Of Memories & Men November 2004 Click to view Table of Contents Click to view photo gallery Click to view cover story

Fiction

Little Boy Blue

and The Man In The Moon
By Will O'Neill

 

People use what they want to believe as a way to silence what they don’t want to know.

When Johnny was born, for example, his parents hoped that he would one day marry and have children of his own. This was naïve, since they had no way of knowing who Johnny was, or what kind of person he would be in relation to parenting ability, but it was understandable. Having children makes you a child again yourself: Unreasonable expectations ("My child is going to have/be everything"), hypocrisy ("No, you can not do things for your immediate gratification as I do, eat your vegetables first"), and of course complete and utter dependence on somebody that you then proceed to emotionally blackmail into feeling good about going along with it.

And the first way to do this, and everything else, was to never ask Johnny at all what he wanted but rather build him as a reflection from whence he came instead of that which he might have been himself. Growing up is an apprenticeship for adulthood, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are little more than Fisher-Price My First Coffee Break.

There was much that Johnny didn't comprehend, but he was raised to believe that believing is superior to knowing, like Kierkegaard overseeing Abraham as he synapsed to machine-arm downwards into the heart of reason. Following suit, the people who wanted to influence Johnny’s behavior knew that the route to take was romance. Don’t show him why something is possible, but instead tell him some made-up story about how someone did it, even if the details are impossible and the luck unbelievable: The primary duty of spectacle is to make you think that you could be something you are not.

And then the carrot just dangles for the rest of your life.

By five years old, Johnny wanted to be Mickey Mouse and, really, who wouldn’t?

Maybe we lie because life is short.

YOU’RE GONNA SEE SOMEDAY. YOU’RE GONNA HAVE CANCER, AND THEN YOU’RE GONNA UNDERSTAND. YOU’RE GONNA WATCH YOUR KIDS GROW UP AND LEAVE YOU, AND THEN YOU’RE GONNA UNDERSTAND. YOU’RE GONNA SEE THAT LIFE IS JUST SOMETHING WHERE YOU GOTTA TAKE IT LIKE IT IS, YOU’RE GONNA SEE. YOU’RE GONNA GET IT.

(Noise, noise, noise… Shut up, holy fucking shit, shut up.)

C’MON AND GET A JOB, BE AN OFFICE MAN, COLLATE AND RECONCILE THE INCOMING FIGURES. YOU WANT A COFFEE? I’M JUST GOING DOWNSTAIRS TO GET A COFFEE. CAN’T WAIT FOR FRIDAY, HEADING OUT OF TOWN WITH THE WIFE AND THE KIDS. WE RENTED A NICE LITTLE COTTAGE ON THE WATER, GONNA GRILL UP SOME STEAKS AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BEERS. YOU THINK ITS ALL STUPID? GET A JOB. WORK A FIFTY-HOUR WEEK WITH OLD MAN GILLMAN BREATHING DOWN YOUR NECK, THEN SEE HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT JUST BEING ABLE TO GET AWAY FROM IT ALL.

Maybe we lie because life is long.

When Johnny was six years old, he went on a cottage trip with his family (Mom, dad, two sisters and his brother.) Johnny looked up to his brother, in a way, because his brother was always smiling and talking about the things that he wanted to do in life. His brother had a girlfriend, maybe two (Wink, wink. You handsome devil, you.) and the greatest collection of baseball caps that Johnny had ever seen. His sisters were young, blonde and blue eyed: The kind of girls that you would never expect to be kidnapped, molested and killed by isolated sexual monsters living in bungalows they inherited from their alcoholic abusive mothers, but they were.

To this end, Johnny’s dad made sure to bring a semi-automatic rifle with him wherever he went, and have GPS chips installed in the girls’ heads. “Better they be date raped, respectably, at a more mature age. That way, they can learn something from the experience about who to trust, and how far to go with somebody who says they love you three days after meeting you, rather than taking away from it an understanding of the truly dangerous and random things that haunt like a shadow just a step behind you. If you survive at all.” Said Johnny’s father. “I don’t want my kids to be damaged - I just want them to be bitter, pissed off and untrusting enough to make it in this world.” Johnny’s mom, long emotionally lobotomized by speeches such as these in this surreal and fictional yet earnest world, made sandwiches.

