A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  OPENING NEGOTIATIONS WITH A DADDY WHEN HE FINDS YOU WASHED ASHORE AND PARTIALLY DROWNED BECAUSE YOUR RAFT GOT SUCKED UNDER A BARGE WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

  This is an impossibility. Best you can do is cry like the child you are and prepare to be hauled off to a middle-of-nowhere jailhouse.

  OPERATIC FALSETTO

  A high-pitched, ear-piercing singing voice that is shouted with great intensity and emotion, traditionally from the stage, traditionally during an opera, but not always. You may come into contact with an operatic falsetto in other situations, and these situations can be terrifying. The worst part is that you never know if somebody is capable of the operatic falsetto just by looking at them. If the operatic falsetto belonged exclusively to very short men with very large chests, for example, you could be on your guard around these men. There is almost no way of being prepared for the moment when a man cuts loose with his operatic falsetto. The one way you can tell that your company possesses an operatic falsetto and intends to use it is the following: when the radio starts playing opera he turns it up as high as it will go, closes his eyes, and begins to sway in his seat. If you see this, prepare yourself for the falsetto. If he then lifts a finger in the air and begins conducting, get the hell out of there as fast as you can. If you’re confined to the back seat of a police cruiser and he’s the sheriff in the front seat driving you God-knows-where through the night, and if he stops his car to turn up the opera and unleash his falsetto, you will very badly want to plug your ears but you must not. Whatever you do don’t plug your ears because it’s most important of all, when dealing with Daddies in the wilderness, that you not offend them. Bad things have happened to orphans who have. Just look at the missing-person fliers on the corkboard outside your local supermarket. Odds are that some of those missing orphans offended a certain operatic falsettic sheriff who once picked them up where they’d washed up on the banks of a river.

  OCCUPANTS OF HOLDING AREAS IN RURAL JAILS

  If you are caught by an authority figure who was called by a couple of catfishermen who found you hacking up river water on the banks after your raft got sucked beneath a coal barge, he will put you in his cop car and take you wherever he wants. If you’ve got no identification or money or worthwhile possessions on you and look more pathetic than threatening, he will take you to a “holding area” while he tries to figure out what to do with you. In the holding area is a TV in a cage high up on the wall, three stained couches, two La-Z-Boy chairs that are bolted to the ground, a pink plastic card table with four plastic chairs, a deck with forty-nine cards, some reference handouts for drug addicts and some for people who want to be religious, a toilet with no stall around it, and a collection of Hardy Boys mysteries in paperback. You will not be alone in the holding area. The holding area will contain neighbors who, at first, are not happy to see you. Occupants of holding cells will vary from jail to jail, and they will represent the poorest people in that jail’s general area. For instance, if you’re taken to a jail in what turns out to be rural Louisiana, your neighbors will be a young diesel mechanic named Big-T who talks too fast and whose accent is too thick for you to understand, and a quiet, pudgy guy with a ponytail who reeks of alcohol and has skin like paste, whose balding head, above the ponytail, flakes like wax, and who has an enormous tattoo of a Betta Fish on his neck. The neighbors of your holding area will be glued to the television, which, in its iron cage, is broadcasting reruns of the TV show COPS. If you interrupt him as he’s trying to watch COPS to ask about the Betta Fish on his neck, an occupant of a holding area in a rural jail cell will say, in a way that actually sounds friendly, that he’ll tell you what the Betta Fish means if you let him give you a black eye, and then you’ll have to decide if it’s worth it.

  PORKING

  If when you come home early you walk in on your fiancée and a man you don’t know having sex in the kitchen of your house, you’ve found them porking. If you come home and find that a stranger is porking your fiancée in the kitchen of your house you’ll become angry (see MORTAL BETRAYAL) and lose control of yourself (see OVERBOARD, GOING). Most often the porker will run off into the woods after you hit him with a chair and tell him to get out, and, an hour after, you and your fiancée will be trying to get back on good terms again. If the porker is a lawyer, on the other hand, and you hit him with a chair and he runs off into the woods, just as you and your fiancée are making up the sheriff will show up and take you to the holding area. Once you’re there, you’ll want to make yourself feel better about the whole episode by telling the strangers who are in the holding area with you all about what happened.

