Think Spew : 2022

A lesson in credible sources.

I was seven years old or so. Living, innocently, in Tallmadge, Ohio. In Vietnam, located just one state over, approximately in place of West Virginia, war raged on in black and white, then in color, in our living room. The same screen brought us to the collective mourning of JFK. Women cried while smoking. Men were silent as they smoked. Children were perplexed and reeked of smoke. Off they went to play with dry-cleaning bags and toys coated with lead-based paint. In that living room a gold star-shaped clock — think the Star of Bethlehem, but gilded — kept track of time for us above the marble lamps, marble end tables, and a marble coffee table that, coupled with my sister’s knitting needles, provided my first drum set. A large, what we called “picture window,” the glass of which would rattle under the pressure of military jets’ sonic booms, gave us a view of our front yard, our mailbox, Hillcrest Drive, inhabited homes of neighbors, and soon- to-be inhabited homes that at the time were studded frames, cinder blocks, concrete, and mounds of dirt — constructions that served as wonderfully dangerous playgrounds, embattled fortresses for our rock-throwing militias, or archeological sites, like two-by-four-and-plywood Stonehenges. Especially cool was that the workmen left behind their yellow Caterpillar backhoes and plows, sturdy cat-tracked vehicles we easily converted into Sherman Tanks. Very thoughtful, we thought, thoughtlessly. They might have warned us, though, that their vertical exhaust pipes were as hot as the sun. I can still hear the sound of my own screams when I learned that harsh lesson. Unforgivingly searing. Unforgettably searing. When your hand looks like a raw burnt steak you don’t soon forget. Later I would learn that this style of grilling meat was called “Pittsburgh Style” — deliciously charred by high heat on the outside, but rare in the middle, as if prepared quickly in a steel mill furnace. It is a succulent way to enjoy beef, if that’s your thing, as it was my father’s, and later mine. It is not — I probably don’t need to say — a great way to treat one’s hand.

Besides the harsh and unforgiving instructor that is life experience, we were learning all kinds of things from the least credentialed and most dubious of teachers: each other. The blind who led the blind had nothing on us. These metaphorical blind folks would destroy us at pin the tail, darts, or rock throwing. We concocted and shared theories based on scraps of unchecked information. We drew lines and stitched one data point to another and — based on woefully inadequate senses of judgment, boldly proceeding without even a learner’s permit to judge anything more complex than the tastiness of ice cream relative to that of brussels sprouts — we accepted the credibility of the source and the validity of the information. We were children, and therefore we were many things. Many, many wonderful things. Skeptical was not among them, however. Imagine the half-circle auditoria of the ancient toga thinkers of Rome and Greece, with the sandaled orators replaced by half-witted physically-stunted people who could be convinced to drink pee if it came in a Pepsi bottle (at first tangy, then not), or to toss darts at one another to see if the projectiles really would penetrate human skin (they will, and they do), or that turtles wore polkadot boxer shorts beneath the shells that they can don and doff like suits of armor or old- timey whisky barrels.

Many subjects landed on the agendas of our symposia. We took turns at the lectern, our bikes thrown down in the tall grass beneath a tree that, if memory serves, was approximately one mile tall. It was as if we had our own personal beanstalk, but it was much easier to climb and was an infinitely superior source of shade.

It was there that one older girl, probably nine, could have been ten, held court on the meaning of a word we somehow knew was bad, although we had no idea why, nor did we have any idea why we so desperately wanted the definition to be revealed to us. We listened attentively in a way that, had we applied that level of focus to actual school, we would have appeared on every honor roll in every grade for the rest of our academic lives. We would have brought a never-ending sparkle to the eyes of our parents who, fortunately or not, had low expectations. We gave them little reason to adjust the levels.

Her lecture was delivered in a hushed tone, forcing us to bend toward her, like weeds being sucked into a small but insistent twister. Her whispers continued uninterrupted for what was probably no more than thirty seconds. It felt much, much longer.

Finally, she surrendered the floor. You could hear a light breeze skimming the weeds, gently jostling the leaves of our gargantuan tree. Our mouths hung open, silent. None of us had follow- up questions. We knew all we had to know. Because she knew it all, clearly, and spoke with such confidence it was as if she handed us stone tablets on the subject. There would be no probing into the finer points. No pondering alternatives. No questions about the source material. Also, there would be no further lectures that day. What more could there possibly have been to discuss? Would a lecture on just about anything have held our attention at that point? What holds the moon up there? What causes wind? Why doesn't my baby brother do anything interesting and why can’t I touch his head? Who cared? We then knew this secret that until that point was only known — and, good god, practiced! — by the sage adults all around us, the wise elders in their twenties and thirties and beyond. In my case, I suddenly knew what I didn’t want to know, something that would contaminate (because “occupy” doesn’t come close to describing it) my every thought for every hour of every day for weeks. It’s my first memory of obsessive thinking, and the power such gruesome imagery can have on a young mind.

