Fight Night(36)

There was something else that I wanted to say … ahhhhh … yes! Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet? Well, I mean in a nutshell. It was a tragedy. Do you know Shakespeare’s tragedies? People like to separate his plays into tragedies and comedies. Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same? So, King Lear fails to connect with what’s important in life and loses his mind … who hasn’t? There is comedy in that, don’t kid yourself. That’s life! And life doesn’t necessarily make sense. We’re human! Enna-way, everyone knows this. I’d like to see someone … maybe it could be you! I’d like to see someone take all of Shakespeare’s plays and mix them up into one play … bits and pieces to make them one … a bit of King Lear mixed up with As You Like It … what? I know, honey. I know. It could be an interesting assignment, that’s all I’m saying. Oh, someone did that at the Fringe Festival? If you say so! But I’m saying it should be mainstream, not fringe. To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy. Even poor old Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that’s saying something. You might say that God is an absurd concept but faith in God’s goodness … I find joy in that. I find it inspiring.

Oba! I’m rambling. But I brought up Romeo and Juliet for a reason. What was it … yes! My town … my hometown, and your Mom’s too. Hooooooooo. And Momo’s, of course … it had a similar tragedy, in my opinion. The church … all those men, all those Willit Brauns … prevented us from … well no, it was more than that … they took something from us. They took it from us. They stole it from us. It was … our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need … not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative … to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.

That church in our town … those Willit Brauns. So smug. So certain. And they caused mass-scale tragedy. They were bandits. They crept in … crept in and tiptoed around in the dark … we couldn’t see what they were doing at the time but we felt it … we felt it … all those Willit Brauns, they robbed us blind. They stole our souls … they hung out their shingles as soul-savers even as they were destroying them … they replaced our love, our joy, our emotions, our tragedies … rage! Sorrow! Violence! Lust! Desire! Sorry … am I embarrassing you, Swiv? Well, they burnt it all down! But listen … Our love … our resilience! Our madness … we go crazy, of course! We lose ourselves. We’re human. They took all those things and replaced them with evil and with guilt. Oh. My. God. Guilt! Jeepers creepers! Ah, but we’ll slay their hypocrisy with our jokes. High five! They took all the things we need to navigate the world. They took the beautiful things … right under our noses … crept in like thieves … replaced our tolerance with condemnation, our desire with shame, our feelings with sin, our wild joy with discipline, our agency with obedience, our imaginations with rules, every act of joyous rebellion with crushing hatred, our impulses with self-loathing, our empathy with sanctimoniousness, threats, cruelty, our curiosity with isolation, willful ignorance, infantilism, punishment! Our fires with ashes, our love, our love with fear and trembling … our … hoooooooo. Hooooooooooooooo … did you find that nitro, honey?

They took our life force. And so we fight to reclaim it … we fight and we fight and we fight … we fight to love … we fight to love ourselves … we fight for access to our feelings … for access to our fires … we fight for access to God … they stole God from us! We fight for our lives … some of us lose the fight … oh, it can bring a person to her knees. It can. To think! To think that Willit Braun came around to the house. To think he came around to the house to have us listen to him tell us that Grandpa and Momo are cast out, are unable to enter the gates of heaven. To think of it, Swiv! There are few losses in life that can bring a person to her knees … have mercy on our souls. Grandpa and Momo too … both of them kneeling on the train tracks … All the Willit Brauns, God was the farthest thing from their minds, those scavengers, those thieves, those heretics … Grandpa and Momo were closer to God than all of them … They knelt … they touched death! Finally. Did they pray?

Hoooooooooooo. Whoa. I’m sorry. A person gets angry. “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” Taming of the Shrew. Do you …

Swiv … are you awake? Swiv … are you awake? Ah! Aha! You got me! Ha! I thought you really had fallen asleep. I thought maybe I’d have to say that all over again! Mamma mia! Whoops … Oh look! Look at that. We’re moving!



I stopped recording Grandma. I took a big breath and let it out like Grandma does. Hooooooooo. We were zooming down the runway, then we were going up … we were flying! I let Grandma take my hand. I told Grandma, Don’t be scared. Grandma laughed. She said she wasn’t scared, she just wanted to hold my hand. She said she loved me. And she had the hiccups. We looked out the window at everything getting smaller. Mom was down there, somewhere. I put my face against the little window and said don’t worry, don’t worry. Don’t have wild eyes. Don’t worry. Then we were in clouds and then we were in the blue, blue sky. We’re in the clear! said Grandma. I’ll be back. Her diuretic was kicking in. I heard her talking to everyone on the plane while she shuffled down the aisle to the bathroom. How were we flying? How could such a big heavy thing fly through the air? I heard Grandma laughing even from way in the back of the plane. I took the jean jacket off my head. I could breathe.