The Importance of Being Sully

Any minute now the brown box truck should be here, rolling up in a burst of acceleration and short-shifted gears, the driver jamming on the brakes, slamming her in park.

Oh, the thrill of it all.

Oh, the slamming beats from the basement of my deep-fried heart.

I’m not going to sit here and act all cool and stuff. I can’t. If I told you some cover-up tale about how I’m not paying close attention to the road outside my house, sneaking around the curtains and peeking down the lane to see if I can see or hear any sign of the thing heading my way, you’d just snicker at me and stare a laser hole in my forehead, huh? I know that you know better, especially when it comes to this sort of thing.

Anyway, today is the day I become Sully, the big blue guy from Monsters Inc.

Today is the day that my Halloween costume arrives from somewhere far away out in America and I can slip it on in the privacy of the upstairs bathroom and then slowly slide myself in front of the mirror and blow my own mind into sweet, beautiful smithereens.

It’s not a cheapo job either, you know. I splurged a little on this get-up. I had to, you see.

The stars all aligned and I did my homework early and I searched and scoured the land and eventually, just when I had begun to try and convince myself that maybe I could be something else this year, maybe just another dumb zombie or the 88th Duck Dynasty dude on my block; just when I was going to give up my latest/greatest whimsical notion to appear on some random early October Tuesday afternoon, down in the kitchen, while Violet, 4, and Henry, 2, were sitting there sucking down their 3 o’clock chocolate milk and graham crackers, me popping out in a burst of blue and purple Sully shag, their little eyeballs shooting out of their heads, their wee minds blown by the sight of their own Dad transformed into the most legendary monster of their lives so far, just when all of that seemed to be sliding from my greasy palms: I found it.

Where?  On line, of course, where grown men can and do become monsters with the flick of a click.

Anyway, it’s coming today because I have been ‘tracking’ the SOB and it finally says ‘OUT FOR DELIVERY’ and I cannot even explain to you how tickled my guts were  when I woke up this morning and saw that simple phrase in the email I got (the latest in a long series of short, soulless messages I have gotten because I signed up for emails that tell me where my Sully is out there on the road, out there on his long, strange journey from some shelf in some warehouse or stockroom somewhere to ride upon the shoulders of a 41-year-old Man-Child in Bumtruck, Pennsylvania).

With any luck my kids are going to crap their Granimals.

At least they better.

If they don’t my heart will probably just burst and I’ll just collapse on the linoleum there in the kitchen, a big dead Sully, which is, like, probably the worst thing you could ever really throw down in front of your own kids, huh?

Whatever. So there’s a lot riding on all of this. Fine, I planted this little garden of strange all by myself, so I’ll harvest the brief magic or die trying.

But isn’t it crazy though? One minute you’re this young guy wandering the Earth in search of enlightenment and money and sex and pizza and beer and then, BOOM!...out of nowhere you are staring into the bright, mild eyes of a baby and everything is different forever.

Here I am: a grown-ass man standing in his front window, hiding behind the curtain, peeping out at the porch like some neighborhood freak, waiting for a costume as if I’m waiting for a brand new liver or a fresh kidney on ice.

It is what it is, though. Anything for a smile, you know?

Anything for their smile.

The Lonesome Ballad of Three Teenagers At Once

Some things hit you out of nowhere, like Little League field lightning or city buses or young lust in the corridors of the mall, and you cannot control them no matter how hard you want to. These are the things that make or break your life I suppose.

They are the biggest baddest 'crossroads' you will ever stand at, really, and you will have to choose whether or not you are going to keep on living and making the best of whatever you've got going on at that moment in time, or if you are ready to let both of your white-knuckled fists just go slack off the wheel at once and just ride off into your sunset ending.

Years ago, when Dale Earnhardt got loose on the final lap of the Daytona 500 and his car seemed to just quit trying anymore, I watched as he slammed into the high wall of the track, my heart throbbing in my chest, my blood sizzling through my veins.

