Dreamdriver - I

The last time I saw Knuckles Pittinger, he was mourning the death of his kid brother. That is really not all that unexpected or unusual, as the funeral was only yesterday and I took a long hard look at old Knuckles – I looked long and hard when he was not looking at me. I kind of saw right through that overweight, bald-headed senior citizen with the diamond earring and the wife with no legs. Who on earth wears a pair of shorts to his brother's funeral, anyway? Knuckles Pittinger, that is who. And “mourning” is a quaint word for what Knuckles engaged in. In certain parts of the world I think they describe it, rather, as “kvetching.”

Old Knuckles called himself an old Spam-jockey – a pug-faced man who flew transport planes into Greenland or Iceland or North Dakota or some other God-forsaken place that the Army Air Corps or the Air Force or someone had sent him. I suppose that he called himself a Spam-jockey for the usual reason.  A good portion of his cargo had been rations for some Army or Air Force base. Spam-jockey. Spam-jockey. Right after I heard the word I thought what a good name it would make for a band, so I filed it away for future reference. Knuckles just kept droning on and on about all the people he hated, and I just found it painful. I even offered a suggestion - “maybe let go of the hate, Knuckles,” I suggested. He just kept droning on and on and his wife with no legs sat there in her wheelchair and smiled and nodded her head. Don't get your hair too close to those candles, Esmerelda...all that hair spray and your bouffant would go up like the freaking Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity.

So Knuckles, you just droned on about all the people you hate, and your poor dead brother's ashes just sat there on a little rickety table and you could have cared as much if it would have been an ashtray in the cockpit of that old transport plane you flew. I just wanted to slap that bald little head of yours to stop the kvetching, honestly. Or was it the mourning that I wanted to stop? Oh yes, I forget. They are one in the same.

I couldn't help notice, though, that there was something unique about old Knuckles – something about him had changed, and I did not stop to ask him why. There was a small triangular scar below his right ear, and every time he spoke there was a hesitation around words beginning with the letter “b.” Boy oh boy. You had better bet. You better believe it. Another Bourbon?

Finally, as the day drew to a close, looking deep into the dusty beams of light filtering into the funeral chapel, with a look that was a thousand miles away and decades distant, old Knuckles Pittinger cried a single tear and shook like one of those tin spring wind-up toys we used to get for fifty cents at the discount store next to the abandoned radio tower. Wind it up, set it down, watch it shake, shake, shake. Shake like Knuckles Pittinger when he looked at that urn of ashes that used to be his kid brother. For a second he didn't hate anyone anymore.

"Oh Bill...my little brother!”

A Nice Tie-Tac

Chico Bowden (not his real name) stood a lot taller than my father, and my father was not a short man. There were many things in Chico's closet, I am sure – things that we speak of figuratively as being in his closet, or perhaps more accurately as his “baggage” – but when I think of Chico (or “Mr. Bowden” as I knew him when I was a child) and I think of closets, I then think of polyester and I think of checked patterns and I think of leisure suits. You have that in the thinking part of your melon, now, don't you ? Polyester leisure suits in checked patterns. If I mention sideburns, glasses with large lenses and heavy frames and open collared shirts, I trust you will paint in very accurately all of the rest of the image of Chico Bowden that you might ever need.

Chico sold insurance. Or cars. Or real estate. Or time-shares. I don't think it could possibly matter what it was that he sold – he was a salesman, as it were. 'Nothing against salesmen, of course – I used to be one myself (perhaps I still am, in a way – aren't we all?). Chico sold. Chico sold himself as a product, and we all eagerly watched as he ran the commercials on the small screen of his life. “Hey hey...Ange the Man...Ange the Man,” he would poke at my father when he saw him, “badda bing...how are those kiddos of yours, you old Ange the Man?”

Dad had been called “Ange” in the Navy – contraction of “Andrews,” of course. Sometimes I think he hated being called “Ange the Man,” but I never asked him about that.

Chico was perhaps the only person I ever heard use the phrase “badda-bing” in real life, with no acting. The other person who might have used it was Kip, whom I knew in college, but he had begun using it as a humorous tool in speech, and it eventually just became part of his unconscious vocabulary. More on Kip later.

The Chico of my childhood aged over the years, of course. The grey, wrinkled man that I saw at my father's funeral was really not much different than the man in the casket, in fact, aside from the fact that he was still breathing and talking and doing all of the things that the deceased no longer bother doing. I got no "badda-bing” from Chico that evening, no sales pitch of any sort, and Chico was no longer in polyester. He wore a tasteful dark suit, a crisp white shirt and a rather tasteful tie.

As I marinated my liver in a second martini, wrinkled old Chico shuffled over to me. He spoke through his tears for a short time, and I longed all the while for this relic from my childhood and my father's youth to refer to my dad as “Ange.”