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saltdawg(If you have any PETA sympathies, ignore this post.)
In the seventies my neighborhood was a veritable battleground. Not like Eritrea or Ethiopia in the eighties. not the Golan heights or nothing, but we had about five bars, taverns and "cafes" all within one town block. As the "joke" goes, in Rhode Island, there is a church and a bar on every street corner. It ain't quite so true anymore, but in the seventies it was, oh how it was in RI in the seventies. First of all the town I live in, grew up in was such that when we moved here in 1970 my father got in a fight with a feller simply because my father wasn't a warrenite. But that didn’t stop my pop from knocking the guy's front teeth out. And the toothless one ended up being my father's best friend. Because his son was my best friend. But that's not the point. The point is that there were five cafes in the neighborhood. One of them was called "Sippen's cafe" another "Marzlik's cafe" and (last man standing) Jack's bar. Sippen's was a biker bar. and there was all kinds of friction between the bikers and the regular blue-collar drunks. The neighborhood put up with the other bars because, well, that was where all the husbands were. Sippen's was vilified because the bikers would get all rowdy and rev their engines and drag race at all hours of the night. My father was the only person in the neighborhood that would publicly speak out against the bikers.
I have the memory vividly etched in my memory of the time that a couple of the bikers and my father almost got in a car accident at the corner of Liberty and Union the corner where I grew up. They were driving a VW beetle, my pop and I were in our 1974 CJ-5 jeep. The argument elevated into a fistfight. My father held his own for quite a while. Everyone in the neighborhood clambered out of their tenements to watch. The cops weren't called because my dad was whipping them. Knocking one down as the other was getting up. And then, one, the one that had the eye patch, got an old-school fire-hydrant wrench out of the back seat of the beetle. Knocked my dad to the ground with a solid blow across the kidneys. And as my father was on all fours, with one of them kicking him in the head, and the other was raising the wrench over his head; for the coup de gras, "little" Armand from across the street stepped in. Helped my dad out a little. And then cops showed up sometime soon after. I don't know who it was but someone was holding me back from getting into the fracas the whole time. I was furious and I wanted a little biker blood for myself. I was maybe seven.
That night they threw a brick through our window with a note on it. And my father stayed up all night with the pump-action .22 “gallery gun“ (that is over there in the corner now) in his hands. Years went by. My father, who was already politically active on the local scene, (planning boards, zoning commissions etc…) sacrificed, through town ordinances and reclamation of liquor licenses, the other local joints which he loved so well in the effort to shut Sippen’s down. Years went by and only Jack's and Sippen's remained. Only Sippen's changed hands and became "d'swank dive". Same people, different name for the bar.
Anyway. the years went by and there was still this bitter rivalry. The bikers even killed my pet rabbit just around this time of year when I was in fifth grade. Took it out of it’s cage and smashed the poor thing’s head with their boots. Just around my birthday. He was a "Flemish Giant" named Festus, and after that happened with the bunny, the gloves were really off. for Little SaltDog, that is.
Anyway that year, the year of the rabbit, went by and my father bought me a BB gun for Christmas when I was ten/almost eleven. I am certain this took a lot of doing on my father's part with my mother. She wouldn't even allow me to have TOY guns. Even though my father had me shooting off black powder guns since I was six. Anyway I get this fancy top-of-the-line crossman air gun for Christmas. We had a firing range in our cellar where we used to shoot off the black powder, but my pop encouraged me to start practicing with the BB gun. I was a pretty good shot for my age. I have several trophies for the "under 15" age bracket for the black powder stuff. I'm a lousy shot now. Anyway I shot that damnded thing every day all winter. When springtime came, my father set me up in the pigeon-killing business.
I would wander around the nor'd end of Warren picking off pigeons from rooftops, at like ten cents a bird. I'd kill all the pigeons I could and then knock on the door of the landlord with my brace and exact whatever was due. In those days, kids could go wandering around in the streets with guns and nobody thought anything of it. Nowadays, in New England, Kids are taught to be so afraid of guns. Fuck, I started bringing a pocket knife to school when I was in the fourth grade. They just EXPELLED a kid for pretending that a FRENCH FRY was a gun in the lunchroom.
