[Author's note: this is a continuation of last week's post. It's turning into a story, a story I will continue to piece together here on the blog and later go back and refine. If you have thoughts, please let me know.]
Fresno
I landed at the Fresno Yosemite International Airport. My flight from Dhaka through Singapore touched down in Los Angeles. I took a short jumper over to Fresno. I rented a Chevy Tahoe from Hertz and set out to find the huge ass.
I drove around for a while, got momentarily lost and eventually found the ass on Highway 99, the Golden State Highway, out by Herndon.
Traffic cones had been laid out to guide traffic into the one remaining lane. The installation took up two lanes.
The giant ass was brown and stood about 15 feet tall. It was just as you would imagine, two large butt cheeks, with a giant ass crack down the middle. The ass flesh was made with laytex, the material out of which they make movie monster masks. It was painted dark brown. The kid from Yale was African-American, so the giant ass was flesh colored. The giant ass was supported by wooden beams, which weren’t visible to oncoming traffic. Just the giant butt cheeks were visible to the oncoming traffic.
The giant ass had become somewhat infamous already. There was a small crowd of people standing in front of it, admiring it or yelling at it. You can imagine the rubber necking.
I asked a fat guy in the small crowd why the giant ass hadn’t been removed by local Fresno authorities. The fat guy was wearing a grey, grease stained tshirt that didn’t quite cover his gut, a yellow Caterpillar hat, and some grease stained jeans that were baggy and fell loosely off his ass. He responded, “what the fuck else is there to see in Fresno?” I nodded a “yup that pretty much makes sense”. He continued, “ We got this black artist from Harvard or some shit,” “He’s from Yale,” I interrupted, “whatever, so we got this kid doing a huge ass in Fresno and the motherfucking city council votes to keep the ass up cause it's art. They think it’s an untapped goldmine for tourism.” Then he asked me how far I had come to see the giant ass. I said Bangladesh. And he said, “see these motherfuckers on the city council know what the fuck they’re talking about."
I moved closer to inspect the ass. Right in the center of the ass crack, the artist had posted small signs. The signs were wooden, painted white and had black letters. They looked a bit like street signs, only without the flare, very common wooden signs.
The first said, “Asshole” Okay, straightforward, simple enough.
The second, directly underneath the first said, “Infinite pleasure.”
The third and final sign, directly below the second and also directly in the center of the asshole said “America”
This lowest sign was still over 7 feet above ground. Underneath it the ass crack was actually made of drapes, meaning you could walk through the ass, into the asshole. Everyone was free to walk through the asscrack, into the asshole, on a freeway, in Fresno. Not seeing any reason why I shouldn’t, I walked through the ass into the asshole. On the other side was a view of the freeway and beyond the freeway one could see a strip mall, with a nail salon and a pizzeria among other local shops in tan stucco.
[Author's interjection: This is where I leave the giant ass in Fresno and go back to visit my parents in Albany. To be filled in later.]
I arrived at my parent's home. The same home I left at the age of nine. I was now 22 years old. I said hello to my mother and she cried. My father hugged me tight. We had dinner. We talked until about 11pm. And then I went back to my hotel on the Berkeley Marina.
It had to be a hotel room.
I got home from the visit with my parents and just fucking lost it. I fell on the floor and wrapped myself in the fetal position and wept, lurched, screamed, sobbed, convulsed. I lost connection with my hardened, and up-to-this-point only self. I was somewhere else--dissimilar landscape, disconnection, some place in the ether, a place like smoke. I lay on the floor blabbering about how much I loved my mother (huge, convulsing tear jerker) and the mortality of my aging father (another round of huge, convulsing tear jerking) I couldn’t hold it in. There was no indication my father would die soon. In fact, during dinner he looked healthy and upbeat, full of life. But eventually his eyes will fade from the twinkling star'd 'verse. Eventually his corporeal apparatus will be cremated (this is what he wants), the physical vessel turned to sand and blown to the sea. About this, I wailed.
I had held it in for too long. I hadn’t cried since I was 5 years old. At seven I realized the world was fluid and all I had to do was manipulate it to my advantage. I was not normal school children. Like the 12 year old who enrolls at MIT and finishes his PHD at 16, I was advanced. But my advantage was seeing from an extremely early age that the world and the people and social structures in it are malleable, that I could have everything I wanted, I just had to take it. My mind and maturity had been accelerated and fully formed by the time I left home. But, of course, many of my childhood needs were not met, like the need for parental authority, maybe that’s not a universal human need, but it's possible we do need someone to house us both physically and emotionally, to give us boundaries. I saw from an early age, these boundaries were fluid, many times unnecessary, easily transgressed and re-formulated. Yet, ultimately, as I lay whimpering snot on the floor, I realized that what I needed was at least some emotional, possibly unconscious (if you accept that mystical notion), ground rules. I needed my father to tell me no. OH GOD! I cried out and sobbed, squirming tragically on the fake oriental carpet. I suffered, I wept, I convulsed, I wept some more, I started blabbering, “I’m so sad, I’m so sad, I’m so sad. Ohhhhhhhhhhh” I felt such pain and misfortune. I didn’t care if the maid walked in. I wanted to fuck her so bad in this sadness, this maid I had never seen, only imagined, and in my imagination she wasn’t event that cute, but fuckable, definitely fuckable. I was in the zone, and the leakage actually felt good until the thought occurred to me again that my father was going to die and AHHHHHHHHHHH THE PAIN!!! I was spewing snot and tears and weakness and holy communion and I started weeping words, “I don’t want my dad to die, I don’t want my dad to die”
a voice: "It's okay. Everything you feel is okay. It's so understandable that you feel a deep, profound sadness connected to your father's mortality. You are entitled to feel this sadness. You are entitled to your tears."
to be continued...
with love, sadness, and a belief in taking small steps towards a larger goal,
Anthony
the sounds of silence
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