| Ticking Time Bomb |
[Jun. 15th, 2005|04:56 pm]
Billy Corgan
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A memory: I am in a fabric store with my father and brother…I’m around 6, he’s around 4 years old…my father is taking forever, and my brother is frustrated that he is not paying attention to him…so he starts acting crazy, and my father keeps asking him to calm down and leaves him with me to look after while he is busy getting whatever it is that he needs…suddenly, without warning, my brother pulls his head back and rams it down on a metal clamp that is attached to a low table…he looks at me with puzzled eyes, and then quarts of blood begin to literally spurt out of his head…I have never seen so much blood in my life, and I almost pass out at the sight of it…my brother’s delayed scream sends my father flying back to where we are, and as my he asks “what happened?” a woman who just happened to be standing there says, “I don’t know, he just went nuts and threw his head into the table”…my brother is wearing a cute white baseball jacket, and it takes the blood well so that now he looks like a murder victim to be…my father’s hand is pushing on his head, compressing the spot, but the blood just keeps shooting out between his fingers…we run to my dad’s car, an old yellow Duster, and speed off manically towards a hospital…now it is my job to keep him from bleeding any more…it seems like he has lost a tremendous amount of blood by the time we are pulled over by the police (they see my dad run an intersection), and once they see my brother up close, they give us a dramatic rescue escort to the hospital…
The area behind the grocery store becomes our daily playground, your basic wasteland of asphalt and garbage, with rotten produce all over the ground (I learn a lesson the hard way when I decide to kick a tomato and it’s blood juice goes right into my eye)…the workers at the store generally tolerate us and our antics, ignoring us when they are busy and striking up conversations when they are bored…one lame employee in particular takes it upon himself to try to chase us off the premises by showing us a badge and telling us that he is a cop…we smartly reply that if he is a cop, what is he doing working at a grocery store…to this query, he has no reply, and leaves us fully alone after that…in order to help the family save money, we often collect coupons at the store, hoping to make some contribution to the constant problem of not having enough whatever; enough money, enough food, enough time…at one point, the store runs a promotion whereby during a certain time period, you will get a 10% discount on your next purchase based on your collected receipts from the previous month (as we average around $200 per month on groceries, our savings would be around $20 or so)…I get it in my head that since there is no set limit to the savings during the promotion, if we collect other people’s receipts, we can save even more money for our family, so I recruit my brother to stand outside of the store with me for hours at a time, asking each patron who comes out if they would be willing to give us their receipts…most, unaware of the promotion, willingly hand over their tickets, and between these and the one’s we honorably dig out of the trash, we manage to collect over $2,000 in total receipts in about 2 weeks, thereby saving our family the equivalent of one whole month’s groceries…the store manager is not pleased, and lets us know…
We get it in our head that we want to camp outside, and our parents agree as long as we will stay in the small enclosed concrete porch area behind our apartment and not leave…having never been camping, or slept outside before, we go crazy making our plans…my father informs us that if we are going to stay outside ‘for real’, we are really going to have to follow it through, which means no coming inside in the middle of the night, not even to go to the bathroom…he emphasizes that if we want this to be a true experience, we must prepare for this as if it is a real night out in the woods…we talk to some of the other parents in our little area, and 3 of our other friends are allowed to join us in our adventure (2 boys and a girl---one boy from across the way, and the brother and sister we are close to)…we all pitch in and build a compact tent out of moving blankets, filling it with toys and snacks and water, preparing for the long haul…the parents all say goodnight, and close the doors, and we are left alone…we are ecstatic with the freedom, and each noise of a passing car or a truck being unloaded becomes ominous in the midnight air…our only light is a single flashlight, and I do my best to try to creep everyone out by telling some scary stories…finally, after all is talked of, and every bit of sugar is consumed heartily with the hunger of a newfound terror, everyone puts their head down to a restful, exhilarated sleep…
