Gorilla and the Bird

by Zack McDermott

  I missed him, even though I consistently declined his invitations to hang out. He understood that I was in a dark place and didn’t take it personally, but I owed him a yes. So toward the beginning of spring, when he threw a party at his place, I bucked up and went.

  As soon as I got there, I realized I’d rather be home asleep. It was too loud and too many people were having too much fun. I wished I could upholster myself in black leather and become one with the couch. Up to that point, it’d been fairly easy to stay away from the reefer, but I was damn near contact high with all the smoke in the air. After an hour, my brain began to turn: Would one toke of the stuff really shoot me straight up the bean stalk? What was so good about being on the ground? Dr. Singh himself had said he wasn’t so sure it was the pot that had caused my psychosis. Best to abstain, yes. But it’s also best to eat food, not too much, mostly plants. After forty-five minutes of nursing a beer, when the joint came around for the fifth time, I said, “Fuck it, let me hit that.”

  And: nothing bad happened. I got high. I got drunk. I started telling stories about my uncle Randy, who showers with dish soap and keeps a gallon of water next to his toilet. I don’t know what it’s for. I owned the room for a solid five minutes, and I remembered how good it feels to hold court—to not know what you’re going to say next but to feel unafraid all the same. I flirted with anyone who appeared to be unattached. I didn’t get laid, but it seemed like I might again someday. I felt like a guy people might want to be friends with.

  It was the first thing I’d done since Bellevue that felt just about right. Age-appropriate—albeit situationally risky—recklessness. So I kept doing it. And nothing bad kept happening. Jonas and I started going out together three times a week, barhopping, chatting to girls, and I came to appreciate the therapeutic power of getting laid semi-regularly. I never found the defrost button for depression, but I stayed alive and put the turkey in the sink and it eventually thawed out on its own. Shit got better because hard shit usually does.

  Normal-ish felt incredible for a time, but that Myles guy I’d stuffed in the closet—he wasn’t dead. It was impossible to snuff out a corner of my personality that had once so wholly defined me. The itch to perform, to create, was never going away, but I was scared of it. Picking up a pen or a microphone felt riskier than hitting that first joint.

  But I had to try, with new rules: No losing sleep to comedy or writing, hence disregarding the comic’s rule that if you think of something at 3 a.m. you must get up and write it down. And if I did have to write something down at 3 a.m., bullet points, not paragraphs—if it’s good, it will make sense tomorrow. Weed seven times per week, no. Weed two times per week, tentative yes. But no smoking after midnight and no smoking once initial high has been achieved. Don’t allow delusions of grandeur to substitute for work. It’s okay to toil away in secret.

  I had plenty of trepidation about going down the rabbit hole again, and I didn’t know how much, if any, of my break was attributable to comedy. Could I pursue creativity at 85 percent? Was I good enough to get anywhere by giving less than 110 percent? What if I found that I needed to go a little crazy to hit my potential—could I settle for mediocrity in order to keep mentally stable or would I go all in at the first whiff of opportunity? I didn’t know, but those sounded like good problems to eventually have.

  I ran it by Jonas over a sushi lunch at our regular spot on Smith Street. He started gently shaking his head no. “Don’t you think that kind of fucked you up?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But I have to do something. I don’t even know if it’s stand-up, but I want to write or hold a camera. Make a documentary. Act, even. I don’t know.”

  “So you’re just going to go buck wild again? Full-on Myles, with your Mohawk and shit?”

  “No, but I think I’ve got to see what Zack’s got.”

  They say write what you know, and I realized that my biggest appeal to The Producer had been that I could be at home in both the Lower East Side and a trailer park. Christmas was now just a few weeks away and I was looking forward to a voluntary trip to Wichita. Always plenty of material in the ’Ta. I talked Jonas into coming home with me. After all the hillbilly stories I’d told him about the McDermott side of the family, he didn’t need much convincing. I was eager to see what these humble folk would make of my womanizing Jew buddy. Quite possibly they’d think we were lovers, especially with his moustache. I was even more excited to watch him watch them.