But despite the pigeon business, the real reason for the BB gun came out that next spring. My father used to have me crawl up on top of a garage behind my house and take pot-shots at "d'swank dive" sign. That was the whole reason he got me the damnded thing in the first place. To shoot out the Biker's sign. But for some reason I was never able to hit the lights. I remember walking by the sign and trying to count the number of holes...it was as pock-marked as Manny Tavares' face, but for some reason I was never able to put the lights out. The way my father wanted me to.
And then, somewhere along the way, my father won his battle. Not directly, but vicariously. His clout in the town got a police sting set up and d’swank dive got shut down for drug charges. It's an antique store now. But for the next couple of twilight years between Lego's and Punk Rock I still roved the neighborhood with my little extermination business. Until.
Until one day that I didn't get such a clean head-shot. The bird fluttered blood all over me and I had to pump like five pellets into his head to get him to stop. I remember the pool of blood around my "docksiders". I remember pumping round after round into the thing and the feel of the hot blood spattering my eyes. I remember just wanting it to stop. And I remember putting the bloody squab into the trashcan and putting the lid on top. I remember making a silent vow to never kill anything again.
And I know it sounds stupid, but I was probably barely 13, and I had it up to "-" here with Catholicism, and had discovered Buddhism and I vowed to never kill anything on purpose again. Not even green-head horseflies that would bite me at Chapin beach. Not mosquitoes, not nothing. When I was a teenager and I hit an animule with my car, I would stop and try to help it. Or at least get it out of the road, so it could die with a little dignity. This went on for many years. I wear Patchouli oil. Not because I like to smell like dirt, but because bugs don't like the taste, which lessened the desire to swat.
But then I moved into a tenement of my own. And I would have pigeons flying into my HOUSE because I didn't have screens on the windows. The BB gun came out again. I still do not like to kill things. I don't like to fish. I'm not so squeamish, but I still have a little hesitation, about dunking lobsta into a pot of boiling water. It's a dualistic thing. Maybe even a Pisces thing. I mean I want and try to be as nice to folk as I can, but at the same time I'll fucking whack a stowaway in the head with a baseball bat if I need to. I don't want to fight, but if you push me...
THE WHOLE POINT BEING
My nephew is almost eleven and has always been a little on the "fey" side. He's a fraternal twin to a sister. He cross-dressed up until a couple of years ago. He screams like a girl and throws like a girl. (not like I don't). And he is afraid of animals, be it dogs, cats, or pigeons.
So he is over my house this afternoon. I was hijacked, again. I put him out into the yard to play and he came screaming in all ascaret of some pigeons in the back yard. I grabbed the BB gun. I picked the first one off clean. Headshot with a pellet. When it hit the dirt it was still fluttering a little and the Nephew was whimpering with his head in a corner. I told him the pigeon was dead and he turned around and then started whimpering because the bird was still moving a bit. Still flopping around. I told him it was just the nerves, but I know the thing still needed a little killin’. I tried to get him in close to the bird, but he wouldn't budge. He was clinging to my backside and peering around as I pumped another BB into the fucker's head, and then it was the same pool of blood around my steel-toed Chippewa boots as the pool around my docksiders twenty-odd years ago. And suddenly the Nephew wasn't quite so scared.
We found the other pigeon under the eaves of my tenement. I showed him how to cock the BB gun. How to pump it. How to draw a bead. His first shot wasn't nearly on target, but the second caught the fucker in the breast. It fluttered nearly to our feet. With a soft thunk. It was in pain and needed to be delivered. I grabbed the gun and pumped it full of air and BB quick as a whip. And handed it to him. He was scared to get near the bird. Scared of the flopping and fluttering, but I told him that HE had to put it down. I nudged him closer to the pigeon and talked him through a one-handed dispatch.
