From A Macaroni Of Doubt Chapter 4 - Crocodiles and Pork Loins (from A Macaroni of Doubt) She sat belted tightly in the back seat of our Honda Civic telling us about a dream she’d had. “My mom was there and there were so many little animals and they were all trying to bite me. And my mom didn’t care ‘cause, um, she was trying to feed the animals and she was okay that they wanted to bite me.” Her parents had named her Delaney because of an unhealthy affection for Jimmy Buffet. (Delaney is his middle name.) Despite the parrot-head parents, she was an adorable little girl and Anna had been watching her since she was a baby. “And there were crocodiles - pages and pages of crocodiles. And there were macaroni of crocodiles!” I laughed as I pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store. “Macaroni of crocodiles? What does that mean, Laney?” Anna scowled at me from the passenger seat. “Macaroni of crocodiles. That doesn’t make sense to you?” “No. When did macaroni become a unit of measure?” “It’s dream logic. Haven’t you ever felt something in a dream that makes perfect sense at the time, and then you wake up and realize its nonsense but you still understand what it meant?” “I guess so,” I gave in. Anna sneered at me and continued, “I had a dream once where I went on an Alfredo Sauce of a bike ride. Actually, in the dream it was just an Alfredo of a bike ride but I knew it was really Alfredo Sauce and not like some guy named Alfredo.” “What’s an Alfredo Sauce of a bike ride like?” “Long and frustrating and tiring. And it feels like heartburn.” “You girls are nuts,” I said as I pulled into a parking space. “You’re nuts, Josh!” Delaney yelled from the back seat as she hurried to get her seatbelt off. No one said anything but I could tell that as far as these two women were concerned that was the final word. I was clearly the crazy one. Once inside the store, Delaney immediately raised her arms so I could lift her into the cart. This was why she liked to go to the grocery store with us. Actually, Anna wasn’t even babysitting her that night. She seldom did anymore but since Anna’s mom tutored Delaney after school we’d often pick her up for an hour or so. I lifted her into the cart and tore off down the meat and cheese isle. “Don’t get in trouble!” Anna yelled as I released the cart letting it soar down the polished linoleum floors and slam into the cheese cooler. Delaney giggled like a crazy lady. “Do it again! Do it again!” I pushed her in the opposite direction and let her bump into a display for lemon salt. She screamed with pleasure. “That’s enough for now,” Anna grunted straining to bend over her big belly and pick up the fallen salt. She always acted embarrassed when I did this kind of stuff but I knew that she couldn’t wait to see me push our daughter into a seasoning display. I couldn’t wait either. “Again!” Delaney squealed. I pushed her over to the meat cooler and shoveled nine or ten large, wrapped pork loins into the cart on top of her. “Here’s some pork.” Delaney laughed and began to enact a play about a little girl and a bunch of crocodiles. Anna and I watched her in amazement. “When’s the last time you were content to play with a raw pork loin?” I asked. “Its been too long,” Anna admitted. “Ahh to be a child again.” I stared off into space dreamily. “To find a sense of wonderment in pork. To eschew the establishment, grab life by the loin or the shank and live it to the…” “Okay,” Anna stopped me. “It stopped being funny when you used the word eschew. Let’s get what we need,” she said and we left the meat isle.” As our passenger improvised her pork loin opus, we shopped and discussed the last chapter. “I’ve got to mention something right off the bat. You need to change the names. I’m really having a hard time getting wrapped up in the story of Burt and Mayling. Its like I’m trying to sympathize with a dog and a withered, old subsistence farmer. I just don’t buy it. No one is named Burt and the chances of someone named Burt happening upon a girl named Mayling…its just too ridiculous.” She grabbed a box of Cheerios. I pushed the cart with my head down, stepping in the center of each linoleum floor tile and grinding my teeth. “See, I agree with you but I also kind of like it that way. It kind of distances the reader form the story. Reminds them that this is my work and I’m struggling to pull them in. I like that tension. Its supposed to be, um,” I knew she wouldn’t like what I was about to say and I cringed as I admitted it, “Its supposed to be didactic. You know, like Brecht.” Anna handed the cereal to Delaney who used it as a stage on