Category: Yo Ivanhoe

I don’t recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special
powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had
sprung from the pages of mythology.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that this didn’t appear to be just
another ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant. For one thing he was a good head
taller than any giant I’ve ever seen, and he could balance small children on
his nose and juggle dogs without seeming to cause the animals the slightest
alarm or discomfort. The dogs actually appeared to enjoy being juggled, in
fact. Some of them even slept while the giant was juggling them.

The giant didn’t have much to say, but he was one of those giants whose
actions spoke louder than his words. He had a real knack for catching people
when they fell, as well as for locating lost objects. He was always returning
things to their rightful owners, things that had been missing for great
stretches of time –decades, in several notable instances.

Some folks were suspicious of this talent, and spread rumors that the giant
had actually stolen the items in question, and was hoarding these things in his
lair. To dispel such rumors the giant took out a full-page advertisement in the
local newspaper, announcing an open house to which the entire community was
invited to inspect his lair and sample his baked goods.

The giant, it turned out, was a damn fine baker, which honestly came as no
surprise to his many local admirers. His generous selection of baked goods
–many of them quite exotic– put to shame the offerings of any of the small
bakeries in town.

Needless to say, those who chose to take advantage of the giant’s
hospitality –and there was quite a turnout– saw absolutely no evidence of
lost or stolen items. And the very next morning the giant delivered a pristine
1969 Chevrolet Impala, a vehicle that had been missing for over a decade, to
the home of its owner, a local school board member.

Any explanation of how or where the giant found these lost objects was never
forthcoming. The man was, as I mentioned, notoriously tight-lipped, and most of
us had learned to live with his amiable silence.

The giant also had a special rapport with birds; he could persuade them to
perch on his head and eat grain from his scalp. On occasion, when he wished to
entertain children, he could coax birds to pluck sunflower seeds from his
nostrils.

There were some in the community who resented the fact that the giant
contributed nothing to the local economy. I have no idea how he survived, but
he didn’t seem to have anything to do with money, and eventually there was a
successful movement to drive the giant from his lair along a river outside of
town to make way for new commercial development.

When the giant left his lair for the last time he did so peacefully, and
comported himself with the quiet dignity many of us had come to expect from
him. He left behind all of his possessions, with the exception of an opulent,
handcrafted, and intricately detailed dollhouse that he carried away in his
arms.

A large family of musically gifted grasshoppers inhabited this dollhouse.
These grasshoppers, it was said, slept in tiny four-poster beds and filled
their little mansion each night with the strains of beautiful music.

The giant finally established a new home for himself (and his family of
grasshoppers) in a smaller neighboring community. A short time later we began
to hear reports that he was healing people and performing miracles, and that,
of course, was when the real trouble started for the poor fellow.

If you’ve done any reading at all –from the Bible to the Greeks right through to some of your classic fairy tales– you’ll know that life is generally hell on giants. And unfortunately our fellow didn’t fare much better than most of his more celebrated predecessors.

It’s a rather discouraging story, really, and I am frankly too tired at the moment
to continue with it.

But what the hell, I’ll just cut to the chase: one snowy night just after Thanksgiving some years ago, the local giant was flushed from his
burrow by a mob of drunken locals and stoned to death. He was interred along with his beloved dollhouse –the musical grasshoppers having been adopted by the daughter of a Lutheran minister– in a plot next
to the old courthouse dome at the county fairgrounds, and folks still come from all over the place to pay their respects. The county historical society has a pair of the giant’s old handmade shoes on display, and they allow visitors to stand in them to have their pictures taken.

One
night long ago in a once-upon-a-time world there was a little lost dog in a
faraway forest. The dog was alone and hungry, and it was a bitter winter in the
forest. The little dog was settling into the cold den he had burrowed for himself
in the snow around the roots of a tree, and as he curled up there in the
darkness he heard the distant shimmer of bells and, a moment later, voices
carrying in the forest, a great many voices joined in some happy song. The dog
had never known anyone to pass through the faraway forest, not once in his lost
time in that cold and lonely place had he heard voices like these, or the
beautiful and wondrous stamping of bells.

The
little dog crept to the edge of his den and sniffed, peering, in the direction of
the music. A moment later, light from the many torches of the travelers crept
dimly into the clearing outside the den, then chased completely the darkness
before them, becoming full, woofing light. The dog watched in wonder as the
brightly clad travelers paraded into view, a moving cloud of steam and smoke
rising above them, carrying within it much laughter and song.