  That afternoon, we booked tickets from JFK to ICT.

  Chapter 13

  On a windy Kansas day, you can smell Grandad’s garage from the end of his long circle driveway: Scott’s lawn fertilizer, potting soil, and fuel. There’s always a brand-new Cadillac parked in the garage (that’s his church and rent collectin’ car), a Chevy three-quarter-ton with a $75,000 fishin’ boat hitched to the back (fishin’ truck), and a GMC work van filled with what looks like the entire power tools section of Lowe’s. My dad’s father made his bones in real estate; a self-made man with little respect/time/patience for anyone too lazy to ascend from rural poverty to McMillionaire status. He’s in his eighties and a bit hobbled, but he still gets the van out to his rental properties in the Wichita community of Planeview, his exurban empire and a sprawling crack den of a neighborhood, six days a week: “patchin’ roofs, changin’ out a radiator, fixin’ a winda.” Grandad collects rent in his Cadillac on the first of every month, “’Cause if ya waits any longer, they spends it.” On the Seventh Day, he follows the Lord’s command to rest by working on his lawn and garden until it’s too dark to see. He built the house Jonas and I were about to enter with his bare hands.

  Christmas Eve at Grandad’s goes like this: We feast on deer chili. The chili is not good—the fat coagulates and simmers at the top of the pot and the end result looks like a public school lunch from a poor district. Uncle Frank—my dad’s stepbrother—is in charge of the scoopin’, which means after first portions have been doled out, he walks through the dining room, pot nestled under his armpit, bellowing like a mess hall cook, “Who wants another scoopin’!?” Most of the crowd will indeed want another scoopin’. These people—my extended family—eat like they’ve just broken out of prison.

  Before he serves the chili, Frank usually stares into the pot as if he’s on an acid trip. He’s more or less preserved in a state of timeless ugliness; he never looks any older from visit to visit, but not because he’s aging well. His beard starts just below his eyes and ends an inch above his nipples, lending him the air of a Confederate soldier nearing the end of the war. This year, like every year, both his baseball cap and T-shirt featured a variation of a bald eagle tearing through the center of an American flag, and both were caked with oil and grease. I’ve seen him remove his hat so few times that I always forget he’s entirely bald on top. The sides and back of his hair are long and dirty. Frank had all his teeth pulled due to general rot when he was forty-five—a birthday gift from Grandad. You can tell he stinks from twenty yards away.

  I sidled up to Frank—motioning for Jonas to join me—as he continued to zone out on the final few stirs of the pot before the blessing.

  “What’s up, Frank?”

  “Same shit.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Not shit.” He never redirected his gaze from the chili.

  Per tradition, Frank didn’t wash his hands before helping with the food prep. The grease and oil under his fingernails and filling in the cracks of his weathered hands could be yesterday’s or last week’s.

  At least one-fifth of my extended family in attendance at Grandad’s house have done crank at some point. Frank for sure.

  Jer’my—as Grandad pronounces it—is Frank’s son and also a member of the meth contingent. He was dressed like a rodeo clown in a bright red, pearl-snapped Wrangler shirt tucked into painted-on Wrangler jeans tucked into red boots. A Colt .45 was holstered on his right hip, and two sheathed knives were attached to the left side of his belt. When I said hel
lo to him, his response took the form of a question: “Guess how many beers I done drank today?”

  “Um, twelve?”

  “Sixteen. And half a pint of whiskey.” Beaming with pride, he didn’t slur, even slightly, as he let me in on this little secret.

  “Do you have a lipper in?” I asked, knowing full well the answer.

  “Yup, Cope. Black. You wan’ one?” he politely offered.

  “I can’t, but thanks. Could never handle Copenhagen.”

  “More for me.”

  Jer’my tried to hide the fact that he was dipping by swallowing the brown juices, but the faded ring permanently branded into the back of his jeans revealed that he partook regularly.

