An Untitled Autobiography - Chapter IV

There are certain events in a life, I think we can all agree, that in retrospect are found to have signaled the end of an era and the beginning of a new, singular trajectory; these watershed moments are often the culmination of some grand buildup, a natural personal evolution over time--the final stop, perhaps, of a train boarded long ago, having rumbled forth with a certain inevitability and promise.

Other times however, the moment arrives almost cruelly, without warning or pause--a pair of shears casually bisecting a length of string. It is in this latter manner that the events to be described herein visited themselves upon my young life.

I remember it, to a point, as it were yesterday. Softly, a breeze--warm, though it was autumn and the leaves had begun to turn. The sky was a sort of nitrogen blue, dense and deep, the color of the ocean in Hawaiian postcards; it cradled the sun like a cracked egg. Colored leaves stirred on the damp green lawn.

Father in those days talked often of that lawn. It seemed at times to consume him, to become for him something darkly symbolic, perhaps. Ah, dear reader, the endless and futile struggle of it! The hubris of living in defiance of nature! My childhood, as I have offered in a previous chapter, is peppered with memories of Father's struggle--the fungicides, the aeration, the public outrage concerning inconsiderate pets (one such incident, following an especially ugly experiment in reseeding, culminated in the vile rumor that Father had fed Ed Casey's labrador Louis XIV a wad of toxic barbecue). There was the embarrassing accumulation of esoteric hose attachments, the hollow-eyed gazing upon scattered (but indefatigable!) spots of brown, the increasingly violent and erratic telephone arguments with the county concerning water allocation--ah, the list doth insist! But I have digressed, dear reader, and we shall return together with haste to that blue Sunday long past.

Father was dressed smartly that afternoon in a snug v-neck sweater and finely creased slacks, having recently received for his birthday a gift subscription to Vanity Fair. Mother sat shaded on the porch sipping absently at a mojito and staring with hazy eyes at the horizon. I stumbled about, three years old and in a near constant state of imbalance, awkwardly circumnavigating the lush (but imperfect) lawn.

Father stood with his feet apart brandishing the thick half of a billiard cue, broken off at the midsection in some seedy bit of personal history that remains unknown to me. He was batting lazily (but oh how determined!) at rotting apples fallen from a tree near the fence, a practice he had recently undertaken after a strict doctor's order had occasioned that, henceforth, Mother would be drinking for the both of them.

I remember the wet thud as Father over and over made contact, exploding the fruit into a pulpy, fragrant mess. He seemed pleased by this; his stern face was drawn tightly into a rictus of grim satisfaction. And as I waddled obliviously into this violent circumference, fate came crashing down upon me with force--the concentrated force of a 30-year-old man exorcising his personal demons through a length of lacquered wood.

My memory here understandably ends, but the purpose of this reminiscence remains to be discussed. I believe that this moment, this exact and unblinking moment, was when one potential future was disintegrated in the face of another, bleaker one; it was the moment when an ocean of boundless potential winnowed and dried to a puddle. Much like an eager child tearing open his birthday present to find a ten dollar gift certificate for Yankee Candle, it was the eclipsing of a beautiful dream--it was the moment when a tender young boy, a beacon of almost limitless potential and unrealized ability, was rendered socially retarded by the absent arc of a billiard cue.

Who on this green earth knows how things may have progressed otherwise? It is best not to dwell on these things, dear reader, but in my private moments I imagine that perhaps I would be happier, more successful, luckier in love--ah, who but Fortuna may divine such things! In the face of such oblivion there is but one certainty and one alone--had that long spent day transpired otherwise, had I wandered even a meter laterally in either direction, had my wayward guardians expressed even a modicum of interest in my whereabouts, it doesn't seem altogether unreasonable that I would have been able to get some sort of job by now--after thirteen protracted months in this godforsaken town that I would be capable of mustering from within my innate worthlessness the drive and vigor to perform literally any task that would result in monetary compensation--something small, simple, to support my paltry and meager lifestyle, to occupy my withering and violent mind, to steer my thoughts, however briefly, from the endless black waste which lies before me like a leering, fanged beast--faceless, nameless, supine and beckoning...

But again I digress, and there are still many fertile fields to plow. Onward, ever onward--