by Elliot Reed
GYPSY PARACHUTE HOUSE
If you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself in the vicinity of people living in a house made of an old parachute, do yourself a favor and ask them if you can go inside. When the sun is shining through the fabric, being inside of a parachute house feels like you’re in the middle of a bowl of jelly beans. When it’s storming outside, being in a parachute house is like being inside the body of a living thing. In my experience, the owners of parachute houses are gypsies, though there are almost certainly owners from all kinds of backgrounds. As for the gypsies, they always knew how to anchor the parachute securely in the ground using whittled-down wooden stakes and sewn-in grommets, so I was never scared, no matter how intense the storm. I remember one time being inside the parachute house right as a big storm was picking up. There were four gypsies playing music and singing. The parachute fabric was bouncing around us like an amoeba, and when it brushed up against our skin it got us wet. Then a piece of hail the size of a popcorn kernel punched a hole in the parachute and landed at my feet. One of the gypsies put down his flute, picked up the hailstone, and danced around with it pinched in his fingers, laughing as he danced. For gypsies, hail can be good luck, especially if it comes inside a parachute house.
GROATS
Cereal grains, kind of like oatmeal, that have been served to horses and which the horses have turned down. Some health-food stores package and sell the refused grains. Isabella ate a lot of groats one summer before she met the astronaut. She said she’d fallen in love with one of the guys who was living in a Winnebago a few miles down the road. She said the groats were healthy and good for her, but I knew she was just trying to look good for the guy in the Winnebago. One morning at breakfast, my uncle said that the guy in the Winnebago was a gypsy and Isabella said that actually he’d come from Seattle. I laughed because I thought it was funny that coming from Seattle meant you couldn’t be a gypsy, but Isabella thought I was laughing at her so she got angry and threw a handful of groats.
GETTING IN CARS WITH STRANGERS
Of all the cautionary tales adults tell to children, the tale of the stranger’s invitation is the all-time strongest. Usually he drives a white van in the story. He comes up alongside you as you’re walking home alone and asks you if you need a ride. There are some variations. Sometimes the stranger is driving a beat-up station wagon and it’s a woman instead of a man. Sometimes the stranger is dangling a piece of candy out the window of the car and the stupid child decides to go for the bait. Sometimes the van rolls up, the stranger asks the question, and against your better judgment you get in the van. Let’s say you’re walking home from your tree fort one day in spring. Let’s say that you lost track of time on account of the fact that you were tricked into a wild goose chase by a passing child, and let’s say, for the sake of the story, that the passing child’s goose chase began as the fallacious claim that there would be a fistfight between two boys at the old dump on the far edge of the park, which ended with your going all the way there only to have the kid who led you there realize, at the last minute, that the fistfight was actually scheduled for tomorrow as opposed to today, and so you’re walking home much later than you normally would, so late that the last mile of your walk, at the rate you’re traveling, will be a walk in darkness. Let’s say that you’re looking at the sun and it’s only a hand’s breadth from the horizon, so you calculate it to be about an hour from dark, and you haven’t even passed the laundromat yet, which puts you at least ninety minutes from home, and you start to freak out. If you’d planned ahead, you would have brought a knife, but as it is you might as well be walking naked through a chicken hawk’s den. And let’s say that’s when the van rolls up alongside you—in that moment when you’re most desperate—and let’s say that the van is being driven by one of the hillbilly neighbors you’ve seen burning tires outside the trailer visible from your uncle’s mansion. The hillbilly’s wearing sunglasses, though it’s crepuscular, and you glimpse, through a window in the side of the van, that there’s a person back there, but all you can see is a shadow. You feel like you’ve seen the driver before, but you don’t know where. The driver offers you a ride. What do you do? If you refuse the ride, you risk making this person an enemy, and you risk hurting his feelings. But still—there’s a chance that it’s a trick, that he won’t drive that van back to your neighborhood and will end up taking you somewhere else, someplace terrible and unknown to you, someplace where there are people who want to chain you up and slowly cut off your arms and legs. But let’s say you think about