Upon arriving at the campsite, which Johnny’s father chose on account of it being occupied by wild animals, Johnny’s father (Oh, alright, let’s call him “Jim”) showed Johnny how to deal with his problems not by avoiding problems altogether, but rather by zealously embracing even the slightest and most circumstantial of conflicts. “Take this gun, Johnny, and shoot everything.” Said his father, passing him the rifle by the smooth wooden stock which sheltered the hand from the feeling of death itself passing through it’s smooth metallic vein.

Johnny took the gun from the gun that made him (Big shout out to all you feminist bitches. Don’t get up, Freud: It gets worse) and felt the transferrence of power from father to son, an odd mix of nausea of elation, of growth and humility, and held it shockingly from ear-to-ear in the palms of his hands.

"Hold it like this, son. Tuck the end into your shoulder and point at things that move until they don’t move anymore,” said his father, negating to mention the part about the trigger and planning to pull it himself for fear of Johnny becoming afraid. Jim had always thought that the trigger needed some wood-grain panelling, and planned to fashion it out of some of the side panels from his old station wagon that he’d had to retire after accidentally running into a kid some years before (Jim hadn’t felt an ounce of turbulence beneath him. They don’t build ‘em like they used to.)

Johnny pointed the gun at a rabbit that he saw behind a tree, and suddenly there was a little shake, the fun-bouncy noise of the bolt snapping, and suddenly the rabbit had not only stopped moving, but did not look as if it any longer possessed a means to.

What happened to the feet? What happened to the head? What happened to the brain, and the body? That rabbit was made of blood and little dusty specks of fur. Johnny didn’t feel so much like he had killed it as if he had simply taken it apart to see what was inside and made the rest disappear.

"Your forefathers, the great hunters of America, killed these animals not only to avoid being killed by them, Johnny, but so that they could survive themselves. When you eat a chicken, Johnny, or a hamburger, that used to be an animal,” said Jim. Johnny was shocked, and wondered if they made the hamburger by taking all the blood and putting it into a cube until it was solid and hardened, or if they just took whatever was left and put it into a machine that would mash it up into a mixture of meat and fat that was spit out of metallic turkey basters onto genetically modified buns. “Don’t be ridiculous," said Jim, indicating to Johnny to point the rifle at a fox running just over a hill in the distance.

"Remember: If it’s moving, it’s alive,” said Jim.

"That fox,” said Johnny, observing the speed and grace of it’s movements, “is very, very much alive. Is it more alive than us, dad?”

"Nothing is faster than what you have in your hand right now," said Jim. “Nothing is alive as that.”

Johnny pointed the rifle at the fox in the distance and, sure enough, it stopped moving immediately.

"When I grow up,” said Johnny, “I want to be a gun.”

It’s D-Day, 1946, and there are foxes in the holes. The boat moves up and sits on the shoreline, while in the distance screams of certain death echo intermittently like an out of tune opera. Please do not disembark until the craft has come to a complete stop. We’d like to remind you that there is no smoking near the live ammuntion that even now is pouring down on the thick metallic border between you and certain death. Our feature film on this voyage was you, sixty years from now, by Steven Spielberg, featuring the guy next to you who will be fortunate enough to make it. He’ll sit there in arcane medals and a badly fitting beret and he’ll talk about how brave, how fine and beautiful and patriotic you were, and how you died for freedom instead of killing for it as your father had taught you to do so many years ago. The door swings downward, the beach opens up in front of you, and you run off of the boat just... like... that.

IF I’M GOING TO DIE FOR THIS, YOU’RE COMING WITH ME.

"Movement,” his father said, “is what living is all about. Anything standing still is nothing but dead and jealous of anything that isn’t. When something or somebody keeps you from moving, whenever they oppress and tell you what to do, whenever they take from you the Freedom that God in all of his righteousness has impressed on you to cherish, even if they are doing it to exercise their own freedom (Fuck everybody else’s freedom) you must destroy them before they can destroy you.”

Johnny, exhilerated by this wisdom, this knowledge that had brought him so much joy and noise and victory, turned to his father and shot him point blank in the face.