Grand dad

He came from the oilfields of West Texas, but he might just as easily have hailed from the coalmines of Kentucky or the steel mills of Pittsburgh.  He was the kind of man who would fit in as easily in one place as in another, but only because he fit in nowhere.  He was a square peg.  The earth was, for as far in the distance as anyone could see, a round, dry hole.  This is not meant to be a metaphor.  It is not meant to suggest that here was a man who found no sex or had no intelligence or lacked mechanical skill.  He had all of these, and in abundance to hear him tell it, though they rarely served the purposes one might expect.  He was small man with a thorny nature and no amount of hammering, no cunning or crafty reserve, could force him past the gates and into the human community in a way that would stick.  If it were what it is not, if it were a metaphor about sex or intelligence or skill, it would be an inadequate one.  It would suggest that, but for the mere shaving off of a few rough edges, this man might find a way to belong.  But that was not the case at all.  In fact, he was unsuited by nature to find a true home.  His thorns kept folks at bay.  Even his own reach was not enough to overcome them.  In those moments when it seemed that he had slipped right in, that he blended with his surroundings, he would ultimately come up short.  Like a peg in a hole, there was always space and distance to be weighed.  He had points of contact as he rattled around the perimeter, but he could never mold himself to the smooth even lines of social acceptance.  His edges were too straight, too hard, too set in their linear ways.  And so the large round earth would swallow him up in its rolling, beckoning topography.  He was angular and it was curving. And he searched the distant horizon for a line of fit, but as he cut across her form, he always found that the line moved further into the distance.  He wore out his boots as he sought the line, but the caliche sand didn’t stick as he walked.  He couldn’t find a place to belong, try to fit, that is, as he might.

 And he did try, too, this man who did not belong.  For a stone-cold loner he spent a great deal of his life looking for a place to hang his hat.  He became at one time or another throughout his long life, an Optimist, a Shriner, a Mason, an Odd Fellow, a Baptist, a Methodist, a Democrat, a Dixiecrat, a Republican, and even, for  one very short period of time in the 1930s,  a Klansman.  This final misguided attempt to fit in occurred while he worked as a rough-and-tumble roustabout during the Great Depression in the deadset middle of the Permian Basin, in the modern desertfloor that once was a prehistoric swirling seabed.  This land was, like the man himself when I knew him, an ancient dusty joke, a shadow of its former self.  It had once been rich with minerals and teeming with life, until the inevitable sun dried up the last drop of moisture and the ineluctable winds covered the flat dead basin with a thick layer of dust, like a dry sink in a dirt-caked Men’s Restroom at an abandoned gas station in a ghost town.  And the land had come, like the man himself, to bend to the inexorable pull of the earth, her minerals crushed under her weighty embrace, as they squirmed and twisted, the minerals did, to get out of those meaty arms, that sweaty Sunday clutch, and they ran when they broke, ran fluid from the room, all wild abandon and innocence, a swirling burbling jumble,  through the parlor and out of the infernal heat and the noise of the adults in the kitchen, and through the swinging screen of the back door and into the whitebright yard,  through the sandbrown crust  of the earth’s embrace and into the sky’s oceanblue.  And he came to live, like the minerals, in the freeing airless air that is the vast skyless plane of the barren West Texas oilfields.  He came to live in the wind.  This happened, this part of the belonging story which marks our man with a mark as black as tar, and sticky, like crude, when the man became a Klansman,  in a small town that was a drive of, at least, 300 miles distance from the nearest black man  –  “As the crow flies,” to hear the folks tell it. This man who lived in the wind, who strafed across the earth in search of a home, tried at last to join by signing on to a cause that was ugly in its heart. And he failed even here because he didn’t have it in his own heart, either the will to stick or the hate to stay.  Still, he would try, when I came to know him and asked about it, to pass it off like it was youthful indiscretion.  He would tell anyone who would listen to him that the group disbanded after only a handful of meetings because they didn’t really have anything to do.  He was the kind of guy who’d say things that weren’t funny just to watch folks twitch.  And though there was probably some truth in his excuse, there was surely more in the fact that, even if he’d been born in Mississippi’s Hill Country, he wouldn’t have lasted in the Klan.  He didn’t know how to hate because he never figured out how to love.  I think that he was a little embarrassed by the fact that he couldn’t even fit in among the rabble-rousers.  He had a little too much good in him, and a little too much wrong with him.  He was a square peg and life a round hole.  He was a gypsy, a roamer, a tumbleweed.  And so he remained alone.

I knew him only briefly during his final years, meeting him by one of those chance-of-fate encounters that bring all people together.  We were never really properly introduced.  He just stuck his face in mine one day, on an early Tuesday morning when I was resting in my bed, contemplating the daylight creeping across the wall, and the world outside and my own place in it.  He had let himself in, evidently, like he owned the place, and had made his way up the stairs to my bedroom and, as I lay there resting and contemplating.  He suddenly burst into the room and walked over to my bed and leaned over my startled body, and put his face into mine.  He made these strange, and strangely aggressive, gargling noises.  Something like a catch in the throat,enunciated with his thick burbling lips.

Ah-bubbbb.  Ah-bubbbb.  Then, just like that, he growled and moved on. And out of the blue, we came to make each other’s alarming acquaintance.  I didn’t have any say in the matter.

