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There I go again, blaming other people. But really, they
deserve it.
I suppose it's not really anybody's fault. But that's so much harder to deal
with. So what the fuck does that mean? It just fucking happened? It was
ordained? Whoops, shit happens?
It was easy for everyone to blame Mike. A lot of his friends did--your
fault, dude; can't you just shake yourself out of this funk?; SNAP THE FUCK
OUT OF IT! I was one of those friends. That's the problem with situations
like this. It's too easy to start delving out the blame.
I just wanted him to get over it. I just wanted him to stop taking things so
seriously. I just wanted my fucking friend back. Instead, he retreated inside
himself and I could blame him for just being so fucking stupid and stubborn,
but it was just as easy to look at the people around him. How could you
fuck him over, Bob? John, why did you do that? Why didn't you call him back,
Bill? How could you break his fucking heart? How could all you just stand
around and let this happen? Mom, how could you not see this coming?
Yeah, I call his mom that. It's natural after all these years.
Mike's always been a momma's boy. I don't mean that in the crude way kids in
junior high school used to throw that around. He cares about his mother, and
maybe PR has upped her role in his life (Hi, Mom's Corner!), but, really,
it's just that she's family. He loves and trusts his mom, and his dad, and
his sisters so completely. It's odd, to me, to never have had doubt, to never
have hesitated. When I was young things used to be like that, all status quo,
but when I got older, when the heavy weight that was Bobby Hull's son settled
on my shoulders, it caught me by surprise, the questions that I had. Learning
to love my father wholly had been just that. Mike, sometimes, takes for
granted how implicit, how ingrained already, that was for him.
His parents could probably be his best friends if not for me. He knows them
well, he knows his mother's a bit more fragile and maybe that's why he's so
outwardly concerned about her.
When she had surgery on her heart, it fucking destroyed him. He was ten years
old again, whispering, "I don't want to lose my mom," and I
couldn't help but think that maybe he wouldn't have been as upset if it had
happened years before. Not that when he was younger he didn't appreciate his
mother; only that after that summer with the cup, his idea of the world had
shrunk down to a handful of people. When your family's that fucking small,
it's frightening to think it could become even smaller.
He took a miniature elephant with him to the hospital. You know about the
elephants, right?
Did you ever visit his house? Did you see his collection? He's got about 30
of these little figurines. Elephants, with their trunks lifted up for good
luck. Not any of those really nice looking figurines you find in stores and
give to your daughters. Nuh-uh. I'm talking about those garish ugly ones that
your Aunt Fran with the blue hair has hanging out with her plastic fruit, or
that you find at the flea market. Real ugly mother fuckers.
They're his prized possessions.
He collected a lot of things for his house: the wood across the ceiling is
from an old barn in Italy, same as the tile--direct import, he probably has
little bits of chapels and villas interspersed into all the architecture.
He's a complete idiot when it comes to his heritage. Renting The Godfather,
drinking Italian wine, and eating spaghetti and meatballs because he's so
fucking Italian.
I digress though, because all those paintings, all that furniture, he buys
it, and it's everything that he wants to be, but he loves those fucking
elephants.
He's collected them from all over the world. His world, though, has mostly
consisted of Cabo, the US and Canada. Hasn't spent much time in Russia
searching for elephants in the snow.
He used to leave them all over his house. One in every room, hidden behind a
vase, on an end table, on top of the refrigerator. He wasn't a superstitious
freak or anything. They were just there. These tiny little things in this
huge house, marking where Mike had been.
I slow down on winding, curvy roads when I spot a cross. It's not just that
they're markers of a particularly treacherous road, though they are, but I
catch myself thinking about the kinds of people who were once there, once
alive, and then try to figure out what they were like by the things left
behind. A photograph sometimes, and usually flowers, and every now and then a
baseball cap or a rosary or a teddy bear.
I think about the things in Mike's old house. Everything a reflection of the
image he wanted to project--just this huge vast space of Italian, cultured
crap and a rug or pool table here or there just so everyone knows he's still
a bachelor who can't decorate. And I think about those elephants: their
presence conveying absence. Tiny little artifacts, and I'm a cuter Indiana
Jones (but, sadly, without the fucking leather whip) trying to figure out why
this ancient civilization left these ugly elephants behind. Little artifacts
talking about what used to be there, what isn't now--who isn't now.
Stupid white and pink and, just, so mother fucking ugly, and everything about
them screaming about what isn't there; markers of absence, and I'm pretty
sure there's a word for all that awareness.
Loneliness.
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