Midnight Raccoons

“Damn coons,” I sighed to myself. It was always annoying to hear your garbage can knocked over and the aluminum lid scraped across the asphalt as it was pushed aside at midnight.

At least I wasn’t asleep yet. My thoughts of little Jeffy’s troubles in school were haunting me. Nora said it wasn’t his fault, lots of kids have early learning difficulties in school, “It’s not so uncommon,” was her assessment. But I wasn’t reassured.

I didn’t say anything, of course, cause I remembered my own troubles in grade school. Zoning out, drifting away, unable to read at the same level as the other kids in class, being laughed at when I was made to recite aloud by the teacher.

Was and saw, what’s the difference? Anyway, my reading, even as an adult, still went in one eye and out the other sometimes. I often had to go back and reread paragraphs, or blatantly forgot news stories entirely because my mind wandered. Like the one about the Panda exhibit Little Jeffy was so excited about, or the next one about the bears escape, which prompted both an international scandal and Jeffy asking, “If we find it, can we keep it?”

“We’ll have to ask Chairman Mao,” I told him.

Anyway, Nora started babbling at me half asleep. “Wha?” she’d ask me all the time, never remembering my answers.

“Nothing honey,” I told her, “just the coons in the garbage again.”

“Um-kay…”

She was just like my own mother in a lot of ways. Like being unable to acknowledge that there was an actual problem with Jeffy. She understood Jeffy like I understand pregnancy, ya know? I mean, I know what pregnancy is, but I’ll never know what pregnancy is, as her femi-nazi sister used to tell me when we, I mean, Nora, was pregnant.

Kristen, what a piece of work. She actually trained me to stop saying “We’re pregnant” when I told people. She’d just get started on one of her rants about the oppression of women and how I’d subjugated her favorite sister, half kidding of course, but half not, and how bla bla bla “You’re not pregnant.”

It wasn’t worth hearing for a 5^th time so I corrected myself after the first few and never said it again.

Anyway, about Jeffy, I knew what he was going through. As I sat up and slid into my slippers, trying not to disturb Nora any further, I remembered how strange it was having my own schedule rearranged at that age. I remembered how strange it was leaving the regular class, alone, and going to the tard-o-room, where the drooling freaks we made fun of on the playground had their classes.

I didn’t have to stay in that class all day, but, just going for an hour to relearn how to read, with the ESE kids, was a blow to my self image, you know? I was one of them now. My parents always told me how smart I was growing up, but then, suddenly, I realized they had been lying.

Not only was I stupid, which is a horrible thing for an eight year old to believe about himself, but my parents were liars too. Or maybe they were just stupid, too? That was a comforting thought for me, actually.

Maybe my parents are just as stupid as I am, I thought, and it was a relief. Because if I was stupid because my parents were stupid, and we were just a big happy family of stupidity, then it wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help the way I was born, could I? And if my parents were stupid, then they didn’t know any better, so of course, they thought I was smart, right? I mean, I could add couldn’t I? For all I knew, that made me the family genius in their eyes.

Anyway, the teacher said everyone had different brains. “We all have different chemistry,” she told me too happily. “We’re all unique and there’s nothing wrong with being special!”

“Unless you ride the special bus,” I retorted in an eight year old monotone.

“You don’t ride the bus to school, silly!”

“Way to listen, dip shit,” I was then telling the empty hallway as I returned to my conscious mind, traversing the house through the dark. I was using the bus to illustrate my pain at being ostracized as an eight year old and she was talking about the literal bus. Idiot.

This was my new Language Arts teacher.

How many kids do you think are already sarcastic as eight year olds? Was I sarcastic or was I made sarcastic? Was I bitter already? No, I don’t think so. It was the new class schedule. Go to the regular class first thing in the morning, get your daily dose of patriot brainwashing by reciting the pledge or get written up instead, then go to the learning disabled room. That’s what did it.

After I finished there I then got sent to the gifted room. I mean, what the hell? After all my ’special’ tests they made me go from the retard room to the gifted class, I shit you not.

How can you be both stupid and smart at the same time? I’m not Rain Man.

“FUCK!” My toe stubbed on the kitchen chair that wasn’t supposed to be there. Little Jeffy’s chair.

“I tell him to push his chair in every night…” I start muttering before I was interrupted.