And yes, the imagery was awful. Terrible. Truly, truly terrible. Unfortunately, it was also wrong. Dead wrong. Not even in the vicinity of correct. It was in a place so far from exactitude it was not reachable by phone, beanstalk, or jet fighter.

To “fuck,” as our expert on the subject enlightened us, was something husbands did to wives. So far, I suppose, so good. From there the definition strayed. From there the definition wandered rapidly and aimlessly away from accuracy as if suffering from a blinding concussion. From there the definition stepped off an enormous cliff, its arms and legs flailing in vain to grasp something, anything, some exposed root, a vine, or a mere twig of veracity. According to our speaker, as confident as she was misinformed, the definition was this: To “fuck,” a husband ties his naked wife to their mailbox and beats her repeatedly with a stick.

I will pause here, dear reader, to give you a moment to picture this scene, as I did. Repeatedly. Enjoy this photo to cleanse your mental palette.

It might not look or sound so horrible to some readers (god knows what you’re into) but to a seven year-old with a teddy bear, a boy who worked very hard to be a “good boy” (despite his instincts) there really was nothing more unimaginable. My god. How can you close your eyes after hearing this? How can you sleep knowing this kind of thing is going on in your front yard? In front yards across the universe. Across Ohio, even! Even in neighboring Vietnam!

I watched what today would be described as a mental .gif — a million times — a visual, never-ending loop. There they were. My dad. My mom. Whip! Crack! Scream! Our mailbox. Over and over and over and over and over and over. Whip! Crack! Scream! I could see my mother’s molars, exposed by her screams, as the movie played. In the backseat of the car. At dinner. Eating ice cream. On vacation. Standing for a family photo at the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. My god! Did George Washington do this to Martha?! Over and over and over. Whip! Crack! Scream! Over. And over. And over again. It was eating my brain. It devoured my joy.

What made it worse was, what if my mother knew I knew? What if she knew what I was picturing as she nurtured me? As if I deserved nurturing! What a horrible child I was! I deserved brussels sprouts! What if she realized I was nothing more than a mobile pornography salon catering to sadists and masochists, people I didn’t know even existed, people who believed in deviant sex before I even knew was sex was?! Talk about getting the cart before the horse! Oh god, he beat her like a horse!

As time wore on the shock subsided into numbness. I got used to the movie constantly playing on the walls of my skull. It became animated wallpaper. Later I would come to appreciate Joseph Heller’s comment about war; his character, he wrote, “got used to not being used to it.”

This relief allowed me to wonder. To ask questions I should have asked in “class” under the big tree. How is it no one ever witnessed these acts that apparently were taking place all around us out in the great wide open? And at what must be deafening, blood curdling volumes? What was the purpose of this act? Why would a man do this and why would a woman let him? What about the mailman? Was he somehow complicit? Wouldn't this, at the very least, have hindered mail delivery? They mention “rain and snow and dark of night” but nothing like this made the Postman’s Creed. Surely, there had to be federal regulations banning such practices, although I would merely have thought “laws,” something a policeman would have enforced. Unless .... no, the police would never be complicit. They would never stand by while one person beats another. The mailman, sure, maybe, but not the police. Wait. And what if a couple didn’t have a mailbox on a post? What if they had one attached to the wall of their house? Or they only had a Post Office box? What then?

I wouldn’t know until much later, and from an infinitely superior source, that the word “fuck” comes from the German word fick. According to Google Translate (blame them), to say, in German, that “the man and woman were going at it,” you’d say, “der mann und die frau gefickt.” So it’s kind of funny, or not, that the similar word frick is to fuck what darn is to damn, gosh is to God, geez is to Jesus, and shoot is to shit. Whether we accidentally came up with frick or somehow it’s embedded in the recesses of our minds or, as Americans are wont to do, we simply misspelled and mispronounced it, we have adopted “what the frick are you doing?” as a more socially acceptable way of asking what the fuck someone is doing. I mean, after all, what are they doing?

I will close with an example: “Where in the fuck did that little girl come up with this alternative, unique, dastardly — and monumentally wrong — definition of the word? It’s frickin’ mind-boggling.”

Think Spew

Sunday, August 28, 2022

The Unbearable Meaning of F**k

A lesson in credible sources.

Her lecture was delivered in a hushed tone, forcing us to bend toward her, like weeds being sucked into a small but insistent twister. Her whispers continued uninterrupted for what was probably no more than thirty seconds. It felt much, much longer.

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