Pick One
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
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