by bc woods

On the verge of tears, Lydia buried her face in her hands. "Oh my God...BC, you are so retarded." Several of the women behind her sobbed their agreement, by murmuring such words as "jackass," "dumbass," and "dork," but in a playful manner that said my story had been more than amusing.

Clearing my throat, I said, "Thank you," to the collected masses, which caused Lydia's abs to ache and her nostrils to tremble. While my almost crippling eccentricity barred me from having serious conversations, the discussions had allowed me to raise the absurd to an art form.

I had met Lydia several weeks ago, while taking my little sister to one of her soccer games. She was the mother of one of Karen's teammates, and we had had an instant rapport. I had a thing for what the great sage and philosopher John Hodgman refers to as SMILFs, and Lydia had a thing for idiot man-children with strong resemblances to computer animated green ogres. In other words, she had been divorced for six months and was trolling for anything that showed interest.

That summer it was a part of my weekly routine to take my little sister Karen to and from her soccer practices whenever I had a day off from working on the oil rig. That was fine except that Jacob had to come along, and if there's one thing a seven year-old American boy can't do, it's watch girls play soccer. Tearing my attention away from Lydia, Jacob tugged on my arm. "BC, I don't want to listen to stories anymore. I want to go play on the playground."

"Well just go on then, honey. Your big brother will be fine," Lydia laughed, taking hold of one of my arms. Despite the fact that she was twice my age, I felt stunningly normal with a woman holding onto my arm.

Jacob's large round eyes looked up at me, imploring. "But I wanted you to play with me." Politely shrugging Lydia off my arm, I knelt down on one knee before Jacob.

"Okay, Buddy," I said, ruffling his hair. He smiled. Lydia seemed somewhat upset that I would take off and leave her, but I didn't let it bother me. I had liked the normal feeling I had had when Lydia held my arm, but Karen and Jacob had always come first in my life, and they always would.

by bc woods

"No way, guys. I don't do drugs. You know that." My obstinance to substance abuse was well known in my high school, and likely the reason that Ryan and Andrew were so intent on breaking me. Surrounded by thousands of acres of forest, with a walk of at least five miles down a dirt road before my feet even found pavement again, the words seemed to lack resolution.

Andrew took the joint from Ryan and approached me, proffering the drug to me in a more reasonable manner. "We're way out here in the middle of nowhere, and I know you don't carry a cell phone. We're not going to drive you back into town if you don't take a puff." He pushed the joint toward me with an even greater resolve.

For every step he took forward, I took two backwards. His resolve was strong. Mine was stronger. "Nope. Not doing it. Sorry."

At this statement, Ryan lost all patience. "Jesus fucking Christ, BC! We're out in the middle of the goddamn woods. Just fucking take a puff, and we'll take you to the bookstore like you wanted us to." A little over fifteen minutes ago they had seen me walking toward the local Waldenbooks, offered me a ride, and then proceeded to drive me out into the middle of Wishkah on the pretense of a "quick chore."

To say that Wishkah is wilderness is an understatement. Relating that it has been, for the past fifty or so years, a hotbed of Bigfoot sightings puts one a little closer to the truth. Around me an army of trees too thick for three men to wrap their arms around all at once, soared up into the sky, blotting out the summer sun. It was not hard at all to imagine that one of man's primitive ancestors had managed to hide from civilization in those dark forests, and was still hiding there.

"Get off your high horse, BC!" Andrew shouted, making as if to throw the joint at me, and then as if realizing how much it cost, stopped mid-swing.

Putting both of my hands into my pockets, I sighed heavily. "Sorry guys, not doing it. I'm going home now." I turned my back to them and started my way back home.

by bc woods

"Come on, BC, time to go." Dressed in dirty jeans, a ripped t-shirt, and old work boots, my father was the antithesis of relaxation. In fact, he looked like the incarnation of hard physical labor.

Defiantly turning the television back on with the remote control, I said, "I don't have to be anywhere today." Emphasizing this point, I gulped a disgusting amount of grape soda and stared insolently.

"We're going to pull weeds at the saw mill to raise money for your senior class party."

Agitated that I was going to miss a morning of made-for-television movies, and growing suspicious that all I was going to do was pull weeds, I grunted, "The kids don't raise money for the party." It was a tradition unbroken for decades.