There
were many tiny acrobats and a great thin fellow toddling upon stilts and
several laughing jugglers. There were five shy horses pulling bright clattering
wagons, and interspersed amongst the parade were dozens of chattering clowns.
At the very end of this colorful parade, lagging almost outside the very last
of the torchlight, there was a small and limping sad-faced clown, leading an old
and slow donkey. As the dog crept from his hiding place in the snow and the
roots of the giant tree, the happy songs and jangling bells of the travelers
were already fading away into the distance and the darkness of the faraway
forest.

The
dog trotted along after the parade and soon found himself beside the limping
clown and the old donkey. When finally the sad-faced clown became aware of the
dog’s presence, a look of surprise and happiness came over his face and he let
out a cry that startled the little dog. The clown crouched in the snow
alongside the donkey and clapped his hands and called out, and when the dog
came into the clown’s arms the little clown began to laugh and the small, laughing clown held the dog in his arms, rocking him gently.

The
clown carried the little dog in his arms -murmuring and giggling happily all
the while-as they brought up the rear of the noisy and colorful and clanking
parade.

They
traveled that night until the torches had all burned down to darkness, and then
they stopped and set up their camp alongside a frozen river. It had grown quite
cold, and the travelers bundled together under their blankets beside roaring
fires, with the horses and the donkey huddled stamping and steaming just
outside the circle of jugglers, acrobats, and clowns.

The
clown had swaddled the lost dog in an old wool blanket, and he held the dog in
his arms and rocked him as the others told stories and laughed and gradually
drifted into silence and sleep.

The
limping little clown’s name was Munch, or so he was known to his fellow
travelers, and now he whispered to the dog in his arms, "I shall call you
Beauteous Munch." Together they sat up until the bonfire had died away to
embers, and together they saw a sky above them where there was no darkness at
all, where there were millions upon millions of bright stars. The clown sang
quiet lullabies and interrupted himself at one point to say, "Look, there goes
a shooting star! Sweet dreams,
Beauteous Munch."

And
that night, as he lay curled up beneath the blankets with the little clown,
Beauteous Munch was warm and slept without shivering for the first time since
the long ago day when he had first found himself lost in the faraway forest.

There
had been a time when Beauteous Munch was a puppy living contentedly with his
mother and his brothers and sisters in a wooden box in a small town. One day an
old man and woman had come to take him away to live with them in their house.
They were loud and unhappy people, and try as he might Beauteous Munch could
not make them any less unhappy. The old man was impatient with Beauteous Munch
and shouted at him often.

All
day Beauteous Munch would sit at the window staring out at the children playing
in the street and passing by his house. Then one day when the nights were
beginning to get cold, the old man put Beauteous Munch outside and it was
raining very hard, and cry as he might and scratch at the door as he did,
Beauteous Munch could not get the old man or woman to open the door for him so
he could come in out of the rain. Beauteous Munch sat on the steps of the house
for a long time that night, until he saw the lamp in the front room
extinguished and it was dark up and down the street and the rain was beginning
to turn to snow. That was the night Beauteous Munch wandered away and
eventually found himself exhausted and lost in the faraway forest.

The
first night in the faraway forest Beauteous Munch tried to sleep, but he was
wet and cold and lonely. He was a sad little dog, and he missed his long ago
once-upon-a-time life. He peered up through the big, wet snowflakes that were
cart-wheeling out of the sky and he found a star there barely twinkling, a
little star that looked lost and distant and alone. And as Beauteous Munch
closed his eyes he wished upon that lost and distant star, wished that
somewhere there was another wish lost and longing for a dog, and that attached
to that wish was someone special with quiet magic in his hands and a soft voice
and a smile that could wag a little dog’s tail.

That
same night, far away from the faraway forest, Munch the clown was bundled up in
a blanket next to his donkey, listening to the laughter and the songs of his
traveling companions. He was stout and not as graceful as any of the others,
nor as skilled. Even as a clown his only real role was to lead the donkey and
the horses around the ring, and to assist some of the others with their stunts.
He could not sing, and because he spoke with a slight stutter he was the
quietest of the troupe, and tended to settle by himself into the background,
talking quietly with the donkey and the horses.

And
so it was that that very same night the little clown looked up into the
sky and wished upon a small and distant star; Munch the clown closed his eyes
and showed his crooked little teeth to the moon and offered only the simplest
and most humble of wishes: Please, he
whispered, Something Nice. Something happy. A small, happy thing.

