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.

Prove It All Night

The mud in the salt marsh outside of Stone Harbor, New Jersey smells like life and death and the ghosts of a trillion horsehoe crabs who have come and gone and at least six kinds of seagull shit and fresh clams and certain summer nights and probably, if you squish your eyes shut hard enough and let your soul slither up into your nostrils like you oughta do more often, it smells just like the inside of a human heart.

Why do I think that?

I dunno, really; it's just a hunch.

We blew through it all on the way back from the grocery store one evening two weeks ago, the four of us, me driving and Monica shotgun, Violet and Henry strapped in the back, the ruby sun dripping slowly down the sky wall as we made our way back to the beach apartment we had rented for our first real family vacation ever.

In the back I could hear the 6 o'clock wind shattering the plastic bags, the swimming diapers so no one would shit in the ocean/ the plastic pint of $7.99 a pound mixed olives with pits/the medicine to help my wife's big red eye flare-up/the green mesh bag of something like a hundred golfball-sized limes/a brick of cheddar, all of it feeling the wild gusts plowing over them as they just lay there beside the once cold case of Corona Light I had bought on my way out of town just so I didn't have to stop again on my way back in.

We roared down the two-lane strip past ramshackle lagoon shanties at 63 in a 50, a State Cop's wet dream, and I remember clocking the VACATION RENTAL signs outside some of those places and thinking to myself that these were the kind of joints that allowed a vacation to just let her robe and bikini slide off her freckled shoulders and fall to the floor in a gentle shallow pool around her silver toe ring and her ankle bracelet. People who were renting these places out here three miles from the ocean beach weren't looking to do miniature golf twice a day or traipse up some once a year avenue, their arms loaded down with chairs and umbrellas and bendy bags of enough bullshit to kickstart a Rite-Aid.

People who rented these places, these places that were pretty much off the beaten path while actually lying paralyzed in the middle of it, they were people who were here to go crabbing, pop endless cans of cheap beer, cook living things outside, eat dead things outside, and watch the sun go down every night with what would amount to the same billion dollar buzz that Jimmy Buffet himself gets off on, just in a different state/galaxy.

It made me like the world so fucking much for a second or two. Just knowing that there are people vacationing out there in the piss clam mud made me giddy for the whole human experience. I guess I'm whacked out of my mind like that.

In my rearview I stole a glimpse backwards and I saw Henry in the floppy Superman hat I got him at Target a few days before we came down. He was staring out at the same shacks that I was, but I have no idea what he was thinking really. Probably he was thinking about the long afternoon we had come through that day and the waves swooshing around his little knees, the smiles and the giggles and the tired tears in the sand.

I saw my daughter, her sleepy eyes fighting themselves just to stay open.

I knew that their young hair smelled like ocean.

Not sea...ocean.

Your hair doesn't smell like 'sea' in Jersey.

It reeks of ocean; sweet wonderful ocean.

------------------------------------------------------------

During that first moment of realizing a thing, a shitty shitty thing, the way I see it is you have two choices, right?

You can either choose to handle it 'like a man' or like an adult or whatever or:  you can freak the fuck out and hope your dumbass hope against hope that somehow, even though you have opened the fridge six times in a row in the last two minutes just to get a fast glance at the last couple of things that live in that son of a bitch and which amount to 'not shit' when it comes down to the freaking fact that you are starving to death and someone hasn't gone to the store since the Civil fucking War ended, somehow or another you might be able to make something happen just by the power of the steam rising up out of the vents of the sidewalk running across your scalp.

But at 4:30 in the afternoon in a St Louis hotel room, downtown, where the rich people stay and where we never, ever stay but managed to stay this one Sunday night because the club we're playing at tomorrow night has a deal with this Ramada or Hilton whatever the hell unfamiliar chain this is to me and the band, when you finally get done in the bathroom and are staring down out of the seventh floor window at the streets of another strange city and then you wander over to the TV to make sure that the damn thing is working and you pop around the channels looking for HBO but don't find it and it suddenly begins to dawn on you what is up.

Back then, in 2000 or 2001 (I can't remeber exact dates) when you were seven weeks out on a long run opening for Govnt Mule or something like that and you and these guys you play music with and travel with and share every single freaking breath of shitty stale air with from Boston to Atlanta to Chicken Dick, Texas realized that the fancy hotel you were all excited and smug to be staying in that night didn't have Home Box Office on their television sets that was a trigger, a catalyst if you will, for some bad seismic shit to go down.