walking home by yourself, unarmed, in the dark, the predators watching you from the trees, and then you decide to chance the ride with the hillbillies—you open the van door and get in, and before you even have time to put on your seat belt the van is racing down the road doing fifty in a thirty. The van smells like a bathroom, and you look behind you and see not one but three people back there, in the darkness, holding large glass bottles. One of them is Carla the cleaning lady, and she’s French-kissing the guy next to her. The driver grins at you, saying nothing, showing off the gold in his teeth, and turns up the heavy metal that’s coming from the static on the radio. At this point you are regretting your decision, and you come to regret your decision even more when the van sails past your uncle’s driveway. You would, at this point, ask to be let out of the van. You would politely tell the driver, who has just driven past your uncle’s driveway, that you’d really like to be let out of the van please. You would want to cry. Then the driver says something unintelligible to the people in the back and they start laughing—you’d be saying your prayers then—if, however, the driver tells you not to worry, that he knows your uncle and that the two of them go way back, and that your uncle would want you to be along for the ride, and Carla passes you a bottle and you drink from it, you might begin to feel a little better. You drink the warm, flat beer and it’s like a skunk peed in your mouth and the driver laughs at how you looked as you drank it and his laughter would make you mad, mad enough to where you chug the hot skunk-pee, you let it drip down your shirt, and the driver stops laughing. He turns up the heavy metal. You shut your eyes and try not to puke. The van turns off the main road and goes bouncing down a dirt track, falling into and out of foot-deep potholes. You’re preparing yourself for death when, all of a sudden, the dirt road becomes a circular, dirt-filled field, a clearing surrounded by tall trees, and the driver of the van stomps the pedal to the floor. The stomping of the pedal to the floor forces you back into your seat and the passengers behind you to hoot like ghouls in a haunted house. The driver is cackling and you, you’re screaming louder than you’ve ever screamed before, but the urge to flee has left you completely. You grip the seat beneath you as the driver wrenches the steering wheel to the left and the van goes sliding sideways toward the tree line at the far edge of the circular clearing. You are, at this point, peeing your pants, or maybe it’s beer spilling from Carla’s bottle. She’s leaning up from the back and yelling something at the driver and you can’t tell if it’s happy or mad, and you wonder if you’ve become the victim of a collective suicide but then, at the last moment, the van gracefully curves its rear around so the front points toward the center of the mud pit as the whole van slides sideways around the center. Mud is slapping against the windows in brown, wet sheets as the van slides. The sun is almost down and the van slides seven, eight more times around the center. The donuts end too soon and you beg the driver for more. He says that enough is enough, and that it’s time to go home. He takes off his sunglasses and you see that his is a kind but somehow sad, run-down sort of a face. He drives you home, where your uncle takes one look at the van and lets you inside without a question.
GOLD IN THE MOUTH
Gold doesn’t flake, or crumble, or make a mark on paper. It just sits, coloring the light. Once it’s out of the ground, people want their gold to be kept safe from thieves in a bank or in their mouth. Gold is also found in jewelry, coins, and the tip of my uncle’s pen. Gold attracts gold. When the
bandits came for Alberta Otter, they were looking for gold, and it was most likely dangling from their wrists as they knocked her door down. Gold makes a unique sound when tapped with other gold. I could hear, from my bedroom, when my uncle was working on a crossword puzzle in his chair in the living room. He’d tap the gold tip of his pen against his one golden molar when he was thinking hard about a word. Sunlight turns golden on the leaves of certain trees, at certain times of day, when all the dust floating around in your treehouse is visible. Once, when Isabella and the astronaut came to the mansion for lunch, we all went swimming off the dock. Isabella took off her golden engagement ring, put it on the wood of the dock, and jumped in the water. Then my uncle went in, and finally the astronaut. It was hot. The clouds looked like huge popcorn. Isabella’s ring was sitting there on the dock, gleaming. I put the ring in my mouth and held it there for a long time, past when they all started looking for it. The astronaut was diving, kept coming up gasping, and Isabella saw me giggling with my mouth closed. That’s how she guessed it.