Looking back now, it's still impossible to know if he really got to make much of a choice, I understand that of course. But whatever... part of me, for whatever strange reason, likes to think that he did have that fleeting instant where he knew that things were gonna either shake down as:

a) 'Dale is staying'

or

b) 'Dale gotta go'

I don't really understand it completely, but whenever I think about that afternoon (and I do a lot, so that's that) I want to think that he took one deep last drag of Florida sunshine, eeked out one last sly grin, and took one look around at the mess that his hard-earned life had suddenly become. I convince myself that he closed his eyes, thought about his kids, knew they'd be okay, and sighed out the final gasp of his Earthly sighs just before his fellow driver and good friend, Kenny Schrader, ran up to the side of that black number 3 Chevy lying still there in the infield grass and saw that it was hopeless, that it was the end of an era.

Of course, experts and doctors and all might tell you otherwise. They might insist that Dale Earnhardt was gone in a flash and that he was already on the bus to whatever the next stop is by the time his car stopped sliding back down the track.

That's cool, but I don't buy it, probably just because I don't want to.

I want to believe, I choose to believe, that you flick off that switch yourself, man. That there is this Dignified Ghost that comes sliding up to your side when you finally make it down those crossroads that you have been searching for, unconsciously, all of these livelong years, and that the Ghost lifts your hand and squeezes it gently three times ( I. Love. You.) so that you know that you can trust it.

Then you see the switch, just like any other switch, but different, obviously.

And just like that you decide. Do I hang around/do I move along?

I have no idea how it feels to make that decision. A lot of people have spent a lot of time down through the years trying to guess what happens in that instant.

But life is full of choices, and we have to trust our gut feeling.

And there you go.

****************************

I'm like 5 months away from 42 years old. I've lived longer than a lot of other guys, guys who seemed like they probably deserved a longer run than my fat ass, but what can you do? Hank Williams, Crazy Horse, Martin Luther King Jr., Sam Cooke, Kurt Cobain, Stephen Crane, John Coltrane, the list is long and sad.

John Lennon.

I've outlived John Lennon. That seems seriously muffed up to me. It seems like it ought to be impossible. But it's possible alright and I've done it.

What does that mean?/What am I saying?

I'm not exactly sure, but I think it means that I seem to be spending a little more time these days thinking about my own ending, you know? About how my tale will write itself out and all.

Like a lot of people, I never did that much before and so nowadays, when I start barking up the Death Tree, trying to get a good whiff of whatever it is I've got cornered up there, it's usually more than I can bear.

That's natural, I guess.

Still, doesn't it really suck to have to think about the fact that three Fridays ago, when you were laughing and having a couple of beers with your wife or your husband and maybe a couple friends and maybe the kids or the dogs were there kicking around in the lush fat tufts of green grass that needs cutting, and the sun was so perfect in the late evening sky hanging out over your town or your beach or wherever the hell you were, doesn't it seem so unfair that all of that seems like it was just six or seven seconds ago?

You were just holding it all in your own two hands, gripping that wheel, steering yourself through such a beautiful kick-off to yet another living weekend; it freaking JUST HAPPENED!

But then again, the reality is that 'no it didn't'.

It's gone and so much living has come to pass since that night; everybody who was there has lived so many moments/made so many choices/cried/laughed/ eaten so many meals since you were just sitting there looking at them right in front of you, holding them close against the heart of your eyeball, feeling their exhales mixing with your inhales, living together.

Life is freaky because it ends. We know so much about so much but we don't know jack shit about forever. We try and tell ourselves that we do, we come up with ways to convince ourselves that we have an idea, but c'mon.

We have no fucking idea at all.

Even our guesses are probably beer league softballs we end up tossing off the edge of a star ten thousand light years in the wrong direction.

***************************

If I can make it, if I can hold on like I want to hold on, and if I can keep hording oxygen/avoiding shitty drivers/missing the rattlesnakes along the rivers where I fish/ hitting the treadmill/staying off the cigs/watching how many beers I drink/eating my vegetables/ and luck out in the ticker department and the cancer department and this department and that department/blah-blah-blah; if I can just hang in there for another 13 or 14 years I might just have the chance to live through something I never thought in my wildest dreams I'd get to live through.

I might just get to live with three of my own teenagers at once.

Three teenagers at once. (Violet 18, Henry 16, 'Newbie' 13)

My God. I know you probably don't really care too much but c'mon, this is a jaw-dropping realization for me. It's like this huge invitation to live someone else's life in some super strange way. But it would be mine, my life. It would be my life...it will be my life if I can find a way to dodge some bullets and outrun some hyenas.

