Listen, before you go any further, you should know that Tales of the Birdman is intended for mature audiences only. The views expressed within do not reflect the views of WordPress, Shiny Red Nothing, or myself. Read at your own risk and enjoy. Life’s too short to be offended.
Tales of the Birdman by Wayne Bird
II: Hotels, Drains, and Ships That Sail
5: Wayne vs We vs They
Everyone was on their best behavior as we opened presents on Christmas morning, early, before mom went to work. After she left, we began enjoying our new DVDs. I had purchased the Looney Toons Golden Collection to do exactly what it did that morning – placate the masses. My sister, dad, and I laughed and giggled and recalled lazy Saturday mornings in bed together, watching Bugs Bunny and his entire absurd gang. Mom and dad would peel oranges and apples for us, and give us grapes in bowls, which would inevitably capsize when a big wave on the waterbed would hit them. The grapes would then roll down into the crevices of the bed.
Of course, dad was drinking, and we all knew that at the rate he was going, he would be drunk by eight thirty.
Growing up, my parents were basically blue collar hippies – dad managed a factory line and mom worked various retail and waitressing jobs. We spent a lot of weekends on road trips to national parks, museums, and sites of Civil War battles. Occasionally, dad could be coaxed by mom into visiting alleged haunted houses on the way. They smoked pot openly and had an endless supply of good natured friends that included bikers, hippies, musicians, artists, and the children of their friends. I have a fond memory of trying to make vegetable juice (which dad called “Home Made V8”) in the blender. We passed a single glass around a table full of the friends I mentioned before as well as my brothers and sisters. Blend. Pass the glass. Make suggestions. Blend. Pass the glass.
“That’s the most inappropriate joke I’ve ever heard,” I told my thirteen year old sister, who was sitting on the couch with Dorothy, a mostly ignored game of “Guess Who?” between them. “Psh. I’ve heard it, like, six hundred times,” she said, and then returned to telling secrets and giggling with Dorothy, just like they had been doing all night and all morning before. My other siblings had not bothered to show up, although they had all called before Mom had left for work to apologize (again) and offer their (mostly) reasonable excuses for not coming home this year (again).
The morning wore on, and I was a sixteen year old boy again. All vestiges of reasonability had left my mind, so I retreated into myself and hid out with my notebook. I had lost all hope for a decent Christmas. In the kitchen, Dorothy cornered me for a hug. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I could feel her breasts against me, and I could not breathe. “Hang in there, Wayne.
16Don’t give in yet, it’s still early.” She is also the warmest, most sincere person I have ever known. She steps back and a mental struggle begins within me. A voice in my head repeats: eye contact eye contact eye contact. “Bruce just
convinced your dad to
“How did he do that?”
“He gave him sleeping sleeps for a while.”
take a nap.”
pills and told him they were Vicodin. He’ll sober up if he
A defense mechanism I because anything could fuck up at any time and I would have to answer for it. I was not shocked to learn that Bruce had drugged my father for me.
(Eye contact)
“It was your sister’s idea, and we figure we can wake him up an hour or so before your mom gets off work and maybe play a board game or something.”
“Okay.” (Eye contact) “It might work.” “It will work.” (Eye contact) “Bruce told me about VD.”
“VD” was the nickname I had for my girlfriend, Sally. This fine Christmas, she was not trying to survive her family at home like I was, she was trying to survive heroin addiction in a clinic. I didn’t know what to say to Dorothy about the whole thing, so I stared at the cracked and browning yellow kitchen linoleum, spider web cracks spread across the entire kitchen floor. Dorothy hugged me again. For a moment, I felt like it would be okay to kiss her, but I did not. “She was very sick, Wayne. Maybe she’ll get better, maybe not. You had to get away from that shit.”
(Eye contact)
“Come on, darlin’,” she said, grabbing my hand. “Remember, Wayne: You deserve to have a good time. Let’s go watch cartoons.”
—
At Bunker Hill, Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny battle over their respective forts. Sam has a heavily armed stone fort and flies the flag of “They” against Bugs’ primitive fort of sharpened tree trunks. The flag of “We”, complete with a carrot logo, flies over Bugs‘ fort. The short distance between the forts is a filled with tree stumps, which is all that was left after Bugs cut all the trees down to erect his stronghold. The field is brown, and is devoid of any other life. It is not clear why both forts are unmanned but for the stars of the show.
