down. Licking his chops frantically, hoping, wishing, lusting, pig still roasting.

Bill is sitting at the coffee table statue still, cigarette burning in right hand as he holds his head in his usual jaded manner, trying to wish away Pat who sits next to him screeching about her mother's chronic hemorrhoid condition.

Stan's at the 8 track and puts on Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing. My mother yelps and comes running out of the bathroom with her vodka tonic spilling to the side sending that much more liquid magic to our constantly stained green carpet. With an, oops and a, woooo she sways and twitches, crystal blue eyes bloodshot red like the still roasting pig out back. She closes them and smiles softly at the thoughts in her vodka tonic mind, dreaming of a better life for all of us. Marvin Gaye's voice seducing her into rhythmic euphoria. She wishes for Marvin to come save her and sends everybody into dull minded lustful stares and immobility. My mother the drunken dancing angel, smiling for the sake of the miserable and lonely, saving them from hopelessness. C'mon Christian, dance with me, and we swayed and twirled in the cigarette smoke and soft light and as she held me against her breast I smelled the vodka on her blouse and breath and watched her red eyes glow redder from the pig still roasting out back...

...and the evening stumbled on that way, clock click clocking, tick tocking, rick rocking to the sounds of Marvin Gaye and American glee glaring through the streets stifling softer sounds. American glee and warm summer winds lulled me to sleep to dream of ice cubes and vodka glasses and Bicycle poker cards...pig softly roasting outside...

...Sunday morning sun, the brightest sun of the morning week peeled me from between the soft sheets hungry, excited, anxious to play on another Southern California day. I walked into the living room and the sun showed me what is in my mind the incarnate example of the American Dream turned nightmare. Drunken half naked adult bodies sprawled across our green stained magic carpet. Jack, Mary, Bill, Stan, Pat, Dan, lifeless, regretful I'm sure. So sorry, so stupid, so soft, so sad.

The refrigerator is half open, there's nothing much inside. My little sister is hungry too so we go outside and pick oranges off our tree and throw the peels at the now charcoal colored pig in the middle of the lawn, I guess nobody checked it. It died in vain. Just like the American dream died in my mind that sunny summer morning. But I knew my mother's angel eyes would awake and be white blue bright again and she'd make big breakfast for my sister and me and send us off to play. Our stomachs would be full, our hearts would always be free, I knew that. American Dream or no American Dream, pig or no pig.

What About When...

...Crossing black seas, and ice flows crashing starboard bows, and wooden crow's nest splintered by frozen skies. Stalingrad grey and muddied, hissing bullets the least of it, blood and rain racing up its hillsides. Sparrow flat and dead on unswept sidewalks, and cats of black and bone who starve for a taste of their eyes and the marrow of their wings.

Dreamland shootouts when the gun in your hand becomes a toy, a flower, a stunted blur with dripping chambers no rounds could fill.

The last day at the slaughterhouse, blinding your last calf. Searing your last foul. The last smells of bleach and blood.

The cold of space, the distances, missing the boat and standing alone on a foggy dock, hungry, homeless, and estranged from the oceans at your feet. No wings to carry you out over the whitecaps, only twisted shoulders, only sagging guns, only blurry bullets, only rainwater blood and not enough of it...

And only a dust pan for a sparrow's grave...

The Phantom Hand

It's telling me to let go. To for go the message and control. It's telling me the highway north along the sea and the illuminated drive through the palm groves on the central coast still hiss and roll in a gentle jasmine breeze and none of this from you...only through you.

It's whispering in my ear to release the grip. To place my hands at my side and to close my eyes, superfluous. It wants me to descramble and forfeit because I fell off the grid a long way back somewhere on that moonlit road regardless and good riddance. The shadows, the tides rising, the temperate