Just under three hours away from The Sopranos, the van parked hard in the underground garage, resting her saggy weary gasoline tits from all the savage sucking we've been doing on them, some dudes already thinking about the grocery store run...the cheeses/the olives/the hard salami, thinking about the gallon of Paisano red we were crafty enough and sly enough and foresightful (word?) enough to pick up last night at a liquor store in Memphis (West Memphis actually, but does anyone ever admit to staying in WEST Memphis...uh...no), and now the bitch slap across the collective unshaven cheek of five tired Philly musicians.

We cursed the hotel, our management, the club. We vacated our fortune as if it was a burning ship.

"Wine and cheese and The Sopranos in a Hilton, motherfuckers!!"

We thought that we were gonna live like the other half lives and now this. Sooner or later, as was our way, we cursed each other a bit.

"You are the fucking diva" my brother, our singer, told me. "That's why we are even here!"

My heart belly flopped into the lake of my sour guts and died in my chest with the realiziation that he was probably right. I was always chasing down the nightclubs we played in, making sure we knew in advance if they had any hotel deals where we could stay for cheaper than usual. Most didn't even bother, and the ones that did, it was usually basic digs, man. Now, having gotten us into something that was swank in our motel-ish world, it was all blowing up in my face.

I smoked ten cigarettes in a row.

The quietest guy in the band chewed his nails and smoked a bowl over by the air conditioner and his edge was palpable.

Don't let me down, I could hear his voice screaming at me inside his skull. Don't dude. Don't fuck me in the ass with this sharp rusted fucking sword!

That's how much The Sopranos meant to him, to all of us.

I was letting them down.

I was letting me down.

Fuck.

That.

I hit the phone/local calls free.

'Motel 6 Airport, this is Roberto, how can I help you." Have you ever just heard someone say something, anything, and felt like kissing them on the face because joy was eating your skin with a buzzard's lips?

Seriously, I'm asking you...

Have you?

------------------------------------------------------------

On the road that runs along the trout stream where I like to fish with my little wet flies and my plastic strike indicators, I put the Hershey's Kiss on my head when I can see in the mirror that Violet isn't looking at me, she's totally out the window.

Then before it can slither down off my hair, I say some stuff that gets her to maybe shift her gaze towards the back of my head. Well actually words don't always work so I typically end up doing some high squeaky robot noises or something dumb like that. It does the trick and without moving my neck too much I peer into the mirror after laying down a track of laser guns and I see her smirking/wondering as she turns my way. Then I see her face light up when she sees the Kiss up there.

"Daddeeeee!," she blows up and it moves my heart.

Every time.

And I've done this same maneuver a hell of a lot, I'm telling you.

I hand her the Kiss and then she hands me back the wrapper foil ( she only does that with Kissses for some reason) and I reach around with my one hand while the other one steers us along this rural road, past cows licking the thick ropey snot off of their own noseholes and crows staring at the high distant sun and Amish guys standing in a field of frozen time their shoulders slumped, their eyes fixed on God or something off beyond the local horizon.

I flip through the satellite radio stations, killing songs, destroying entirely possible lifelong love affairs with a song, or a band even with a flick of my fingers: Arcade Fire (POW!), Sigur Ros (POW!), Iced Earth (POW!), Phish (POW!), The Cars (POW!), The National (POW!), Jay-Z (POW!), Adam and The Ants (POW!), Pharrell featuring Pharrell (POW!), Kid Rock (POW!), Confederate Railroad (POW!), Motorhead (POW!) back to Phish (POW AGAIN!), forward/forward/forward through so many songs I can barely even register what the hell they are or even sound like, but it is somehow therapeutic and artfully relieving for me to run over Daft Punk and Superchunk and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs all in one sickly twisted teenage nightime raccoon squashing ride down through the night woods.

To be honest, I don't even know how the hell I end up where I end up because I rarely listen to the Springsteen channel that much either, mostly because I'm too busy flipping through the thing to stop and listen, but whatever. Life is life and things happen.

Stuff appears on the tiny radio screen and I can hardly believe what I begin to hear, the first noirish piano notes rising up out of the scattered whistles and cheers of a crowd. The digital letters say Boston, May 30th, 1978. My throat swells up. I barely miss smashing some free range chickens out on the edge of the road.

"Fuck off!," I scream.

"Today is May 30th!," I holler to no one, to Violet in the back.

She smiles through the wind blasting through her curls but she doesn't move her eyes toward me. I see a smidge of melted chocolate at the corner of her mouth where her lips hinge.