“Are you ok?” Nora asked from the hall entry.

“Yeah, sorry, I zoned out and kicked the chair. Sorry I woke you.”

“Try not to swear in the house, sweety, Jeffy will hear you.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Turn on a light, you won’t run into things.”

“It wasn’t pushed in.”

Outside the trash can rumbled around for a sec.

“Damn coons,” She whisperd as she turned back for the bedroom, swinging her hips slightly as she went, making an intentionally enticing wiggle in the dark before stopping at the door frame to turn back, exposing the profile of her naked breasts in silhouette.

“Hurry sweety, I’m scared of the wild life!” she mock whispered down the hall at me.

I felt a little rumble down below, giving me half a chub before I turned from the kitchenette and stepped into the foyer leading to the front door. “God bless you, coons” I whispered to myself, “I’m about to fu-” Outside the trash can rolled around a little more as paper got pulled and ripped out, interrupting my fledgling fantasy of Nora.

“Ugh, this is going to be a mess.”

Gently closing the door, I walked across the porch and nearly busted my ass tripping over a small length of bamboo. “Jeffy!” I swore, “I said throw those sticks away!”

The kid was on an Indiana Jones kick. I’d sat down and watched the first installment, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, with him for the first time last weekend. It was frightening in a few spots, like finding rotting skeletons in the opening cave sequence, or the spirits escaping from the Ark at the end and melting peoples heads off, but Jeffy still loved it.

“Hell, I still love it.” I told the moonlit porch.

So now little Jeffy was on a mission to build a whip. You know how kids are. At first he wanted me and Nora to buy him one, he begged for days. All his friends at school said it would be dope to have a whip. Dope they said, eight year old kids using slang like dope…

Anyway, we naturally said no to the bull whip. Undeterred, Jeffy decided to make one instead. He went down to the neighborhood creek every day for three days, searching for the perfect bamboo pole. He came back with nine or ten sticks, some thicker than his arm and twice as tall as he was, that he intended to fashion into a handle.

We didn’t have any leather, so instead he got rope from the garage and tied it to the bamboo. This didn’t work right. The rope didn’t snap when he tried to play ‘Indy verses Nazi’s’ with his friend Billy from down the street.

They were both Indy and they used their stationary, parked bikes as stand-in Hitler’s, attempting to whip the cheap, Wal-Mart Huffy’s into submission with the rope. Big Bill, Little Billy’s father, suggested they try a longer stick so their snapping motion would have more leverage.

“Does swinging a rope in the air need leverage?” I asked the darkness as I paced down the drive toward the trash.

Well it worked. With a 3 foot pole the rope actually snapped.

Nora was concerned they would pop each others eyes out but I told her not to worry. “There’s no way they’ll do that to each other,” I said. “Once one eye is lost, they’ll stop.”

She wasn’t amused. She didn’t like the left over bamboo sticks laying around either, so she asked them to clean it up, which they did, finally, by putting all the left over bamboo into the trash in the garage and sweeping up the bits and pieces of flayed rope that were littering the floor and driveway.

“So they must have left a stick on the front porch,” I told the little black blob of fur that was rummaging through my trash as I approached it.

The fur-ball froze, stepped back and lifted it’s head out of the paper. It’s small little front legs didn’t look so small.

“You’re a big fella aren’t ya Fur-ball?”

Fur-ball had a stick of bamboo in it’s mouth. It’s cute little bandit eyes were large and round. Too large. It’s head was white, not gray, and the eyes were black patches, not a stripe.

“What are you, an albino Raccoon?” I asked it. “Ok, feeding time’s over, scram punk.”

Fur-ball dropped the bamboo and stood up on it’s hind legs, raising it’s head two feet into the air. It then let out a threatening growl-like whine and bared it’s large, front teeth.

“Oh f-fuck!” I stammered and stumbled backwards, tripping over my own feet.

“Panda! A baby fucking Panda! This isn’t fucking China!” I thought as my ass hit the concrete. I was so startled by the raccoon actually being a 50 pound baby Panda that I think I broke my tail bone. I felt this tiny pop, almost like an internal zit, burst somewhere between the small of my back and my ass. It was an odd thing to notice, and the last clear thought I had before the pain hit.”

