Pick One
By Bryan May
In the
history of friends and enemies, friends of enemies, and
enemies of friends, I have a question for you. Do you think
more pairs of individuals have started out as friends and
ended as enemies, or started as enemies and ended as
friends? Surely the former, right? I would think far more
people have begun friends, and through love or money or envy
ended as rivals full of disdain. Now then, when it comes to
allegiance, where are the rules, and when do they become so
scrambled that you no longer know what is right? The answer
is that they are always scrambled. No decision can ever be
easy, because if it were easy, it would not be a decision,
it would just “be.” You don’t decide to breathe, and you
don’t decide to love. Well, that’s the way it is supposed
to be, and I am not attempting to compare breath and love,
but neither should be conscious, mental decisions. The
former is natural and predetermined, the latter natural and
either yet to be determined or determined through a
controllable or uncontrollable series of events. What do
you owe another person, and what does another person owe
you? Depends on the sticky-ation, naturally. When your
parents grow old and feeble, and need full-time care and
attention, desperate for affection of any kind, what then?
They model your behavior that you exhibited as a small
child, when your mother held and nurtured you, fed and
embraced and bathed you, enduring all of your constant
needs, and bearing all of your pain. When you cried and
screamed from an earache, her heart didn’t beat right. As
an adult, are you or can you be expected to return the
favor? Are we capable of treatment reciprocation when both
parties are fully grown human beings? It broke her heart to
leave mother at the rest home, but it got to a point when
she had to walk away.
The young
man showed up to tutor Ryan at the scheduled time of 4:00.
When he arrived at the door, Carrie opened it provocatively,
glass of wine in hand and blouse in its typical low-cut
form, breasts ready to box. I walked inside and looked
around. Music was playing, but the standard chaos caused by
5, 7, and 12-year-old boys who inhabited the region was
absent. “Where’s Ryan?” “He’s not here. But I’m here,”
she responded in her most seductive voice. Lips full of
collagen and head full of liquor, Carrie’s judgment, the
little that she possessed, was certainly non-existent that
afternoon. “Well, then I have to leave. If Ryan gets here
and needs tutoring, you can have him call me. But do not
contact me unless he is here waiting.” She begged me to
stay, but there wasn’t a chance. This woman recruited me to
tutor her son, who was 12 and in need of guidance. Her
other two sons were 5 and 7, and he ended up spending quite
a bit of time with all three, whether it be tutoring or “boysitting,”
as she called it. The tutor, a tender 19, still thought the
best of people. Despite Carrie’s late night calls and
offerings of wine and personal training, he was hoping that
his discomfort was unwarranted and a simple
misunderstanding. She was married, with three sons who the
tutor cared about very much, how could she be acting this
way? It was so wrong, so desperate, and so upsetting. Yet
he could not leave, because his presence was extremely
important in the development of the three children. Their
father was never home, and their mother was either drinking
or ignoring them. Externally, the house was an immaculate
dream, but inside, the household was a dysfunctional
nightmare. I imagined how the home would have looked upon
purchase, and the disastrous mess that it had become was
quite a terrible site. The kitchen smelled of rotten food,
the bathrooms of unflushed toilets, and the playroom of
musty carpet. It was a general testament to foulness.
Carrie would call the tutor and put the youngest boy, Robby,
on the phone to speak with him. All three would leave
prompted messages on his pager saying how much they missed
him and when could he come again. Her advances continued,
but while his bitterness toward Carrie grew, his concern and
affection for the boy deepened. The day he knocked and rang
and was unanswered, yet heard clamoring and yelling inside,
he entered to find Robby crying and stringing together words
of potential abuse, only to be silenced by the other two who
claimed him a liar. Carrie, screaming, entered the room
where Robby clenched the tutor’s leg and begged to go with
him until Carrie coerced him with promises of root beer
floats and playtime. He looked at them and struggled
himself into the most convincing smile capable at that
moment. It broke his heart as Robby suffocated his cries,
but he could not endure any more, and he had to walk away.
The birds
shot from the sky were lined up on hangers and removed of
their feathers in anticipation for the fire. They were to
be nibbled after only a bit of night air-cooling, that’s how
they were best. The flames had been ignited from the
pictures, collages and stories that they had created
together, but now he was by himself, confined to his
conflagration. His gun and smores ingredients would not be
needed just yet; they could rest until called upon out of
necessity. Park rangers would not approve of his serial
de-birding of the forest, but it was not their call, was
it? The quail were already on the hanger, and the smiling
pictures were already charred, at this point, no one had a
say. He looked up at the divine shelter provided by the
redwoods, and wondered the effort involved in climbing one
of them. Was there an apparatus on earth that would enable
him to get to the top, then get back down, without
sustaining injury? He thought it near impossible, but was
still curious to try. Standing at the base of the giant
trunk, he hugged the bark and looked back at his man-made
fire, laced at the top by the skewered fliers. The whole
mission was broke from the start, but he had to decide a
way.
Bryan May
bmay@emarketmakers.com