The piano plays, meandering/magical/a switchblade in a pocket in an alley in a city in a galaxy and I need someone to share this moment with as somewhere back in time, just a few hours from where my sleeping seven year-old head was laid out on my pillow, my mom downstairs probably crying/ our nuclear family breaking apart from the moors, a 28 year-old Springsteen was out there underneath the lights of some theater, lights which have all long since been shut down and trashed and hauled off to the dump by some Boston Sanitation truck (Darkness On The Edge of Town!) and it slams into me now, across the years/across these decades, this rock and roll like nothing I have ever heard before and nothing I will ever hear again before I die.

Bruce's electric guitar cuts across the scene like a fucking runaway Harley with no one on it, you know, ripping and rising up out of the gutter like an overdrive phantom shooting a hose of fire down the dark midtown canyon.

No one can do that anymore.

No one pushes riderless bikes out into the city night.

"This is Daddy's favorite song ever," I tell Violet. Then for effect, I add, "This is Daddy's favorite anything ever."

Her eyes seem transfixed on the world outside but I can tell she is listening. Hell, she has no choice; we are up at 11; the Honda factory radio is stretching its powers and I know that.

We sweep past a parade of cows marching back across some field toward the barn for lunch or whatever.

The guitar is shooting fire at the piano.

I see a hawk in a tree; our eyes meet; we speak without words; he is a resurrected Indian warrior, he tells me; I am picking my daughter up from preschool, I tell him.

In my mirror, Violet's face is in and out of the nest of wild snakes on her head.

All my shit, all my problems, all my money shit and my need to get laid and the novels I love and all of that hummus and carrot sticks I've been eating and all of the sadness I can't explain and all of my Zoloft pills and holding Violet and Henry in my arms as we watch Babe in the early morning and every trout I have ever watched throw my hook in the middle of some epic slashing leap that seemed to say "Fuck you Serge and everything you ever hoped for you greedy fat sumbitch!" and all of those times walking across the Williamsburg Bridge trying to peer into the housing project windows and so many dirty thoughts and silent tirades and gentle whispers and exploding kisses and all of my heart's hot blood and twitching muscle being channeled into a new stockade where my two kids are standing there in the middle of all that dank horseshit and woody darkness and how I would lay all of it down in a brief instant just to be able to promise those two something eternal and forever, ...all of that rages over me sitting there behind the wheel of an '05 Pilot as if I am just a fucking pebble laying there on the bottom of the crick to our left, this New Jersey guy using his guitar like a God to smash me across my own massive wonderful universe on a weekday afternoon on the way home from preschool at the Y.

When the song finally ends and the long ago crowd bursts through the here-and-now speakers, I peer back at Violet in the mirror and she has a look of super intensity, her brow furrowed, her eyebrows Wilford Brimley-ing.

I look ahead then and turn the radio clean off.

I have seen enough now.

We have heard enough.

We listen to the wind the rest of the ride home.

-----------------------------------------------------------

In the Super 8 room that we rented for the night, but will only use for this hour and change, we live like mad kings and it is something seriously beautiful, too.

We cut our bricks of supermarket Fontina and provolone with the dull end of a bottle opener because that's all we got. We rip the pepperoni stick with our hands. Same with the beef stick. We eat a loaf of Missouri Italian bread, dropping the crumbs all over the grimy carpet, our Timberlands and All-Stars grinding it all down in there to join the buried civiliztion of traveler's ketchup and coffee and jiz and cologne and booze and blood and free breakfast milk.

The jug of wine is tilted into our bathroom plastic cups.

Our lives in this band have often been ones where we try so hard for things that oftentimes things seem to pass us by because they can't even look us in the damn eye because our heads are hung low while we are working our asses off, trying so hard for things.

But not tonight. Tonight we have made it. We are all alive, far from home, but together. And we are drinking our wine and someone is packing a bowl and we are easing our way into something good, something easy. And we deserve that, I think.

I remember sitting there as the song began:

"Woke up this morning and got myself a gun..." and I was thinking: we deserve this shit, man. Even then, that's what I was thinking. Even in that moment, as it unfolded all around me, seconds before we did what we did every single Sunday night ( no gigs on Sundays during each Sopranos season, that was the rule no matter who fucking liked it or not) and tuned out our desperate/ hungry/and brilliantly lived lives, I remember thinking that this was what was so spectacular about art anyway; that we were free; and that this was about as good as any guy could ever hope things could get.

Looking back now, I was damn close to right on all of that, too.

-------------------------------------------------------

Me and Violet and Henry and Monica were standing there loading the car up underneath the floating gulls.

