He pushed his hand across his eyes, red with
growing sadness and anger. Even with all of that, some people do not leave. Some people stay put, even
though they really do not LOVE IT. Most people stay put. Only a few leave – some of those with no good
reason that anyone else can think of.
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Feuilleton 7 of 20
1970’s - CANADA – Little black Carl and his Very Big White Woman BESS
Jackson had to move again. Not that anything was forcing the issue or causing him to have to leave Windsor, he just had to move again. He would have preferred a return to the west, to Vancouver British Columbia, but he would settle for Ottawa. If this were a studio released movie this would be the point in that studio made movie for the inevitable MUSICAL MONTAGE SEQUENCE -to cover too many events in too short an amount of time.
( yah, y’would do that, wouldn’t you – oh you of the too short chapters in all the wrong places. )
Their next-door neighbours in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, Little black Jamaican Carl and his very big white woman BESS from northern Ontario Canada, and their loud reggae music tapes, their loud reggae music 78 rpm vinyl record albums, and their smaller thinner but also loud reggae music 33 1/3 rpm vinyl singles records, all played outside in front of the old single story low rent subsidized housing in Ottawa Canada. In the warm summer in their ratty giant thick boxy wooden speaker cabinets with dark brown frayed cloth grills, the reggae music played on and on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgVgiikmoYA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpTzzjMn278&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dQE1OSHnsE&feature=fvwrel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zx2obBeS5Y
It was a time of learning. Almost some sort of Canadian Finishing (or Starting) School for one that had never
been IN a school of this nation. Being taught how and what to drink by the French, the Canadian Quebecois
French that is. Being shown wines and cognacs, after knowing only Thunderbird and Manischewitz, and long before the Urban American Anglos began calling it Yak. Switching from hard pack Canadian PLAYERS cigarettes to French GAULOISES andGITANES in their thin walled blue packs that reminded him of the thin soft packs in the USA, when Jackson was smoking forty cigarettes each day, fluctuating between rolling his own and buying the blue packs with their high contrast graphics on the sides, sometimes lighting up one even before the previous smoke had been extinguished in the dirty filthy ashtray. In French areas of Quebec north of Ottawa the FLQ triggered the WAR MEASURES ACT from Ottawa as the hip young Prime Minister Trudeau committed to holding firm on one country for Canada - in the face of his own possible political assassination. The rude new decorations inscribed on rocks and walls of these parts encompassed bilingual HATE TAGGING, local FOLK EPIGRAPHY - all of it over top of the old fading LATRINALIA, POLITICAL, and even a few previous rare Catholic looking SATANIC scribblings.
Jackson and Shari were young and unaffected in this country that was so much more peaceful and civilized than the lands of Detroit where they had grown up. They lived in their low rent ground level apartment with reggae neighbours. As the studio released movie reggae sound played its MUSICAL MONTAGE, Jackson could see himself standing absolutely still on cooling autumn streets of downtown Ottawa as the powerful Soviet Premier Brezhnev rode by in his long black diplomatic gasoline limousine - before the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Russian Mafia.
Young Jackson and young wife Shari liked Ottawa, and all of the foreign embassies too. They had ended up at an embassy party in the winter, the cold Ottawa winter. After being invited by some co-worker CBC
media people they tagged along, crashing into the official winter party inside the African embassy building in downtown Ottawa. Jackson getting drunk on local Tanzanian drink and dancing in this Tanzanian embassy. Ending up much later in the frozen wee hours of morning singing yelling out what Jackson currently considered to be the beautiful Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, outside on the streets in the cold Ottawa winter snow long after midnight when the party had actually ended. Clad only in his old cracked black leather bomber jacket. His legs and ass and balls were out and naked cold but he did not know. When he finally sobered up the next day Jackson began to wonder again about what caused his old nostalgic-romantic restlessness which began to pull him again. Pull him back to the west coast, to Vancouver Canada one more time.