Lately, something has come over me. Or someone.

It's been like some hard-headed son-of-a-bitch just barreled into this little world of mine, a world that only me and like three other people even give two shits about, and he jacked me up by the collar of my George Jones t-shirt and slammed me into the barnwood wall of the bar I created in my mudroom. And grabbing my shaking fist in his cold steady fist and holding it up against the wall, next to the light switch, he stared into my mixed-up soul with his bloodshot eyes and cackled out a Jack Nicholson laugh , the world melting away from me, my heart bursting with fear as he pulls the whole runaway train back onto the tracks with three firm/hard squeezes.

Or maybe it's a she. There's just no way to tell yet.

But the squeezes are undeniable.

I. Love. You.

Then he/she picks me up by the scruff of my neck and tosses me back into the living room where Violet and Henry are climbing all over Monica, who is sitting there on the couch trying to hold back the First Trimester pukes with a sandwich baggie full of Jolly ranchers and I land down beside them all with a soft leathery thud.

I look around, no one even notices my ass is in the room, but I am as far from that switch as I could ever hope to be.

And I'll take it.

Walkers

Monica and me are on the couch and it's 8 in the evening, give or take, and we are trying to watch a zombie eat some dude's cheek meat when in strolls the Anti-Monster, his foot beats on the hardwood giving him away before he even rounds the corner.

"Walker!" I holler out, but Monica isn't all that amused.

I hit the pause button on the blu-ray remote and we sort of cringe at the fact that we are leaving a pretty complicated/gnarly still life on the screen, a scene that could probably land us in some kind of weird hot water should Henry decide to turn that way. Even here, with our bowls of lukewarm pasta in our laps and The Walking Dead finally landing down in our living room years after it has already probably landed in yours; even now as the two of us try and lose ourselves in some macabre thinky tale of major shit going down in suburban Atlanta in the not-so-far-off future, we are still faced with the stone cold reality that there are two kids up in this joint, and that one of them is sometimes known as Hank the Tank, and that it is that kid who is now abandoning the 43rd DVD showing of Puss in Boots of his short lifetime to move out of the playroom and back onto our radar just as someone is getting face-bit on the TV.

Grrrrrr.

"Mommy?" he starts things out with a question. That's how he pulls you in, you see. He tries to act like he is asking you for the thing that he is about to tell you to get up off of your ass and fetch for him.

Monica eyes him suspiciously.

"Can I pwiz have milk?"

"In a minute," she tells him. "It's time for bed, man. Go upstairs and I will bring you some in a minute."

The whole time this is happening I am floating down a river of possibility, the awkwardness of a man's face dilly-dangling from a Zombie's jaws hurling itself out into the living room like a slightly drunken Mr. T.

"Hey...Hey MAN!!!.....I SAID HEY MAN!!!! HEY SERGE YOU BIG FOOL!!!!!!!!!!"

Oh please, not now!

I'm begging you, don't get Henry looking at you, okay? We really, really just want to finish this episode without some thirty minute 'brush your teeth/bedtime story' intermission, or without just bailing on it until another night because you know as well as I do that sometimes after a thing just sits there too long on 'Pause', the electricity goes out of the plug, so to speak.

"Can it be chocwit milk, Mommy?"

Oh my Gaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhd. Damn, is this kid good or what. He plays his momma like an old Kentucky fiddle and he plays me even better. We say no to him, don't get me wrong. He meets plenty of no along the roundabout way to wherever it is he is taking us, but I'd be a damn liar if I was to deny the fact that he knows how to appear, even smack dab in the middle of a zombie apocolypse, and ask for milk or apple juice or even one of the little mini-ice cream sandwiches I found at the grocery store (16 to a box!) that have seemed to change the way both of my children live their lives, and to get just what he came for by the time things shake out.

I watch these two out of the corner of my eye: this game of wits/this turn of events in which a sippy cup of some kind of milk lies in tha balance. With my other eye I try and think what I might even begin to say to Henry in the next three seconds when he inevitably turns and looks up at the TV and then very slowly, the audio-tape of our life movie slows down like in the real movies so that his little voice becomes very deep and drawn out as says, "Whuuuuuuuuuutz dat Daddddddeeeeee?"