It was 7ish two Saturday mornings ago and the thing that I noticed most of all was that all of the people who came by jogging down the bike lane in the street while I was trying to cram all of the Frisbees and the sandy towels and the bags of leftover boxes of cereal and thawing out frozen hot dogs into the back, they all smiled at us and said hello and it pissed me off in a weird way.

I guess I wanted them to be sad for us, you know?

One look at us and anyone could tell we were breaking camp, hauling ass, and headed back to whetever hamlet or cul-de-sac or neighborhood hacked us up and hocked us out onto the turnpike once the weather became just barely late spring enough for the off-peak level families to hit the road for their special week down the shore. It all goes by so fast.

Now it was over for us, obviously, but probably not for these people; they seemed to have the look of two weeks or more about them. They seemed relaxed, mid-stride, in their knowledge that they wern't going fuck-all anywhere that day, or for a lot of days to come.

In my mind, they were at the beach forever. Not a cold wintery stretch of battered coast either. In my mind, they were going to be hanging around that little ocean town for the rest of time under that same sunny sky that was beaming down on me and my family as we prepared to depart.

Leaving sucks, I guess. That's just the way things go.

No one likes to leave, especially when there is probably going to be a lot of sunshine this coming week, and there will be even more ladies in their small new bathing suits and the flounder will probably start biting. 

Shit.

No one wants to roll out especially when there is that lingering bright promise of ice cream cones after fried shrimp and clams on the shell spread out across all of the rest of the evenings to come after we are long gone.

But we go.

We go because we have to.

We pack our shit and we get in the Honda and we drive out over this causeway or that one and make sure we have our quarters for the tolls as we take one last deep drag of salty air into our aging lungs and we just go go go until we aren't in New Jersey anymore.

Until we're finally home again.

I Was Here

How could I win?

The field was kicking with wind and the sun was metal glinting in space and you could see through the water to the bottom of the stream so clearly that even if you spotted a fish in there, a chub or whatever, he had already seen you coming when you were still back at the house having a cup of coffee and looking at that People magazine article about Angelina Jolie's mastectomy while you were just sitting there on the john.

Henry had the Zebco outfit I had bought last year before trout season. That was back before I had taken Violet out fishing with me; a blustery afternoon where all of my dumbass visions of father/daughter outdoors camraderie went up in a puff of crazy toddler smoke. We'd been lakeside maybe all of ten minutes when I realized that the kid didn't give a shit about catching any fish.

She wanted to throw things in the water. Or maybe hurl herself into the cold deep. But after two casts and a bird's nest of tangled line that emerged from the small hole in the reel in the form of a thin tight knot that appeared so deadly serious that upon seeing it for the first time I knew that things had been shot to hell before they'd even gotten three feet off the ground.

Fools die hard though, huh? An so here I was back for more; a glutton for the kind of punishment that guys like me deserve, I guess. We let time, even just a weak year, lap up over the cool stones of reality and gloss over the cold hard truth with water we pretend is paint.

And the cold hard truth is that Henry was whacking the fucking rod down into the shallow meadow stream as if the water was a dragon and the rod was the only sword in all the land that could stop the beast from eating the shit out of us.

"Henry!," I tell him for the 65th time in two minutes."Lift the rod up, dude! Aim it at the sky and get it out of the water!"

My commands cloak him in the fine mist that covers a lad when he must choose his path at that old school Old Testament proverbial fork in the dusty dirt road.

His decision dangles from a beam of sunlight.

It drops slowly down onto the back of his young ruby neck.

I hear the faint cannonade of drums as the pan flute whistles fill the air with the theme from 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Every moment I have ever lived has come down to this: a man and his son, fishing for the first time together underneath the wild blue canopy of promise and forever.

The wind whips our hair like snakes on fire.

Choose, boy. Choose.

He chooses.

Henry chooses.

He smashes the rod down into the stream again. And again, real quickly...a big giant pro basketball player's long middle finger to me and my patronizing bullshit.

"Henry!" I shout as I watch the nub of earthworm that he had on his hook go sailing through the air.

What a world, I think to myself as I hit pause on life and just watch things go down.

What a fucking life, huh?