which the pork loins played out their drama. Grabbing a bag of generic cornflakes from a lower shelf, she opened it, shoved a handful into her mouth and crunched while she spoke. “Okay, pants. First of all, I don’t know. You know I don’t. I didn’t study all that stuff. But that’s not the point. The thing is, no one is going to read it that way. It’s just gonna seem like weird names. I think you forget that you’ve taken a lot of time to mull this stuff over. You’ve thought it all out. The reader’ll be like on the treadmill or in the bath. I seriously doubt they’re going to be sweating on the elliptical and go, “Burt? Mayling? Wow! This seems really Dimmatic!” or whatever. But it’s not even that important. Keep the names. I don’t even care about the names. How much milk do we have at home?” “Get a gallon. You’ll drink it. I’m not sure you’re following me on this. I’m not trying to say that people will read this and say, “Wow! How didactic!” I just thought that since I’m using the experience of writing this book to frame the story, it was a relevant idea to think about. It’s a feeling, not some rigid, literary convention. We need olive oil.” “Like I said, keep the names. Let’s move on.” I knew she was right and what’s more I was faced with a theoretical conundrum. It’s a part of my personality, I guess. I’ve never been able to tell if certain things I think or do are intentional and meaningful or if I simply justify choices I’ve made with a bunch of meaningless dogma. In this case, I’d become attached to the idea of didacticism. I’d even pulled out some old notes from college and brushed up on the concept. While I possessed a lay understanding at best of Brecht’s conventions, I’d decided that my book would definitely employ its principals. The story would mirror my own process as a writer. I wanted to create a work of fiction in which the reader was distanced from the emotions of the characters to the extent that they’d always remained focused on the feelings of the author. I wanted a kind of symbolic memoir. But here’s the confusing part: Maybe this wasn’t some snobby literary gesture at all. Maybe I decided on silly character names because I couldn’t think of anything else – because I’m not an experienced writer. I just made a poor choice and rather than admit to it, I invented some lofty purpose for the silly names. I realized that I seldom made progressive change in my life because of this tendency. When I was too scared to head down a new road, I could always create some paradigm of belief that justified the road on which I’d been stumbling. I stared at the gleam of the fluorescent lights on the grocery store floor and I felt lost. Should I change the names or do they work for the reasons I’d outlined? Was this whole idea about rationalizing choices by inventing lofty theories simply another meaningless rationale? Maybe I simply lacked faith in the choices I made. I couldn’t figure out if I believed what I was thinking or if I was both full of shit and dumb enough to believe my own shit. So much shit. Was I just going in circles? Did I question myself too much? As I began to hyperventilate I was saved from my own head by something cold and clammy flopping onto my sandaled foot. Delaney had bored of the pork and began to lob the eraser-colored, flaccid loins out of the cart one by one. “Stop it, Delaney. You know that’s not ok,” Anna scolded grabbing a hunk of meat from her tiny hand before she hurled it out to join its fellow actors. Liberated from my dead-end obsessions, I thanked Delaney for having saved me. “No! She’s right. This way if we get lost, we can follow the pork loins back to the cookie isle,” I yelled and took the loin from Anna, double-handing it in a high arch over my head. It landed with a splat somewhere behind us. Delaney screamed and shoveled three more out of the cart and on to the floor. “Do you see what you do?” Anna picked up the rest of the loins in her arms and flung them at me. “Pick up all this disgusting meat, take it back to wherever you got it and meet us in produce.” She began to push the cart away then thought twice about it and turned back to me. “FIND us in produce. No more meat.” Damn. Foiled again. After the warm tenderloins had been returned to their home, I found the girls in produce. Choosing a check-out line was always a tedious chore for my wife and I. Besides the usual considerations, we had to concern ourselves with which bagboy would pack our groceries. Our local grocery apparently had a policy of hiring the disabled. We were never sure what the quota was, but it seemed that one out of every maybe five