And
now Beauteous Munch and the little clown were together, and that first night as
they curled up together beside the fire and Beauteous Munch was warm and happy
for the first time in a great many days, the little clown saw the beautiful
shooting star tumble all the way down the sky and he thought to himself, So that is what happens when two wishes
collide with one another: An old star
is freed from the heavens and falls into a distant sea where it becomes a
thousand bright and shimmering fishes. A wish come true is a gift that sets the
stars free.

So
that is the story of how Beauteous Munch came to live with Munch the sad-faced
clown. Together they learned many tremendous and difficult tricks and Beauteous
Munch learned to ride on the old donkey’s back and walk across a rope and leap
into the arms of Munch the clown, and all the signs the performers took around
and posted in the towns and villages now said "BEAUTEOUS MUNCH -POPULAR SHOW
DOG!" He was very popular indeed, and people everywhere would come from far and
wide to see the little clown and his astonishing dog.

And
on clear nights, as Beauteous Munch and his friend the clown
curled up and drifted off to sleep, they would stare into the sky above them
and watch with drowsy wonder as star after star tumbled through the darkness
and somewhere, they knew, wishes came true.

My family had always been a
remarkably insulated and self-contained unit. Despite my parents’ divorces
(they divorced when I was eight years old, remarried two years later, and divorced again just after I graduated from high school) there really hadn’t been much in the way of drama or anything you could call
real tragedy in my life. Even when my parents would fight they would do so with
a sort of quiet resignation; we didn’t have a lot of shit storms around our
house. We weren’t people who made scenes, which was both a point of pride and a
sort of mantra with both of my parents.

Because my family was so small, and
I suppose because we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, my childhood was
relatively untouched by grief. We were this strangely insulated little group of
emotional spectators, distantly puzzled by suffering and calamity and the usual
public and private responses to it. Typical small, ugly things happened to us,
but we had been spared calamity, let alone anything approaching true tragedy.
People in my life didn’t die, or hadn’t died, and in this, I realize, I was
remarkably lucky.

There had been an older boy in my
neighborhood that had drowned when I was a kid, and a couple of high school
classmates were killed in a car accident, but I hadn’t been close to any of
these people and hadn’t attended their funerals. Their deaths had been shocking
in that general way that all sudden deaths are shocking, I suppose. They had
also been profoundly mysterious to me, largely because of the way they had been
announced, briefly tsk-tsked over, and then dismissed by one or the
other of my parents with a rattle of newspaper pages being turned. Yet death
didn’t hold any emotional mystery or meaning for me. It seemed to be
simply this strange or puzzling thing that happened to other people.

I suppose I would have to
characterize both my mother and my father as reserved. They were self-contained
people, buttoned down. My mother could get paranoid, and had a voluble,
eccentric streak, but she didn’t do hysterical. If I thought about it hard
enough I might consider my older sister the most thoroughly rational person I
know.

I remember when I was young and
something disruptive happened in my life or around my house my mother would say
to me, “How do you feel about that, David?” Yet it was always clear to me that
this was something almost uncomfortable for her, something she assumed was
expected of her as a parent. She was attempting to communicate with me, I know,
but I also know that what she really wanted from me was almost always what she
got, a shrug. There was nothing more reassuring around our house than a shrug.
A shrug might mean, “I don’t really care,” “It’s no big deal,” or “What can you
do about it?” And all of those things ultimately meant that we weren’t going to
have any big scenes or make a fuss.

I suppose you could infer something
about my emotional makeup as a child by the nickname that dogged me through
junior high school: The Zombie. And also from the fact that being called The
Zombie never really bothered me in the least.

One of my first jobs out of college
was as a legal assistant at a large Chicago law firm, and I remember the first
apartment where I ever lived alone was in this non-descript five-story
cinderblock building, one of those absolutely generic and utilitarian examples
of (I assume) 1960s architecture that you’ll see all over every big city. My
apartment was in the back of the building, and every one of my windows had a
view of the brightly lit parking lot of a huge funeral home.

Shortly after I moved into this
place I developed a severe and persistent case of insomnia, and I got tuned
into the disturbing nightly routines of the funeral home. From appearances the
place did a bang-up business. It seemed like several times every night hearses
–and the occasional ambulance—would pull into the parking lot after midnight
and disappear into the darkness of the underground garage. Night after night I
found myself sitting in my living room with the lights out, drinking beer and
watching this mysterious and very final transfer or transaction taking place. I
found the routine oddly compelling.

Often in the aftermath of the
arrival of the hearse or ambulance there would be other visitors to the funeral
home. Cars would show up and take a space in the huge expanse of the otherwise
empty parking lot. It was always curious to me that most of these people would
choose to park at some distance from the actual entrance. I’d watch as these
people made the long walk to the backdoor, where there was a lighted vestibule.

