Opening: a white suburban house, sharp focus, medium shot, no sound. An establishing shot. Establishing what? The camera over cranks. Roll focus: a small child, evidently tossed into the air, slowly rises from the bottom frame. His feet glide upward as his body comes to rest mid-frame. There is a look on his face you have seen before. His shoelaces stretch toward a clear sky, defying gravity for the moment. One soft, out-turned pocket floats. Gently, he begins to drop. He disappears quietly beneath the frame. Roll focus: the house, which appears quiet. Several seconds pass. Roll focus: a small girl floats upward from the bottom frame. Her eyes are shut tight, her body fetal. She glides upward, softly, as in a dream. Softly, she falls. She disappears beneath the frame. The house remains unfocused in the background. After several seconds the boy reappears from the bottom frame, gently rising. Just as slowly, he falls.
For years I’ve experienced two recurring images in my mind’s eye—not dreams but wakeful phantasms. One image is actually a pair of images: apropos of nothing—I could be reading, driving, listening to music—I’m faced with the image of a great jet airliner’s tail wing covered with charcoal-black graffiti, the precise words obscured. After a moment it is replaced by a long shot of an indeterminate black car— sometimes it’s an old Volkswagen bug—half-covered in freshly fallen snow, resting quietly on a frozen lake. Just as quickly the images vanish. Occasionally they switch positions, but always they come paired, two sides of a confounding riddle.
Another unbidden image. This one originates from an old dream. At the end of this dream—the rest of which I have forgotten—I stand in the parking lot of Saint Andrew the Apostle Elementary School as my younger brother (who, although three years younger than I am, appears in my dreams exclusively as a young kid) is being driven away from me in a yellow school bus, his sad, pale round face pressed up against the last window.
My brother and I never rode school busses. Nor have I ever seen a graffitied jet wing. But these images are now hardwired in me, as integral to my core as DNA, as complex, as mysterious, as oddly necessary. I guess they will accompany me for the rest of my life, a kind of sign language that I blink at like a lost foreigner. Still, they repeat.
When I was six years old I had my adenoids removed at Holy Cross Hospital. Once, passing by a room, I glanced in to see a small boy my age sitting in a wheelchair, grinning. His head was shaved and his skull punctured by a dozen tiny, black holes. He visited again last night. When we are tapped on the shoulder we wheel around but stare at a gaping field. Longingly, we look to the ground for prints.
Jackie was an ugly girl. At age twelve, I could see it: the doughy, mottled face, the bulbous and hooked nose, the fat legs, the stringy hair. I confidently assumed the general playground condemnation of her, joined in the ranks of those who intuited, somehow, that she was less fortunate than the rest of us. I posses an image of Jackie jauntily swinging her red backpack as she crosses the blacktop at Saint Andrew’s, dumbly eager to ignore what her stocky body bears all too heavily. My memory fades, or the frame snaps, before Jackie nears anyone on the blacktop who might skip toward her in blithe, giddy friendship, thrusting out a girlish embrace. Were I to somehow unearth this lost footage of my memory, and thread the dusty film gingerly through a projector, I might watch as Jackie walks alone toward a home I often wondered about.
She was the predictable brunt of jokes. Once in the cafeteria, Andy asked her to a dance, and we all watched the charade, smothering snorts and giggles behind our hands. When the reality dawned on her, Jackie’s face drained of color, and her mouth dropped open as if she were puzzling over a problem that everyone else had solved. There were no friends for her to dash away with. Instead, she bore it up; I distinctly remember her back stiffening beneath her white uniform blouse. Whether she turned on her heel and left or stayed and stomached her lunch beneath the hoots, I can’t recall. At an all-school picnic in Rock Creek Park, Jenny, a very pretty blonde girl recently stripped of popular status, and so reduced to making friends with the likes of Jackie, told everyone she could a sad and juicy truth: Jackie told me last night that her dad comes home with liquor on his breath!
The drama of this public cruelty had a more complex timbre for us. This gossip reeked of home, of privacy, of desperate confidences. This joke made my small chest go cold. Jackie’s humiliations were dragged from her house, her privacy pawed at and scattered. We had thoroughly defeated her now.
How clichéd this all sounds! The lonely homely girl, the alcoholic father, the unthinking, opportunistic classmates. I hesitate as I write about Jackie’s misfortunes: clichés arise from truth, of course, though their dailiness obscures and undermines truth-telling. The sharing of such childish cruelties morphs into a kind of adolescent pornography; sheer repetition of a stock narrative numbs us. And yet it lingers, like a mother’s tight grip, leaving a mark. Jackie’s complicated face in the cafeteria, her audible gasp as Jenny gleefully cried out her secrets. A bruise remains.