The thought does occur to me that I could turn the whole rig back to the TV; CNN is probably waiting for us there on the other side of the wall, but, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't want to risk losing my spot here in this episode and it would really bum me out if I had to go poking around through my DVR's veins to try and find this exact moment in this exact episode again.

Plus, what if something happens to this episode by mistake or something?

What if someome sitting behind that sprawling control board at Direct TV Central sees our house blipping up on the massive map of America above him and just decides right there that the Bielankos are done with Episode 9 of Season Three of The Walking Dead and so he might as well go ahead and show them the favor of just instantly deleting it from their recorded queue, you know, so they have a little more room to record another one of their 60 Minutes that they never watch.

It is 'Customer Appreciatin Days' after all, where you get $3 off of your $79 dollar bill if you help sign up 200 new subscribers in the next six hours.

What then? Hmm? What happens to my evening, to me and Monica's big stupid-ass Tuesday evening then?

I don't need that freaking aggravation.

"No, regular milk. You've already had some chocolate milks today, buddy. Now go upstairs and get ready for bed and Mommy will bring you a drink in a few minutes when mom and dad's show is over."

At this point, you might be saying to yourself, "Well, why doesn't one of these people just get up and get the poor kid some milk?"

Okay, fair question, I guess. But I would then have to peg you as someone who hasn't yet gotten a fresh whiff of hot Zombie pie, now have you?

No, you haven't and I can see it in your eyes, because once you and your better half have been married for most of a decade, and certain things change with the ebb and flow of the rolling tides and the changing moons, and you pop out a couple kids, before you know it the two of you both find yourself on some sort of an island out in the middle of the fishy smelling sea of your own life and you both simultaneously start looking forward to this whole new tiny universe you have discovered at the end of the livelong day and by, like 2 in the afternoon, you're both in different physical rooms or towns even, but you're both thinking about a little food and a cold beer or a raspberry seltzer (one of us is pregnant) and, oooooooh(!), which episode you are up to in one of these new fangled fancy-pants ass-kicking cable series that, if you find yourself behind in the times and have several seasons to catch up on, allow you to finally indulge your messsed up tired mind for like 11 nights in a row/2 episodes a night most nights, gluttonously feasting upon this clever script and that wildly talented unknown actor, unless you have gone down that particular dirt road yet then you really don't know jack shit about the situation that I find myself in in the strange long seconds that are hanging in the air like a fat ghost staring me down as I try to telepathically get Henry to suddenly really miss whatever scene he bailed out on in Puss and Boots in the plaroom and to go back in there so me and Monica can watch this poor bastard get his eyeballs chewed out of his skull and finish our spaghetti in one straight ten minute shot.

I see Henry decide that he can wait on the milk; his sweet face lowers itself down a rung and I can tell that he got the attention that he came for to begin with. The whole milk thing was just a con, a ruse; he needed some conversation and his sister was too wrapped up in that movie to even notice him standing there probably yammering her ear lobe off, so he did what comes natural.

He brought that show on the road, to us, to Mom and Dad.

Ugh.

We're such assholes, I tell myself.

Suddenly I want to get him the milk myself and just be done with it, but at that exact precise moment in the entire history of the entire universe I see him turn and look at the screen and lift his veal eyes up to the 40 flatscreen inches of sun baked reanimated freak show digging into some dude's face as if it were a nice big bowl of whipped cream from a can. Oh damn. Oh dammit to hell. I imagine the years of therapy my own son, my special little man(!), my spawn/my world will need from here on out because mom and dad were too goddamn lazy to hide away the secret thing they loved so much even when the secret thing turned out to be cable Zombies.

We have failed him.

Fuckers.

We are probably failing him every step of the way, huh?

He stares up at the screen for a good couple of seconds and I can feel Monica's maternal regret coming off of her in hollow snakes of thick black drag racing smoke.

It's Holding Pattern City. It's too late now.

Then, without so much as a single word, Henry loses interest in the screen, looks back at us on the couch, smiles his golden smile at the two of us sitting there in limbo and walks off, disappearing around the living room corner, back the way he came from, as if Zombies never even crossed his beautiful little mind at all.