"Nope, everyone is going to be there, kids too. Dude's coming." A mental image of my childhood friend Dude, bent over in a dirt patch pulling weeds out of the ground, settled in my mind about as comfortably as an image of me in a loving stable relationship with a beautiful woman. It was a scientific impossibility.

"Dude's coming? Now I know you're lying." Back when we were seven or eight, Dude had briefly thought about working, but then had decided the effort was too much trouble.

"BC, don't be a pussy." My father stared at me like an experienced hostage negotiator, waiting for what my next move would say about me in his grand strategy.

I put my hands to my face and groaned. I looked at the ceiling and asked myself, "When will I learn?" I slammed the mason jar on a nearby coffee table, transformed my recliner back into a seat with the efficiency of Optimus Prime, stood up and muttered, "God I fucking hate you." Shuffling to the door, and pulling my shoes onto my feet with as much visible effort as I could muster, I called out, "Did you put the rakes in the back of the truck yet?"

"Not yet."

Under my breath I said something which sounded suspiciously like "cock-sucker" but which my father correctly interpreted to mean that I would get the tools from the garage and put them into the truck. As soon as I got outside, I realized I was still wearing pajama pants and went back inside to change.

by bc woods

"And you're not comfortable!" Karen complained, throwing an elbow into my stomach.

"Well, I'm sorry, but there aren't enough seats for everyone." Inside the auditorium where my brother's graduation ceremony was to take place, I was drowning in a sea of white trash. To my immediate rear, a woman with large purple plastic rectangular earrings wore sweatpants and a t-shirt. Every now and again she would push the gum in her mouth into a pocket on her tongue and blow a bubble until it popped. A young man of no more than eighteen sat in front of me, with a child on his lap. At first I had thought, like me, it might be his younger sibling, but at a graduation like this it was more likely it was his own spawn.

"Jacob got his own seat," Karen rebutted, staring at our youngest brother. He was sitting glumly in his oversized auditorium seat with his chin resting firmly in the palms of both his hands. His expression was one of a child staring out a window at a rainy-day playground.

"Well you two will just have to take turns, we didn't save enough seats for everyone."

Before she could complain again, a woman in a business suit took the microphone on stage. "Again everyone, we are not able to start the graduation until the walkways are clear of people. It's by order of the fire marshal." All around me the crowd rose up in protest, as people continued to crawl through the cramped aisles in hopes of finding an open seat.

"Unless the fire marshal has a retarded child, I'm guessing he won't be here to see," I muttered.

"What?" Karen interjected.

"Nothing, honey. She just said that if everyone sits down, Bryan can finally come out on stage." I hoped that it wouldn't take too terribly long to graduate fifty people.

by bc woods

Like myself, my uncle Doug was occupied with filling out his own notes: only it was in ticket form. Having never received a ticket in my life, I could scarcely believe how long it took to fill one out. If I were a cop, no one would ever be arrested. There was just too much paperwork.

At 10:34 that night my uncle Doug had pulled up in front of my house with the promise of taking me on patrol with him to help me to procure a few good stories. Armed with a notepad and a pencil, I drove with him to the police station. At 11:11, after receiving a brief instruction on what to do if he was shot or incapacitated (one of which involved an awesome half-joking scenario of me getting to use the passenger side door as a shield and fire an M-16), we finally hit the streets.

While we had pulled over several other vehicles, the Ginger Bread Man was our first actual arrest of the night. He had started to weep almost as soon as my uncle Doug had handcuffed him and thrown him in the back of the car. Blubbering loudly, as both I and my uncle Doug attempted to fill out our mutual types of paperwork, the Ginger Bread Man asked, "Am I gonna go to jail, Officer?"

Rolling his eyes, my uncle Doug answered with his own question, "Would you like to?" At that, the Ginger Bread Man shut his mouth and chose a wiser course of action by sobbing silently with his head against the window. Although the ticket was just for driving with a suspended license, it took my uncle Doug a good twenty minutes to do all the field paperwork necessary to process the Ginger Bread Man and release him. There being no real reason to take him to jail, my uncle assured me it was less of an inconvenience to just let him go. After allowing the Ginger Bread Man to wander off alone into the night, my uncle Doug sighed regretfully. "Good, now he's despondent, and he'll go home and kill himself. Then I'll have to take care of that goddamn mess."