  PEACEFUL NEUTRALITY

  If you’re new to a holding area, chances are you won’t be receiving a warm welcome from your new neighbors. Over time, if you’re polite (see GOOD MANNERS, THE IMPORTANCE OF), your neighbors may seem to get used to your presence. Once this period of adjustment has passed, you’ll be asked to take sides. The occasion of your choosing a side will involve a conflict among your neighbors in the holding cell. If, say, one guy wants to switch the channel because he’s been watching nothing but COPS reruns for days and, say, the other guy would rather watch COPS than the only other available channel, which is showing vintage LOONEY TUNES, and, he says, “Elmer Fudd ain’t funny,” you may be asked to cast a tie-breaking vote. It is important that you not voice an opinion, even if you have one, since voicing an opinion will make a friend of one of the men but a mortal enemy of the other and, in this case, subscribing to one team and not to the other will officially make you part of whatever game or competition or conflict that may arise in the rest of your time in the holding cell.

  PISSING YOUR PANTS

  This is a phrase that is used to describe a state of extreme fear. Let’s say you’re sharing a holding area with two men who are much larger than you, whose speech you find hard to understand, and whose violent outbursts come mostly at random. These are men you’ve just met, whom you know nothing about, who’ve committed any number of strange, elaborate, twisted crimes in recent nights before eventually winding up locked in here, with you. They wind up here so often that it’s like a living room for them. They know how to fix the broken television so it works and they know which of the tables isn’t bolted to the floor of the holding area and they’ve even hidden cigarettes in a BIBLE with a hollow place in it that’s one of the only books on the little shelf. Let’s say that the appearance of Elmer Fudd on a television screen in that holding area causes a man with waxy skin and a tattoo on his neck to beat another man in the holding area with a plastic card table. Let’s say you abandon peaceful neutrality to intervene in the conflict and are subsequently threatened with the plastic table. You might, at that point, be pissing your pants.

  PATROLS AT NIGHT

  The job of someone who patrols at night is to keep an eye on a place between dusk and dawn, when people should be sleeping and nothing should require attention but when most evil things usually happen. The night patrol checks to see that all the locks are still locked, that the drips dripping from the air conditioners haven’t overfilled the cups that catch them. He checks to see that the vending machine is stocked, that all the pencils in a cup on the lieutenant’s desk are sharp. At any moment in the night, he might be called out to a blood-covered living room in a nearby trailer and asked to make photographs of dead people. He walks past the holding room and looks inside. He’s supposed to do this every couple of hours. The night patrol must be cool-headed but firm and, in principle, he must uphold the rules of the institution he patrols. Between patrols, he can be found reading a book or listening to the radio at a desk down the hall from the holding area. If he’s like the night patrol at the jail whose holding area you’ve occupied for thirty-six hours after having washed ashore on the banks of a river, who finds you huddled in a corner of the holding area during the course of his patrol, he’ll take you from that holding area, give you a soda and a candy bar from the vending machine, and ask you to tell him your story. If you tell your st
ory right he’ll make some notes on some papers, lean in to show he’s listening, and once you’re done telling your story he’ll tell you his. It’ll be late and you’ll be exhausted and it might be boring to hear him talk about his job but you must try to stay awake. It’s bad manners to fall asleep when people are talking to you. When he’s done talking he’ll let you take a shower in the employee locker room and then, just before dawn, he’ll give you a ride to the nearest bus station where he’ll instruct you to wait for the afternoon bus going north. In the idling car he’ll hand you a little garbage bag in which you’ll find another garbage bag—the one you thought you’d lost in the shipwreck—and inside that bag you’ll find your papers, the photograph of your dad, and the arrowhead you picked up on the island upriver. He’ll apologize on behalf of the operatic falsettic sheriff and he’ll thank you for listening to him talk for a while, and then he’ll leave. You often find lonely people in the most unlikely places.