He enthusiastically explained to his hesitant wife that fresh clear water from the Canadian Rocky Mountains
flowed drinkable down the steep lands, that intoxicatingly irresistible air given off by the tall cedars and fir
trees. Jackson breathed it again, all of it. The west coast life, so different from the east in both countries, was one he thought he felt the most at home in. Jackson should have paid more attention to Shari’s face and tone as he rapidly set in motion a move from Ottawa to Vancouver, one that would affect both of them forever.
He should have, but instead Jackson concentrated on driving yet one more VW bug, this one belonging to Shari – her very first car that she brought into the marriage – all the thousands of miles across North America again. Even as they drove west the Canadian government was changing miles into kilometers. They arrived in Vancouver in about one week while the metric system took almost ten years to really get there. They set up new housekeeping. New jobs, new routines, new people, new culture, unique to British Columbia. Even the weekly laundry was reformed.
Jackson and young bride Shari performed their new weekly ritual of going to the coin laundromat to do their laundry. The two of them developed a silly romantic ritual of folding the large dried sheets together, kissing as the folding of the sheet brought their bodies closer together as they each held the opposite corners of the warm sheet being folded. On a weekday workaday morning he drove Shari to her session and after he dropped her off he drove to his new regular 40 hour a week job in downtown Vancouver. It was a good job for a young immigrant. He was involved in design work for TV and had the run of the big old fashioned art graphics camera in a big dark room inside the 1950’s Studebaker Automobile Show Room building that had been converted to a makeshift regional Canadian television studio.
Shari would visit him at work when her day was done. During those times after work hours when all the other staff had gone home the two of them would move into the darkroom where the big old camera stood. The windows to the street had been blacked out and the door made to fasten securely so there would be no light leaks to spoil the film images being worked on. Jackson would smile mischievously and lead her into the small dark room, smelling of paper and dust. When he shut the door behind them it was dark. No light, just black darkness. It took some minutes for their eyes to adjust enough to see anything at all. By the time he could see her hair shining slightly as it moved, he had already felt her mouth and had moved his heavy metal belt buckle out of her way. He held her shoulders as she took him in completely. He loved her. He would have loved her even if she did not eat him up, but her overwhelming gentle moves and gestures always humbled him. By the time the Commissionaire security guard came around knocking on the door to see if people were still in the workplace after hours, she was finished and he was done. He always wanted to make love to her afterward, and they did as soon as they returned home to their small apartment. After one particular work day like this, and the loving night that followed it, they both slept deep and dreamless. The next morning he drove Shari to her session across town. Jackson dropped Shari off. He pulled back out into traffic and drove on toward the job in Vancouver feeling happy and light because they were in love and because it was brilliantly sunny outside, a rare occurrence for most of the year in the always misty-rainy Pacific North West. Jackson was so happy as he saw an unusually large golden-edged God Ray sliding down from the cloud break in the Vancouver sky. It was transparently bright all the way across the rugged Canadian Rocky Mountain vista on its way to the watery floor of the Pacific Ocean floor – and Jackson watched it intently. As he watched it slide down, as he drove at legal speed in his little Japanese commuter car, he SLAMMED AND HIT IT. Jackson crashed-smashed noisily and directly into the stationary back of the sitting Chevrolet Camaro that had stopped right in front of him for some reason. Jackson had seen the stopped car as he hurtled toward it with brakes slammed too hard too late. As the impending crash appeared rushing at him through his small front glass windshield Jackson’s body adrenaline ripped and tore and gnashed right through him. His entire body, from head to foot, felt and registered for future memory the painful violent tearing of something in every vain and tissue in his body. He was to feel a minor repeat of this tearing and ripping every time he had a near miss in vehicular traffic for many years after that. Totally ruined his little commuter car. Collapsed it all the way up to the dashboard. Jackson was most fortunate he had already started wearing seatbelts every once in a while, even though they were not required yet. He wore them because race drivers wore them, and he would alwayswear them every time after that day. Jackson thought about the crash afterward. He was very lucky to come through it with no injury. He should be grateful. He should thankful for his full and healthy life. But? But he still felt like moving?