So much has changed from my youth. The woods remain fecund, though they have mostly vanished. When I visit my parents’ house in Wheaton, Maryland, the house in which I was raised, I remember the alarming rate at which nearby woods were removed when I was a kid. Woods wherein I once lost myself in heady darkness were leveled with astonishing ease and alacrity, paved for handsome, large, bright houses with forbidding doors and enormous picture windows. Equally curious were the changes going on in the backyard of Dr. and Mrs. Fox, who lived in a house next to our split-level on Amherst Avenue. The house had long since made its presence felt as a chalky white acid seeping beneath the north fence that bordered our yard, choking off an increasingly widening circle of our grass. I remember my mother peering down at the mysterious patch one afternoon with discreet consternation, behaving as the trained nurse she was. To me it seemed as if our neighbors were simply more advanced than we were. After all, they had a pool in their backyard—we did not, we never would—and surely our creeping glacier was a small if inevitable price to pay for their suburban enhancement. Less wilderness to mow.
As the natural world slowly vanished, I lost a kind of enchantment. I looked forward to the end of my daily walk home from Saint Andrew’s: a diversion through Mr. and Mrs. Vengrouskie’s backyard on Arcola Avenue. A tiny creek zigzagged through their property over which they had constructed a small footbridge made of quartz and mica rocks and concrete. This blessed their yard with a nearly European, Old-World charm to my ten-year-old self, and I would make believe that I was in the Black Forest in Germany, with miles of hills and solitude and friendly, pie-faced children awaiting me when I emerged. The tiny bridge led me into the recesses of the Vengrouskie’s yard, perpetually cool even on the most humid of suburban Washington DC afternoons, a darkly draped mini-forest that, though it was merely a hundred or so feet from my own home, transported me. The Vengrouskie’s modest, landscaped yard bordered larger woods that my friend Mike had the great fortune of living next to. In fact, for many years—until they were leveled for a large house—these woods were his backyard. We would lose ourselves in the maze of thickly growing ash, acorn, and maple trees, navigating a course of fallen limbs and dive-bombing crows. The moment I entered the trees, my sense of demarcation—the civic parlance of suburbia—lifted. This is where my obsession with infinity must have begun.
My sensuality began to bloom as well, though dimly. Years after these trees were razed I kept a pornographic novel hidden in the moist recesses of a tree stump across the street from my house. By the time I’d reach it each day—and it was all that I could think to do—my heart would be pounding up through my neck, my hormonal body trusting to fear and lurid excitement. Lifting the book from the stump was a nearly obscene gesture: the novel was often heavy with the prior evening’s rainfall, and I would gently pick away slugs and snails from the cover to reveal the nude, languorous woman pictured there. The damp and crass knowledge inside was fiercely erotic and sprang from the fecund wetness all around me, the sharp, pungent odor of sopping grass and dank trees. It was a drizzling kind of erotic. My hands literally trembled as I peeled pages apart like layers of skin.
Years earlier, the woods behind Mike’s house was the scene of an event that remains troubling in my imagination. Predictably, details refuse to marshal themselves: I’m sure of the participants but wildly unsure of the particulars. What year? What season? What motives? Mike was always a risky boy, the kind who, when dared, would eat gum off the street. His face seemed perpetually smudged with dirt and mischief. He wore When I was six years old, I had my adenoids removed at Holy Cross Hospital. Once, passing by a room, I glanced in to see a small boy my age sitting in a wheelchair, grinning. His head was shaved, and his skull punctured by a dozen tin y, black holes. Jackie was an ugly girl. At age twelve, I could see it: the do ugh y, mottled face, the bulbous and hooked nose, the fat legs, the stringy hair a sandy-hair bowl cut and a crooked grin that stretched out devilishly beneath a freckled nose. He was slightly older and so stood as a kind of talisman of life’s scary, sensational possibilities.
He had a younger sister named Lorie who was playing with us in the woods one afternoon. Lorie was with us under protest, and I remember her whimperings and objections. Some generalities of an ordinary afternoon: Mike, slightly taller than I, smirking; Lorie, tiny and foal-like, trembling; me, witness and accessory. Mike held a black marker in his hand and yanked down Lorie’s shorts after she had refused, in a desperately squirming kind of way, to undress for us. I remember Mike bending his little sister over a tree stump and scrawling a word on her.