After a couple of hours, I awake to the breeze, and it begins to rain drowsily, and the soft pat-pat of the water on the blankets sounds like a small, tight tapping drum…then the thunder starts, and the water pours down in buckets…the tent begins to flood through faster than we can push the pockets of rain off to our side…the blankets beneath us soak up the water, so now we are wet, cold, and miserable, and there is nowhere for us to go…the kid from across the way is the first to run home even though we make fun of him for being a momma’s boy…he says he doesn’t care what we think, and since his warm, dry bed is just 25 feet away, he makes a hasty exit…the brother and sister, made of tougher stuff, last a few hours in this storm of biblical proportions, but when the lightning draws close and just above us, they decide they have had enough…so now it is just my brother and I, sitting under an ever-collapsing roof, unsure of what to do now…my brother says he wants to go in, but I remind him of what our father has said about toughing it out…he ignores me, quickly leaving our tent to make the short beeline towards our back door…within moments, he is back, soaked with rain because the door has been locked for the night…so we sit like this for hours until the storm passes on, finally throwing off the wet blankets, sitting together on the back steps as the morning light breaks…my brother passes the remaining time quietly eating dog biscuits while I try to wring the heavy blankets out…
We learn every square inch of our tiny neighborhood, riding our bikes as if we are constantly on an unseen assault…you can always hear us coming because, following the trend of the day, we have clipped baseball cards to our spokes, which make a terrific rattle as we approach…our world is small, but it seems huge, this suburban utopia of ill-planned grottos and empty parking lots…our home life is a strange and constant contradiction, the normal family with 2 kids and the pretty wife and the dad smoking a joint while he is eating his dinner…I am known as the big eater in the family, the joke being that I have “a wooden leg”…it is not unusual for my father to bet me to see how much I can eat, or how quickly…one particular night, he challenges me to eat a whole bowl of spaghetti…my prize if I “win” is to be 3 large chocolate cupcakes for my dessert…after shoving all this food down, I also force down the chocolate treats as well, not because I am hungry, but because I have won and have proven my father wrong…I am very happy and content, that is until I throw the whole concoction up…but I don’t mind, because I have won the bet, and that is all that matters…
The grocery store runs a new promotion, this one a bingo style game where you must collect all the pieces of a given row, and if you do, you win whatever prize is on that row…the largest prize available is if you get the middle row fully, you will win $2,000 cash…so once again, my younger brother and I take it upon ourselves to master this as well, and we take up our old spots outside the store, bothering customers as they come out for their bingo pieces…the manager tries to shoo us away, aware of our ruthlessness, but we just ignore him and tell him the sidewalk is public property…each time we get a new token that we don’t have already, we place it on the supplied game card which is taped to the refrigerator door…after about 3 weeks, we come up with what appears to be the magic piece, and we go crazy as we the responsible party for winning our family the $2,000 prize…however, there is a problem, as the piece in the center square has accidentally fallen off, and just in case, my step-mother has written that the piece “fell behind the refrigerator” on the card…at first, we figure that maybe the missing piece is not at all that rare, so we dig clumsily thru all the extras tokens to see if we have it…we become really concerned when we realize that the missing piece is the hardest piece to get in the whole game, so we must find this piece, or we don’t win the money!!...all 4 of us start searching frantically as best we can to find it, ultimately pulling the refrigerator away from the wall, and all the drawers completely out…we search for around 4 hours, late into the night, but the piece is never found…
At dusk one evening, my brother and I are walking near our home when our attention is drawn to a loud ticking noise…we both ascertain the ticking is coming from a parked car, so I nervously poke my head underneath the car to see what might be causing the sound…my brother figures it to be a bomb, and not sure if I agree with him, ask him “what do you think we should do?”…he suggests I knock on the door of the apartment that the car is parked in front of, because maybe it is their car, and if it isn’t, maybe they can call the police…the job is now mine, so I knock gingerly on the door, which is answered by a nice middle age lady…I ask her sweetly, “ma’am, is this your car?”, cautiously pointing to the car out front…”yes it is son, but why do you ask?”…”umm, I hate to bother you so late, but I believe someone has planted a bomb beneath your car”…she calls to her husband, and I quickly repeat my story…he laughs and says as he pats me on the shoulder, “I appreciate your concern, but that is just the sound an old car makes when it is hot and cooling down, so don’t worry about it at all and run along home now”…
Out playing one afternoon, I come home for a drink of kool-aid when I find my step-mother breathless with excitement…she asks me if I want to know a secret, a secret a cannot tell my father…“are you ready?”…after a long drawn out pause, she says nervously, “I’m going to have a baby!”…it is the happiest I have ever seen her…”don’t tell your father, because I really want to surprise him”…when my father finally comes home, I avoid him like the plague, because I do not want him to see the secret in my eyes…after a time, the moment finally comes when she decides to tell him…he is sitting at the kitchen table, watching a t.v. program with the sound off when she comes over and tells him “I have a big surprise for you”…his response is puzzling to me, as he straight ahead, not looking at her, and without emotion says “you’re pregnant”...she jumps excitedly into his lap, but he does not seem at all happy about the big news… |
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