Through all of these life experiences, even through the momentous births of their two sons and his eventual speedy career building, Jackson Kelley always came back to feeling that no-good need to move – to drift on to somewhere for no rational reason. Through all their complex living the mutual youthful loving between the two of them, between Jackson and Shari, rose and fell but never stopped. At least not for a couple of decades.
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FUTURE PRESENT CEMENT AND SHADOW
Zorah looked at him again in late morning sun and Jackson thought he could see her eyes peering at him above the thin frame on the dark lenses she wore. She looked to her left at her smaller younger sidekick, Majed. Majed was deeper in the shadows again. She could see from where they were that the man was down. Down and out and cold. Jackson still felt the cold, right through the warm summer heat of Los Angeles.
“It shouldn’t be this cold.” Jackson repeated to his son, Mason.
“It should be hot. Hot and bright and comfortable, not like this.”
(yes yes yes – and YOU, you should write LONGER chapters, damn it.)
( Well, we could prolong this chapter – by re-emphasizing and writing again about the various forms of
wall markings all around our characters in the back street situation there in Los Angeles. It would be
easy enough to say once again that all around them are an organic mishmash of all the types :
1. YOUNGER HIPHOP, 1D sigtags, 2D throwups, 3D flats, slaptags, scratchitti, etching – and sometimes
Giraffitispray-painted very, very high
2. GANG TAGGING, for nation building, boundaries, roll calls, memorials, and death threats
3. HATE TAGGING same as always
4. earliest forms of FOLK EPIGRAPHY from KILROY to now
5. LATRINALIA in the latrines
6. POLITICAL, whether we like it or not
7. STENCIL to show us their art to us, also whether we like it or not
And good old number 8 with larger implications for all these too-short chapters you keep bitching about:
8. SATANIC, to still hold their rituals, those few crazy sick bastards.
And even we could say that though they rarely mix, how recently there’s been a blending, a combination of
some parts. Most certainly in back street situations. But no, let’s go back decades to a
beached whale in another country.)
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1970’s – SUNSETS and Superman’s X-ray vision
This really should be just about the middle of the story. This really should be almost up to that balancing point in the tale. With old on one side and new on the other. But even as all forces that bring this story to a crashing close on the last page are flaring up – confronting each other – changing, evolving, rapidly – even with all of that going on Jackson and Shari were in Landed Immigrant Heaven in Canada. Even though rough knuckle hands were being shook, old finger rings being kissed, and kneecaps being broken, the burgeoning transnational crime systems that promised to wreak every possible kind of havoc with normal lives were all growing, nicely.
But normal lives they were for Shari and Jackson. Hot and bright, Shari looked like a big beached whale that summer in the late 70’s in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Jackson had even taken a picture of her lying on her back, with her high pregnant belly protruding up to the sky. It was hot that summer but they did not care, their first child was being born with or without air conditioning. These were the days before scans told what sex the baby was going to be. There had been one occasion, much earlier in their past years together, when they thought they might accidentally be having a child. It was a time of great upset. They had only been married a short time and Shari had been on birth control pills. From all indications it looked like she might be pregnant. They were intense and miserable as they tried to decide what to do. They really could not afford to have a child yet, but they were both deeply in love and committed to one another. The pregnancy did eventually turn out to be “false”. It had only seemed like she had been impregnated? But it lasted long enough (everything used to take longer then) that while the testing was going on, they both decided they would not abort it. This wasn’t based on religious church beliefs. They both felt they had created a new living person, and they did not have any right to kill it. They would not shove this decision or conclusion or thought process down anyone else’s throat, as they both thought each person had to decide for themselves, but they now knew how *they* felt about this within their own personal lives. After it turned out to be a false pregnancy it was six more years before a real pregnancy happened. They were still young. They still knew nothing about babies. They were still silly romantic youngsters. They still did foolish little newlywed things like kiss-breathing to eliminate a case of the hiccoughs. Something about the carbon dioxide exhaled by one and inhaled by the other seemed to quell the lurching wracking hiccoughs when one of them had drank too much. The first real pregnancy came along. Jackson went right out to a book store and came home with a stack of hard and soft cover books that used to exist then. Quickly realizing there were no real manuals nor any useful documentation of practical information to help out young parents completely on their own with their first child, they prepared for