I love the idea of a garden, and have begun a couple, but I usually lose interest at a certain point. I consider this a real failing of character. I grew up on a farm, mind you, and can’t even seem to grow tomatoes. My wife, on the other hand, has a real aptitude for it. So it works out.

This story contains one of the truest lines I’ve ever written: He went back inside, poured himself a glass of wine, and returned (with the bottle) to the patio and drank the lion’s share of it, which, after forty years of teaching, was the closest Thurgood could come to crying. I like it because it displays the kind of faux-world-weary attitude I’ve so often encountered in teachers. It’s melodramatic while, at the same time, not taking itself at all seriously, just like many teachers I’ve known.

I’ll not comment on the capabilty part, but I will comment on the process of recovering. When my hands were bloodied up by removing fifty year old staples with a scredriver and hammer, I started thinking about people from ten years ago that left me feeling pretty much the same way. And that led to me thinking about how much time I napped on the sofa with the green and gold stripes, laughed with friends long lost on it…hauled it from state to state, place to place. And though I didn’t actually tear up, I could have. It’s MY sofa, and it carries the people and experiences that are part and parcel to being someone’s sofa.

I am not most people.

The lack of representation of black people in television and film is a real problem. What irks me about Perry is how he exploits the problem. Worse yet, he essentializes the black experience and throws it on the screen and calls it authentic. A great deal of his work implies there are right and wrong ways to be black. Perry is very much invested in the trope of the working class hero and when he portrays upper class black people they are always conniving or lost souls who have “forgotten where they come from.” In a Tyler Perry movie hard, honest work and getting good with God are the proper paths to righteousness. On one level, there’s nothing wrong with that message. However, I resent that in Perry’s world, anyone who doesn’t follow those paths is a sinner or a loose woman or a drug addict or a corrupt, wealthy individual. The message: to stray from the righteous path is unacceptable. We should succeed but we shouldn’t become too successful because when we’re too successful, we compromise our blackness. Given Perry’s meteoric success, that message is somewhat ironic.

Perry’s characters are always caricatures, lacking depth. They can often be described with a simple word or phrase. More often than not, he finds the lowest common denominator and caters to it. He loves the strong black woman who doesn’t realize that all she needs a good man. He loves the god-fearing mechanic who is a “good man.” He has a near obsession with black single fathers as if he is trying to reverse societal wrongs through filmic fairy tales. More than anything, Tyler Perry loves the vulgar but wise, gun-wielding fat black matriarch in the character Madea, which Perry himself plays in drag as if there are no talented black actresses ready, willing and able to play such a role.

Perry has also ventured into television but I cannot discuss the shuck and jive minstrel shows that are Perry’s television ventures without losing it completely.

The most interesting thing about Perry, perhaps, is that he is really circumspect about his personal life unless he’s discussing his difficult childhood. He’s never romantically linked with anyone and the rumors he is gay are persistent. I don’t care who or what he does in his personal life but the intense secrecy fascinates me. As I wrote Queries Involving Tyler Perry, Difficult Decisions and Two Skanks, I was thinking about how I am pretty certain Perry is a real freak because he has such a carefully constructed persona.

BFFs is a small piece of that aborted novel/longer story, and I think it’s the strongest piece, and I also think it says most of what I was going to try to say throughout the course of that half of the novel, so probably best off for everybody, but mostly me, that I bailed out and took the piece I liked the most, and polished it up to the extent possible.

I should probably explain the Gilmore Girls thing, while I’m talking about this story. I really like that show, actually – it’s soothing in the same way that Road House or Point Break are soothing. It’s nice to wade into this alternate universe for 45 minutes or so. I’m pretty sure, though, that that’s not how it works out for most 18 year old single moms. I live in central Pennsylvania, and I’ve been to Wal-Mart, and I’m pretty positive that, as the story says, “witty banter and the new clothes and going to fucking Yale, everybody good looking and clean and best friends forever” is not generally how that story ends.

Thanks again for publishing the story, and for the chance to jibber jabber about it. If you’re interested, below are a few more sections of that original story/novel, with this same character, as he works his way south.

————————————————————————

BFFS: THE HIDDEN/DISCARDED TRACKS

Pennsylvania is a big goddam state and it took me like a whole day to get the hell out of there. By the time I was crossing the Mason-Dixon I figured the cops might be looking for me and the truck because of the diner money. Or, I figured, maybe they wouldn’t. Not like there was some kind of surveillance camera in there, like at that Quick Stop in Buffalo that one time when you had to get improvisational with the shaving cream.

You always were better at all this than me.

