“It’s just glass,” said his mom. “It’s not any special kind.”
“What kind of glass is the glass on the shows?”
“The glass on what shows?”
“All of the shows. The ones on the boob tube.”
“Same thing,” his mom said. “It’s just called glass. Glass is glass.”
Glass is glass. That was too much. Gil knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. His mother would never let him drink from a cup made of glass like the glass on the shows, which could break and cut you up. It wasn’t safe. Only a horrible mom would let him do that. This mom protected him. This mom was his. She wasn’t horrible. He knew she was lying. Or kidding around. He wanted to show her. He wanted to show her that he knew she was lying or kidding around and he wanted to show her he knew she wasn’t horrible. He knew she would always make sure he was protected. He thought he could show her all of these things by knocking the glass down onto the floor, and saying, “Ha!” or saying “Gotcha!” when the glass didn’t break when the glass hit the floor, but she didn’t like spills and the glass was half-full, so he thought of another way. He squeezed the glass as hard as he could.
“Gil, stop that,” his mom said. “You might break the glass.”
“I can’t break the glass.”
“Good,” she said. “Stop. I’m not kidding around.”
But she was. It was obvious. Unless she was lying. She was either kidding around or lying. But why would she lie? So she had to be kidding, the part of the kidding where you say, “I’m not kidding,” or “You think I’m kidding?” or “No kidding!” She had to be kidding and she knew that he knew because she thought he was smart. They were kidding together now. He kidded some more.
“Look,” he said, and raised the glass to his mouth, and bit into the rim of it as hard as he could, like the glass was an apple and he was a dog, the dog that ate the apple on a show that he saw once. He chomped the rim with the fangy teeth on his mouth’s right side and the glass cracked open and cut him on the gums and cut him on the tongue, and when, surprised, he opened his hand, the falling part raked him and opened his chin up.
It hurt. He bled. It was all her fault.
* * *
—
That final line—“It was all her fault.”—must have been the source of Triple-J’s confusion, the line that made him think I was saying “mothers can never be trusted.” Rather than making any kind of broad proclamation, though, all I was trying to bring across with that line (with that whole passage) was Gil’s awareness (after having ruined the ring) that he’d always been blinkered, and that throughout his whole life—since well before he’d lost his Bam Naka—it had often been the case that he’d reasoned unsoundly (sometimes via invalid arguments, but mostly via valid ones comprising false premises). I was trying to get the reader to see that Gil, who, despite knowing his own history of tricking himself in the course of seeking knowledge, and despite recognizing the convolutions of thought he used to trick himself while seeking knowledge, still helplessly continued to trick himself by way of those same convolutions, and never seemed to acquire the sought-after knowledge. I wanted the reader to see that Gil was not only aware of his problems, but was intimate with the analytical mechanism behind them, yet was unable to change, let alone thwart, that mechanism, despite (and sometimes because of) his efforts to do so. I wanted the reader to understand Gil’s sadness, and I wanted the reader to be sad for Gil’s sadness, and laugh about it, too, so it wouldn’t—this sadness—be all for naught. All of this to say that, while it (obviously) wasn’t unimaginable to me that “It was all her fault” could be misread in such a way as to lead a reader to believe I was saying that “mothers can never be trusted,” I was nonetheless surprised to imagine it, for the line is not only shown by the lines preceding it to be a total misconstruance on the part of four-year-old Gil, but it’s stated from deeply within his four-year-old point of view, which isn’t his nine-year-old point of view (i.e. present-action Gil MacCabby’s point of view; the point of view of the Gil who’s remembering), let alone is it the narrator’s point of view, much less the author’s (i.e. mine).
Yet despite my surprise, I, on my bed, having read the scene twice, felt no less flattered by Triple-J’s praise than I had on the driveway. After all, had I not, in my own adolescence, believed J. D. Salinger was trying to tell readers of The Catcher in the Rye that everyone was phony except Holden Caulfield? The message I’d taken from Franny and Zooey was that only through ascetic religious practice could a genius remain good and true in New York. And then there was “A Hunger Artist”: the first couple times I’d read it in high school, I was certain it asserted that to suffer was an art. Triple-J’s misunderstanding, I’m saying, saw me feeling comparable to Salinger and Kafka.
Not a bad feeling.
Jonboat’s misunderstanding, on the other hand, was so far off the mark that it made me worry—even despite Burroughs’s assurances that he’d since abandoned said misunderstanding—it made me worry Jonboat had gotten as batty as the tabloid headlines occasionally suggested. To state it plainly: Gil’s lost action figure represents no one I’ve ever known; as I mentioned earlier (really more than just mentioned), No Please Don’t isn’t autobiographical. Furthermore, the childhood experiences on which I had drawn (in spirit, indirectly) to write those passages concerned with Gil’s feelings about losing Bam Naka were experiences to which Jonboat was, at most, peripheral. One of those experiences has been described here already, in the “All-Encompassing and Tyrannical” chapter: the time I refused my father’s invitation to go see the Mustangs game and get ice cream. The others will be duly covered in the next few.
II
THE HOPE OF RUSTING SWINGSETS
LOOK AT YOUR MOTHER
THE TENTH SWINGSET I murdered belonged to the Strumms, a family of bikers who lived in some trailers on an acre of pavement off County Line Road. The second-youngest Strumm, Stevie, had invited me the previous Monday in lab. She’d be stuck at home sitting her sister, she’d said, while her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins all rode out to Alpine to see G N’ R; they’d be gone half the day and at least half the night, the swingset was “fucked,” and the neighboring properties were totally vacant.
In the couple-three weeks since the school year had begun, I’d turned down any number of similar invitations. Despite all the social capital I’d earned from my performance at Feather’s, I wasn’t so sure I was ready for an encore. I was, first of all, spooked by the possibility that Feather’s swingset hadn’t initially wanted my help; even if it had said, ||Finish,|| to me—if that hadn’t been the bat, or my imagination—it hadn’t done so til I’d pummeled it for most of an hour. And then, secondly, I had this uncomfortably self-contradictory feeling about having helped it in front of others (a mix of satisfaction and shame at witnessing my own satisfaction, which persisted despite the persistence of the shame). This was a new, almost vertiginous feeling, a feeling I’ve only ever felt twice since: while dressing at the foot of Grete the grad student’s bed, and after reading No Please Don’t’s first review.