the worst. All of their relatives were thousands of miles away. They really were on their own. They signed up and took the needed breathing and exercise classes with floor mats and pillows. Jackson was going to be at Shari’s side and help the best he could. When the time came, the first son, the red son Mason, decided to be overly acrobatic on the way out of her and into our world. His head was wrapped in the cord, and in those days that was the triggering event to immediately force the husband to leave the room and wait outside. Their tone and attitude had switched from cooperative and friendly to hostile, impatient, and pushy. They ordered him to leave. He left. He sat in the hall for a while. He sat in the waiting room for a while. Then he sat outside on the grass lawn outside the building, staring up at the operating floor as though he had Superman’s comic book X-ray vision and could see his wife and their child and the doctor team. But he could not, so Jackson worried every moment until the son was born. Until both mother and child were ok. Then he looked at the new mother and the child. The whole world had changed. They were, the three of them, happy. But the world had changed forever and it would never be anything even remotely like the years that preceded that first birth. Until much later, when the sons were grown, when Jackson and Shari were to briefly regain the newly designated ‘personal’ time. If it had actually worked out that way, which it did not because by that time the world had changed again. The world, even their little world, changed outside and around their relationship more than either of them knew it could. The small world and the bigger unifying world came together for them. By the time they had fallen out of love and their children had left home their elected government representatives had already started spending lots and lots of frightened money on robots.
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1970’s TO THE 80’s - waters of the North West coast of Canada
Two years after the first born, Jackson and Shari’s blonde second son Andrew was born, signaling his arrival dramatically on board a ferry boat crossing the waters of the North West coast on Canada. This dramatic behavior was to become one of Andrew’s prevalent behavior patterns. This second son arrived smoothly and quickly, seemingly anxious to get on with things in this world. And then there were four of them - in this new 1980’s family in British Columbia, Canada. Jackson thought he had already come to terms with the loss of her love during the birth of the first son, and told himself that it was just something to get used to. A mother loves her children first. Besides, now it was more enjoyable feeling the extremely unusual sensation of being able to love three, then four humans at the same time in exactly the same way with the same intensity and the same commitment. Jackson could not have believed this before. No one could have told him about this. He would not have believed it. But, it would be a good life. Jackson had always wanted to live with one woman, have children, and build a life in this world. So he set about doing just that, actually taking an occupation seriously for the first time in his life. Jackson also went to a doctor to join the new wave of men getting vasectomies in large numbers for the first time. The new tech and procedures made this a painless and easy choice. His two sons instantly became a limited edition run of progeny. The two sons also became dual citizens of the two countries as soon as they were born. And though no one knew it yet, his two sons would be among the last to grow up in a world where predominant physical industrial machines would be run by men, by humans, not by machines.
The two sons grew. In the kitchen of their first humble suburban home in Port Coquitlam, British
Columbia, Canada, he watched the two grow into toddlers climbing into the lower cupboards.
The two small sons would clamber into metal and plastic cookware objects, grabbing hold of things to drum on. Alternating times filled with giggling silence followed by a smashing crashing cacophony of clanging and young yelling and cheering as they discovered not only the sounds each object could produce but also the internal echo effect achieved by sitting inside the lower cupboard with its hard wooden walls on all sides. The two boys were delightful. The joy Jackson felt at having these two new little humans around was beyond description. He tried to remember if it was like this when he was growing up around his father. He was pretty sure that it must have been, even though his own father was probably home even less than Jackson was due to his work. When Jackson moved them from their first humble home to a grander leased property on rising foothills overlooking the grand Pacific Ocean up north in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, they were still small enough to continue auditory explorations with percussive cookware in that new place too. And there were now the added advantages of their proximity to the ocean as well. The waters were far too cold to swim in, but there were stretches of shallow tidal pools that would be warmed to comfortable temperatures by the sun. Very pleasant for the two very young boys to romp and splash and chase after floating kelp in the warm shallow tide waters. Although Jackson worked too much and too long, there were good times there.