He hesitated. I could hear my father in my voice telling him that he had to kill it and end it's suffering. After a heartbeat, I could see the look in his eye change. He blew the thing's eyes out. And even though he is the same age as I was when I used to walk up to a door with ten bloody pigeons in my hand demanding a dollar from Pal Socia, all he could do was give me the gun and tell me to put the pigeon in the garbage can. But still. I saw the look in his eye change. I saw that he knew something that his 13 year old brother (who said “killing is wrong” when we told him) would never knew. I could see that I had done something, that WE had done something that reversed all the damage that all the years of bicycle-helmet, kneepad wearing “safety” and uproars about “what about the children” has done to the kids today.
The look in his eye changed. And I recognized the look. It was pride.
Granted it wasn't an elk, or a whale or whatever the fuck you used to kill for a rite of passage when Squanto and King Phillip used to walk around where my back yard is now. And I know the kid well enough to know he isn't going to start torturing cats like a John Wayne Gacy or anything; I know that I taught him something that most kids, around here at least, don’t learn any more. I know that he not remember a lot of the things I've tried to teach him, but together we shared a visceral experience that will stay with him for the rest of his life. For good or for ill.
And I know I'll have less pigeon-shit on my kitchen window sill. I know that the next time, he'll stand a little closer to the next dying pigeon. I know that he won't be quite so afraid of not wearing his seat belt while we are doing donuts in the snow out in the church parking lot. I know that he has something on all the kids I would have hated if I was going to school with. I know that he understands a little about why crazy uncle SaltDog ain't really so crazy after all.
If only there was a neighborhood bar I was at war with...
In the seventies my neighborhood was a veritable battleground. Not like Eritrea or Ethiopia in the eighties. not the Golan heights or nothing, but we had about five bars, taverns and "cafes" all within one town block. As the "joke" goes, in Rhode Island, there is a church and a bar on every street corner. It ain't quite so true anymore, but in the seventies it was, oh how it was in RI in the seventies. First of all the town I live in, grew up in was such that when we moved here in 1970 my father got in a fight with a feller simply because my father wasn't a warrenite. But that didn’t stop my pop from knocking the guy's front teeth out. And the toothless one ended up being my father's best friend. Because his son was my best friend. But that's not the point. The point is that there were five cafes in the neighborhood. One of them was called "Sippen's cafe" another "Marzlik's cafe" and (last man standing) Jack's bar. Sippen's was a biker bar. and there was all kinds of friction between the bikers and the regular blue-collar drunks. The neighborhood put up with the other bars because, well, that was where all the husbands were. Sippen's was vilified because the bikers would get all rowdy and rev their engines and drag race at all hours of the night. My father was the only person in the neighborhood that would publicly speak out against the bikers.
I have the memory vividly etched in my memory of the time that a couple of the bikers and my father almost got in a car accident at the corner of Liberty and Union the corner where I grew up. They were driving a VW beetle, my pop and I were in our 1974 CJ-5 jeep. The argument elevated into a fistfight. My father held his own for quite a while. Everyone in the neighborhood clambered out of their tenements to watch. The cops weren't called because my dad was whipping them. Knocking one down as the other was getting up. And then, one, the one that had the eye patch, got an old-school fire-hydrant wrench out of the back seat of the beetle. Knocked my dad to the ground with a solid blow across the kidneys. And as my father was on all fours, with one of them kicking him in the head, and the other was raising the wrench over his head; for the coup de gras, "little" Armand from across the street stepped in. Helped my dad out a little. And then cops showed up sometime soon after. I don't know who it was but someone was holding me back from getting into the fracas the whole time. I was furious and I wanted a little biker blood for myself. I was maybe seven.
That night they threw a brick through our window with a note on it. And my father stayed up all night with the pump-action .22 “gallery gun“ (that is over there in the corner now) in his hands. Years went by. My father, who was already politically active on the local scene, (planning boards, zoning commissions etc…) sacrificed, through town ordinances and reclamation of liquor licenses, the other local joints which he loved so well in the effort to shut Sippen’s down. Years went by and only Jack's and Sippen's remained. Only Sippen's changed hands and became "d'swank dive". Same people, different name for the bar.