  Cousin Tater was also there after a five-year boycott on account of his sister marrying an Asian. I applauded him on his journey; he even expressed a desire to have his Confederate flag tattoo removed from his shoulder. Said the Lord told him to.

  Uncle Randy practically ran to greet me when he looked up from the Walmart shrimp cocktail he was shoveling into his mouth by the fistful. Instead of a normal hello, he made the international “OK” sign with his thumb and forefinger and placed it on his belt. “Hey, man, you know what that is?” He did not wait for me to answer before launching into his explanation. “In high school, we used to play this game, man. If your friend walked up to you and went like that, you had to poke your finger through the hole—otherwise it meant you was a faggot.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “If you don’t penetrate your male friend’s hand pussy, you’re probably gay.”

  “Please, white boy. I used to get more ass than a toilet seat. Where’s that girlfriend of yours, that blondie?”

  I didn’t know if he meant my high school or law school girlfriend. Both had been subjected to several of his unsolicited hugs.

  “I don’t know where she is. I don’t have a girlfriend right now.”

  “She was sweet, boy. She was sweet on me.”

  “Probably. Toilet seat and all.”

  “Hey man, I got a bone in the van if you want to sneak out later.”

  “We might could do that.” I slip into Wichita vernacular quickly when I’m home. It’s a hobby. If tradition held, in a few hours, Uncle Randy would be in the garage challenging me to a push-up contest on our knuckles, followed by a stomach-punching contest. He’ll struggle to snap off more than three or four push-ups—his gut is sizeable—but the frozen December concrete will irritate his knuckles not a lick. Once the punching contest begins, I’ll remember why: his knuckles are made out of frozen December concrete, hard as they are sharp. I always forget that he punches like a wrecking ball until he knocks the wind out of my solar plexus and then strikes the exact same spot with his second punch, doubling me over. “See, that’s how your granddaddy taught me to punch, way back, boy. This before your time.” He’ll continue his tutorial until he hack-laughs himself into a coughing fit. Odds are decent that he’ll moon me too and tell me to “tell all them Yankees that they can kiss my Rebel ass!” followed by another hacking, coughing fit.

  “Aw’right!” Grandad shouted. “Get in here! We’re gonna say the prayer, then we’re gonna start the scoopin’!”

  It’s the same prayer verbatim every year. His voice lowers from rootin’ tootin’ Arkansas sharecropper to somber televangelical preacher.

  “Lord, we thank thee for these blessings you have bestowed upon us. We thank thee for these gifts, and we ask thee to bless this food that we might use it to nourish our bodies so that we may glorify thee. You loved us so much that you sent your only Son down from heaven. Jesus, you loved us so that you died on the cross for our sins. In your Son’s name we pray. Amen. Let’s eat!”

  “Oh, man. Let’s get this chili, boy! Who’s scoopin’?!” Uncle Randy was so excited to eat the chili that he jumped on a chair and assumed a position that was half chicken flapping its wings, half man shitting in the woods. “Oh, man,” he whooped, “I been ready for this for weeks. I didn’t eat all day.”

  The rush to the pot had all the urgency of a Black Friday door buster at Walmart. Despite the fact that there would be leftover chili for days, and that he would certainly take seconds and thirds, Uncle Randy filled his red plastic Solo bowl beyond capacity until chili ran down the sides and onto his fingers. He licked the chili off his hands and proceeded to pile half a pack of Dillon’s-brand shredded cheddar cheese and two handfuls of stale oyster crackers on top. The bowl was buckling.

  After dinner, we all went down to the basement to open presents. There are hunting lodges with fewer animal heads on the walls and rivers stocked with fewer fish than Grandad has displayed in his basement. Ten-point buck, elk, catfish, and stripers. No saltwater fish. Their fake, sad marble eyes look down upon us and ask Why?

  Adjacent to the elk wall is a gun cabinet that houses a small arsenal. The first time I saw a gun fired was in this basement. I was eight. Grandad, sixty-five at the time, somehow spotted a snake near his pond from at least seventy yards out. “Get down!” he boomed as he ran to the gun cabinet. He was locked and loaded within seconds. I dove behind the couch and lay on my stomach like a G.I. Joe. Boom! “Got ’em!” He had not bothered to step out of his house before firing the gun through the open basement door; as he discharged his weapon, he rested his leg on his Barcalounger.