One second you're a baby worm born in some guy's worm garden, some long trough of cheap lumber and horseshit and apple peels and brown gunky lettuce or whatever, and you're there pigging out on the slime and the minerals seeping out of the decay, living La Vida Loca/a resort worm born into the good life/a fatso/el gordo, God knows where you are born...Ohio maybe....maybe suburban Cleveland or maybe Erie, Pa or maybe in the south somewhere/where do they grow worms? who knows?/everywhere maybe, and it doesn't even matter because one day they scoop you up and some big human/God finger handles you and counts you (you're one of 18 if you're a nightcrawler, one of 30 if you're a redworm) and thumps you down into a squat plastic arena with the rest of the worms whose fate it is now is to lay beside you in this damp lump of dirt and wonder what the hell could possibly happen next.

Oh man. They have no idea. Poor bastards. The Walmart fridge back by the camping crap. The sudden lid lift and the epic burst of sunlight. Swift random thoughts of freedom. Then... the hook point in your guts. The confusion. What is happening to me?

Why?

Fucking why is this happening to me?

Then my son whips the rod I asked him not to whip and part of your torso goes flipping through the late spring air into a patch of grass where probably some ants or a spider or something will eat it by tomorrow morning.

Jesus.

I zoom back in and I'm over all that now. I'm way more concerned with the state of this 40 dollar upper-echelon Zebco rig that I bought and that is being systematically destroyed before my very eyes than I am worried about the state of affairs down in Wormville. It's pretty much the same way that, if there was a God, he'd be way too busy trying to constantly salvage some of his shit, some of his forests and rivers and all, to be able to watch you and your sorry ass being whipped around ragdoll-style, pathetic frothy snot swishing out of your lame weak allergic nose and eyes as you scream and cry like a little bitch while dialing up his mobile number non-stop/over and over and over again/'praying' to him for some saving, some salvation, to have some more 'blessings' bestowed upon your fat ass that you can mention on Facebook and just genuinely being a real annoyance while he is trying to make sure that the whole fucking thing doesn't fall apart at the seams underneath the weight of you and your team of a billion careless bullshit artists.

My wife shows up as Henry embeds his size 12 empty bait hook into the tough old man skin of a wild willow.

I must appear flustered, I guess.

She looks at me through her pretty girl sunglasses and I know she wishes she could just Gyllenhaal me with the blink of her sensational baby blues but she cannot and this is her fate, at least for this afternoon down here on the crick at the neighbor's Memorial Day trout stocking/bbq/bonfire/beer drinking bonanza, and so she sighs a winter wind at me and says with that certain pretty girl disineterested tone that comes from a place on the undercarriage of the freaking soul:

"Why don't you just cut off his hook and let him throw the bobber around?"

Hmph.

HMPH.

That lands on me hard, like a jet.

I hate her so much right now, her soft pretty Utah lips over there spouting out simple little country wisdoms while I am over here overthinking this fleck of worm hurling through the sky and unsure how to reign my own son in.

I want to grab her and savage her here in front of everyone, in front of my own child, for Chrissakes. I want to make mad love to her in the middle of the creek, on top of three rainbow trout and a cold river rock until all of the people over by the campers come obver to watch us bumping and grinding down in the water.

"Look at Serge and Monica," they'd say in flat rural Pennsylvania farm tones. "Who knew?"

But no. No, I just grind my teeth and hide behind my thousand sheets of afternoon blahness and I dig in my creel for my clippers and I find them and take them out and clip off the hook from Henry's line and he doesn't even notice or even stop slapping the shimmering stream for barely a hot second.

I look at the rod and I notice a very fine thread of black dancing in the breeze; one of the guides is coming unwrapped and I just have to smile to myself. The thing is probably ten minutes away from a ride on the trash truck, but suddenly it doesn't matter to me at all, man.

The freaking kid is having a blast. Sweet boy/ halfway down the lane between two and three/ the greatest moments in my life, here/now.

Henry keeps hollereing out, "I got another one! I got a fish, Dad!"

I'ts actually kind of beautiful, really. He isn't catching shit, of course. You know that. He doesn't even have a hook on his line. Hell, people out golfing near a pond this holiday weekend probably have a better chance at landing a fish than Henry does at this point. He has no idea about any of that, though. Isn't that wonderful?

To him: this is fishing.

To him, to my boy: this is the greatest thing that could have ever possibly happened. His daddy handed him a fishing pole by a stream under a shining sun and it was Go-Time.

Plus, he's quite high on potato chips and apple juice.

Look at him stabbing the water with his rod.

My boy, slaying a dragon out here in the middle of this country meadow while down the road, left or right it don't matter, some young soldier's bones are lying still down in his grave, too far underneath his own kid slamming his own fishing rod onto a cool creek to be of much help, the worms coming and going at all hours of the day and night.