GOOD MANNERS, THE IMPORTANCE OF
You could say that the first humans knew it was bad manners to poop in the middle of the trail, right where people had to walk. There’s no doubt that good manners exist in the animal kingdom as well, and probably always have. A well-mannered dog, for example, won’t eat from another dog’s food bowl. If you find that you’re about to do something that’s bad manners, you’ll feel a weird sickness in your stomach. If you feel like you’re about to have bad manners, try a thought exercise and see if it doesn’t help you shake off the urge. Here’s an example of a thought exercise that might help you: It’s Easter. Three kids are running across a lawn in pursuit of eggs and jelly beans, holding baskets full of what they’ve already found. They’re running because they’ve realized that one of the places they forgot to check for loot is at the base of the old dead tree by the pond. The three children are running side by side. One of the kids trips on a root and falls, spilling her basket across a patch of mud and spitting from her mouth a few half-chewed beans when her body hits the ground. The well-mannered kid will stop running, help the fallen girl to her feet, and give her half of his jelly beans. That tripping root could have appeared before the foot of any of the children, and it’s not fair that she should be left with no jelly beans because it was she who tripped. The well-mannered thing to do is to share the jelly beans with the fallen girl. Bad manners would be to laugh and run ahead to the rotten tree, snatch the eggs hidden in its claw-like roots, and keep them all for yourself.
HAIL DAMAGE
One of the number-one gypsy hustles is traveling to areas that have been hailed on and repairing hail damage. In the spring, after it hails, expect to see gypsies. Expect to see them come in with signs advertising the dangers of hail damage: WHAT STARTS AS A NICK IN YOUR WINDSHIELD CAN BECOME A SPIDERWEB CRACK AND SHATTER WITHOUT WARNING. LUCKY FOR YOU, EVEN THE MOST EXTENSIVE HAIL DAMAGE CAN BE REPAIRED IN JUST A FEW MINUTES BY A TECHNICIAN WITH THE PROPER SPECIALIZED EQUIPMENT. Or: DON’T SHOW UP TO A BUSINESS MEETING DRIVING A CAR THAT HAS BEEN PUMMELED BY HAIL. YOU WILL APPEAR DESPERATE! DON’T DRIVE TO THE BODY SHOP AND BE OVERCHARGED FOR A JOB BY SOMEONE WHO ISN’T A SPECIALIST. He will repair your first dent for free, just because he’s being nice, and has good manners. If you like how he fixed the first dent, though, it’s bad manners not to have him do the rest of the dents. Find a gypsy near you, if he hasn’t already found you, and ask him about hail-damage dent repair and glass filling. Nobody’s better at repairing hail damage than a gypsy who has followed the severe weather with his family and tools in tow.
HAVE A BLOWOUT
A flat tire is a type of blowout. So is a huge party, like a cookout but with more people in attendance. A child of the word BLOWOUT is the term BLOWN-OUT, which is used to talk about a whole variety of things but ultimately is a way of describing your opinion about something. “Look at that. That place is totally blown-out. I can’t believe they’re raising children in there,” said someone standing on the porch of his mansion as he pointed to a lonely double-wide trailer on a ridge, where four hillbillies could be seen throwing tires into a smoking campfire (see CAMPFIRE) and listening to country music on a boom box.