  The gift exchange on Christmas Eve is actually more of a small redistribution of wealth. Despite Grandad’s disdain for welfare recipients—“See, first you get one black, and then she’s sixteen and she gets pregnant. Now you got two. And then, see, she gets pregnant again. And now you got three. And they’s all on welfare, and who’s paying for it? You and me. You and me”—Grandad still revels in the spectacle. Before the cash is handed out, he always starts with a joke. As he’s gotten along in years, they’ve become more long-winded and nonsensical. The punch line is usually something along the lines of “The old man didn’t report his wallet stolen because the thief was spending less money than his wife.”

  Not to be outdone, Uncle Randy responded with a joke of his own: “Why did Obama quit giving speeches?”

  Oh boy. I held my breath.

  “Because every time he got up on his soapbox, they sold him down the river!” Randy was all grins.

  Next, the high point for most of the attendees: the cash. Grandad stands center stage in the basement as an ever-expanding group of sugar-high great-grandchildren scream and swirl around the carpet like little white-trash tornadoes. There are new additions every year and I’ve long since given up trying to learn their names.

  “Jer’my!”

  Jer’my snapped to attention and met Grandad at the center of the room, where he’d collect the same envelope we’d all been receiving for the past twenty-five years: Merry Christmas from Bank of America—a wreath and a bow on the outside of the envelope, Ben Franklin’s face peeking through the oval slot under the flap, “Love, Grandad and Grandma.” Jer’my promptly emptied the festive envelope and tossed it into the trash pile in the middle of the floor—$100 into his wallet quicker than a drug transaction.

  My cousin Stacy had been staring at Jonas all evening. He’s a good-looking guy—blue eyes, thick dark curly hair, strong jawline, short but extremely fit. Like her siblings, Stacy attended a Bible college in Missouri (or Mizz’er’a, as my relatives pronounce it). I’d be surprised if she’d ever had a beer or been past second base. But despite evangelical prohibitions against experiencing sexual desire outside the confines of marriage, she was absolutely lusting after Jonas. So she flirted with him through fellowship—conversation in the service of glorifying Jesus. “No offense,” she said, “but why aren’t you with your own family?”

  “Oh, because I’m Jewish.”

  “Sorry, but you don’t look Jewish.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad, because Jews are some ugly motherfuckers. Big nose, big ears.”

  “Yeah,” she answered matter-of-factly. The notion that he even might be speaking sarcastically did not register.

/>   Once all the hundreds had been handed out, Uncle Randy demanded everyone’s attention. “Hey, everybody, listen up! I got a gift. I got a gift fer Dad. I want y’all to see this.” Then out of his back pocket came an unwrapped rusty blade. The handle was made of a deer foot—hoof, fur, and all. He knelt down on one knee and presented it to his father as if he were bestowing Excalibur upon him. The room went silent for a moment, then…universal awe and jealousy. “That’s a nice knife, Randy!” “Whar’d you git that knife?” “That’s a nice knife!” “Dang, that’s a nice knife!”

  I can’t say I was entirely unimpressed, but Grandad appeared to be. Goddammit, Randy. That knife won’t cut shit, his face said. I have raised a failure—three failures. Randy; my dad, Mack; and their sister, ’Lou ’Lou. (’Lou ’Lou used to drive a school bus and is hands down the most successful of his three offspring. Her husband, Donald, is also her stepbrother. The only thing husband-stepbrother Donald said all night was “Get me one a ’em,” in reference to a piece of pecan pie.)

  I was actually a bit surprised at how unimpressed Grandad seemed. This was a far more appropriate gift than I’d ever expect from Uncle Randy. Grandad likes knives. Grandad likes to kill deer. Grandad likes to preserve artifacts from the killing of deer. What’s not to like?