The Quiet Kind of Extravagance

[Come to accept the idea of a future that is exploring us and we can give ourselves, again and again, the possibility of remembering the future.   L. Berio.]

I once knew a sniper with a pink teddy bear tattoo on his left arm.   He told me he and every other Marine in his unit got the same one.  It was intended to provoke smart-ass comments, which is to say it was intended to provoke violence.   

When we met he was out of the military and no longer left targets in a lifeless crumple beneath a pink mist. He still killed animals, of all persuasions, and found it a moral imperative to eat as much of what he killed as possible.  Once the sniper feted me with bear stew, simmered in mushrooms and red-wine sauce.  It gave me claustrophobic dreams, like I had to dig myself out of a collapsed cave.    

I never saw him fight – never saw him drink either.   He told me he had to quit both or else end up dead.  In the winter we would stack square bales on a wheelbarrow and walk out to the pasture to disperse it in piles for the horses.  Without fail he stacked two seventy-pound bales in his right hand and a third in his left. 

Sometimes he needed a warm body to help with a project.  I remember one time he held a piece of four-inch polyurethane plumbing that was plugged full of human shit, while I took a Dewalt cordless sawz-all and sliced through it, expecting each moment to splatter us both with excrement.  That didn’t happen.  We patched in a new section, with ample amounts of diaphanous violet epoxy glue – enough to leave me cross-eyed.  The rich people whose shit had plugged the pipe complained about the smell.  We hated them, each for our own reasons, but we got paid in full.  I came away from the experience with a newly-felt but abiding sense of limitation. 

Where id was, ego shall be.