The next day he did the same thing.  And the next, he did the same.  This went on for a time, this bursting in and leaning over and this weird aggressive gargling.  Each time he’d end with a growl.  Each time he’d stay only a moment.  And then it would end as abruptly as it had come on.  He’d disappear quickly, as quickly as he’d appeared, shaking the dust off his boots as he walked down the stairs.

This odd how-do-you-do continued to occur on almost a daily basis for probably a year or more.  It happened for so long, in fact, that it eventually became of little notice to me.  And then, when he noticed that I’d stopped being impressed, he began, through a series of interactions that grew increasingly sophisticated, to sharpen his approach.  He would sometimes push his face near my own as if he was tempting me to touch it.  I sometimes gave in to the temptation and reached out a tentative hand to push at his gnarly whiskers.  He’d wait until my fingers had almost reached their mark, and then he’d turn his head and snap at them, his bared teeth clicking in a snarling grimace, noise burbling up from his throat, forcing me to pull back in fear.

He wouldn’t leave me alone.  It came to a point, over a course of days, weeks, months, years, that, at any moment I might, for example, find the man  rushing from around the corner shouting epithets and running straight at me in a brazen attempt to pick me up and throw me over his shoulder.  Or else, I would be walking through a room somewhere, anywhere really, and I’d look up and see him sitting in a chair in the corner.  He’d be sitting there patting his knee with a flyswatter, a glass of bourbon on the table beside him, telling me to come over and take a seat beside him.  He spoke with a strange, measured lowness, slightly whistling through his teeth.  He was completely unaware  that I was terrified by his gruffness.  Or he knew and didn’t care. He was clearly unlike the others in the room.  He was, indeed, it seemed – it still seems – an Odd Fellow.

Actually, if truth be told, the oddest thing was that I found myself over time to be drawn to this man.  It was as if, even in those early encounters, when I looked in his face, when I reached out my hand, it was as much from a strange fascination as it was from a startling fear. When I saw in his face the structure and the story of the man, the creases in his eyes, his life’s experience, his wrinkling skin pulled tight around his sharp cheekbones, I found both the nature and nurture of humanity, or the lack thereof, played out in in his lanky frame.  It was as if, when I looked in his face, I saw a version of my own story, like a foreshadowing of things to come. I recognized, without being able to put words to it, a family resemblance and, more, a map of the fearsome world.  The deep-cut fissures in his once smooth skin told of rivers cut into the rock, of hardscrabble search for meaning.  His eyes were black as oil, and as suggestive of buried value.  Something stirred in my blood when I saw him.  As if I felt some ancient tug in his direction, drawn along by an odd warming of the blood.  This response was, as I have said, beyond my reckoning.  It ran fluid like rivers, deep like oil, and warm like the blood in my veins.  And the thick viscous pull of this man ran like blood, like oil, through my heart.  I came over time to warm to this man not just because he was strangely familiar but because he was angrily other.

Perhaps it was his scrawny-bone frame, or the fact that he hunched over slightly at the waist in a way that made him look somehow tough and mischievous and vulnerable, all at the same time.  I can’t really say, even now, what it was, but whatever the attraction, I came to be drawn ever more closely into his sphere.  He would sit with his flyswatter and curse at the TV, his web of arms catching me up as I ran past his chair – always slowing just a little, just a little, as I rushed by, cutting wide swath circles to make sure I didn't bump his table and spill his drink and block his view.  It was a game we played, we two, as he sipped on his bourbon and I dashed through the house.  He’d sit and curse as if I didn’t exist, and I’d dash around the corner with my sparkling eyes, and he’d slowly reach down with his glass, pressing his hand upon the table waiting motionless until I, like a fly to his swatter, came to rest within his reach.  And just when I thought I had made it past his reach he’d snap out his arm in a flash of light and catch me by an ankle, turning me head over heels in a pile on the floor at his feet.  Then I’d reach up and stroke those scraggly whiskers and I'd climb up in his lap and I’d  be caught in his web, where I’d sit with him and listen to his wild stories and watch his over-animated expressions.   I’d hold my sides and laugh.

It was then that the relationship transformed into something  miraculous.  When I say “miraculous” I know the weight that is implied.  I know it and I intend it.  I mean to say that the relationship was life-changing.  It was the kind of relationship that comes along only rarely, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime.  We two, this old man and I, came to know and to love each other, despite ourselves.  He was the source and I was the echo.  And yet through our prickly interactions, I became a source of my own.  He took on something like a second youth when in my presence and I benefited from the lift of colorful lies that he told with the wit of deep experience.  He became a wellspring of youthful vigor, I opened up to an ancient priming knowledge.  I drew from his well of wishful, whimsical memories and he from my unabashed innocence. Perhaps it was his withered body, its increasing frailty suggesting a kind of weakness, or a need where none had existed before.  Or perhaps it was the fact that he was small for a man, hunched at the waist to exaggerate the effect. But somehow we came to see eye to eye.  He was closer in height to my own small frame than other adults, and there was a comfort in his proximity, his frailty, his willingness to play the clown to cover over any weakness.  He was Shakespeare’s second childhood, having nothing but time left to lose. I was Shakespeare’s morning-faced school-boy, lost in the wilderness of endless fantasy.  We became lost, we two, in mere oblivion. Like conspirators, I became protective  of him, and he of me.

... to be continued