bag boys would in some way be referred to as “special.” We had no problem with this policy in theory, as long as we didn’t get Billy. We new his name because we heard the other employees order him around. “Billy, could you go collect shopping carts. Billy, Sharon needs help on aisle 4. Billy, please don’t eat that.” He did a fine job with the bagging, I suppose. There are some basic tenants of grocery bagging and Billy seemed to have a pretty strong grasp of them. He didn’t pack fragile items with heavy cans, the bags weren’t over packed, and he seldom left anything out. However, he had one bad habit. If he’d only done this once we’d have overlooked it, but Billy performed this disgusting ritual every time he touched our food. Billy was an ear digger. He stuck his finger deep in his ear canal as he molested our fruits and vegetables. And he wasn’t discreet about it either. This was the most conspicuous ear gouging I have ever seen. He’d extend his index finger and raised it skyward, as if he were holding a starter pistol and about to begin a marathon. Then he’d pull his forearm back toward his head in a wide, measured arch. Leaving his elbow extended, he’d plunge the tip of his finger a good quarter inch into his ear and rotate it not with his wrist, but with his entire forearm. It was exaggerated even for a lone driver who doesn’t know you’re watching. This ritualized aural cleansing usually culminated when Billy would hold the tip of his fingers up to his thick glasses and examine the fruits of his labors. Then he’d handle the things I’d planned on putting in my mouth. I told Anna that if it happened that time I was going to complain. She has a gentle, forgiving soul, my wife. Plus, she used to work with autistic children at a day care center and was used to this kind of socially aberrant behavior. “Hey, lighten up. I used to work with this kid Alex. Every day, he’d remove his penis from his pants and do something weird with it. Like, once he scotch taped it to the wall, he covered it in wet paper towels, colored it black with magic markers. I even caught him trying to stick it in an electrical outlet. When I sat him down to explain why this was wrong he looked at me with a completely straight face and said, ‘I just like to play with my penis, okay? It doesn’t have to mean anything and it doesn’t have to be wrong.’ Remember, this kid was eight years old at the time. I tried to think of the appropriate response, but all I could say was ‘Hey. You’re right, Alex.’ Of course he needed to learn that playing with his penis is a private thing and outlets are dangerous and all that, but the fact is I was really the one in the wrong. You shouldn’t be so uptight, honey,” she put her hand on my shoulder. “Its okay to play with your penis.” “What the fuck kind of moral is that?” I laughed. “ I know its okay to play with my penis. I play with my penis all the time. I’ve never tried to stick it in an electrical outlet but, hey, my penis is one of my favorite toys. What does that have to do with this kid’s ear waste getting all over my pears?’ Delaney laughed and looked up at us from the shopping cart. “Its okay to play with my penis!” she cheered. Oops. She repeated this phrase over and over, sometimes laughing, sometimes singing, all the way through the checkout line. Fortunately, we didn’t get Billy but with all the people staring at the seven-year-old girl singing loudly about her penis in our cart, I’m sure we would not have noticed if we had. Back in the car, after Anna had convinced Delaney that, while there was nothing wrong with the word penis, it was rude to repeat it over and over in public, she returned her attention to my apparent intolerance. “You know,” she started off sheepishly, “for a guy who’s had a tick most of his life and daydreams about how much more everyone would respect him if he got eaten by lions, you shouldn’t be so hard on people.” I speed up, as is my tendency when driving and angry, then remembered Delaney was in the back seat and slowed down. I bit down hard and in a slow, measured voice, through grinding teeth, I said, “I do not do that anymore. And I do not have a tick. God, I write one personal idiosyncrasy into the story and you just can’t leave me alone about it. I know you said it was vivid but I’m sure you were just trying to make me feel better so I’ll take it out, okay? It’s gone. You happy?” “You see, a lot of people would judge you for being such a baby. You ask for my opinion on your writing and then you punish me for expressing it. If you just wanted me to praise every word, you should have let me know beforehand. In