Sunny backyard of the not unpleasant upper working class one-story brick house. Scott’s tree house rotting and black, we’re barely able to walk on it. I’m there alone looking down on the party. Scott has turned four and some clouds are passing over the sun. From Scott’s tree house, I can see my house, old wreck, and the beatings and tears inside do not disturb me. I’m squatting down in the corner of the tree house and a spider moves up the wooden beams but I do not move. I’m defecating very slowly as the party sings Happy Birthday to Scott. I’m Scott’s best friend but no one has so much as called out my name. The word Luke or Lucas does not cross the lips of a single person in the joyful yard, with its little rock garden and plastic menagerie of typical large birds. This back yard is trying too hard to be something it’s not. Scott’s last name is Anderson. He is a Jew, I hear one of the grown ups say, as he brings the punch to his lips, I have no idea what a Jew is, in my little child’s mind. I’m defecating in my pants; it is wonderful, so very peaceful, powerful!
I can almost hear the screaming from my father’s house, he is beating mother again, or the refrigerator and stove. Perhaps mother is beating father again and smashing out the windows again. It is all the same to me, my pants fill up with pure shit, it is pure Joy, it is like the Holy Ghost they speak of in Catechism, being re-born in the Father and the Son, then there are footsteps on the ladder to the tree house, it is Scott. He says, Come and see my uncle, so I stare at the shit that is dripping down my leg and who knows what kind of misery this will bring to the party and I climb down the ladder with Scott and we walk over to the uncle who is sitting between two old women in lawn chairs. The chairs send me into a whorl of class-born misery; they are ugly, so manufactured. The uncle smiles at me, the uncle has no fingers, only palms, hands of sorts without fingers. Is he a Jew too? He says something about a war, the uncle is embarrassed, for Scott and I are looking down hard at the man’s hands, empty of all fingers; he mutters something to the two women who remain as still as trees and he gets up from the chair and goes away, goes inside, where he will undoubtedly weep out of shame. Scott and I have ruined the party even though I’m only four and have no conscience to speak of; I cry because everyone can smell me, I know they can, the whole party has gone silent, the missing fingers, the shit, the smell—
Poor working class people, I didn’t mean to do this to you.
1974