This same enjoyment of living continued when they moved again. Into a home next to a forest in Newmarket north of Toronto, thousands of miles away back east, again. This move made necessary by a crazy idea Jackson had to go to the country to live on a farm and be a PAINTER, quitting his hard built career in design. But after some failure, renormalizing, and more apologizing, together they moved into the house by the forest. They built a father and son tree fort that straddled the high plank fence at the back of their new property behind the house in Newmarket. This fort was the dividing line between their civilized back yard and the wild and thick Evergreen Forest behind them. The boys had named it that after a TV show they watched then. The two boys named everything they discovered back there. They drew and painted pictures of the forest with the named places. Names like Tonsillitis Hill and Nancy’s Narrows came from local conditions and events and people. It was their forest and they loved it. Even today it stands the way it was then because it was on a hill that quickly descended into a lower flood plain that cannot safely be built on. There were water problems. Their side of the treed hill, their back yard, had water drainage problems. One winter when the thaw came, Jackson had to charge out of the house into the suddenly warmer winter air to hand cut channels in the thick melting ice layer behind the house using a long steel wedge bar to keep the house from being flooded as the ice and snow turned to water and ran down both sides of the already saturated hill. Although Jackson redamaged his rib doing this, he saved the day. The waters were kept from the house. He kept their young raw hand painted landscapes of all these places framed and ready for hanging. It would be years until they were framed and hung, and even then not where Jackson thought they would end up.
It was during this time that Jackson worked in Toronto, about one hour’s drive south. Jackson Kelley had desperately stumbled into the newly born field of Digital Computer Graphics. He should have known or felt that he had tumbled into surface symptoms of big changes that were taking place just out of their sight. The new job he found was a turning point. It was to affect the rest of his life. Too much to tell the whole digital story inside of this one, but importantly he learned about the curve of change. And he learned that no one knew where it would take us. That we seemed to be irresistibly drawn to digital tools as we quickly shed our older physical tools and methods. These days also showed him a wider range of human behavior than he had ever come across before. It took years for Jackson to learn about and get used to these initially very unique people involved in animation, in computer graphics, and eventually in movie making back out west again. But before even considering leaving for the coast again he worked many long days, nights, weeks, months, and years in Toronto – osmosis-soaking all that was happening digitally to us.
Jackson and the passionate curious artists he worked with were making things up. There was no established way of doing anything yet. They were inventing the way work would be done years later. And his two young sons would come with him into Toronto on those weekends when he needed to more extra work. They sat up in the elevated glass ‘fishbowl’ that was a newly built glass wall encased computer workstation area. This was constructed to show the paying clients and constantly visiting investors just how advanced and futuristic this new “business” was. Jackson’s two young boys learned to play 3d flight simulators on those weekends using early large computer workstations. While their friends at school talked about spending quarters in the video arcades, these two boys were flying new digital jet fighters and polygonal 747’s. Later, after Jackson did move them all west again, the boys learned WORD and EXCEL programs way before their time. Jackson took them into the California animated movie studio when he had to work those same long hours on the weekends there too. It wasn’t all learning for the two sons though. Jackson would let them sit in the studio screening room. He’d load up one of their favorite movies on those old fashioned VHS videotapes. Load it right into the play-back projection system. Jackson would make some of that brand new and speedily cooked microwave popcorn to eat while they watched and he worked, and worked, and worked. He was not the best father. There were many things Jackson did not do that he should have. But there were enough moments that he felt he had done a little better than his father had with him. Jackson always remembered his father telling him that he had felt like he had done a little better than his father had done with him. Every generation tries so hard to improve upon the last when their turn comes.