Anyway, I drove and drove and the whole time I’m kind of wishing we did do it, me and the waitress, right there on the counter instead of me kind of flying off the handle there and yelling about the Gilmore Girls when I wasn’t really talking about the Gilmore Girls or even talking to the waitress so much as talking to you.

I do that a lot now. I know one of the reasons you took off with that hippie was he was all sensitive and whatever, like, really listened and all that bullshit. But now that you’re gone, now that it’s been like a month and I finally decided to leave Rory with my mom and come and bring you on home, I talk to you all the time. Like these letters. Like yelling at the waitress. Even with Zechman at Ada’s after we’ve had six or seven, I’m talking to him, telling about my stupid day and all the shit that pisses me off, but I’m really talking to you. I really was all along. I wish you were here now so I could tell you this in person.

I made it into Maryland today. Same as Pennsylvania. I don’t know what this thing about South is with you. It’s all the same — mountains and McDonalds, Burger Kings and little towns and big roads and potholes, people who don’t know who I am and don’t care, waitresses and truckers and clerks who are all too quick to put their hands up, not get hurt, hand over whatever they got in the register. In Thurmont I stole a thing of huggies, too, thinking about Rory, and how you liked that Raising Arizona movie so much.

* * *

Camped out in Williamsburg, Virginia. Do you know what the hell its like in this place? Do you have any idea? People walking around dressed like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Seriously. They talk all like, Good day, my good fellow, would you like some meade or some mutton or some such shit. Jesus, you would have loved it.

I pretended I was deaf to see if there was a way to do sign language in that colonial speaking thing they’re doing. There wasn’t, far as I could tell. Then when Thomas Jefferson came up I pretended I thought he was George Jefferson. “Good day my good fellow!” he said. “Governor Jefferson, a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Where’s Weezy?” I said.

“I beg thou’s pardon?”

“And aren’t you supposed to be black?”

Now, this must be kind of a sensitive area or something, because Jefferson pulled something out of his pocket and started reading real fast, something about colonial times and history giving us the chances to see our mistakes and how Williamsburg celebrates the beginnings of the systems that freed the slaves and made every man equal and all that bullshit. Jefferson stuffed that thing back in his pocket and kept moving.

I sat down and finished my big gulp while I watched the families walk by, college kids, more poor sonsofbitches dressed up like old time. I thought about history, about some of the stuff Jefferson was saying. Not like, Colonial Williamsburg bullshit history. But our history. You and me. And how maybe Jefferson was right when you really got down to it. Maybe the point of our history, of all the shit we been through, is that it’ll let us see how to do it right in the future.

We were sitting on empty nail kegs next to his icehouse on the edge of Lily Pond in Saugus, Doc Sawyer and me, talking about everything and nothing in particular. It was his way of communicating. In his gray felt hat, shirt collar buttoned but with no tie, Mackinaw open so I could see red suspenders clasped at his paunch, Doc always had time to talk to kids, dropping lore and legend in his wake. “Where you’re sitting right now, son, is the geographical middle of our town. It’s right under your feet, or,” and he chuckled, “under your butt.” I felt special, being ten years old, on the inside where real data was concerned.

He was full of tidbits like that. “Bazooka Bobby Burns scored the first touchdown on that field when it was dedicated this past fall,” he said, pointing across Appleton Street to Stackpole Field, re-dedicated in 1938, “and young Mike Harrington scored the second one. You watch that young one now.” He could make declarations, too. (Mike Harrington, in explanation, later became the first athlete nominated for our Saugus Hall of Fame, into which I was later selected in the fourth year of its existence, having Mike Harrington and Eddie Shipulski as my heroes for years on end … Iron Mike and Shipwreck Ed.)

It was Saturday. It was cold again, as it had been for a good spell, and the ice cutting would begin today, the temperature below freezing for more than a week. On the pond the ice was over fourteen inches thick, thick enough to hold the small army of men soon to be on it. Morning light fell gray yet vivid across the face of the pond, and it raced off toward the island in the middle and the Turnpike beyond. It was a long skate from one end of the pond to the other. Some skating days it paid to bring lunch.

Crows were sending brittle messages to each other out across the frozen surface, over the cliff on Cliff Road, into the woods. Now and then I could hear the tires on a truck as it ran north to Maine or Canada on the Turnpike. Sounds ran over the pond as though they came through a funnel. Old Doc turned as he heard hoof beats on the pavement of Summer Street running alongside Stackpole Field. Like a drummer playing games, I thought.