“Enemy, ahoy!,” calls Sam from the top of his fort. He is not impressed to discover that his enemy is a rabbit. “I’m Sam Von Schamm, the Hessian, that’s who I am, and I have you outnumbered one to one. Surrender or die!,” he orders with confidence. Bugs Bunny is not impressed, and does not feel threatened despite the fact that he is quite obviously outgunned and that Yosemite
Sam can somehow fire eight or ten cannons on different levels of his fort, simultaneously, by himself. Bugs Bunny has his wits and that is enough. The two adversaries charge each other’s forts again and again, repeatedly rushing past each other with bayonets fixed. Sam yells, “CHARGE!,“ and then Bugs yells, “CHARGE!” and then they rush past each other to take the respective enemy’s fort. Every time it happens, Sam is surprised to find that, after he has raised the “They” flag over at Bugs’ fort, Bugs has raised the “We” flag (with the carrot logo underneath) over at his fort. When this gets old, Bugs comes up with a variety of ways to blow up his Hessian foe.
You should know that it doesn’t matter what happens to Sam, because Yosemite Sam is invincible. He is never really more than disheveled and ego-bruised after the
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learned during my formative years was to never be shocked
bombs go off. A quick shower, costume change, and beard trim (all off camera), and he is burrowing underground from Fort They to Fort We. He comes up inside of a shack of TNT (and fireworks?) inside of Bugs’ compound, where he is subjected to another massive, but mostly harmless, explosion.
“That Wabbit was waiting for him!” exclaimed Bruce with sincere glee. He looked to Dorothy and said, “You’d think that Bugs would realize that dynamite won’t kill him and try something else, like maybe plastique or a voodoo doll.”
Dorothy pulled away, mid-secret, from my sister’s ear to say, “He’s not trying to kill him, Bruce, he’s trying to win him over. Besides, at this point, that cocksucker’s just a raging ball of irrational fury and fun to fuck with.” My sister giggled at the word “cocksucker.”
After being blown up for the fourth time or so, Sam decides to carry a barrel of gunpowder over to Fort We. He leaves it at Bugs’ front door, and then sneaks back to Fort They to watch the explosion. Unbeknownst to Sam, there was a hole in the back end of the barrel, and through it poured the gunpowder, right into the seat of his leggings. Whilst Sam cackled over his devilishly clever plan, his leggings leaked a gunpowder trail behind him the entire sneaky trip back. Of course, Bugs is wise to the whole thing, and now sits on the barrel of gunpowder Yosemite Sam left at his fort door (curiously, the barrel is now painted black and labeled as gunpowder). He casually puts out the sparking wick just before it reaches the barrel, and then lights a match against a log in the fort wall. He drops the match on the gunpowder trail Sam left behind and the trail sparks up and sizzles its way back to Sam‘s Fort, and the fort, and thus Sam, blow up yet again. Finally, Yosemite Sam concedes defeat and joins Bugs Bunny’s “Spirit of ‘76“ style band (on drums). It’s a classic, time honored example of that Merrie Melodie tradition of, “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em!”
You should know that it’s not as funny if you have to have it explained to you.
Mom came home and found us exactly the way Dorothy and my sister had planned…except for the fact that Dad had woken up two hours prior and was drunk for the second time that day. We were all at the kitchen table playing Monopoly, Looney Toons too loud in the background. We greeted her with a round of “Merry Christmas” in loose unison as she picked up the T.V. remote from in front of my father and made her way to her place at the table.
“How was your day?,” asked Dad, looking tired and hungover and drunk again. She eyed him suspiciously and did not answer. She sat, turned down the television, and sighed: “Merry Christmas, everyone. My day was pretty crazy.” Dad mumbled something under his breath. The air between them, across the dining room table, was charged with a palpable tension.
“I bet,” squealed Dorothy, answering my mom and eager to relieve the tension. She related the horror story of her ONE Christmas in retail while my sister giggled in her hands. I noticed that she was making a mess of the tortilla chips and salsa she had been eating, red sauce was dribbling from the corner of her mouth, chewed corn chips and crumbs were collecting on her shirt and on the table and on the floor. The cat was eating a tomato chunk by her fuzzy pink Powerpuff Girls slippers. She got up to go to the kitchen, and, inexplicably, dropped to the floor in a fit of laughter, hitting her head on the wall on the way down. She was hysterical.
