Memory, All Alone in the Moonlight

look on my works ye mighty and despair

by Jeff Somers

I have found a small green caterpillar in the back yard and decide I will keep him as a pet. I put him in a mayonnaise jar, holes poked into the lid, with a leafy branch for sustenance. A few days later I notice a red scar along his body. I think he’s dying. I release him back into the yard and am sad for days. He is not the last insect whose existence I step on.

My brother and I have just been informed that alcohol burns. We spend the afternoon in the kitchen taking bottles out of my parents’ liquor cabinet and trying to light shots on fire. We burned a lot of whiskey. Miraculously, despite the fact that we didn’t try to hide any of this, we didn’t get into trouble. I suspect because it was ostensibly an educational moment.

My mother didn’t want us to have pets when we were kids because she was pretty certain she would end up taking care of them. To satisfy us, we bought a goldfish. Our first fish lived for a year, which I now understand is remarkable for a goldfish. When he passed away, we carefully put him in a jar with water and buried him in the backyard. We bought a new fish. Which died within days. So we buried it in a jar with water with slightly less ceremony. We bought a new fish. Which died. Then another, and another. The backyard of my mother’s house is littered with jars filled with decomposed goldfish. Then she finally gave in and let us take in a neighbor’s cat that they were planning to put to sleep.

In grammar school I started playing Dungeons & Dragons because our teacher had the books in class. Two friends and I decided to create and market our own role playing game. The result was the spectacularly bananas INFILTRATE, which was a complete set of rules with a crazy construction-paper cover. We named the ‘company’ after a portmanteau of our last names and decided we were going to be famous. The most amazing thing is we actually wrote the fucking rulebook. I mean, jebus, I was twelve years old.

Back in college I actually started jogging a little. Not seriously. I doubt I ran more than half a mile, ever. I did it mostly as a dramatic way to have some time to myself. I used to run in the golf course on campus at night. It was cool being in a semi-wooded area in the darkness, alone. One night I sat down by a pond for a while feeling curiously sorry for myself, and came home with a tick embedded behind my knee. Chaos broke out. Word spread throughout our coed floor and before I knew it about fifteen people were in my room examining the tick and offering suggestions for getting rid of it. We burned it, we put nail polish on it, one guy took a penknife, ran it over a flame, and tried digging the fucker out. I could actually feel it squirming there, which remains one of the worst sensations of my life. The next day I had to take my bandaged self to the clinic and have a very bored nurse extract the tick and re-bandage the area. She never batted an eye at it. I supposed she’d seen dumber things.

In Eighth Grade I briefly became a Crossing Guard. Details are fuzzy, but I remember it being a big deal. Only the Eighth Graders could become Crossing Guards. You got a cool belt to wear. It kind of sucked. I did it for about a week and had the first of many why the fuck am I wasting my time with this bullshit moments that led to my mediocre and just-barely-adequate academic and professional career. I regret nothing. Anyway, after a week, I quit. And my teacher pulled me aside and gave me this ridiculously over the top speech about how I’d regret this decision for the rest of my life. That I was making a huge mistake. Even at the tender age of thirteen I could barely keep the smirk off my face. Was she fucking serious? Quitting the Crossing Guards was going to wreck my life? Jebus. I still get all outraged, decades later.

I read The Lord of the Rings. I write a book.

My next-door neighbor has moved off to college and left his pet cat behind. His parents keep her in the basement and talk about having her put to sleep because they don’t want to care for a cat. I go over and visit. Every time I go down into their basement she comes out meowing and likes me to bend over so she can stand on my back. I have no idea why she likes that but she purrs when I do it so I do it every time. Three weeks later she is my cat. She comes into my room every night and sleeps with me. Once I forget and lock my door and she is trapped in the room all night with me. When I wake up she is sitting on my chest staring at me. She immediately begins to cry.

I now have four cats. One sleeps with me and The Duchess every night.

In Seventh Grade my class does a Shakespeare video project, with kids dressed in costume and performing scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. I get assigned The Taming of the Shrew with a girl whose name I cannot remember. We have to come up with costumes. Mine involves tights, which seems to make sense though I am extremely disturbed. I find myself wearing a pair of pantyhose and being filmed. Somewhere in the universe there possibly exists a videotape of me wearing pantyhose and doing Shakespeare. This is terrible knowledge to carry around with you.

I am nine years old. I am challenged by my eleven-year-old cousin John to urinate in the basement. I accept.

I am some undetermined age under my bed eating crayons. I have no reason to be eating crayons aside from the belief that they will make my poop multicolored. They do not.

My friend Jeof gives me a cheap acoustic guitar. I do not tune it or make any effort to learn how to play. I sit at home and invent chords on my own. They are terrible chords. Chords awesome in their strident discordant terribleness. The guitar eventually breaks and I throw it away. Years later The Duchess buys me a new guitar and some lessons. Those awesomely terrible chords are lost forever.

When I’m a little kid of some unremembered age I beg and plead for a Huffy dirtbike. All the kids in my neighborhood have dirtbikes, except me, and it causes me a lot of angst. On my birthday my parents amaze me by giving me a Huffy dirtbike. I take it out on its training wheels to ride. Two older kids come and steal it. Just like that. Knock me off the bike and one of them rides away on it faster than I thought possible. That is still my takeaway from this event: How inhumanly fast that kid rode my bike.

I can remember when I was a kid, when I would eat too much my mother would tell me I was going to “explode”. I always thought this was just a colorful expression, until one summer day when we were having some sort of party and I’d been eating hot dogs and hamburgers for hours, I went in the kitchen, opened the fridge, and started drinking soda from a bottle. I got a few swallows in before vomiting energetically onto the floor in a violent manner. There was no nausea. I just threw it all up. I’d exploded.

Years after releasing the green caterpillar back into my back yard, I have an intense dream. This is unusual because I do not normally dream, or remember dreams. In this dream I am standing in my backyard and a large, beautiful butterfly comes and settles on my shoulder. It sits for a few seconds flapping its multicolored wings, then flies away. It is the caterpillar, transformed. I wake up crying.