Ephemera: Something You Only Barely Remember

Sustained Joy

In Tom’s workshop his first exercise was to “Write about something you only barely remember”

Every week of summer vacation was marked by a family get-together. This meant a picnic or barbecue every Saturday or Sunday. In my grandparents’ backyard, or an aunt’s or a public park. Each marked a relative’s birthday or a holiday such as Independence Day.

Every week each mom had to bring a wrapped gift or a covered dish: Jello salads or hot dogs or a potato salad. These gatherings run together in my mind because of their sameness. Singing Happy Birthday, blowing out candles.

That said, they were compulsory, like attending Mass or celebrating Christmas. My mother seemed to enjoy them, but she also complained about the treadmill of baking cakes and shooing flies while sitting on webbed aluminum lawn chairs around patios and picnic tables.

The cousins banded together to play tag. The women talked. The men talked and drank beer. Every adult smoked cigarettes. The sun was brutal. Back then the only menace lay in swallowing one of the many wooden toothpicks used to hold together a layer cake. Or stepping barefoot on a firework that wasn’t fully dead, the hot wire of a sparkler for example, or a sidewalk “snake.” Or swallowing the metal pull-tab of a soda that had been dropped inside the tin can.

In those days, the blazing weather made weeds send up a spray of flowers as fast as fireworks, as fast as an orgasm. That bursting feeling. That seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes feeling.

From back then only one cookout comes to mind. It started with a water balloon, a kid with a water balloon. One kid smacked another kid too close to the grown-ups. A teenage uncle gave chase. The uncle splashed a younger aunt. My mother’s family had a lot of “Irish twins,” meaning siblings born a year apart. A younger aunt grabbed a garden hose or filled a plastic bucket with water and splashed a great aunt.

The rest, the rest is a blur but one I can still see, of people racing around the yard and garden. Kids and adults in a free-for-all of cold water. Old people waiting in ambush with tumblers of ice water. Moms and dads trying to juggle a water balloon in one hand while protecting a lit Winston or Camel in the other. Everyone in Sunday clothes, drenched and screaming with laughter. Dripping and breathless. Everyone losing their shoes. Under that late afternoon sun, that fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk heat, in the August sunburn air of the desert, we shivered with winter cold.

It was over in an instant. Everyone panting and dripping. Mothers shouting, “That’s enough!” And cousins saying, “I got you good!” And uncles saying, “But I got you last!” And water beaded on someone’s Simonized Oldsmobile Cutlass parked too close. And the dogs, our border collie or my uncle’s black lab shaking off wet-dog water near the potato salad and everyone screaming, “No!” Glass ashtrays full of soggy cigarette butts. Amber glass. Followed by the slow tickle of skin drying in the hot while every slicked-down hair on your arms popped back up.

That Dylan Thomas feeling. Something contained becoming uncontained.

It had never happened before, nor would it ever happen again, so it’s the only family party that stands out. That’s what I would’ve written about in Tom’s workshop, so I’ve written about it here. Just that one flash of sustained joy among all of those lost summers of ritual.

Most of my life later, while on book tour in Houston, I had dinner in a cloth-napkins restaurant with an aunt who now lives in Texas. She told me that her maternal grandmother—my great grandmother—had committed suicide. The woman in question had seated my then-toddler grandmother at the kitchen table for lunch and told her not to leave the table until my great grandfather got home from work, and she, my great grandmother, had gone into the next room and killed herself. The death certificate recorded that she’d died of a broken heart. Emotionally, my great grandmother had been swamped.

Per my aunt, my grandmother had sat for hours with her own mother dead in the adjacent bedroom —and that’s how come our holidays had been so regimented. After the chaos of her childhood, my grandmother had wanted big scripted birthdays and picnics and Easters and Christmases and Thankgivings and… you get the picture.