There were so many signs of change but Jackson only consciously saw a few of them. Jackson’s brother-in-law back in Michigan was talking about government failure and economic collapse in the USA. Jackson would watch him with mixed feelings as the brother-in-law stocked ammo boxes, survival rations, and attack weapons in their Michigan home. It would be years later, but Jackson’s brother-in-law would be right. In those later years his brother-in-law’s grandkids would need and use their grandfather’s vintage guns and ammo as the predictions started to come true. There were other signs too. Not as many up in Canada, but there were signs in the USA. Jackson knew there were crazy people roaming the streets. Real crazy people, not just artistic eccentrics, roaming the American sidewalks. In the USA these people had been freed, released, kicked out of medical facilities to save money. Others joined them, swelling their numbers. Jackson remembered that in his youth there used to be some bums and some hobos, but only here and there. He had heard his grandfather talk about unemployed men and even poor families wandering during the DIRTY THIRTIES depression days, but it seemed to Jackson that more and more of these new HOMELESS people were populating all the major cities with largest gatherings of them in warmer places where they would not freeze at night. Something was going wrong and it could be seen, but it was being seen through the veil of THE AMERICAN DREAM OF PROSERITY FOR THOSE THAT EARN IT. Something was wrong. He could feel it and one could read it in the change of mark making on the walls too. More sigtags and GANG TAGS with roll calls and memorials. The HATE TAGGING melded with these and with the few remaining FOLK EPIGRAPHY andLATRINALIA. The POLITICAL and the SATANIC began to mix in almost indecipherable ways. It all became harder to read and understand. Things had changed, and not for the better. At least not for the better of most of the people Jackson saw.
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1980’s - young like Madonna and raw and cooked like Fine Young Cannibals.
Thousands of miles east and a bit to the south in the month of March of the early 1980’s while Jackson’s young family was still beginning to grow up among tall coniferous oxygen trees of British Columbia, that’s when the Folsom family of Detroit was growing up too. The world outside their homes continued to go through growing pains but neither family paid much attention to those. The pains varied, but many were caused by people whose greed and ambition exceeded their humanity and concern for the lives of the people around them. There were things like the accident in Russia. Chernobyl. 90 immediate deaths. The World Health Organization said 4,000 more died and another 60,000 cancer deaths became the result of Chernobyl nuclear fallout. More aggressive Greenpeace report put it at 200,000+ dead. A Russian publication said 985,000 excess cancer deaths eventually occurred as a result of radioactive contamination. Another accident - in India. The Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. A leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals. The official immediate death toll was over 2,000. Another 3,000 died within weeks and a further 8,000 died from gas-related diseases. Causing another 500,000 injuries Union Carbide India Limited was the Indian subsidiary of the Union Carbide Corporation. Indian Government controlled banks, and the Indian public, held almost 50% ownership.
After the disaster the Supreme Court of India allowed Union Carbide to sell off its 50.9% share. Union Carbide also sold UCIL, the Bhopal plant operator, to Eveready Industries India Limited in 1994. The Bhopal plant was later sold to McLeod Russel (India) Ltd. Later, Dow Chemical Company purchased UCC. Poison and death, for profit.
None of this was on the minds of either family. Back in their dirty old home town of Detroit the son of Snake, P.T. Folsom, was with his pregnant girl friend while she gave birth to their first. The grand-daughter of Marilyn Folsom, the daughter of her son, the daughter of the young girl that P.T. had been seeing for almost a year now, was being born in the Motor City Hospital.
There were many more family members present for the birth of this girl in Detroit than there had been for
Jackson’s two sons way out west in Canada. Partly because of the closeness of the hospital to all of their homes and places of work, but more than partly because of an unspoken connection between them that kicked in when one of their family members was being affected by Life in some hard way. On this occasion there were many smiles and many good wishes. They brought flowers and small gifts. The young girl-mother’s room that she shared with three others divided by a curtain that they did not bother to pull across, was full of physical and emotional signs of joy and happiness. This birth, though into poverty again, was a sign of hope. Each new life meant that there was a new chance to break out of the cycle of depressing economic enslavement that each of them was experiencing in their own lives one way or another. Her new name, the new baby’s, was Mary Lynn. Mary Lynn Folsom, the newest member of the family that lived in the same place, in the same building, with the same set of friends and enemies for many years. Mary Lynn was born into their tapestry of family generations.
