The feckless fruit-bat of frenzied flagellation.

In the dark of a late June night, my neighborhood is still and dank like a broached sepulchre, naked in the muteness of unspeakable, profaned horror and cloaked in rank neglect. Two savage cats, denizens of the copse of trees nearby, bring themselves to feral climax in the midst of their midsummer copulation. A neighbor in a stained white wifebeater, jean shorts and loafers with black socks pulled up halfway up his calves pauses in his autistic rocking on his stoop just long enough to light up a filterless Camel, examining the new crop of liverspots on his nicotine-stained hands with detached curiosity. Someone is frying something nearby, despite the fact that it is nearly midnight; if I had to guess, I'd say that it was pig lymph-nodes. Somewhere distant, softly, a dog chained to the rotted hulk of an unused, wheelless vehicle strains to bark while gently strangling itself, alarming the creatures of night in soulless repose in the upholstry. And, from under my bed, a gentle, muffled weeping; clearly, Cuddles the Underbed Clown has not yet dispatched his nightly kill. Ah, the horrors of being five and gullible.

This past Sunday was Father's Day, a day to celebrate the man whose seed ushered you into existence. Since I've forgiven my own father for locking me in that storm cellar for three weeks with only rancid kimchee and Cajun Spicy barbecue sauce to eat and drink for "not lovin' on the Lord more", I decided to tell you a special story about him. You decide afterward if I've really forgiven him.

My father decided, at seemingly random intervals, to go camping with one of his work-buddies and his buddy's son, who was four or five years older than me. This was no ordinary campground; no, this was Round Valley Reservoir, which had campsites you could either hike ten thousand miles to, or you could get there by boat. My father had a Maine-made Old Town Trapper canoe and an ancient, sputtering outboard motor, onto which he loaded poles and tackle, Dinty Moore beef stew, Tang, and a ten-year-old me in a day-glo-orange lifevest. Round Valley's attractions were manifold. One, you had to either hike until you dehydrated and died to get to an outhouse or you had to defecate like a wild animal in the forest, which was alluring because of the apparent quaint rustication factor. Two, said outhouse's toilet rim was about thirty feet above the actual lake of waste below, so when there was solid bodily movement, you could shout "Bombs away!" and wait for the muffled splash, as my father was wont to do. Three, there were serpents. The men would sit around and grunt and poke at the fire and drink cheap beer and smoke White Owl cigars, which smell as though you've lit the hairs from a whore's ass on fire. Jake, the son of my dad's work buddy, was aloof to my pleas for him to play with me; what was perhaps more galling was that he had the coolest things to play with ever. I mean, he had a hatchet. He had a filet knife. And, most delightful, he had a blow-gun. He found insane delight in taunting me with them, because apparently since I was small and young that also meant that I was mildly retarded and clearly not capable of not slaughtering myself utterly. And there I was, given cinders and an old syringe we found on the beach to play with, watching Jake hack small branches to pieces, or setting up his little target for the blow-gun, or beginning his own regimen of scratching and belching and talking about how the "skirts get him down." I'd look up periodically from my ashy little playground, moth-scales dusting my tiny lips and the high, citrusy taste of Tang on my tongue, and wonder how much a gender reassignment costs and how long I'd have to stay in Sweden. I'd heard that Steppsholmen was delightful that time of year.

The last time we went to Round Valley, high winds chopped up the surface of the reservoir, and men in a stable watercraft patrolled the lake with a bullhorn warning the campers to keep their crafts docked. The problem: I needed to go home, as I had to go to school that Monday. What began then was what I affectionately refer to as "Dom's Trail of Tears", a death-march across the perimeter of the reservoir to the parking lot, where my sweet, loving mother awaited. Wheeling in the heat-shattered heavens, carrion raptorbirds licked their nonexistent lips and waited for my pathetic death-rattle to plunge their vile, naked heads into my putrefying offal. My father's cattle prod poked me savagely in between my shoulderblades, and the stony ground rendered my tender young feet into fleshy bulbs of what appeared to be improperly ground hamburger. Just when we reached the two hundredth mile, I was allowed two and a half minutes of respite, which I used to swat kaiser-roll-sized mosquitos and pull feasting ticks off my carcass. When I finally reached my mother, I was alive, but my childhood had tattered away. That, and I will always have malaria as a grim souvenir of my death-march; yay for being a host.

The last time I went out to see the old man in his new digs in Kansas, we got really blasted and wandered around what I imagine to be an old meat packing district in downtown Wichita, though it's probably something much more mundane. It's strange, that transition from where your parents are your parents to them becoming your friends. It's not seamless; those late teen years when everything your parents do makes you want to fall into a hole lined with sharpened pongee sticks and saltwater come to mind. But in the end, making sure that your drunken father doesn't fall into an open manhole makes up for all of that. And now that he has a fancy new bionic hip (and accompanying card for airport security), it's only a matter of time before the old-before-his-time and the young-at-heart bond over fermented grain. That two-pronged scar's just a memory now.


I remain, as ever,

Domonic