  PODUNK TOWN

  On the surface, in the eyes of a visitor, a Podunk Town has no distinguishing characteristics. In reality, every Podunk Town has its own set of laws, rules, guidelines, and specialized terms. Nearly all Podunk Towns have a dollar store, a McDonald’s, a car repair shop, a religious antique store, a bus stop, and a gas station. In most Podunk Towns, one or two people will be sitting up against a dumpster in the gas-station parking lot drinking beer from forty-ounce glass bottles. The sidewalks of a Podunk Town are mostly empty. Cars can be seen idling in the dollar-store parking lot and in lines at the drive-thru. Killing time in a Podunk Town can be a chore if all you have is a few dollars and a bus ticket. The first thing to do is check the dollar-store dumpster for stationery supplies and expired snacks. Avoid the locals as you do this. If the Podunk Town you’re in is the home of the sheriff who has recently arrested you on unfounded charges of trespassing, theft, and conspiracy to burglarize, be especially careful not to attract attention to yourself. Scan the ground for dropped money or bills that have been sucked by wind from cars idling at the drive-thru. The bushes around drive-thrus often contain bills in their thorns. If, when you check the bushes, you find ten bucks, and you’re bored and depressed because your raft was sucked beneath a barge, it’s a good idea to approach the two men by the dumpster with your money and have them buy you one of those big beers. Maybe one of them is in Real Estate. You must hope that neither of these men is a Daddy.

  Be careful that they give you enough change when they give you your bottle of beer, but don’t count it in front of them because it’s rude to act like they’re not trustworthy, and then tip them a dollar for their efforts. When they ask you where you’re going, say Paducah, unless of course you are actually going to Paducah, in which case tell them Poughkeepsie. If you’re lucky, whatever Podunk Town you get stuck in will also be near a river and a bridge or at least a culvert where you can go to get out of the sun for a while.

  PHILOSOPHY OF NIHILISM

  Nihilism is the idea that nothing you do matters, that no belief you have will improve your life or the lives of those around you. Nihilism is a perfectly logical response to an overwhelming and confusing world. Butch, the waxy man with a tattoo on his neck in the holding area, was a good example of a nihilist. The only time he seemed to care about anything was when Elmer Fudd came on TV, and that was because something was seriously wrong inside of his head. In fact, the back of Butch’s skull had a square scar, which had to be from where a doctor took part of his brain out. Butch was a guy who didn’t seem to want to be in his own brain any longer than he had to. The night patrol, unlike Butch, believed there was a right and a wrong way to live in this world, and he believed it was wrong to keep me locked up in the holding area. I hadn’t hurt anyone, and still there I was about to be beaten with a plastic card table by a man I’d never met before. If you’re saved from a bad situation by someone who is not a nihilist, like the night patrol, that doesn’t mean you won’t do something nihilist yourself. Let’s say you’re alone at a bus stop in a Podunk Town along a river in the middle of nowhere. Let’s say you’re feeling leery of strangers, and your stomach is growling, and that it’s an hour before your bus leaves. Let’s say your sole concern becomes getting some food in your stomach, and let’s say there’s a man selling hot dogs off hot metal rollers in the corner of the bus station. If you believe it is wrong to steal because stealing hurts other people, you will not steal hot dogs from the hot-dog man. On the other hand, if you see the universe as a chaotic soup in which you’re slowly being boiled, and you’ve been shown, time and time again, that no matter how you act, things will come along and change your life in ways over which you have no control, you will.

