So I’m reading Fight Club right now and I’m just enthralled by its maleness.
The whole bit about not wanting to die without any scars’ it’s just mesmerizing.
I have scars. I have tons of scars. I don’t know how any pretty boys could make it through their life, or at least to their late twenties and early thirties without a single scar.
I got my first scar when I was five years old. My mother rented space in a horse barn out on highway 29, a four-lane highway. I had grown bored of chasing chickens, playing with the puppies, or what have you. One of the farm boys told me he’d take to the lake across the highway. I asked my mom. She said ‘sure’. My mother took kind of an open-minded approach to child rearing’ she figured that which did not kill me made me stronger. I think that all parents of young children should avoid Nietzsche, but that’s just my opinion. Maybe I’m a little jaded. So the farm boy, whose name I’ve since forgotten but I probably had a five-year-old crush on him, because I was an overactive List maker even then, although my List probably was something like List Of Boys I’d Like To Hold My Hand During Couples-Only Skate, and I started to walk, but then we realized that there were three barbed wire fences between each of the roads. Or three fences with a string of barbed wire atop them. Um. Ok. Not a problem. We’ll just climb over it CAREFULLY. This is crazy country farm boy logic. And I am five years old and have a crush on the farm boy, so I go ahead and do what he says. It was all very chivalrous, actually. He held the barbed wire strand down and I was supposed to put my hand on top his hand when I went over the wire.
We made it over two fences without a problem. Almost three.
On my descent of the third fence, instead of putting my five-year-old right hand directly on top of his hand, I put it on sort of crooked. Right onto a barb. The rest is just a blur. I remembered trying not to cry because I didn’t want Farm Boy to think that I was a little baby. I wanted him to think I was a tough shit five-year-old. Farm Boy had to leave me alone by the fence and go back to the farm, climbing over all the fences again, crossing the highway, while I stood there, in the long grass, thinking about snakes, blood cursing out of my hand, dropping off in big droplets onto the ground, thinking more about snakes. Finally, I watched as my mother drove her big green Cadillac convertible out of the farm, but she had to drive all the way along the access road, up to the on ramp and back onto the other access road to come and get me. Then I started crying again. Because it’s easy to be tough when you’re standing in a grassy ditch, surrounded by bloodsucking snakes and cars wizzing by you, but it’s hard to be tough when your mom is about to give you a hug. Two hours later, it was still bleeding, so they took me to the hospital for three stitches to the inside of my middle finger. My stepfather fainted in the hallway. His emergency room bill was bigger than mine.
Because of this entire episode, I always look at my right hand for my scar whenever someone asks whether they should turn right or left. I know which direction they want, but the hand still flips and my head looks down at the Y-shaped scar. I have no free will in this issue. It will happen. I am a freak.
That was my first scar’ my worst scar, in fact.
I have another one on my knee. When I was six, my fainting stepfather loaded up his pick up truck with things that needed to be brought to the dump. There was a tiny little space in the back, next to a broken bubbled white glass lamp and a rusted pitchfork with two tines. I begged to be allowed to ride in the bed of the truck to the dump. I had never seen the dump. All of the stuff in the bed of the truck was fascinating, and that was OUR junk’ imagine what the junk of strangers would look like? He picked me up and put me in the 1×2 foot area, got into the truck, started it, and everything in the truck shifted down onto my six-year-old body. The white broken pegged glass made an incision into my leg. I screamed. My mother, standing in the driveway, having come out to tell my stepfather to take me out of the bed of the pickup truck, screamed. My stepfather stopped the car and yelled at me for wanting to ride in the back of the pickup truck. It was my fault. I didn’t get to go to the dump. Everything sucked.
Esteban told me that if I were ever horribly disfigured in an accident, such as if I had fallen face first into a tank of hungry piranhas or some such, he’d look for that knee scar to identify my body.
So maybe scars are a good thing’. At least when faced with a tank of piranhas. Or the flesh eating virus, which I’ve heard can strike justlikethat. Bam. You’re dissolving away to nothingness, with only your knee scar to identify you.
I have three small scars on my left hand; I think to balance the one humongous barbed wire scar on my right hand. One is between my thumb and forefinger’ it is the shape of a smile. I got it trying to use an axe on a piece of paneling in my grandmother’s garage. Then I lied to her and told her that the axe fell and caught my hand. She knew I was lying because she found the piece of paneling sitting there, with a few chops in it. The other two scars should not, by all rights, be scars. One is the neighbor of the smiley scar, on the knuckle of my forefinger. It is a little round circle’. Received from scuffing my hand against the pool at Jellystone Park. You know, where Yogi Bear and Boo Boo live? Yeah, that place. The other scar is a little tiny slash on my pinky. It was a paper cut. It is so small that it looks as though you could blow it away.
None are cool scars. The paper cut one is downright embarrassing. I have a hard time understanding the desire to accumulate more. Maybe that’s the author’s point.
Or maybe I’m a girl and girls just don’t get it. Or maybe boys don’t.
This was going somewhere when I started writing this. Really.
Maybe this is just the weird brain journey your mind takes you upon when you follow up The Vagina Monologues with Fight Club.
This morning, I had a surreal moment.
I was dreaming this very vague dream, something about a friend and religion and possibly a stable. I’m not really clear on it. And then I woke up and Esteban was snoring. On my stomach. And in my head, there was a 50’s style lounge act playing, like Henny Youngman or something, some old Jewish comedian, and he was telling jokes, only it wasn’t whole jokes, it was just the punch lines. ‘That will be a dollar extra.’ ‘Take my wife’ please!’ ‘You think that’s bad’ you shoulda seen the other guy!’ ‘You got a drink named Bob?’ ‘And then the Rabbi says ‘Hold the bacon on mine’.’ And in between each punch line, there was a laugh track.
I think I may have had a glimpse of purgatory. If it had been a cockroach delivering the punch lines, I’d swear I was channeling William S. Burroughs.
Thus I’m in a strange mood today. Plus, by rights, I should have been in a plane flying to New Orleans right now. I would have been exiting the plane or being pissed off a small airplane seats or all proletariat about first class seating. This is probably a small taste of purgatory in itself. I suppose it could be worse’. My face hasn’t been gnawed off by hungry Amazonian fish or anything.