Unlike some of families of this chaotic time, the wayward ones, the wanderers, whose family tapestries like that of ancient Penelope, wife of Odysseus, that used to be unwoven each night, to prevent the tapestry and the story from ever ending, to be rewoven the next day, delaying unwanted events - unlike these, the Folsom family tapestry now had it latest colorful and joyous threads sewn in. The city they lived in, and the country that their city was in continued to change. All things change. Change is constant. Change makes the future. The Folsoms knew things were changing but they could not know how much was changing, here and everywhere else too. The older world of Europe was in decline even as monarchies and new parliaments tried to do better for their people after the great Second World War and all its devastation. North America, the USA, had just now peaked and was beginning its decline too. It was too early to see it clearly, but people could feel it. They could feel that something was wrong. Hardly anyone in North America paid much attention to the beginnings of the upward trends in the third world because the North Americans still thought of these people as backward and primitive; in spite of them coming from ancient civilizations that had already achieved and lost greatness before the USA was even an idea.
Mary Lynn grew and took root in the same neighborhood that Marilyn and P.T. grew up in. The old neighborhood grew worse with each generation however. But a child does not know that something is worse than before. A child knows only what it sees and experiences, and assumes the whole world, and all the people in that world are in the same situation, in the same “normal” situation that they experience each and every day. Mary Lynn was eight years old when her grandmother, Marilyn, fell ill. Granma Marilyn really did fall down ill. One day, on her job, Marilyn could not stand any longer. She fell hard to her side, bounced off the corner of the desk next to where she was standing in the billing area of the company, scattering the paperwork that was stacked on that side of the desk. It was in the late 1980’s, on a Sunday in March. They had been trying to catch up on a backlog of work and were working on the Sunday. Marilyn’s mother had always told her not to work on Sundays, to keep holy the Lord’s Day. Marilyn could not distinguish Sunday from any other day of the week. Marilyn, who used to be Snake, who used to be dressed sleek and soft, who used to move with menacing sensuality, thought,
“It is Sunday” as she felt the room and the floor rise up to crush into her with the corner of the desk wounding her in the side on the way down, painfully keeping Granma Marilyn alert to what was happening to her. By the time she crumpled into an almost fetal position on the office floor, she was unconscious. Her coworkers buzzed around her calling the emergency number for help, yelling for the boss, and just looking at Marilyn lying there on the linoleum tile floor. She seemed to lose wrinkles, folds, and stains of time as she laid there on the floor next to the desk. She looked much more like Leteesha, The Snake. She looked more light golden aggressively beautiful than she had in almost 20 years. Not the Marilyn that her coworkers knew, but the legend they had all heard about. The other woman they all talked and whispered about behind her back. But now Marilyn’s body had shut down and was attacking itself from the inside.
Little Mary Lynn went with her dad, P.T. to see Granma Folsom in the hospital, the same hospital that Mary Lynn had been born in 8 years before. P.T. himself was only 24 years old now and looked vital and strong, though his morning cough from smoking was extending now throughout the day, coughing at the start of almost every statement he made all day long. He was coughing a lot right after he would eat his meals, which he resolved by lighting up another cigarette.
Mary Lynn’s mother did not come with them.
Although Mary Lynn’s mother Maria was much younger than P.T., she had lost weight, her eyes were edged red, her lips parched. She had joined the new crack-using generation and was a pitiful zombie of a person, compared to the hot spirited girl that had fallen in love with P.T. and had his baby. Maria was somewhere on the street listening to music, the ironic strains of Carlos Santana's “WINNING”, while they visited Mary Lynn’s Granma Folsom in the Motor City Hospital. The days of the “BLACK MAGIC WOMAN” were now a decade old and the energy of that time had turned into something else less so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaKnRUfh_5I
And it wasn’t just Detroit – there was more trouble everywhere - troubles that the people in Detroit did not focus on, troubles that they sometimes never even heard about. A new almost biblical plague shadowed cities and country sides alike. The new plague eventually identified as AIDS.