I yelled out then. The internal pop shot a bolt of sharp pain into my ass and it was followed by a dull, immensely large, pulsating throb. Then something large tore through the privacy hedge a few feet away and seemed to mock my cry of pain with one of anger.

Mama Fur-ball was 200 pounds with two-inch claws on every finger.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“I remember Nora screaming. And Jeffy was crying but I couldn’t see them. I tried to scream at them to get away, to get Jeffy away, but everything was a blurry scuffle after that. And pain. Lots of pain. The top of my head, my arms, especially my forearms, felt shredded. And pummeled, too, like I had spent a minute in the ring with Ali. I hurt all over in so many different ways. It was surreal.

“Say Doc, what’s black and white and red all over? A news paper, right? Wrong! My vision when attacked by a panda!”

“I’m not a doctor, Jeff.”

“You’re not… Who are you?”

“I’m here to help you across. Now, look into my eyes, Jeff, do you see the billion points of light there?”

Twelve the First Time

I think I was twelve the first time. Looking back, I can see a series of indicators leading up to it but at the time, well, I was only twelve.

It was somewhere near the end of sixth grade, the final six week period. My grades were falling and I was afraid of finals. They weren't close yet, weeks away, but that's forever to a twelve year old. The teachers were pushing us to devote our free time to studying but I didn't know how.

Weeks was an eternity to do nothing but study for something I didn't care about. For something meaningless in my mind. For something that could change nothing and only lead to a series of six more somethings that were the exact same thing I had already been doing for the last six years, which was half my life. They were yet another eternity each, the coming grades, and they all lead to what I was working for, but graduation was something I had never chosen for myself. Something I never understood, only knew I had to do.

Every morning, wake up, go to school, come home, work on school work, go to sleep, wake up, go to school. Over and over and over. So redundant. My motivation was draining before but now it was dead. Literally. My mother, who had encouraged me, who even inspired me with road trips to museums in other cities, complete with planetariums and King Tut's traveling tomb tour, was dead.

I guess I loved her. I think I did. It's hard to recall really, but all my relatives told me they knew how much I loved her and that they all loved her too and that they knew exactly what I was going through because they were going though it too. It looked to me like they were going through something else entirely as they choked back the sobs that mangled and distorted their words, making them sound like half trained walrus rejects from Sea World.

"I oved har oww ark!" Their faces were equally twisted by blubbery giggles of flesh as they made strange, suffocating expressions that were enhanced by too much makeup and running mascara stains from the tears that streamed down their faces.

The men just looked tired. My Father was dead now, too. Not really, he was alive, but it was different. He was a zombie, there was no spark, no animation, no more smiles and playful teasing. He made no effort to pretend anything going on around him was of interest. He just stared off into space mostly, often ignoring even direct attempts to speak with him.

Three months later, just a couple weeks after my uncelebrated birthday, it happened.

He woke me up early in the morning. Real early. Sometime after midnight but hours before sunlight would reanimate the world in a way the two of us would never feel animated again. He shook me awake and said, “Come on.”

“Huh?”

“Get dressed, we gotta go.”

“Where...”

“Put your clothes on son, it's time you learned how to be a man.”

I had no idea what he meant. I'm not sure he even knew what he meant but I could tell there was no arguing. He was somber but forceful and I had reached a point in living where I often felt like I was watching a movie pass by, so I didn't argue.

My movie had characters made just for me, that only interacted with my camera according to what I did, but was still somehow an illusion, something that didn't really matter. I had gotten bored with my movie but kept watching anyway because I had nothing better to do and didn't care about anything anymore, so I just followed directions and let events take their course.

He lead me through the house, out the kitchen lined with dozens of empty beer and liquor bottles that were never drank when Mom was alive, but would never be cleaned up now that she was dead, and into the garage.

“Get in,” He said. I did.

He drove us out of the suburbs, through midtown and into downtown, where the street people and drunken bums where around every corner, asking for change or shuffling from one spot of nowhere-to-go to the next. They mumbled incoherently about things only they new about, if that.

On the way my father told me life is tough. Life isn't fair. Life is hard. I already knew the first two, as if my mother dying hadn't convinced me, but I had never found living hard. It wasn't much of a challenge for me, until now. But life is hard, I was about to learn.