HEADSTONE
This can refer to a band some of my cousin Isabella’s friends were in, to a rock thrown at somebody’s head, or to the big gray slab they put in the ground over where a body is buried. The band Headstone was a three-piece hardcore group that practiced in my uncle’s basement one time. The music was loud and they were banging their heads as they played. When practice ended, one of the guitarists came upstairs and found me in the kitchen. He had a shaved, pimply head and wore a shirt that looked like it had come off a body in the morgue. I was looking at a map of the park that I’d made the day before, minding my own business, when he opened the fridge, stole one of my Cokes, and came over to the table. I remember his shirt, wet and warm with the pimple sweat, brushing up against my arm. Then I remember him saying, “I know you, young dude,” and I remember him pointing at me while he spoke. “Your mom was batshit, dude, and then your pops bailed out.” I remember wondering what he meant by telling me that my mom was made of bat shit. That was the last I saw or heard of the band Headstone. Headstones, however, you can still find anywhere. Headstones are a very specific kind of throwing rock in that they’re selected with the intention of being thrown at somebody’s head. You’ll know the stone you have is a headstone if when you pick it up you become blind with rage and your jaw clenches up and all you can think is where’s the head that this headstone is for and all you can do is go directly off and find it. The last kind of headstone, the kind you find in graveyards, makes you feel a lot differently when you touch it. When you die they bury you in the ground and then put the headstone over where your head is now, six feet down and in a coffin, and they carve your name into the stone so that when people come to look for you they know where to find you. If it’s a headstone belonging to somebody named WABASCH MANDICOT and you’re playing hide-and-seek in the graveyard with a couple kids from the neighborhood because the construction site has a fence around it and you’re crouching, winded, in the shade of the stone, winded from a run because Ned counted to ten way too fast, you’ll feel the warm stone and the sharp carvings of engraved words against your cheek, which will be pressed against that stone in an effort to stay unseen. In that case the headstone would be warm and comforting and would make you giggle if you looked at the name carved into it, WABASCH MANDICOT, and your giggling would blow your cover. If, however, your uncle brings you to that same graveyard one day, out of the blue, and takes you to a headstone with the name SUZY TYCE carved into it and below that LEFT US ALL, ALL ALONE, TOO SOON, and your uncle says, “Here she is, son,” though he is not actually your father, he’s your father’s brother, so you are not actually his son, your actual father is missing, perhaps he’s alive on the moon or in a different country, just for sure not here beside you—beside you is a headstone that means your mother is below you. This headstone will be cold and covered in some invisible grit kicked up by a hard rain and that’s basically how you’ll feel, too, when you touch the carved letters of your weird last name.
HOMICIDE
You have no part in the deal of your own death. The death of other living things, on the other hand, is a different matter. You can kill other living things. You can also kill yourself, but if you did that you would lose the opportunity to kill in the future. Killing is best done with sharpened sticks, headstones, knives, or guns. Knives and guns can be hard to come by, but if you have one knife, you have spears for life. There’s no feeling like the feeling you get when you’ve sharpened spears all day in your treehouse and then you look down at the pile of sharpened spears. It’s bad manners of the worst kind to kill innocent beasts of the woods and ponds, though many children are drawn to this type of killing. The only types of justifiable killings are self-defense and revenge killings. If a pack of four boys surrounds you as you make your way home
from a tree fort in the woods when no one else is around, and these boys pin you to the ground right on top of a rock that feels like it’s punching a hole in your back and then they rub leaves covered in dog shit on you, punch you ten times and run away, you’ll feel the need to kill one or more of these boys. The first thing you do when you pull yourself up off the ground is look around for any nearby headstones. You will be doing some quick archaeology. A good headstone will settle the score right there and then, and you won’t have to plan a revenge killing for later. Just wait for the group to split up, and use the headstones on the one who did you the worst. Aim for his eye. Your aim will be good because you have homicide on the mind. Get the others back, too, one by one, over time. In the movies they never go for the worst guy first, which works to your advantage in real life, because the worst guy will expect you to go for one of his minions before you go for him, but he will be wrong.
INCEST
Cousins, the children of your aunt or uncle, are sexually off-limits as far as modern middle- and upper-class Americans are concerned. I mention this only because of the times I’d be standing on the porch of my uncle’s mansion when he was having a cookout, and a bunch of adults would be milling around drinking beer and preparing fireworks when one of them would say, “Hey, look over there,” and point to the place on the horizon with the trailer and the black smoke curling into the sky, where people were loitering in the yard working on a car or chasing off a dog, and then the person who spoke would comment that “those people probably have sex with their cousins.” At times like this, if Isabella was around, I’d blush and run down to the basement.
