Hulking Up

Disclaimer: You must have, at a minimum, a passing familiarity with 80's professional wrestling for this to make any sense.

I need to Hulk Up. Remember Hulk Hogan? Not his Golden Hulk persona in Rocky III but rather the original fiction, the Hulk who wrestled in the squared circle for Vince McMahon and who now, so many years later, has a reality show where his look-alike daughter is attempting (what else?) a music career?

So back in the 80's Hulk Hogan had these wonderful wrestling matches that involved him and his opponent ricocheting off the ropes, hair flying, spangled boots raised to throats, bodies slamming canvas and then at a certain point, if this was one of Hulk's big matches, the script would settle into the most compelling stage of the Hero's Journey: defeat, death, finis. The Hulkster would be lying on the canvas or cruciformed on the ropes, or his back inverted in the dreadful "C" of the Camel Clutch (Iron Sheik nods and preens), his great blond head sagging, his musclebound corpus limp, those magnificent powerhouse-arms hanging slack from his shoulders. The referee, with a dubious and wistful expression, would grab one of those hands and, at the urging of the crowd, raise it skyward, and release. The hand fell back to the canvas with a wet plop. The crowd screamed for the Hulkster to wake up. The referee again raised the hand. Again it fell. Hulk's eyes were still shut, his heavy brow furrowed as if pricked by an invisible crown of thorns.

With a shake of his head, knowing it was hopeless but following the established protocol, the referee would raise the Hulk's hand one last time. Release. Fall. Full stop. Hand arrested before it touches canvas. Opponent's face distorted with rage and fear. Hulk's massive phalanges knitting into a fist. Fist pumping. Crowd screaming. Hulk's eyes open. He stands up! What ungodly power could've raised him to consciousness? The Hulk stands in the center of the ring and poses to restore his strength, supplementing his own power with the power of the crowd, whose roars he funnels into his ears with cupped hands. The opponent, terrified, is quickly slammed and piledriven into submission and now it's the Hulkster preening, with one boot planted on his opponent's chest, who listens to the three count.

Today I need to Hulk Up. I am pinned below a crushing weight but my spirit, like the Hulkster's, is soaring through the arena, gathering strength.

The Knife

The John Birch Society must've promoted my old man. We left the trailer park for Lafayette, IN, a college town about 70 miles to the southeast. My old man had rented us a house and I remember my brother and I chasing one another through the somber empty rooms. It was a shotgun house with a big cement porch and buckled hardwood floors with the bedrooms tacked along right side like an afterthought, three boxes connected by a narrow hallway. You entered the basement at the back of the house through a door in the pantry, down a cramped set of slippery stairs, past the cobwebs and the indignant spiders into darkness that was sweet with mildew. My brother and I helped carry the old man's metal boxes of weapons into the basement and then we helped carry the emergency foodstuffs and the radios and the other survival equipment. He'd picked this house specially for the basement which, due to a lack of windows and five feet of earth above its ceiling, was a perfect bomb shelter.

"It will see us through a long bad time," he'd say.
"If it comes," my mother would say.
"It's only a question of when."

I was doubtful that we could survive long in that cold cramped little room and at night I dreamed of white-hot mushroom clouds and of rustling stealthy spiders plotting to liquefy our organs, leaving behind our dessicated and web-swaying skins.

The old man felt good about the new house and the new town; he began to make the occasional grim joke about our nightmare at the trailer park. After a month he got us another German Shepherd. We named her "Madchen." He kept her in the backyard where she began systematically leaving, in glazed cups of snow, little piles of candied excrement. One Saturday my brother dared me to pick up one of these little logs and hurl it at him, but I was afraid to do so because I imagined that beyond the shellacked surface lay a warm and loamy center and that it would crumble apart in my hands. My brother, tiring of this game, went inside to finish his Alistair MacLean novel and I, drawn irresistibly as all boys are, drifted toward the street at the front of our house.

The old man's green Vega was parked at the curb, his body wedged at an uncomfortable angle, his feet projecting into a snowdrift. I did not like my old man and in fact to be near him made my stomach hurt but the dazzling emergence of the sun and the those comical protruding legs allayed my fears and I moved close enough to peer into the darkness of the car.

He was lying there with one hand clutching a pair of bright unruly wires below the dash. The stereo and CB were lying on the floorboards. Protruding from his side, just above his waist, was the handle of the short knife which he ordinarily kept in a leather pouch on his belt. The old man made rhythmic animal groaning sounds as his right hand clenched and unclenched around the handle of his short knife. I could see now that the black upholstery sparkled in the sunlight where his blood had soaked it through.

"You okay?" I said.
"Hi. Hi." He spoke in the peaceful voice of some past or future self. "Go get your mother. I've had an accident."
"What's wrong?"
He was very calm and patient. He waited until his groaning stopped although his hand continued to clench and unclench around the handle of the knife. "Go get your mother I've had an accident."
"Are you okay?"
"Go get your mother I've had an accident."

Later when they wheeled him out of the emergency room I admired him for his handsomeness and the crease along his temple where he'd been shot in the head in Vietnam and for his coolness when the knife was stuck in his side. He was wearing a shirt my mother had brought from home and one could see the bulky gauze pad below the thin fabric. My mother cried at intervals as the doctors explained the particulars of caring for the wound.

"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"He saved your life." My mother was referring to me.
The car was quiet. My mother cranked the starter and the engine coughed to life. Madchen, wedged in the backseat between my brother and myself, flattened her ears.
"He wasn't obedient," The old man said. "I had to ask him three times."
"You can't whip him, you're full of stitches," my mother said.
"I appreciate what you did but I had to ask you three times did I not?"
I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace.
"Did I not?"
My brother punched me in the shoulder and frowned.
"Yes, sir," I said.