Anyway. the years went by and there was still this bitter rivalry. The bikers even killed my pet rabbit just around this time of year when I was in fifth grade. Took it out of it’s cage and smashed the poor thing’s head with their boots. Just around my birthday. He was a "Flemish Giant" named Festus, and after that happened with the bunny, the gloves were really off. for Little SaltDog, that is.
Anyway that year, the year of the rabbit, went by and my father bought me a BB gun for Christmas when I was ten/almost eleven. I am certain this took a lot of doing on my father's part with my mother. She wouldn't even allow me to have TOY guns. Even though my father had me shooting off black powder guns since I was six. Anyway I get this fancy top-of-the-line crossman air gun for Christmas. We had a firing range in our cellar where we used to shoot off the black powder, but my pop encouraged me to start practicing with the BB gun. I was a pretty good shot for my age. I have several trophies for the "under 15" age bracket for the black powder stuff. I'm a lousy shot now. Anyway I shot that damnded thing every day all winter. When springtime came, my father set me up in the pigeon-killing business.
I would wander around the nor'd end of Warren picking off pigeons from rooftops, at like ten cents a bird. I'd kill all the pigeons I could and then knock on the door of the landlord with my brace and exact whatever was due. In those days, kids could go wandering around in the streets with guns and nobody thought anything of it. Nowadays, in New England, Kids are taught to be so afraid of guns. Fuck, I started bringing a pocket knife to school when I was in the fourth grade. They just EXPELLED a kid for pretending that a FRENCH FRY was a gun in the lunchroom.
But despite the pigeon business, the real reason for the BB gun came out that next spring. My father used to have me crawl up on top of a garage behind my house and take pot-shots at "d'swank dive" sign. That was the whole reason he got me the damnded thing in the first place. To shoot out the Biker's sign. But for some reason I was never able to hit the lights. I remember walking by the sign and trying to count the number of holes...it was as pock-marked as Manny Tavares' face, but for some reason I was never able to put the lights out. The way my father wanted me to.
And then, somewhere along the way, my father won his battle. Not directly, but vicariously. His clout in the town got a police sting set up and d’swank dive got shut down for drug charges. It's an antique store now. But for the next couple of twilight years between Lego's and Punk Rock I still roved the neighborhood with my little extermination business. Until.
Until one day that I didn't get such a clean head-shot. The bird fluttered blood all over me and I had to pump like five pellets into his head to get him to stop. I remember the pool of blood around my "docksiders". I remember pumping round after round into the thing and the feel of the hot blood spattering my eyes. I remember just wanting it to stop. And I remember putting the bloody squab into the trashcan and putting the lid on top. I remember making a silent vow to never kill anything again.
And I know it sounds stupid, but I was probably barely 13, and I had it up to "-" here with Catholicism, and had discovered Buddhism and I vowed to never kill anything on purpose again. Not even green-head horseflies that would bite me at Chapin beach. Not mosquitoes, not nothing. When I was a teenager and I hit an animule with my car, I would stop and try to help it. Or at least get it out of the road, so it could die with a little dignity. This went on for many years. I wear Patchouli oil. Not because I like to smell like dirt, but because bugs don't like the taste, which lessened the desire to swat.
But then I moved into a tenement of my own. And I would have pigeons flying into my HOUSE because I didn't have screens on the windows. The BB gun came out again. I still do not like to kill things. I don't like to fish. I'm not so squeamish, but I still have a little hesitation, about dunking lobsta into a pot of boiling water. It's a dualistic thing. Maybe even a Pisces thing. I mean I want and try to be as nice to folk as I can, but at the same time I'll fucking whack a stowaway in the head with a baseball bat if I need to. I don't want to fight, but if you push me...
THE WHOLE POINT BEING
My nephew is almost eleven and has always been a little on the "fey" side. He's a fraternal twin to a sister. He cross-dressed up until a couple of years ago. He screams like a girl and throws like a girl. (not like I don't). And he is afraid of animals, be it dogs, cats, or pigeons.
