post nuclear prep

Reading for December 20, 2009

At the age of seven, I would have attained reason; the adult world informed me. I kind of thought that meant I would possess a magic wand for life..........oh, not so.  One day in second grade, having barely made it through the preparation for likely annihilation by an Atomic Bomb Blast, I came home to find my home in an uproar.
In my village, my brothers had a friend, their age, whose name was Ronnie.
“What was the matter with him? Was he mad? What was he thinking? Was he crazy?
I had my first glimpse into craziness in no time at all.
Ronnie would often come over and play with my brothers in their boyhood days. I could only watch from a distance as their high energy fun and games excluded me by virtue of the age difference.
I will never forget, though, the succession of wild circumstances which evolved out of Ronnie’s idea.
Now, I thought what Ronnie actually did was, like super cool. Obviously not sharing my point of view, the grown ups were so fraught with dismay over the incident, an alarming tumult like nothing I had ever seen before, was developing right in front of me.
Adding to the chaos, was my introduction to the shadow world of nuances, innuendos and judgment calls. In years to come, I would find the only thing to rival its mysteriousness was the world of young ladies. Girls - I would come to find out - were a life form of their own, with powers to vaporize my brain.
At present, though, I had a situation. This was the first time in my tender years of childhood that I was not only confused on an intellectual level, but emotionally split into different directions by the attempt to relate to the conflagration of emotions that the adults were consumed in.
Between the number of years separating Ronnie and I, and, the apparent sequestering that I sensed he had received, I never came anywhere near even mentioning the event to him - yet alone being able discuss it in any detail.
What was at the eye of this storm, to the best of my knowledge and memory, was that Ronnie had come upon a great practical joke to play on his mother.

With incredible insight into both the laws of physics and the neurochemistry of a mother’s heightened state of response, Ronnie marched into his back yard and pretended to hang himself.

His brilliant scheme, which left him virtually unharmed, was to hang from the yard’s lone tree, but do so in such a way that he was completely supported from the waist. An ingenious combination of a rope with his pants’ belt held him safely, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, aloft. With the touch of nothing less than theatrical genius, while his body was solidly supported at his mid-section, he managed to bring a loop of the rope around his throat, creating the illusion that his entire weight was borne fatally by his neck.
One can, but only, i m a g i n e……. what primal responses get triggered in a mother when she is suddenly confronted with the hanging dead body of her only child.
Probably, she was held in that unnameable state for but a few seconds, because in a stunning reversal of events, her son returned to life. With this re-occurrence of life, came an understanding of the hoax.

It was said that Mom took Ronnie to an inch of his life as she beat the holy shit out of him.

This is how I remember the story told and retold so often that it reached near epic proportions. I have no firsthand knowledge of this event; but the intensity and scope of the swarm of stories about it were such that it was impossible to pass through unaffected. I attribute much of the staying power to the graphic details (I left out as a courtesy to Ronnie's family that I have nothing but the fondest memories of) my mother repeated over and over again. My brother Jerry, who has thankfully abandoned his dream of being the United States representative on the Olympic controlled long spit team; and, even more thankfully has become a best friend, recalls Ronnie playing a joke on both his parents in the form of being shot to death. In this version, Ronnie creates a life like pool of blood with a ketchup mix and is found in the middle of the shop. When I told Jerry what I remembered and pressed him for more of his memories, he said “who knows?” maybe he did them both.
Who knows?
There was definitely a part of me that wanted to see the tiniest morsel of recognition in behalf of either or both of the masterful simulation(s); but, a greater force overcame that – the survival instinct.

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Happy daze,

The Captain