He gave what seemed to me a deep and contented groan. As we rolled along the frozen streets I came to realize that I'd lost a chance that would never come again and I cursed myself for walking toward the street when I could've picked up one of Madchen's segmented candies instead. My stomach began to hurt. The bare branches of oaks and maples flashed over our little car, an endless parade of switches with which little boys could be and would be whipped.

Engelbert Humperdink

Man, that Engelmbert Humperdink musta been one unhappy motherfucker in middle school. Don't ya think?

I love my dog very much, but I am unhappy with her current passion for licking her crotch. I can't expect her not to lick her crotch, she's a fucking dog... that's what dogs do. But like me, my dog takes everything to the extreme, strives beyond excess... this urgent, rhythmic, desperate licking, her back bent beyond its limitations, a slurp that sounds like a glug, but muffled, over and over and over again while I wonder to what end... is it menstrual, a yeasty adventure, fantasy filled? And she only does it when she is happy and comfortable and around me... ahh... life is good, well fed, recently walked, pretty day, quiet house, close to the Alpha dude, it's time... time to lick my doggie coochie, yeah...

God, there are times when I can't take it... I look down and yelp or slam my heels on my desk or throw a paperback at her...

Maybe it's just jealousy...

And again, it's not that she does it period... or even the duration... or frequency... it's the god-damned passion... how it becomes a life or death thing

fucking dog.

Warm Up

There was this kid in my neighborhood named Andy K. He lived with his big Irish family in a rented house two down from us, on the other side of the walkway that led to the park. The house had green shingle siding and a carport covered with corrugated green plastic. When it rained, tines of clear water streamed down evenly along the length of the carport. From the window of my attic bedroom I watched this phenomena, captivated by its perfect uniformity. Then my mind always drifted to life within Andy's house.

His father listened to the opera and drank a big glass of red wine before dinner. His sister was a beauty queen who had been a finalist for Miss Michigan and held herself apart from life in the neighborhood. In the basement Andy had a Coleco Vision game system which I thought inferior to Atari but which I nevertheless condescended to play from time to time, mostly in hopes of glimpsing his sister in her rapid passages to and from her bedroom.

Andy and I were famous in our neighborhood for our series of fights. We'd been fighting since the day after my arrival in the neighborhood, and after each bout we'd agree on a winner and then mentally tabulate the overall score of the series and agree on that as well. Sometimes we fought over a disagreement, but as he was a polite boy and I was a polite boy we rarely disagreed, so we would agree to fight just to keep the series going. We always fought in his back yard. I remember the way the impact of his fist made a "chock" sound in the bones of my face, the stunning blast of pain when he bloodied my nose, and the groaning rolling clutches in the snow and the grass. He was a polite fighter and so was I. We really liked one another and always let up when the other was beaten. We were both very proud of our series and reported on it to our parents and grandparents. In all my letters to my grandmother I mentioned the latest battle and the overall score.

One day we stopped fighting. I don't know why; maybe we were too old, or too emotional now in puberty to trust that our friendship would survive, but the irony was that without the fights we had no real basis for friendship, and so we drifted apart. I became bookish and withdrawn and Andy K. began to avail himself of his brother's weights, put on fifteen pounds, and joined the football team. Andy went to the Catholic high school and I went to a Christian school but I followed his football career in the local paper. One day I saw him outside and congratulated him on his successes and he shook my hand in a massive and calloused hand and I was glad then, feeling his hand and looking at his powerful build, that we'd stopped fighting.

Sedulous

I just wanted to express my admiration for "sedulous." I like counterintuitive words. For instance, I would imagine "sedulous" to have something to do with "seditious" and would consider it therefore to express a form of disloyalty or betrayal, but of course that's not the case.

Joyce is the only writer I've personally read who has used it in a sentence:

"When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live."

I'm a big fan of Dubliners. That's probably putting it mildly. I have asked my wife to read to me from Dubliners when I'm dying. I prefer it to the Bible as an expression of reverence and as an attempt to give form to the divine.

April Fool's Session

Nobody played a joke on me for April Fool's Day, not even mother nature. We had waves. It was cool at the beach, with the sun blinking down from a milky sky, but the water was already in the upper 60's. From the sand, which was populated by bikini-clad girls posing for pictures or throwing Frisbees and petting dogs picturesquely, the waves didn't look so good but far on the outside, far, far past the end of the pier I saw a small surfer drop into a wave that was easily over his head.

It was a long paddle-out, particularly for an aging programmer who hadn't been surfing in months, but I finally made it outside and there, lo and behold, were some fairly groomed swells of 3-5 feet. What fun. What can I say? Getting on my feet the first time was a bit shaky; like trying to balance on a water ski, that wallowing back-and-forth motion as I went down the face of the wave, but I didn't care. And while I was surfing I remembered why I live here. And I remembered how rare and cool my life can really be when I make the time to paddle out.

Letter to Someone Who Moved on to a New Job

This is how short-lived my gratitude can be. I am the master of disaffection. The master of sour, of entitlement, of the glass-half-full. This weekend I was worried that I wouldn't have a job at all. And now? See below as I participate in current-employer bashing with a former employee.


Go easy, JB. Go easy. Some of us are not out after all. I could see the Huey dicing the air above me, could see the extended hands of the grim medics. You were behind the machine gun, your body tick-tocking in slow motion rhythm as the brass shells arced through the smoky air and I tried JB, to grab something, anything, that would pull me to freedom but the helicopter leaned on its side and shrank to a small dot while the orchestra blared a symphony of death and desertion.

I am still here. Crouched at the foot of a palm tree, eyes shifting w/murderous anxiety in my mud-painted face, strangling my sweaty gun. I am still here.