"How long does it take to do all the paperwork, when you go back to the station?" Due to budget cuts, my uncle Doug's police station is actually a trailer that employs five officers and only has one patrol car with 147,000 miles on it. After he told me that when he got back to the station it would likely take him a half an hour to fill out the incident report just on the Ginger Bread Man alone, I wondered how much of the department's budget went toward purchasing paper.

by bc woods

Slapping me solidly on the back instead of using his screw gun to secure the piece of drywall over my head into the wall, my uncle Mike coughed again. "Don't worry, BC. I've been coughing like that for years." He swallowed at the end of the sentence, and I winced at the mental horror of the blackish-green thing that must now be making its way into his esophagus.

Instead of complaining about the weight over my head that had reduced my biceps to limp strands of spaghetti, I coughed through the dust and smoke asking, "Isn't that just all the more reason to quit?" My uncle Mike laughed in response to my foolish query and, just as one of my arms seized in a painful cramp, secured the drywall slab over my head into the ceiling with a loud electric whir of his screw gun. It was all I could do to keep it secure with the other arm.

"Watch it, BC. Gotta hold onto them till the very end." Massaging my arm, I complained under my breath and glared at my friend Dale. Dale Trevin was captain of the high school football team and generally a hell of a nice guy. I had on occasion tutored him through subjects in school that he was having trouble with. In payment for my friendship, he had been watching me hang drywall for half an hour with folded arms, a grin, and a barely repressed chuckle. He claimed his arms were for throwing footballs, not doing construction.

I moved my shoulder in a slow circle, massaging my bicep. Dale trembled with laughter. "Oh, just laugh now, fucker. Wait till the Hamlet test comes up. See who's laughing then." Dale's chuckles slowed then stopped like a motor that had run out of gas. The humor ran out of his face, until his mouth resembled the inverted umbrella of a basset hound's jowls. I raised my eyebrows in truculent success. "That's what I thought, asshole."

by bc woods

Barely thirteen, I huddled in a corner flipping through photo after photo and wondering where it had all gone wrong. The fact that I could not find my father in any of the pictures only seemed to emphasize the fact that he was now going to be strangely absent from my life. Worse, I kept seeing some gangly red-headed man-child dancing with my mother and had no idea who he was. Further, I saw my grandfather actually smiling. Having never seen such a sight before, I felt like the floor had fallen out beneath me. The confusion was too much. I felt tears brimming in the corner of my eyes.

The door opened suddenly as light fell upon my huddled, sobbing form. "BC, what on earth is wrong with you?" my grandmother asked.

Snot bubbles popped in my nostrils and super-heated tears flowed down my face. I tried to articulate my problems. "My parents are getting divorced... and there's some crazy island guy at my house... and... and... Grandpa's smiling in all of these pictures, and I've never seen him do that before!" Taking a moment to deposit the stalagmites of nasal leakage hanging from my nose onto my sleeve, I threw the pictures to the ground and screamed, "And there's some red-headed guy dancing with my mom at her wedding!"

My grandmother looked down at the pictures. "Honey, don't be upset. This is your mom's first wedding. You're looking at the wrong pictures." She clipped her mouth shut only seconds too late.

by bc woods

From behind, one of my father's coworkers offered his suggestion. "We need to call the PUD, and ask them to disconnect the power service. Then we need to call an electrician. That whole thing needs to be torn out and replaced."

My father squatted down next to the conflagration, licked his lips, grabbed his shovel, and said, "All right... let's do this."

by bc woods

I spent the week packing boxes, in preparation for the move. I channeled my anger at my mother and Mike into packing those boxes. Instead of having any real rational discussion with me about her living situation, my mother played American Idol on Jacob's PS II, ignoring everything I said in favor of computerized scorn from a digital Simon Cowell. In between bouts of singing Karaoke, she and Mike argued about everything from the color of the sky to who contributed more to the misery of their marriage. When my mother left the house, Mike continued the argument by swearing at everything he could see, hear, or imagine. I had once again been suckered by my need to believe that hope persists against all odds.

On the day of the move, my mother decided that what little work she had done had been "just too much" and started to scream in everyone's face about how men had been oppressing women since the dawn of humanity. She brings up women's issues at the drop of a hat, so I told her that if she didn't want to pick up the plates herself, I would do it for her if she would just be quiet. She could not have been more offended.