So he is over my house this afternoon. I was hijacked, again. I put him out into the yard to play and he came screaming in all ascaret of some pigeons in the back yard. I grabbed the BB gun. I picked the first one off clean. Headshot with a pellet. When it hit the dirt it was still fluttering a little and the Nephew was whimpering with his head in a corner. I told him the pigeon was dead and he turned around and then started whimpering because the bird was still moving a bit. Still flopping around. I told him it was just the nerves, but I know the thing still needed a little killin’. I tried to get him in close to the bird, but he wouldn't budge. He was clinging to my backside and peering around as I pumped another BB into the fucker's head, and then it was the same pool of blood around my steel-toed Chippewa boots as the pool around my docksiders twenty-odd years ago. And suddenly the Nephew wasn't quite so scared.
We found the other pigeon under the eaves of my tenement. I showed him how to cock the BB gun. How to pump it. How to draw a bead. His first shot wasn't nearly on target, but the second caught the fucker in the breast. It fluttered nearly to our feet. With a soft thunk. It was in pain and needed to be delivered. I grabbed the gun and pumped it full of air and BB quick as a whip. And handed it to him. He was scared to get near the bird. Scared of the flopping and fluttering, but I told him that HE had to put it down. I nudged him closer to the pigeon and talked him through a one-handed dispatch.
He hesitated. I could hear my father in my voice telling him that he had to kill it and end it's suffering. After a heartbeat, I could see the look in his eye change. He blew the thing's eyes out. And even though he is the same age as I was when I used to walk up to a door with ten bloody pigeons in my hand demanding a dollar from Pal Socia, all he could do was give me the gun and tell me to put the pigeon in the garbage can. But still. I saw the look in his eye change. I saw that he knew something that his 13 year old brother (who said “killing is wrong” when we told him) would never knew. I could see that I had done something, that WE had done something that reversed all the damage that all the years of bicycle-helmet, kneepad wearing “safety” and uproars about “what about the children” has done to the kids today.
The look in his eye changed. And I recognized the look. It was pride.
Granted it wasn't an elk, or a whale or whatever the fuck you used to kill for a rite of passage when Squanto and King Phillip used to walk around where my back yard is now. And I know the kid well enough to know he isn't going to start torturing cats like a John Wayne Gacy or anything; I know that I taught him something that most kids, around here at least, don’t learn any more. I know that he not remember a lot of the things I've tried to teach him, but together we shared a visceral experience that will stay with him for the rest of his life. For good or for ill.
And I know I'll have less pigeon-shit on my kitchen window sill. I know that the next time, he'll stand a little closer to the next dying pigeon. I know that he won't be quite so afraid of not wearing his seat belt while we are doing donuts in the snow out in the church parking lot. I know that he has something on all the kids I would have hated if I was going to school with. I know that he understands a little about why crazy uncle SaltDog ain't really so crazy after all.
If only there was a neighborhood bar I was at war with...
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-22 11:20 pm (UTC)and i like to wear dead things close up against my skin to remind me. when it comes down to it we're all brutal as shit animals &'d slit each other's throats to survive.
people like to pansy around that but its true.
Honestly.
Date: 2004-03-22 11:36 pm (UTC)Re: Honestly.
Date: 2004-03-23 05:17 pm (UTC)well...im very reserved in person, and you met me in the middle of a flat black depression in which the fish had to scrape me off the linoleum and into the bar.
i guess im equally obsessed with total freakish self control and absolute abandon. hence my obsession with corsetry, which is both.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 04:57 am (UTC)god damn, saltdog. I don't have a hunter bone in me, but good lord that piece got me right in the heart, or gut, or something important like that.
fuck!
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 06:45 am (UTC)But you already knew that.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 09:19 am (UTC)Kids with Guns
Date: 2004-04-16 05:44 pm (UTC)When I was little and living in N.Dakota, my older brother and a neighborhood boy spent every summer shooting birds. This would upset me, but not as much as the fact that they would bury the bodies in my sandbox. I stopped playing in that sandbox pretty quick. At leaset they were good shots and the kills were clean. Since then, I've always had a complex response to guns and my family's relationship with firearms.
Aww, shucks...
Date: 2004-04-16 06:06 pm (UTC)