  PURPOSE

  Related to EXPECTATION, purpose is a feeling that one thing is related to another by being the cause of it, the reason for the second thing. We need an example: THE PURPOSE OF THE BAT IS TO HIT THE BASEBALL. See how we expect there to be nothing that comes along before a baseball that the bat needs to hit? Still, almost no one would argue with the statement THE PURPOSE OF THE BAT IS TO HIT THE BASEBALL. Human beings spend a lot of time and energy trying to understand the behavior of one another. A boy convinces himself he has understood why someone is doing something by coming up with a reason why that person is doing that thing—a purpose for that person’s action. Why is a man climbing that tree with a bugle in his belt? Because he wants to play the bugle from a tree limb. There’s his purpose.

  QUANTIFIABLE

  Numbers are comforting. Anything you can put a number to is a quantifiable thing. A river is not a quantifiable thing, but the gallons of water flowing through a culvert each minute can be counted, made into a numerical quantity, which means QUANTIFIED. You don’t actually have to count something for that thing to be quantifiable, you just have to know that you could count it if you wanted to. Whether or not animals quantify anything is a mystery, but there must come a point in time when a squirrel stops squirreling his nuts—a point in time where he judges he’s got enough. Does that mean he has quantified his nuts, or could he just have looked at his nut pile and thought “Big enough.” The question of whether or not animals quantify things is probably impossible to answer. An eagle would, you would hope, notice a chick is missing if when she left the nest there were three chicks and when she returned there were two. You would hope. You assume the gypsy knows what he’s doing when he looks at your car, pockmarked all over by hail, and says “I see around seventy-seven dents,” which is quantifying your problem. Numbers are supposed to establish certainty, but they don’t always. The photograph by Howard Tyce, torn from the library book by El Hondero and stolen from me by the river, was published long before I launched my little raft, but not long after he’d left me with my uncle. The photograph was taken some quantity of time before it came out in the book, let’s say a few months, and round up, so let’s say ten years before I got on the river the photograph was taken, and so ten years plus three weeks, give or take a few days, before I arrived, unknowingly, in the place where the photograph was taken. Do these quantities help? How could they? I don’t have an idea how many hot dogs I have stolen over the years. Maybe knowing the total number would be comforting. If you’re trying to kill time, let’s say you’re feeling lonely and confused, try quantifying something. Take for instance the squabs perched on the power line outside the dollar store. There are exactly twelve of them. When a new squab flies up and perches, one of the old squabs drops from the line and flies away, and so it’s still twelve squabs. When three squabs fly up and land on the line together, no original squabs leave, though one seems like he’s about to and then doesn’t, and so the number of squabs is now fifteen. The population of squabs on the power line outside the dollar store somehow becomes important once you’ve quantified it. Nobody can tell you why the squabs have become important—it’s probably just that numbers are comforting the same way lists and definitions are comforting, the same way a campfire (see CAMPFIRE) in the night is comforting. The number of times I’ve quantified things
like squabs on a line in order to feel the comfort of a number? Countless times. The method works for a moment, but then everything that’s not quantifiable surges like water through a culvert after a storm.

  QUESTIONABLE

  If something is questionable it means it might not work, or that you don’t believe it’s true. The purpose of the word QUESTIONABLE is itself questionable. “Those monkey bars are questionable,” people said, for instance, about the old wooden monkey bars in the overgrown yard behind the Wilson Carmichael Bunkhouse. When a fat boy tried the monkey bars, he quantified the maximum weight the rotting rungs could hold to be the weight of one fat boy. He made it down the bars with no trouble. When a skinny boy went next, the fifth rung broke in his left hand as he swung toward the sixth rung, his right arm outstretched, and so the quantity had changed. The maximum load of the remaining monkey bars became questionable again. Everything can be questionable. A nihilist no longer questions anything because no answer has ever really helped him. To a nihilist, the world is soup, and counting squabs is useful only if he’s wondering about dinner. I remember there were nights in my uncle’s mansion when I questioned if my body would work without the help of my mind. I worried that I’d forget to breathe and die in the night, and I wouldn’t fall asleep until he sat there with me and held my hand in the dark.