Sometimes people came alone to the
funeral home in the middle of the night. Other times they would come in pairs,
or in even larger groups. However they came, they would make their way,
clinging to each other (if they had anyone to cling to), up the incline of the
long sidewalk that led to that backdoor.

I have to admit that this spectacle
was gripping theater, and it reached the point where the basic routine became
pretty much predictable. Once I’d seen the people into the building I felt
strangely obligated to sit there in the darkness until they came back out.

Sometimes they’d be back out in
fifteen or twenty minutes, and other times they’d be in there for what seemed
like more than an hour. What they’d do when they came out, however, virtually
never varied. If there was more than one person and they had arrived in
different vehicles they would gather around their cars under the lights of the
parking lot, and they would stand there quietly, alternately embracing and
moving away from each other and pawing at the pavement with their shoes. In
warm weather, when I had my windows open, I could often hear them weeping,
sobbing, choking through great, wrenching, congested squalls of grief.

If they had come alone, or in a
pair, they would almost invariably sit there in their car in the parking lot
for a prolonged period of time –I once saw one man sit there all night in his
running car. I assumed they could not bring themselves to go home.

This nightly ritual made me feel
lousy, but I couldn’t seem to escape it. Every night I found myself making my
way out to the living room and settling into the one chair in the room,
directly facing the windows. I’d tell myself that I was just checking in, but
inevitably I’d end up sitting there for the whole grim spectacle.

It didn’t take long for that
experience to sort of infect my entire life and affect my job. I felt like I
had acquired a dark secret, and was carrying it around with me every day. I
never told anyone about it, and I didn’t have any close friends at work.

This business went on for many
months, through one entire summer and into the late fall. I suppose it was
inevitable, but one night about five or six months into what I had come to
think of as a sort of vigil I watched as a car pulled into the parking lot and
a woman I recognized from my office emerged alone and made that long walk to
the backdoor of the funeral home.

I saw this woman every day; she was
a secretary on my floor, and I suppose she was probably in her fifties. She
wasn’t in the funeral home for very long, but after she came back out she
followed the standard routine by lingering in her car in the parking lot for
more than an hour.

The woman didn’t show up at work
for a couple weeks, and I never heard anyone in the office discuss a reason for
her absence. I couldn’t even tell you whom the woman had lost, whether it was a
husband (my first assumption, I guess, although now that I think about it I
never even entertained the notion that she might have lost a child) or a
parent. For several days I carefully studied the obituaries in the local
newspaper (another disturbing habit I’d gotten into, trying, I suppose, to fill
in the missing pieces of the puzzle), but I never saw her name –or what I
understood to be her name—show up in any of the fine print.

Partly in an attempt to break
myself of this increasingly disturbing habit I volunteered to go to Phoenix for
three months to work on a case that involved a lot of document retrieval. I was
going to be set up in one of those large extended-stay hotels right downtown,
and as I’d never really gone anywhere, I was actually somewhat excited to be
embarking on something that amounted to an adventure for me at the time.

My first night in Phoenix I had
just gotten settled into my room and I was sitting in the little dining room
area eating a pizza and watching TV when I heard the thump of a helicopter
outside my windows, growing insistently louder until it was literally rattling
the silverware in the kitchen drawer. I watched, astonished, as the helicopter
dropped into view directly adjacent to my window; I could literally see into
the helicopter, could see the pilot in his headset.

The helicopter landed on a rooftop
pad that was at almost exactly the same level as my room, and perhaps a hundred
yards away, separated from the hotel by a ground level parking lot. The cargo
doors of the helicopter were opened and several people dressed in surgical
scrubs dashed across the rooftop in that unsteady lurching wobble that is
characteristic of people approaching a helicopter. These people unloaded a body
from the copter and placed it on a waiting gurney. The body was already hooked
up to various I.V. bags, and it was obvious that I was watching a victim of
some calamity or mishap being delivered to a hospital’s emergency room.

It should have been obvious, at any
rate, yet it took me several disoriented moments to process what I was seeing.
There was a sort of floodlit glare to the proceedings that gave it both an
astonishing clarity and an unreal quality.