What do I really remember? How much of our memories do we ourselves compose? How often do we gravitate toward the magnetic comforts of narrative as we assemble and reassemble the machinery of our lives? Details seem to fall into place, but I don’t know if they’re valid details or a kind of fictional integrity, components of the pleasure-seeking impulse to shape a story into order and order into a kind of knowledge. The great fear that binds my life like a verdict is that I made it all up. Did I dream such an awful transgression in the woods? I could track down the rumor, the possibility, the wishes, see what leads me to the truth of Lorie, or the truth of Jackie alone on the playground. But would my sad dreams of Jackie’s house have been validated had I met her father, her mother, peered into her bedroom, a haunt of misery? Her face and her facts linger in the shimmering that encircles her, the gloomy atmosphere through which she sifts.
Why does most of the world dissolve? I remember Mr. Vangrouskie dissolving, slimming year after year as he walked past our house. I’d watch everyday as he strolled south along Amherst Avenue, ambling past our large kitchen window, a small, brown sack of sunflower seeds in his palm. He walked and chewed, walked and chewed, for years it seemed, his fat, round body slowly slipping away, until, in the final months, he was nothing more than some fused rails bound up in baggy pants. Only recently I learned that he was a town drunk, that he was walking—every day of my childhood—to Rosie’s, the old-man bar three blocks down the road, a narrow train car of gloom into which I’d occasionally peer during my allowance walks. Dusty sun strained and leaned into the bar when the door was propped open, revealing hunched, toothless men in undershirts. Did they call me in? Only in my excitable fears. Before I knew fear I understood Mr. Vangrouskie’s weight loss as the result of healthy constitutionals, renewed discipline, a kind of hale self-control. But he was wasting away at the bar, inside a vexed marriage, and, later, reduced by ravaging cancers. The stroll past my house brought him from point Z to point Z. He emerged from the woods behind his house as a kind of truth, a truth that I assembled over many years, but the truth was myth, a wished-for story. He emerged from the woods and the woods began disappearing behind him, met by machines that condensed them efficiently one row at a time, renewed them with domesticated tree houses that promised stories that could be told and trusted, known and embraced. As the woods vanished, so did those other stories, those whispered and dubious stories, unknown and avoided.
I don’t remember what word Mike wrote in big block letters on his sister. All I remember is her hot, feverish tears and the image of her dashing home, struggling to pull up her shorts. What was that word? A curse we’d recently learned on the playground? Something vulgar and sexist? Or scatological? Stare now as I might at the memory of Lorie’s tiny body, I cannot will the word to appear. Like all words, it was subsumed into the grandeur of language itself. What remains is a gesture, the music of defacement. Mike inscribing his sister’s body was language asserting itself in the worst kind of way. The degree to which I am plagued by the shadowy details is language asserting differently, a beckoning toward some kind of understanding.
And why do I remember that Mike chose to write a single word? Why not a goofy face? A caricature of President Nixon? A ruthless squiggle, even. But a single word? Like my visiting jet wing covered in graffiti, the specific language remains blurry. All that remains is language. Mike, a crude linguist, was laying claim on his younger sister, branding her in his own idiom. Lorie squirming, the lurid shock of her bright white body in the woods. The world suddenly privatized itself, and the three of us shared an intimacy, morally dubious and humiliating, in those few moments.
Language slips from us, resisting the simple categories that our scrapbooks demand. Words, images lurk in us as an approaching storm that promises a downpour but never arrives. They’re the riddles that we create our personalities by, and a search for answers helps to assemble the stuff of our humanity. In childhood, the struggle begins to match language to deed, but as the woods around me were lifted and laid on the backs of trucks, logs spirited down the road into weakening daylight, so has the language of our youth faded, words once tremblingly composed to allow meaning its ache in our throats. Jackie whispered her secrets to Jenny in dogged vulnerability; Mike printed a word on his sister; I sift for sense.
Faces flow in and out of memory, the pallid images. Children learn geometry the hard way, when the infinite world gapes open before them or mysterious enemies leap from dark corners. One of the numerous tricks memory plays on us is to elasticize space: when I enter a new building for the first time, I have an inflated feel for dimensions; I visit the building regularly, and its size reduces properly. The imagination, when it encounters fresh space, searches for the infinite—this seems to me as fundamental to the human condition as anything else. Similarly, when I revisit a building from my youth its dwarfish dimensions surprise me, as if an entire story or wing has vanished: when I walked through the halls of Saint Andrew’s recently I felt as if I were in a doll’s house. The root of the word art is ar: “to put together.” Confounding language! How can you assemble a story if the parts keep stretching and reducing in size? It’s difficult to trust such a surrealist blueprint. Memory’s proportions erase my desk, swept clean in an attempt to put together the past.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Erik Mclean