"When it began turning up in children and transfusion recipients, that was a turning point in
terms of public perception. Up until then it was entirely a gay epidemic, and it was easy for the
average person to say 'So what?..." said Harold Jaffe of the CDC to anyone that would actually
listen.
It was also became more clear that AIDS was not a disease that just occurred in the USA. There were reports of the disease occurring in a number of European countries. In Uganda the first cases of this new, fatal wasting disease. This illness soon became known locally as 'slim'.
There was also an almost biblical famine in Ethiopia too. Five Ethiopian provinces received record low rainfalls. Lack of adequate government preparations, and the increasing pull on government revenues by all the violent new insurgencies did not help. President Mengistu Haile Mariam announced that 50% of the Ethiopian Gross National Product was allocated to military spending, creating the largest standing army in sub-Saharan Africa; and the allocation for health in the government budget fell down to less than 5%. Death toll of over one million from famine, millions more destitute. And then, then they found the damned hole in the Ozone Layer. The Ozone layer that protects all life on Earth from harmful effects of Sun rays - three times the size of the United States and growing. A seasonal hole, discovered in the ozone layer above Antarctica was the first confirmation of a thinning of the layer. There is a corresponding hole over the Arctic that similarly appears in the spring. Things were not going well.
But the Folsoms had more pressing matters at hand.
Granma Folsom was happy to see her son and her grand-daughter. The lines of her face were creased with love as she greeted them from her bed. All the other women in the ward said hello to young Mary Lynn as she came in with her dad and headed toward the bed her Granma was in. When P.T. looked at his mother his heart hollowed out, stealing his breath. Her color was gone, the creases in her face were deeper, she had lost weight and looked fragile.....not the strong, moving-forward, beautiful woman he had know all his life. But he made happy sounds as they entered. He did not want to reveal how he truly felt, nor did he want to frighten Mary Lynn. There would be time to explain later. For now, he just wanted some happiness for his mother and his daughter.
“Well hello, little Mary Lynn. You are not so little anymore, are you?” Granma Folsom said, propping herself up a bit more on the double pillows behind her. After she said this she looked to one side, to the woman several beds down, who had a television by her bed and was making a noisy racket with the game show music and audience noise on the TV channel she was watching.
“ Lucille, puhleeeze turn that damn thing down...” she said with her head aimed straight at Lucille, three beds over. That’s more like my old mom, thought P.T., smiling. But then she lapsed into some coughing and wheezing and held her right side with both hands. When it passed, she collapsed back onto the two pillows, already damp with the perspiration of previous attacks.
“Do yourself a favor son. Stop smoking, eating cheese, beef, and ice cream. Believe me, it just ain’t worth the price you pay for it.”
She smiled then turned her eroded face toward Mary Lynne,
“ but you, Mary Lynn, you are still young, so you ENJOY that ice cream, ok?”
“ I will enjoy it and I will keep eating it and I won’t get old.” said Mary Lynn smiling.
P.T. and his mother looked at the young girl and smiled back. The tough streak the young girl received from her grandmother was already obvious. P.T. did not tell his mother, but Mary Lynn was already hanging around the gangs in the area. At eight years old, they tried to get her to smoke dope and even sell it, but she didn’t....yet. Mary Lynn came home from school to ask her dad why boys wanted sex all the time. These were the kids in the 3rd and 4th grades. Frustrated P.T. did not know what to do. So he dodged the subjects. Young Mary Lynn followed her internal compass as she charted routes to and through the young gangs to get what she decided that she wanted.
“I’m gonna be young like Madonna, and raw and cooked like the Fine Young Cannibals.”
Mary Lynn said this as she smiled broadly and watched her father and grandmother recoil but then smile back at her. The TV down at Lucille’s bed was making news noise about the death of Hirohito in Japan and the new invasion of Panama. Mary Lynn did not know anything about either one of these. But she knew she loved her grandmother. She stretched up as tall as she could and gave her grandmother a hug. Granma Folsom winced in pain, but did not let Mary Lynn see it. P.T. saw it and pretended he didn’t. The physical year was coming to an end as the digital years were being hatched everywhere, just out of sight.
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