"Do you think you're funny, BC?! Do you? How dare you! How dare you! Who do you think you are!" Sitting on the porch as I loaded her box of dishes into her trunk, my mother screamed at me for the sin of male frailty. It was like every other rant she had ever had before. Only this time it was different. I was different. Something inside of me snapped.

A lot of stupid people would have tried to use reason to argue against her. I may not be a genius, but I'm far from stupid. I know reason only works against actual human beings, with actual cerebral function. "How dare you talk to me that way, Mr. Man!" I hissed. "I am a female divinity! I am the best woman you will ever have in your life! Do you hear me?! Do you hear me?!" Imitating my mother has never been difficult, as she only has six or seven truly distinct ideas.

by bc woods

With graduation freshly behind me, I figured high school hadn't been so bad. With relatively little effort on my part, I had managed to graduate with several awards, including the departmental scholarships for math and science. All of my teachers had offered to write me letters of recommendation, and, rare as it might be, I was feeling good about myself. Tired, yet spiritually satisfied, I walked to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast.

Not even the sight of Rachel, sitting at the kitchen counter, doodling pictures on her arm, could bring me down. As usual, I ignored her. Grabbing a bowl, some cereal, and a gallon of milk, I prepared for my meal. Out the window, a sunny June sky promised longer days and brighter horizons. Without thinking about it, I began to smile.

Bent around her forearm with the posture of a toad, Rachel said, "Someone called for you, while you were sleeping." In annoyance, I grunted at her disturbance.

"Was it the call I heard just a few minutes ago? I wasn't sleeping." It was typical that she hadn't even thought to check.

"Yeah. It was some guy named Osh Kosh Begosh or something."

I rolled my eyes. Rachel never took my messages properly. "That's a brand of shoe. I don't know anyone with a name like that."

"Anyway, I told him you were asleep. He said he wouldn't be able to call back since he was having a graduation at his college. I didn't know you were hanging out with college guys, loser." Likely, she just hadn't wanted to check to see if I was awake as it might distract her from whatever she was drawing on her arm.

Pouring milk into my cereal bowl, I bit my tongue in contemplation. Usually, dropped messages didn't concern me, but for some reason this one tugged at my mind. I didn't know anyone in college, let alone anyone whose name sounded like Osh Kosh Begosh. Flakes of Life cereal submerged under waves of white milk as I continued my internal search. A revelation came over me so powerfully that I had to stop pouring for fear of spilling everywhere.

by bc woods

This is not what makes me afraid.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in my closet mirror and turn away. It's what I see in the mirror that makes me afraid. I wish it wasn't there.

The shotgun Mike got for Christmas is shaking in my hands. I'm doing my best not to look at it, but every time I turn to the mirror, there it is. I take my finger off the trigger for fear of accidentally firing. It hurts to breathe. My reflection stares at me from the corner of my eye asking me a question that I don't want to answer.

Less than two minutes ago Mike's junkie brother George had run past my room, gushing blood from his arms and torso. Mike had caught him fucking my mother. He'd had suspicions, but this was the first time he had caught them in the act.

From what I could hear from down below, my mom and George had locked the door in time to stop him from entering right away, but Mike had clawed through the glass and unlocked it again. Before George could run away, Mike had shoved him into wreckage of the window, the shards of glass lacerating his arms and torso. That was all the excuse that George had needed to turn tail and run. I had just managed to catch a glimpse of him on his way out through the basement. Wherever George is now, he is probably still running.

Coward George is gone. There is no one left to do what has to be done.

If you do this, you get close. That's a shotgun, and it sprays.

I nod at the internal voice. It is my grandfather's voice. Ever since he had died, I had managed to keep a small bit of him locked inside. It was both the iron in my spine and the sage in my court. My door swings open like a choice.

If you start, you don't stop.

I nod again. It isn't a decision to start, only a condition if I do.

by bc woods

The bruises were still on her neck when she decided, "Oh come on, who are we to judge?" and forgave Mike for trying to choke the life out her. The next day she decided to go see him and, as she loaded the car, demanded that I go with her. Fearing that she might, in fact, be murdered if I wasn't there as a witness, I reluctantly got into the car.

