The Mobile
�Curses!,� went I, �that damn woman has done it again!�
The Mobile had been moved a little higher, just so I could not sit up and touch it, so... one day, little baby blue learned how to jump. I can recall jumping, and crashing, and jumping, and crashing, and crashing, until I had the jump thing down solid.
With a solemn ritual, I baptized my efforts against the Mobile by anointing myself with some milk from my bottle, and then � a bend in my legs, tensed muscles, coiling, tensing, and finally, release upwards, into the sky, higher and higher, until my little hand brushed against the far leg of the little horse with the big nose and then caught onto the neck as I passed by it, holding on for dear life, bouncing, bouncing around like it woouldn�t stop, and it wouldn�t, until a period came and finished off my sentence. By then, I was face up on the ground, a little shell shocked. And the mobile was still hanging up there.
Trial number two came the next day. I figured I was rested enough to try again; no pain, no gain. Besides, the parents could move the Mobile up higher. This jump took my head over the top of the crib. On my back and crying, my mother came into the room and swept me up into her loving and loathsome arms.
�Blast her and her magnificent superpowers! I�ll show her!�
Number three had mu arm up � so ambition was giving me marked improvements, just as Mrs. Flynn, the rat-faced lady, had thought. (One day, while all the mothers were drinking coffee and watching their children throw blocks at each other, I happened to stand up before I realized what I had done: now they knew I could stand. But with a divine sense of timing, I fell backward again, on purpose, and turned on the waterworks.
�Well,� said Mrs. Flynn, �don�t we have an ambitious tyke here!�
And the murderous look she gave to her son, sitting in the corner and grinning dumbly at her with his hand covered in Elmer�s glue and carrots smeared up his face into his hair � that just said it all.
�That bitch�s baby, disgusting dirtwad, trying to stand when my own Ricky can�t even talk yet, and he�s older! How... The nerve!,� I could imagine her thinking. �Say Mama. Mama. Say Mama, honey. Mama? Mama? Oh fine, just suck on your toes some more. I really couldn�t care any more, Ricky. What the hell do I pay those damn hellhounds at that private nursery school of yours for? Those teachers should be drawn, quartered, sewed together, then burned alive!�
And then even Ricky could tell that Mr. Rat Face would be in for a lot of complaints from Mrs. Rat Face tonite.
To make a long story short... but that�s not the point, is it? A story meant to be long should not be cut short, and vice versa. Of course those are just minor questions � nay, roadblocks � on the pathway of enlightenment, otherwise known as fictional subterfuge.
After another four months of no progress whatsoever, I jumped again. If there were an audience (that would be where you come in, dear reader) they would have all cut short their cheering in favor of stern disapproving glares, for my dash for joy and freedom - with that Chariots of Fire theme blazing from the part of the stands where the big band would play on - was considered a slap in the face of the empowerment movement, because they all knew what would happen at the end. Though, they would admire my faulty courage and pointless denial of what they felt was reality.
Hope, indeed, was like the run-on sentence that one never really wanted to end. It is obvious that it must end up somewhere; that syntaxial monster known as grammar, in combination with the iron fist and thin oak branch, and welded in the hands of the olden-day English teachers, meant that proper writing, and proper feeling, would always be kept under control because the hideous after effects were to be avoided at all costs.
I then imagined all the eyes on me: the indefinitely old grandmother squinting into the sunlight, the legion of spoiled Chihuahuas waiting with breaths drawn and tails still (owned by fat and overly done-up hair product salesladies that - when not driving in their disgustingly large 1971 Chevy, model unknown, with their voluminous product kit to your house in the middle of dinner - were letting the mascara roll down their left cheeks and their nail polish spill into their TV dinners while they watch me on their large televisions, out of place in their cramped trailer with their army of infants, toddlers, pre-schoolers, little devils and god knows what else crammed into the little floor space available to live out their insufferable little lives until they grew up to become the psychotically deranged adults that they watched on Springer and new local trailer trash programming), the snake-eyed lust-filled Ritalin-using raging boys of middle class suburbia with their all-American, sunny-sweet, Prozac and prenup-dependent, pushup bra-wearing, underage girlfriends staring at their daily five hours of television, Wall Street Silicon Valley types looking for the next best thing and not realizing that they�ve actually burned out and are hallucinating that VC money will come back and support the enlargement of the technocrat�s bubble, the lucky Hispanic college graduate who won license to all of the minority scholarships out there and made it to the Ivy League of choice, the orthondotically and mentally challenged daughters and sons of absentee parents who have chosen to hide the existence of these �problems� and who have unsuccessfully avoided moral and financial bankruptcy, the Vietnam War veteran bitter that he can�t remember anything between that grenade and the sudden collision with angry anti-war protestors in a supermarket parking lot after hours, the day after he had somehow returned home with his regiment.
In the astonishing millisecond before I approach this Ground Zero, I can smell my freedom, loud and clear. It is intoxicating, spellbinding, and better than the best drug in providing the persuasion of pleasure and satiation of desire to that limbic center of my brain, wherein U begin to feel mighty. My little arm flexes as I draw in air with a nervous chuckle and lash out to the ground to cushion my fall; my arm hits the solid wood floor and is savagely twisted into an unnatural state. It is obvious to the phantasms (that I imagine are still watching and laughing at me) that my arm is broken. My nose crashes into that knot of wood that I always stare at from the bars of my crib at night. I imagine it has drawn me to it. The blood, red with oxygen and purity, blackens itself into the dust present on the floor before drying and leaving a sticky trail down my nostrils, my face, my hair and ears, the floor. Before anyone could come in and notice my condition, I suddenly realized that though I had won, the fact that I did not emerge unscathed meant that I could never truly claim a win. Being great did not make a winner, only being the best. I understood this and learned it well � for the time I spent in recuperation was spent on dwelling over the agony of defeat. I was not content to label progress as good enough.