“There,” he said. “that one,” Pointing to a smallish, late middle-aged man in an old coat and ragged shoes that was turning a corner into an alley. The man tilted his paper covered bottle up to his lips and tilted his head back all the way, trying to get the last few drops of what must have been his second or third quart of the night. Empty, he tossed it away as my father pulled up in the empty street.

“Kick his ass.”

“What?”

“Kick his FUCKING ASS!”

“I'm not touching him!” I protested.

“GodDamnItSon!” he screamed as he wrenched open his door, threw himself out and started marching around the back, the car idling in the empty road. “Life is fucking hard!” He yelled as he worked his way around to my door. “Life is fucking tough as a mother fucker, and by God, you will be too -GOD DAMNIT!”

He threw open my door and yanked me out by my arm, knocking my head on the roof as I went. The bum, no longer in his own little world, just turned and watched, silent.

“Kick his ass.” my Father stated again, nudging me towards the bum. I held my hand to the back of my head and looked at the small, drunken, pathetic man with grooves stretching out from the corners of his eyes, and the gray, patchy beard on his grimy face.

“But...”

“NOW!”

I timidly walked up to the bum, who just stood there, silent, watching his movie, and lightly punched him in the chest.

“Hey!” he garbled in an unfamiliar accent, “Gerroff...” and lightly pushed me away.

“MOTHERFUCKERRRRRR!” my father screamed.

Now the bums expression changed. From nothing, his face slowly contorted into fear, to understanding, to resignation. Or maybe it wasn't slow, maybe I was slow. Or maybe my comprehension was working at the same pace as this homeless mans was. I don't know.

What happened next was strange and frightening, like sneaking your first horror movie as a kid in the basement, while your parents slept upstairs. Tense... gripping. Something you dearly do not want to see but cannot help but watch anyway, helplessly as it all unfolds before your eyes.

My Father came from behind me and slammed his fist into the bums face, temporarily trapping me in-between the two men. I smelled the dank, stark, burning order of a man who hasn't cleaned himself in months. I felt the grit of his filth stick to my face before he fell away and to the ground.

“What the fuck is wrong with you!” my father asked urgently, pulling me to his face as he bent down to look at me. “Never let a man push you around like that!”

The irony was lost on him.

He walked a few feet into the alley and grabbed a cheap, aluminum trash can as he continued to lecture me.

“When someone lays a hand on you, you defend yourself. If he insists on starting something physical, you finish it.” He raised the can over his head. “You do...” he paused and strained as he brought the large, metal can down on the bums head, emphasizing the next word, “Whatever! ...You have to do to end him.”

The bum had been attempting to lift himself off the concrete but fell flat as the force of my fathers blow bent the container around his head.

“Now,” my Father continued, picking up the bottle the bum had discarded and handing it to me. “Finish him.”

There was blood on the concrete. Nothing huge like what you see in the movies, no giant puddle, just a little splatter from my fathers initial punch and a few drops dripping from the mans nose now, as he tried to rise again.

I stared at him, lifting the bottle half way up. He turned his head to look at me looking at him. Our two unrelated movies of emotional detachment, now linked by the rage and force of my fathers violence, just took note of the others film in progress and kept on shooting. Them shooting us shooting them shooting us and on and on into eternity.

He had blank, empty eyes. The bum had seen this scene dozens of times before and was bored by it. Now he was just waiting for it to end. I saw this. I saw into his mind, into anyones mind, for the first time. I knew what he felt without him telling me, and I knew now, that I wasn't alone in the world.

I burst into tears, sobbing uncontrolably. The empty bottle, held like a club, dropped to my side as I stood there balling at the thought of this mans tragic, empty existence.

“Gimmie that!” my father hissed, snatching the bottle from my hand. He hefted it over his head and shattered the glass over the other mans cranium, spraying sparkly bits across the sidewalk. A few stuck in the growing puddle of blood, catching the light, before the bum collapsed back into his own fluids.

A siren screamed to life in the distance. “C'on,” my father sighed, obviously disappointed in me.

On the ride back home I stared out the window, looking at other homeless drunks hover past my window, my viewing screen. I wondered how many of them were also my soul mates, like the bleeding man we just left on the sidewalk.

Fuck school I thought, there's no one for me there.

A few years later, after breaking the nose of a kid two grades behind me in the school yard, I walked off campus and never returned. Life's hard, I thought, but so am I.