The Sock Hop

I've only gotten in a fist fight once in my life. It was in sixth grade with the main tough guy, Johnny Biggs. He lived in the poor part of town and was rumored to have an alcoholic dad that would get drunk and beat the shit out of Johnny and his older brother.

Johnny had curly brown, shoulder-length hair in the fall of 1974. He was skinny, but strong and wiry - like an over-cooked chicken wing. He was athletic and loud, and his voice had already changed. He got into fights a lot.

Conversely, I had blond, wish-it-was-shoulder-length hair and was not skinny - or athletic. My voice squeaked like Alvin the chipmunk, and I just wanted to sit around and draw pictures or write songs.

My dad never got drunk or beat me, and I had no idea how to fight.

*****
One day Johnny saw me talking to his girlfriend. I'm sure I wasn't hitting on her - not because I didn't like her - but because I was too shy and self-conscious to talk to the popular, pretty girls. She probably just wanted to borrow a pencil or something.

That night, Johnny called my house. My dad answered the phone and handed it to me. It was a big, black rotary phone with a short, curly cord from the handset to the receiver. There were no private phone conversations in the 70's.

Standing in our kitchen/dining room with the Brady Bunch decor, I said, "Hello?"

Johnny got right to business, "If I see you talking to my girlfriend again, I'm gonna kick your ass."

Now, I don't know if it was because my dad was there, or what, but I said, "You probably would want to kiss my ass, you faggot!" and hung up the phone. My dad raised his eyebrows while thumbing through the mail and was probably thinking, "Wow, my son's a bad ass."

Unfortunately, I was not.

The next day at school, Johnny did the classic, After School Special, knock-the-books-out-of-my-hands-in-the-hallway move. All my notebooks full of chimeric drawings and poems went sprawling across the dusty floor, stopped only by the feet of the dingy, gray lockers. While I meekly picked stuff up, Johnny said between his teeth, "I'm gonna get you at the sock hop."

No, really. Those were his exact words - as if we were in an After School Special.

The sock hop! Holy crap!

The sock hop was the most anticipated thing to ever happen in my life at that point. There was going to be a real live rock band - with drums, and a singer ... with a microphone, and Marshall amps ... Gibson guitars! Man, I had been waiting my whole life for something like this!

And now here was this ugliness that caused a bad feeling in my stomach every time I thought about it.

So I avoided Johnny as best as I could until the big day, but there was never any question of whether I would go to the sock hop. Did I mention there was going to be a real live rock band?

*****
The teen aged musicians could have been Led Zeppelin. I stood spellbound, baptised in the aural rapture of timeless radio hits like "Smoke on the Water", "Whole Lotta Love", and "You Really Got Me".

I studied the drummer's kit, his stick-twirling technique, and spotty facial stubble. I noted the homemade colored lights - made from Folger's coffee cans, the singer's twisted locks and embarrassingly tight pants.

I barely even noticed all the other kids hopping around like imbeciles in their white gym socks.

After the show, while still in my rock star reverie, I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to the cafeteria. There lay waiting syrupy drinks and starchy snacks - the only drugs I yet knew - to plenish my rock and roll gluttony. It was dark, except for the dim light sighing from the frosted, cafeteria windows with their chipped and peeling, cold, gray frames.

And there in the distance, walking slowly toward me - between me and the door to my refreshment - was Johnny Biggs (and his crony), his gaze fixed menacingly on me. I wasn't surprised. In fact, it seemed as though everything that was happening was predestined and I was just following a script.

We stopped within eminent striking distance, facing each other. I took my balled fists out from the pockets of my brown suede, faux-fur-lined jacket. None of the Dad Knows Best grown-ups with their Leave It To Beaver families seemed to notice the grave crisis that was unfolding around them.

Pragmatically , Johnny said, "Call me what you called me on the phone."

Just following the script, I said simply, "Faggot."

I knew from protocol that this meant Johnny would have to hit me on the jaw, so I waited for that before I commenced to windmill his ass. This is like dog-paddle for grade-school boys. If there has been no formal training in the art of self-defense, it is simply instinct to put your head down and start flailing your arms wildly. (See Ralphie in A Christmas Story)

Surprisingly, tough guys appear to have very little defense against the windmill. Johnny just bent over and covered his head. The blows didn't seem to be doing much damage though, because he said something during the barrage like, "What're you trying to do, scalp me?"

But I didn't care - maybe it was like a video game and I could accumulate points. I just kept up the assault until someone yell-whispered, "Here comes the principal!"

We scattered like oil from a drop of Dawn dishwashing liquid.

*****
Not long after that, Johnny became friendly to me. The covenant had apparently been consummated. I had made it through some caveman ceremony and been accepted into the association of ruffian honor.

In hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing that one can gain entrance into their club through use of the windmill. They really should consider stricter requirements.

Poncho

Poncho was a dog.

He was medium to big in size, but wiry and lean. He had those underwater eyelids, and one was lazy and sometimes half closed even though he was on dry land. He also had trouble keeping his penis in its sheath, especially when he sat down. This caused much embarrassment to all but Poncho.

He peed like a girl and looked as though he thought he was in trouble when it snowed. He howled often and in many respects seemed to be more wolf than dog.

He lived to run.

He was a pound mutt – which doesn’t sound very nice, but he took no offence. Poncho never took offence. He was especially meek and altruistic - always willing to be the beta dog.

He lived on an enclosed, half-acre in a racially diverse neighborhood - which was kind of like a cross between a retirement home and gangland. He had plenty of room to run and seemed to enjoy regular visits from his humans who brought him food and took him for walks and told him to shut up his howling at night.

But he was still lonely. He was lonely for someone that he could sniff and lick and hump – one who would consider that kind of behavior attractive or at least acceptable. He spent an undue amount of time trying to find ways to escape from the paradise in which he was held captive. He did this more or less so that he could find someone who would let him sniff their butt. This embodied his idea of a thriving friendship.

He was allowed to run free at the lake on weekends. He would run joyously at full speed for no other reason but that God commanded it. Poncho was no blasphemer and he obeyed the Word. He never wanted to stop running – never wanted it to end.

One day God explained that it didn’t have to end, "Just don’t get back in the car. Why should you voluntarily put an end to your rapture? The free world is considerable - there are vast rivers of mud in which to trudge and countless, sundry sniffable butts."

Thus Poncho began his experiments with autonomy.

One day he went to the annual, downtown street scene where it was reported by friends that he had a grand time eating hot dogs, listening to music, and playing Frisbee on the grass.

Another time he was gone for three days and the pads on his feet were raw and bloody when he finally found his way to a friends’ house. It took him a while to recover from this one, but he had been free – free to do God’s work. For three glorious days he was able to express his dogness unhampered by the shackles of humanity. He had known bliss.

But in his lust, Poncho was oblivious to the evils that lurked in the dark and seedy underbelly of his free world – mechanical monsters with metal teeth, underpaid state workers with tasers and nets, and every dog’s arch nemesis: little boys with BB guns.

Poncho had not eaten of the tree and knew naught of its fruit.

So the humans spent hundreds of dollars and every free moment trying to keep him from harming himself and the neighbors’ trash. Each weekend a new project was taken up to reinforce the walls of his prison – chicken wire, barbed wire, electric wire – and each week he would run emancipated in some Homeric orgy, inevitably humping any neighboring dog he could find.

Well eventually, the dim-witted humans put two and two together and got Poncho a dog. His name was Steve Peagram and he had kennel cough.

Dirt Pumps

I live in a house in the woods. The monumental oaks and poplars tower more than sixty feet above the roof of my split-level house. The maples and dogwoods stare maternally in my windows at night.

Each autumn literally tons of leaves drift deliberately to the ground. They lie there.

The top layers protect and mulch the Earth throughout the year, keeping the ground moist and filling the air with the scent of second grade. The lower layers are worm food and beetle fodder as these alchemists make good on their accord.

I try ineffectually to find time to rake the leaves from my small patch of shaded lawn and use them to cover the yawning vegetable garden like a bequeathed quilt.

The next year, leaves fall again, covering the defiant that refused to obey the former mandate of entropy. The rebels are smothered in the love of their brothers. Seizures of rain compel life from cloud to ground.

Descending the mulch, we visit the past.

Years before my family lived here, the family with the two boy scouts raked the leaves from the same trees. They are here below, with minerals and rocks and things that conventional science refutes, integrated and infused with excrement and the bodies of buried pets.

There are forces here. These things exist, and from the perspective of the verb "to be", may be viewed as be-ings.

The roots reach nearly as deep into the Earth as the branches reach into the Heavens. The web of fine arteries and their symbiotic fungi drink from the subterrestrial fountain, taking in the mineral nutrients, and pagan forces, and Boy Scout convictions.

A capillary, scarcely bigger than the molecules it consumes, dutifully conveys the serum to its parent node, which accepts it manifestly.

The liquid makes its ambitious odyssey up the tree, traversing from one node to the next, each getting larger, wider, more detectable and clear. Drawn by a genial force, taboo and heathen, yet greater than the myopia of man's mechanical sun. More and more nutrient distills until the hydraulic power of a single tree silently rivals humanity's most creative and coarse contrivance.

The affusion ministers the sunken treasures to the host, and emerges chaste on its leaves in a baptism of indoctrination.

And finally, as the water makes cloud, and the oxygen makes alms, the leaf withers and wilts and returns to the Earth pious and appeased.