Have-a-heart Trap

I was at the Agway with my dad and brother, and there were these little tiny have-a-heart traps for sale. They were right next to the big have-a-heart traps that looked like the one we used for catching groundhogs. Our have-a-heart trap didn’t hurt the groundhogs, just caught them long enough to drive to Pennsylvania and let them go by the train tracks, where they could thrive without eating our garden. We must have re-located 10 groundhogs a summer with our big have-a-heart trap, resulting in a refugee ground hog depot of sorts, a thriving community of tunnelers on the banks of the Delaware river.

So, when I saw the tiny have-a-heart trap designed for mice, I envisioned creating my own mouse community, catching a bunch of mice in my tiny have-a-heart trap, and relocating them to the playground behind the school. How nice would it be to visit my mouse friends at recess? I could feed them, and watch them, and see them be happy. It would make going to school a bit less depressing.

I saved my allowance for three weeks and came up with the $2.75 to buy the tiny have-a-heart trap next time we went to the Agway. The trap was a so cute - grey plastic with yellow writing and tiny yellow trap doors connected to a tiny yellow bait tray. When we got home, I found some cheese, and I set the trap in our neighbor’s shed - a place I believed would have a ton of mice to catch. I checked that trap in an hour. No mouse. I checked that trap the next day. No mouse. I checked again and again day after day, and still no mouse. I checked so many times that I began to forget if I checked or not. And then I simply began to forget checking. The last time I checked the trap, it was a brutally hot day. The shed smelled like death. There was no happy mouse friend in my trap, just a corpse - a sort of mouse raisin - shriveled and stinking. I buried the trap with my furry victim inside, feeling terrible that such a lovely creature had died a slow and heartless death because of my forgetfulness.

Schwinn Predator

There was no other bike. The only one worth having was the Schwinn Predator BMX. The one with the powder blue frame, monochrome lavender mag/tire set, and mushroom grips. This bike was worth Christmas, birthday, and my own money from flickin beetles at the Biddle Berry Farm all rolled up in one. The one essential thing that didn’t come standard on that bike was pegs. I had to have pegs - for tricks and stuff. But I was tapped out from buying the bike. So I saved up, and eventually got a set of slim-line pegs for the back wheel. And I rode that bike every day after school feeling like a bad ass gangster from Miami. My biggest trick was that I didn’t know any tricks. My second biggest trick was that I was scared to do tricks. My third biggest trick was fuck you, I’m a bad ass gangster from Miami.

Dubuffet Buffet

Every year for New Years Eve, my parents would take us to their friend’s big house - it was like a house out of a movie. There was a spiral staircase, and a fire place so big a professional wrestler could stand up inside it. And unlike many of the boring adults that my parents would subject me and my brother to, the grownups who lived in this big movie house were attentive, kind, and funny.

There was a long drive involved in getting to the big movie house. We went over a white bridge, past Sing Sing Prison, and along side of a graveyard that seemed to go on for miles. My dad would tell me and my brother that we had to hold our breath while we were driving by the graveyard or the headless horseman would come for us. The panic I felt as I ran out of air was thrilling.

But, all this is beside the point. There was really only one point of these trips for me: Dubuffet books. I looked forward to seeing them every time. I knew Dubuffet was an artist, and I understood what an artist was because my parents were artists. But this Dubuffet guy was special. He saw the same world that I saw - a world full of cars, buildings, bikes, hats, messes, and mushy people. It looked like he didn’t care about rules. It looked like he just wanted to make pictures - the same way that I just wanted to make pictures. And he had his pictures in books. The kind of books you leave out for guests. And I loved that, once a year, I got to be a guest at a house with Dubuffet books.

Jean Dubuffet – Parages frequentes (Busy Neighbourhood), 1979. Acrylic on paper (with 28 cutout elements) mounted on canvas, 27 1/2 x 40 1/8 in

My First Memory.

My first memory is not visual. It is not an experience. I can not see anything, I can not do anything. I do not know any words. I have not been introduced to my body yet. In my first memory, I am just a feeling, responding to an awareness.

The awareness was change, the feeling was rage.

Tree Puncher.

My knuckles were bleeding. Bad. And the tree couldn’t have cared less. It didn’t feel a damn thing. It just stood there doing what trees do - nothing. And I stood there doing what angry little boys do - crying and bleeding.

The small husky one.

I was always the small husky one. That is the nice way to say I was short and fat. I think I prefer the not so nice way to say it though, because it’s more true. And cuz I hate dogs, and husky is a type of dog as much as it is a type of fat kid. Anyways, whatever me and the Dead Meats were doing, I either couldn’t reach, couldn’t see, or couldn’t keep up. If we were peeking into Mr. Buckman’s shed to see if we could steal a boat, I needed a boost. If we were having a crab apple fight, I could only throw the soft brown ones from the ground, as I got pelted with the hard green ones from the branches. For every normal sized kid step the Dead Meats took to get up the hill to the high tension wires, I had to take three measly small husky steps. I am thinking this is probably why the first hit song by Tim and the Dead Meats was an urgent little ditty called, “Hey assholes, wait for me!”