Velociworld

Critical Mass

My sense of nostalgia for the Senator oft belies a true reckoning of quizzical behaviors and the odd streak of subterranean malice he could exhibit from time to time. This was Old Skullpop talking, of course, but a youngster doesn't parse the sources, merely the outcomes.

I was the fourth of five children. By the time my little brother and I came long the wind was pretty much out of the Senator's sail insofar as rigid obedience, and discipline. He was luffing. That was the upside. The downside was the two of us brothers shared more stertor than senator with the Big He.

Life takes its toll. Or, rather, one takes one's toll upon the life one is bequeathed. That is verity. The only variable is the size of the bite, the voracity of the appetite one aims to sate. And the Senator had wrung a sizeably large toll from his godly mien by the time I was thirteen or so.

And so: while my elder sibilants balanced the hyperfueled courtroom collossus one bragged about at school with the stern harshmaster one weathered in the privacies of home, so my brother and I balanced the lesser ambitioned wisp with the pater familias become tolerant through degradation.

More simply said, we got away with murder.

Hair to our nipples, beer, whiskey, fucking Mary Jane, baby. The Senator had had a Come to Jesus with Jesus Himself recently, and been metaphysically flayed in the process. I pretty much imagine the Nazarene hovering over the hospital bed, holding the Senator's costic sweetbreads in His hand, in sorrowful manner.

The Senator? He was just goddam happy to be around, after that.

I saw the change around the time I was thirteen or fourteen. Before the Come to Jesus, even, I suppose. My sister was come home from college for the weekend, with a boyfriend. (At this point the Senator was collecting properties, always essaying to stay one good bender away from the ever-pursuing bride. We still had the farm, still had the summer cottage in Carolina, and he had added to the mix an abysmal bungalow a block away from the prep school my brother and I were attending, along with my middle sister. It was a fucking abomination, this place, but it was a convenience to the Senator, and so we said nothing, like the little Tar Babies we were.)

This wasn't a truly serious thing with my sister, but he was a boyfriend. Nice guy, too. Father was an airline pilot, good boy. And the Senator got drunk and hid in the bedroom, as I recall, and wouldn't come out. Foofahrooed about in there, and pissed and moaned, I think.

Don't you fucking grow up on me.

At any rate, we kids talked in the kitchen for a while, then my sister and her boyfriend "split", as they called it back then, because the "scene" certainly wasn't "grooving" at all.

Fucking Ada, that.

A few nights later my mother caught the Senator fondling his Ruger Blackhawk .357, en bagge, as the French say, and muttering about fixing this shit. I know this because I was there. And, as any good mom does when she finds her husband whipsawing a revolver open to check the rounds while vowing to correct the alignment of the planets, both big and small, and that little prick, she scowled at me and closed the bedroom door. The Senator had apparently reached critical mass, I suppose. The boiling point, in Faradiacal terms. Fissionable, he were. What they call a supercritical mass.

Fah. I knew he wouldn't make that trip. I share those genes, after all. No, the next day was an exemplary example of exemplifical behavior: I played upon his remorse for short term gain. I shook him down. Suggested twenty dollars would shut my little pie hole.

Humble Pie's Rockin' the Fillmore, I believe, and Fireball by Deep Purple. Alas and alack, sure. I could have had a fucking Dodge Charger put on blocks until my 16th birthday, had I been smarter, or more venal. I sold out cheap to a master litigator. Who, incidentally, owned my ass.

Those scrawful albums still tetch my heart, though. Once upon a while, I'll still play a tune or three. And fantasize about how awesome that road trip from Savannah to Statesboro would have been, if only mom had allowed it, and the Senator had took me along.