Be Sweet

A Conditional Love StoryBy Blount, Roy, Jr. JR. JR.

Harvest Books

Copyright © 1999 Blount, Roy, Jr. JR. JR.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780156006828
From Chapter 8
Got to Get a Handle on It First

Children cannot be surprised by the extraordinary who have not been made aware of what is ordinary. A generation knowing top hats only as props for conjurers does not think it so remarkable when rabbits emerge from them.
--Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Book of Children's Verse

I remember discovering my feet.        

"Awww, look at his little feet," I had heard huge, looming presences say, one HLP to another, as if my feet were present but I wasn't. Remember how it felt to be little, with no way to speak out besides bawling or smiling, and all around you flourished a conspiracy of presumptively superior beings who talked knowingly among themselves, right in front of you, about how precious and impossible you were? And they didn't sound all that well-informed! But you had to reject that notion--if they weren't well-informed, who was?

Sometimes you'd be dozing off and you'd hear a chorus of overbearing oohs and awws and an enormous voice would say, "Aren't they sweet?" (They? I'm "they" to them?)

And another such voice: "In their sleep."

Chuckles, and then they would slip away, quietly, so as not to disturb me.

The other day I saw a mother leading a tiny boy in a hooded sweat suit into a seafood store. The proprietor, an older man--well, he was probably my age--said, "Can I see how it feels to pick up a little boy like this?"

The mother nodded proprietarially.

"Isn't he solid?" the mother asked.

"Why yes," said the seafood man, hefting him.

"He's just a chunk," she said.

The man looked like he had about exhausted his curiosity with regard to the boy, but when the mother said "chunk" he hefted him again, and said, "Mm."

"He's just as chunky as he can be," the mother went on. "All my children are solid like that. He's as solid as a little rock."
"Why yes," said the man, setting him back down. And dusting his hands, an odd gesture.

"Of course he's spoiled rotten," said the mother.

On the boy's face there was no expression. He didn't look all that solid to me, nor that rotten. Stolid, yes--on the outside. On the inside, who knew?

I believe we remember things from birth, but we don't realize what we're remembering because we had no way of knowing what was going on at the time--just that it was so outlandish, the most outrageous thing until, presumably, death. We remember flashes from birth, and everything else we remember collects around those flashes.

But a foot is fairly solid.

"That's your foot," adults said, or "See your foot? That's Little Roy's foot." What? I would feel them touching me, pointedly, somewhere.

I could tell the difference between contact with a person, no matter how insensitive, and contact with the side of a crib, say. But it wasn't at all clear to me that the difference was of quite the requisite quality. It wasn't clear to me that this touch was taking me adequately into account. I cried a lot. It made my mother anxious.

I was too critical. The boy who cries "Bull!" It's a bad strategy. Because what comes back is, "You're so critical!" or even, tragically, "I don't please you!" and now I've got to apologize, the issue is me, my complaint is lost. I pretty much don't complain anymore. I live alone.

But I hadn't worked all that out yet, then.

"Noey has officially begun crawling," Ennis E-mailed me the other day. Noey is what we call my second grandchild, Noah. "He waited until the day after he discovered his penis--which took up most of his spare time." When I was an infant, adults did not encourage that sort of thing.

And I guess there wouldn't have been much point in their telling me, "There's your nose," because I couldn't have seen what was indicated--no there there. But a foot: voilà.

My attitude, however, was: You just keep me fed and refrain from crushing me until I figure things out, and then I'll decide what is or isn't my "foot."

Then one day--after a lot of random scanning, back and forth, and putting things together bit by bit, same way I figure things out today, when and if I do--I got a grip on it: the thing, and the concept. Foot.

I liked it. The word foot connected admirably with the thing itself. I have never been such a chauvinist, so to speak, as to assume that Anglo-Saxons were the only people capable of coming up with the right words for things (I'm Norman-Celtic genetically, and lococulturally Celtico-African), but there's something gratifyingly solid about foot. Le pied is
too . . . prancy; der Fuss puts on heavy airs. Whereas getting the word foot is like receiving a nice easy pitch in a well-broken-in catcher's mitt. Foot.

I could feel it. And I could feel it feeling me. Mutual contact. Of a sort that did have a certain clarity. The toucher, the word, the touchee: a complete loop. Feel foot, foot feels back, ergo: my foot. But wait. I felt a qualm. It was empirically mine, this foot, but was it not also said to be the foot of someone else? Of someone else who was a smaller version of some third party? Contact should lead somewhere. This time--because of the qualm--it led to this: my foot is Little Roy's foot.

Then I must be Little Roy! I was seventeen.

No, I'm kidding, I was just an infant.

Then these, I thought to myself, would be my fingers . . . hand . . . arm . . .

And what is this other thing that looks just like my foot? Oh, duh. Other foot.

I lay there, turning these things over in my mind. I didn't think of it as my mind then--I still don't with any clarity. Expecting anybody to know how his or her own mind works is like asking a dollar to make change. I could turn things over in it, though:

I have body parts. Ergo, I have a body. This is my body, which I have, and also am: where would I be without it?
Wait. Somewhere along in there I started making this up.

"Write it as fiction," my fellow rock musician Stephen King once advised me. "Then the other people who were there at the time can't tell you it's wrong." But I have some kind of block against that. When my fellow sportswriter Dan Jenkins was a kid, he and his friends made up fake names for themselves, in case they ever got in trouble with the law. His fake name was Bob Roberts. Then one time he did get picked up for some sort of mischief, and the cop asked him his name and he said, in a small, muffled voice, "Bob Roberts."

"What?" snapped the cop.

"DAN JENKINS," he blurted out.

But a memoirist needs details. So, finally, I did consult a hypnotist.

"You want the implants?" he said.

"Certainly not. All I want is a little hypno-suggestive help in getting past whatever blocks have kept me from retrieving the richness of my past as it actually was, the texture of it, the way a single broken live-oak leaf slanted down . . . made its lop-winged way . . . along a something ray of crisp September sunlight and, whatever, you know--as I took my first faltering steps toward school that fateful day in the second grade when--"

"Were you paying attention to this leaf and this ray at the time?" asked the hypnotist.

"No, I had things on my mind," I said.

"I can get you the implants."

"How can you possibly implant the stuff of...