After this patient had disappeared
into the hospital through what looked like the gabled entryway to a saloon, I
didn’t have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for the appearance of the
first ambulance, moving in silence up the empty service road with its lights
tossing a strobing red wash over the dark adjacent buildings and empty parking
lots. The ambulance disappeared beneath an overhang, and shortly after its
arrival –and the arrival of the helicopter—I witnessed the appearance of a
solitary car in the parking lot beneath my window, and saw a young man spring
from this car and run full speed toward the area of the hospital into which the
ambulance had vanished just moments earlier.

As attracted as I had gotten to my
grim vigil each night in my apartment across from the funeral home, this new
spectacle was certainly a noisier and more dramatic deal all around. I was
astonished by how many emergencies a big city can manufacture in the middle of
the night. This hospital, of course, was merely one of any number of hospitals
in the Phoenix area, yet virtually every night brought the appearance of at least
one helicopter, and it was not uncommon for them to come and go a half dozen
times in the course of a single night.

The ambulances came steadily, at
all hours, almost like taxi cabs. I supposed that the appearances of the
helicopter must have represented some truly life threatening crisis. Why else
resort to such extravagant transportation in the middle of the night? The
ambulances, however, could be carrying anything from heart attack victims to
hypochondriacs.

I’ll admit that I found it a bit
disconcerting that in attempting to escape my morbid routine back in Chicago I
would now find myself a helpless spectator to a variant spectacle. There was,
though, a crucial difference here; these people’s lives still hung in the
balance, and they might yet be spared the ride to the funeral home.

My own response to these nightly
dramas continued to disturb and puzzle me, mostly because I was fully conscious
that I was sort of blankly fascinated by what I was watching, and recognized my
almost complete lack of any kind of real emotional connection to events that I
was witnessing from the comfortable distance of my dark room.

Eventually I went back to Chicago,
got a different job and a new apartment, and gradually moved beyond the strange
vigils of that year. I’d sometimes think about those days, though. The memories
would come to me at odd times, and I would marvel at the things I’d seen and
try to make sense of that time in my life, and to figure out what it was I’d
felt sitting there night after night watching the private dramas of complete
strangers unfold.

I felt compelled, I knew that much.
I kept returning to the windows, after all, often for hours at a time.

But had I ever felt real
compassion? Had I ever felt frightened, for either those strangers or for myself
and whatever unhappy surprises the future might hold for me? Had I been moved?

I don’t think I ever did manage to find an honest
answer to those questions.

Come on, give a rat’s ass, would you, you fuckers? Give it the old college try.

Take a good look around and tell me what you see.

Don’t lie to me.

My kingdom is a laughingstock. I’ve let myself go, grown fat on the sautéed kidneys of disc jockeys and dickweeds whose gross ambition offended my eroding sense of decency. I’ve eaten other things I’m not proud of. So-called professionals.

What I wouldn’t give for a second chance.

What I wouldn’t give, you fuckers, but it’s too late for that and I have nothing left to give.

This confusion of dialects, poverty, and heat. I can’t get any more naked, have no more grease left to sweat.

From my window I can see the laborers dragging bodies across the dirt courtyard and stacking them on a flatbed truck. It’s not a pretty picture, but I am incapable of painting a prettier one.

Near as I can tell the engineers have cobbled together some sort of crematorium in the laundry room of the Super 8 across the courtyard. Three tin smokestacks that weren’t there yesterday are belching out clouds of thick black soot, an additional layer of grime that is trapped beneath the over-gloom.

Mine is now a kingdom of branded cattle swilling 3.2 beer, feral dogs in shopping malls, brain-damaged lab rats shuffling along in flip-flops and ridiculous sunglasses, and genetic monsters with perfect teeth. Dime-store dollhouses and teetering castles made of recycled plastic sand. The fine bones of dead roses. Fields of loud pastel crows, screaming for attention. Almost trees. Burned-out rocket ships that never left the launch pad. All our dreams, dreams written in invisible ink and nightmares etched in the more permanent kind.

When night falls I draw the shades and listen to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings over and over as I imagine –or cannot imagine– the next crippling blow, the next wave of sorrow, the inevitable endlessly repeated slow-motion montage of flag-waving catastrophe. You can bet, by God, that when again this world begins to fall down around me they’ll once more dust off the old reliable Barber.

Didn’t any of you remember to bring a flashlight? Did it not occur to a single one of you that it would be dark in the belly of a whale?

You tricked me into this covenant, but I have no one to blame but myself.

These words –the last I have left– are the ghosts of dead snails. I give you my word: you haven’t been haunted until you’ve been haunted by the ghosts of dead snails.

Come on, let me have it. I’m ready for my medicine. Give me my bitter pill.

I am waiting, my little sparrows, to hear from you.