After a half-day drive, I found myself huddled in a small, two bedroom apartment, face-to-face with a snaggle-toothed, half-retarded, all-crazy, thirty-five year old man by the name of Billy. Mike had introduced him as his roommate before disappearing with my mother into his bedroom for "undisclosed reasons." After the door shut, I heard an animalistic groan and realized that I was going to be there for a few hours at least.

Billy sat on the couch across from me, a rat-tail dangling softly down the nape of his neck, his legs crossed Indian-style on the couch cushion, eating a piece of celery while regarding me with two eyes that held all the reasoning power of a stoned koala. His tight red shirt hid the sight of his sagging man breasts with an action-posed image of the Red Power Ranger, while leaving the milky white of his lower stomach fully exposed. I knew without a word being spoken that he wasn't the kind of person I wanted to have a conversation with.

There was no television in the small living room, and it was a great mental labor to find something to look at other than Billy's slack-jawed, celery-chewing face. Finally, after my mother had been gone for half an hour, and the groans showed no signs of abating, the silence became unbearable. My core humanity demanded I converse, if only to drown out the sounds coming from the background.

"So... uh...how long have you been living with Mike?" As he continued to slowly masticate, I realized that conversing with Billy was the equivalent of trying to play catch with a pool of stagnant water.

With an expression like a cow chewing a piece of cud, Billy continued to chew his stick of celery, ignoring my query. I nodded for no particular reason. Everything I knew of etiquette made no mention of people whose primary form of communication was chewing celery. I found a magazine and distracted myself with the lives of celebrities. Every few pages, I looked up to make sure he hadn't crept up on me with a knife...just because he looked like the sort of person who might.

by bc woods

Kathy was my father's third live-in girlfriend in the less than one year period after his fourth, and most recent, divorce. My father has never had trouble finding women. I imagine that this might have something to do with his habit of approaching a woman and saying "I love you and I want you to move in with me" before getting around to mentioning that his name is "Gary." He believes it is because he is out-going and fun.

Unfortunately, Kathy, while intoxicated, had wrapped it around a power-pole the night before. She was still in the hospital. "It's a damn shame. This car was a classic." The wreckage of the '68 Camaro still looked like it was bent around the power pole, even though it was no longer there. The entire frame seemed twisted around its left side. All that was left of the car, and it's "427 cubic inch, 450 horsepower fucking engine, you cock-sucker" was laying on top of a tarp at the top of our driveway. Dad had had it towed there, so he could stare at it and feel depressed in his free time. The only thing I can compare it to, is the compulsion mad scientists have to look at malformed children in formaldehyde jars.

"Yeah, it would have been better if she'd broken something replaceable like me." I answered. My father nodded his agreement. "How fast was this thing anyway?"

"Well, let's just say this: it went from zero, to ninety, back to zero in less than a block." He ran his hands over the bumper, then the license plate. He looked like he was caressing a sleeping lover... or like a necrophiliac fisting a dead cow.

"How is this my fault again?"

"Well, you were out with the truck last night."

"I was at a friend's graduation party."

"Well, if you had been here Kathy wouldn't have taken her car out and she could have called you to pick her up from the tavern."

by bc woods

"What are you doing?" Bryan asked.

"I'm working on the entry that goes up tonight."

"What's it about?" My entire family regularly reads my posts and while some are quite upset about it, my father and brother could care less.

"It's about the time Kathy wrecked her car and it was my fault."

"It was your fault, you fucker!" my father yelled from the kitchen. My father has the rather remarkable ability to yell at me without actually being angry or focused on what I'm doing. It's much like a doctor hitting a patient's knee with a small hammer. The insults completely pass over his conscious mind and come out without the hindrance of thought.

"I love you, dad!" I screamed back, feeling completely at home. It's my understanding that other families don't carry on conversations by screaming across the house. However, after sitting alone in my apartment for the past few months, the screaming was making me feel downright nostalgic.

"Hurry up and write your story, fucker!"

"Dogs that shit fast, don't shit long, dad!" I screamed back.

"Who told you that?" I could hear my father pausing, appreciating the wisdom of the sentiment.

"You did!"

My father paused again, smiling, I imagine, with pride at his own mental fortitude.

"How come you never write about the smart shit I say?"

"I will later!" Opening up a word-file I have to this effect, I made a note to do so.