So me? I’m writing this as I pack boxes for the September book tour. You see the hundreds of—thousands?—of stuffed kangaroos I’d planned to throw at you? Well, they arrived from China shrink-wrapped down to the size of plastic-encased mice, so I had to surf YouTube to find out how to unshrink them, so I’ve been running the clothes dryer nonstop, full of smashed kangaroos and a wet towel, so now it’s midnight. So now I’m running the dryer to unsmash the Kangaroo Helper costumes—which also arrived vacuum smashed down to tiny bricks and looked monstrously wrinkled.

This comes on top of raiding every all-night grocery store in the area for bags of Payday candy bars to throw at you. Paydays because the bags of candy bars have to be white or silver or bright orange—something that stands out—so you see them the instant before they smash into your face. You need to have a fighting chance. Candy bars because nobody wants a soft bag of cheap buttermints or marshmallows.

Thrown because that smack in your ear should feel like the first punch in Fight Club like the way the Dalai Lama slaps people like the way the Bishop slaps you at Confirmation like the way Cher slapped Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck when she said, “Snap out of it!”

Like my own grandmother—my grandmother!—gleeful and waiting with a soggy Camel between her lips just before she springs like a gazelle from the pyramidal arborvitae hedge to douse you with a coffee mug of cold water. Her hair, ruined.

And now I’m thinking dog toys. I’ve got to throw a few oversized dog toys at you. And I’ve got to order some extra extra-large Kangaroo Helper costumes because so many people would like to dress up. That, and my next-door neighbor is holding a yard sale and selling a batch of old Halloween costumes for one dollar each. One dollar! So I’ve bought them all.

And the Adult Bedtime Stories book tour had been such a success because a bah-zillion people came wearing pajamas. And the Rant tour was so fun because people came wearing old wedding gowns, men and women. So now this tour needs a reason to wear a big cheap costume.

And that’s why I’ve neglected the Substack. Poor Substack. Because the book tour stuff has piled up in my warehouse—it’s small as a warehouse goes—until I found an unshelled peanut in a case of life-sized plush kangaroos (long story) which means the chipmunks have found the tour stuff which means I’ve got to box up everything and ship it to the book stores or soon it will all be full of peanuts and bird seed.

And, yeah, this means you should plan to wear a costume—more guidelines to come. Think kilts. Think stereotype. Not because of my great grandmother’s death, but because of life. This is life.

And all of this riffs with that otherwise forgotten blazing hot, summer afternoon a half century ago. And all of this riffs with a handful of chaotic Cacophony Society stunts. And all of this riffs with the kind of Sustained Joy that I feel while writing, and that I always hope to convey in books like Fight Club and now Not Forever, But for Now. A kind of Animal House food-fight energy that burns itself out so quickly, but that you never forget.

And all of this riffs with the one moment in college when I stood outside the display windows of the J. J. Newberry dime store—a window crammed full of hamsters and diapers and dishes—and a friend had said, “Their visual marketing strategy must be, ‘If it doesn’t look right… put more in.’” And we’d all laughed. Such a moment! My friends!

And that’s the feeling, that’s the feeling I get when I read an Amy Hempel story. And now all the stuffed kangaroo dolls—the joey dolls that go into the cloth pouches of the Kangaroo Helper costumes—they all look sadly wrinkled and crushed, so they’ve got to go through the clothes dryer on High with a damp bath towel. And now it’s past midnight.

And to be honest, that’s why I haven’t posted more often. And last night at the Safeway, I was buying a hundred bags of Kit Kats—bright foil packaging, you know, for safety—and the clerk said, “It’s July 4th, dude, not Halloween!” And we both laughed. And now the sun is coming up.

And almost all—really 99%—of all the light-up shit I’ve sourced for tour is biodegradable because because. And all of this frenzy brought to mind that one family cookout that is the only one I have not lost. That freezing cold skin on a blazing hot afternoon. Because I hit you last so… now you to hit me.

So if you find a peanut in your terry-cloth kangaroo pouch, blame the stupid chipmunks.

Still Life of Unsmashed Kangaroo Helper Costumes at Backdoor with Shoes and Gun