“Are you all right?” Mom asked. All of us (except for Bruce, who was in his wheelchair behind the table) rushed to my sister’s side immediately. We helped her up, and then Mom asked, “What’s so funny?”
Bruce put his cheap black wraparound sunglasses on and said, “She’s drunk.”
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“Are you drunk?” Mom asked. My sister was leaning into our dad, laughing and slobbering onto his t-shirt.
“How did she get drunk?,” she shot at my father.
Dad was defensive. “I told her she could sip some wine from the box in the fridge, but I didn’t say she could get fucking hammered, honey.”
“I’m not drunk, I’m fiiiiine!” she sang into his chest. “She’s wasted,” observed Bruce.
“Let me take you to your room,” I offered, taking her arm. She reared back and slapped me hard across the face.
“I’M FINE!,” she roared at me before collapsing in another fit of laughter, again banging her head.
“How could you not notice this? She’s thirteen! How could you let this happen?”
It was as if, at that moment, the thin scab that had been keeping the real nastiness in check had been picked. My parents were ready to bleed for me and my sister and Bruce and Dorothy and The Baby Jesus on his special day. Mom helped
my sister to bed and the rest of us sat in awkward silence began. Then we fucking laughed.
“But I ruined Christmas!,” howled my sister from upstairs. Silence. “But I ruined Christmas!” Silence.
“But I ruined Christmas!”
until the screams
We laughed because it was funny. The laughter let off some began the Monopoly game again, tossing my drunken sister’s back into the bank. When mom returned to the table she was that my sister had fallen asleep. Dad did not look up from said something meant for him that neither we, nor he, heard. It earned her a glare. “What did you say?” he asked, his tone menacing.
“Why do you have to be so mean to me?,” My mother’s words hung in the space between them.
The rest of us stared at the table.
“I couldn’t hear you,” he replied, still glaring. He picked up the DVD remote and started a new cartoon. The “Looney Tunes” intro played and he watched the first few seconds of the cartoon, and then skipped ahead to the next cartoon, let the intro play again, and watched the first few seconds of the cartoon. He repeated this cycle through disc one and proceeded to do it with disc two.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I want to watch Speedy Gonzalez,” he answered. “Why not just go to the chapter selection menu and find it?,” I suggested.
The glare was now directed at me. “You try it, smart guy.” He threw the remote at me and it almost made the flight. It landed on the floor next to me. I picked it up and found the cartoon he wanted.
He got up to turn up the volume and Mom said, “Don’t turn it up too loud, please.”
“WHAT?!?,” he growled, at that point little more than a ball of beer-drunk rage. “Why do you have to be so mean to me?” Mom asked him for the second time.
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of the steam and we money and properties smiling, and said his deeds, and she
“Fucking…”
There was a moment of silence. A mental search for the perfect noun to describe my mother.
“…disease.” —
Dorothy insisted we drive to her mom’s place in Chicago. She would show me a good time, and told me that I deserved that. We flew along the interstate at eighty five miles per hour, Bruce, our lame-legged driver, singing along to “Scentless Apprentice” by Nirvana at top volume. There was a zombie in the car and it was me. I was lying in the backseat, head on a pillow against the passenger side of the car, legs across the seat. Bruce told us about the weird Asian fetish pornography he wanted to pick up at a place he knew. My zombie doppelganger sat on the floor behind Bruce (who was in the driver’s seat) with his rotting legs stretched behind Dorothy (Bruce’s alleged succubus, and the object of my lust, in the passenger seat). The doppelganger and I stared each other down without expression and I cannot tell my frontseat friends about it because then Dorothy would know that Bruce had given me my first-ever hit of acid and he made me promise I would not tell her.
Bruce is showing me a good time. Dorothy is in danger of being swallowed by The portal. There is a zombie in the car and it I am a zombie. I will not respond rationally, so I There are penguins in the car. They march but never advance on me. When you are with me, you are invincible. I close my eyes and change nothing. The penguin says it. His lawyer says it. The doctor says it. There is a zombie in the car and it is me. I am a zombie.