the future I’ll just say it’s very, very good, okay? Being that I have to restrict my opinion for fear that you’ll fly off the handle out of nowhere, maybe you could do me the favor of taking it easy on the autistic, fifteen-year-old bag boy. At least when I’m around.” Anna looked at me with her eyes big and watery and shook her head. “Delaney, you want to go to the park before we bring you back to Donna’s?” Delaney cheered but I wasn’t listening. I was really pissed that her eyes had welled up. She’d upset me. Sure, I raised my voice, and I shouldn’t have, but I’m the one who got my feelings hurt. I stewed until we got home. After Anna and Delaney left for the park I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my reflection. I stuck my finger in my ear and rotated it slowly. Never having been too big on jamming my finger in my ear, I couldn’t see what the attraction was. I was always more of a down my pants kind of guy. Maybe I was too judgmental. Who the fuck was I to think anything about anyone, much less to write it down? This whole thing, this whole project, this book thing was arrogant and stupid; another waste of time. I ran myself a hot bath and sat on the edge of the tub feeling sorry for myself. Since I’d stopped working, I took a lot of baths. As a matter of fact, I’d developed a theory about the socialization of gender roles since I’d lost my job. I theorized that most of the traits we think of as feminine or womanly were actually a direct result, not of estrogen or anything else distinctly feminine, but rather the inescapable influence of being at home with nothing to do. Therefore, masculinity, testosterone, aggression and all the bullshit associated with machismo, were regulated not by genetics but by social standing, position, hierarchy. My own behavior I held as proof. My pregnant wife worked all day at a law firm while I stayed home on unemployment. I lay on the couch eating chocolate and watching Oprah, took long, hot baths while reading my wife’s sad novels, I looked at myself in the mirror and obsessed on my weight, and I cried like a baby at every opportunity. I had become a woman. I thought I might open a clinic that provided social rehabilitation for men who’d undergone sex change operations. Surely there was a market and with my newfound insight I was confident I could make a mint. Then came the inevitable realization that once my business got off its feet and I became submersed in the daily grind of making my fortune, I’d lose the stagnancy, which had given me my womanly edge and subsequently the acumen that made my clinic the best. A real Catch 22. I admit that the pun Snatch 22 did enter my mind, but at the time I felt I was too emotionally evolved to give it voice. Eventually, I remembered that most women have a shit-load to do during the day and that my behavior was not necessarily effeminate but rather my own, personal way of wasting life and pitying myself. But at the time, I was convinced that if I could summons the energy to get up out of the bath and write all this stuff down, the Pulitzer was mine. As I never had the energy to do so, it took me a while to figure out how flawed my genius had been. I splashed hot water on the wall of the tub so the porcelain wouldn’t be too cold on my back and lowered myself into the steaming bath. I hadn’t bothered rinsing the tub out and the water had specks of stuff floating around in it. I took my penis in my hand and made it sort of dance around a little. “I just like to play with my penis, okay? Maybe I should stick with what I am good at,” I said out loud and watched a black speck of something float past my legs toward deeper waters. I sighed deeply and closed my eyes. Raising my hands up to my face, slowly and deliberately I plugged my nose with my thumbs, one nostril with the right thumb and one with the left thumb. I pivoted my palms toward my face and reached around my sweaty, husky cheeks with my index fingers, with which I plugged my ears. Thus prepared, I slid my body forward in the tub, submerging my head in the hot mater. Since the tub wasn’t long enough for my outstretched body I had to point my legs straight up along the front wall of the tub, straddling the faucet. I’m sure I looked ridiculous but the position allowed my some distance from reality. I was in my own space where nothing could get to me. So there I lay, my hands wrapped around my submerged head, my legs sticking straight up out the water, trying to put my anxiety into words. I felt I felt lost, alone, afraid. I felt doubt. A lot of doubt. A macaroni of doubt.
Copyright © 2005 Sean Joathan |