The biggest horse I had ever seen in my ten years came down the street, and Mitch Crocker was guiding him with a set of long reins, not snapping them but laying them easy on that great back. That horse was so big it even made Doc stand up and take off his hat. He shook his head, light bouncing off his glasses, and said, “Where’d you come on him, Mitch? Win him in a game?”

Horses in those days always awed me, fearsome things, huge as boulders, with great teeth and hooves like catcher’s mitts. Horses hauled milk wagons, and honey wagons, and now in winter the clumsy snow plows behind them, dragging on their muscles, calling on their hearts. This one with Mitch Crocker was a tower of an animal, dark chestnut in color. His teeth were yellow and enormous and now and then he’d pull his lips back to show them to you. Steam pulsed from his mouth like any other great engine of a thing.

“What’s his name?” Doc said, laying a hand on the rippled neck, rubbing that fur coat smoothly, easily, talking another way, something closeted in his voice.

“I call him Titanic,” Mitch said, “though I don’t expect him to answer none. “He don’t happen to answer to any name unless he downright feels like it. So names don’t make any difference and one’s as good’s another.”

“For the ship?” Doc said. The horse’s eyes were a mix of lime green and yellow, and deep, as if he were reading my mind. I figured he had already read Mitch’s mind. I looked away from those eyes.

“As well as any I could pick on, specially for size,” Mitch said. “It’ll do until another comes along. This boy can take care of all your hauling today, Doc.” He patted Titanic on his broad chest. “Drag all the floes into place, get them up on to the ramp so’s they can be cranked up and stored. Yes, sir, do it all.”

For a few hours that Saturday I watched the strange army of itinerant ice cutters saw and chink up the ice of Lily Pond, saw Titanic with long chains hitched to his leather gear easily haul the huge cakes of ice to the slabbing point and transport up the chain-driven ramp to where they’d get buried under shavings and saw-dust. Easily and steadily he worked, the steam puffing in great clouds from his mouth and circling around his head like halos. Now and then, as if to reaffirm who was really in charge, he’d throw off a head-shaking command and bring attention to himself.

Never a sound came from his throat.

Throughout the morning old Doc Sawyer kept nodding his head, admiring that animal as if he’d never seen his like before.

Noon crawled toward us, still cold, still steamy about that great beast. Then the heart leap came and a fearful noise, a renting, a crashing. It was just before lunch when Titanic went down. I heard a yell, a scream, the unforgettable thundering noise as though a crack was going to sprint the length of the pond, and Titanic was in the water. In the deepest part of the pond. His legs thrashed at the ice, breaking off huge chunks, the noise like an enormous ice machine at work, like an icebreaker in frozen Boston Harbor I’d seen before. The ice under my feet shook.

The day stood still for me.

I’d never before seen a huge creature like him frightened, and his eyes said just that. They were like baseballs. Yellow-green baseballs, all wet and frosty, with tunnels behind them and all kinds of talk in them. He made sounds, too, desperate sounds down in his lungs, deeply bellowed sounds inside that huge canister of a chest and they came blurting out of his mouth along with the torrent of steam. Could have been grenades going off beneath the water.

Everybody leaped to grab chains and ropes, to pull that thrashing and ponderous beast out onto the surface of the pond. But the ice kept breaking under his hooves. And he tired and sank two or three times and came back up thrashing and kicking more, and the steam rising off his great back. The chains snarled and came caught up in ropes, and in his legs I suppose. You could see the lines of them somehow get shorter and shorter. There was no slack in them at all. None of the men could steer or drag that ship of a horse onto the top of the ice.

Mitch Crocker, just before Titanic went down for the last time, dropped a length of chain from his bare hands. He blew into his cupped hands and tried to rub them. He was wet all over, dark stains growing across his clothes. His thick fur hat bobbed in the water. Then a last bubble came circling around it where Titanic’s lungs had let go for the final time.

Doc Sawyer put his arm around Mitch’s shoulders. “That was some animal, Mitch. I’m really sorry for your loss.” I remember thinking it was like standing in line at the funeral parlor. Everybody sad, their heads down, striking for one correct word, a passable word. Cold and quiet were twin elements around us.

In the water all the bubbles had gone.

Then, about five minutes later, itinerant ice cutters in odd clothes and knee-high leather boots and kids and on-lookers still standing quietly on the ice, about ten or twelve feet of chain, yet laying out on top of the ice as though remnants of a disaster, just slipped off the edge link by link and went down out of sight. Perhaps one last lunge by that great horse.

When all the noise was made about the movie of the same name in these recent years, I thought about the other Titanic going down. I remembered how quiet it was after, how cold, the last hunk of chain, getting dragged off the ice, still making a connection.