S.B. Postgame Notes

© Robert Sommers

It is sometimes said that people that oft trigger our most unpleasant reactions are those who most resemble ourselves. My dance with S started years ago, a relationship that has been characterized by swings between periods of love, camaraderie and deep empathy and equally intense periods of vicious hatred and savage venom. Like the vituperation you might show to a excommunicated family member or someone who knows exactly where to put the arrows in your softest underbelly. And vice versa.

The truth is that we are more alike on some strange level than either of us would like to admit, leaving the sexual narrative completely aside. Our lives and personalities were made out of the clay of west and south Texas, mine in the Rio Grande Valley, his in Matamoros. My name was Robert Fisher then, I had taken my stepfather's name when I was about five. My memories are of cotton fields and friends whose homes had dirt floors, nut farms and bits of broken glass on the small parapet walls of our little adobe in Las Cruces. Fishing for crawdads in the little sumps in front of the house, the Colonel next door hanging his deer next to our kitchen window. So dry the blankets would make sparks when you lifted them, lightning and thunder that would scare you to death, flies and swinging screen doors that you forgot to close at your peril.

The Colonel liked to leave his old truck running in front of the house in the twilight evenings, daring an interloper to try to steal it, he would be awaiting inside his darkened picture window with his deer rifle, in hopes of capturing a different type of game.

I don't know much about S's childhood, I don't know how similar or dissimilar it may have been to mine. I know that his rarified and special form has to be emblematic of a childhood that had a level of difficulty that equalled or exceeded my own. You toughen up or die or maybe you just mutate? Some of us are better at disguising our wounds than others. The indians have an old saying that "where you first put your feet will be your home forever." Sometimes it ends up being more like what you have to run from forever. I don't have total recall of my experiences back then, forgot what I was able to. Son of a missile expert who drank too much and beat us for sport, we were quite intimate with what poor was. Ate a lot of corn meal mush, sometimes for breakfast and dinner. We kids knew that our family was more than a bit abnormal.

Always in serious debt, life was a constant dash to escape the creditors, the principal one being the Speigel Catalogue Company. My mother had an unspoken rule that she seemed to live by, people were more important than things. And we never had any. Mom sewed a lot of clothes from the patterns they sent. She couldn't say no to anybody, at one time our little home in Cielo Vista had 13 people living in it. I will try to remember the names, Adelle, Don, Liz, Barbara, Robert, Buzz, David, Donna, Rusty, Gale, Johnnie, Pretam, Ralph. Our adopted sister Sherrie was married and stayed back in California. Plus the sheepdog, the cats and the great dane. Who ate a hell of a lot better than we did.

I still have a sad remembrance of the kids at school with the ringworm, they would shave their heads and put women's stockings on them, try to keep it spreading to the rest of us. I have a shifting twilight dawn memory of driving with my stepfather in the early morning through Alamogordo and pulling a mexican boy out of a burning sedan, saving his life in a memory that now almost seems fake.

We would drive the old plymouth through Mesilla and Anthony, T or C and Elephant Butte, a place my friend George's family would bring me fishing with my cheap Zebco reel. Don would sometimes drive me down two or three hours into Chihuahua, poorest place you could ever conceive. I remember helping him install an air conditioner in a house in the poorest slum or Colonia to provide respite from the grueling heat for the poor mexicans. We returned one day and there were at least 20 of the neighbors packed in the house, all seeking solace in the cool air during a killer heat wave. Only air conditioner in the whole slum. Don would take Buzz and I to Juarez for haircuts for a quarter. If you were lucky you would get a piece of chicle when they were finished.

Once a year we would all pile in and drive to Gallup for the Indian Pow Wow and Ceremonial, first time was 62 or 63. Gallup was wild and wooly back then, hundreds of drunks lying in the dirt streets, and even more all trying to simultaneously hop the freight train making its way through the town, hanging off every conceivable flange, opening and handle, some falling off. Gallup was known to have the longest trains you ever saw, you could sit for a long, long time at an intersection waiting to cross. Watched a blind indian sand painter paint a picture with the straightest lines you could ever see.

Don liked cheap whiskey, Old Crow and Old Grandad. He also favored Oso Negro, the clear industrial proof spirit with the plastic bear on a chain attached to the top that he would let us fight over. He would sometimes disappear into Mexico on a three or four day drunk and come back rolled, Mom having to pick up the pieces. She favored darvon and librium in those days, the more the merrier. It made for an interesting childhood, to say the least. They dressed me up in heavy black horn rimmed glasses, shorts, high black socks and my "church shoes." I remember the first time I came back to California people were pointing at me, laughing at the dark skinned, crewcutted, little kid that looked a bit like the alien child from My Three Sons.

We build an armor that gives us what we think is our best chance of emotional survival when we are tempered in such a furnace. I went my way and S went his.

*

This was a new show for both of us. When I saw that my booth was situated right next to theirs I shuddered. Because although we could vacillate between getting along and not getting along, when we choose to indulge in the latter, it can get overwhelmingly toxic. Imagine a family member who starts up the act and you know all their moves and it is like nails on the chalkboard. And truthfully my moves are equally grating. And I have, in the past, been less than an ideal gentleman concerning this couple, at times approaching and going over the line and being a complete asshole. We are a couple of junkyard dogs fighting over the very best bones and have the misfortune of having a very similar aesthetic.

This show started off with a very icy period, a minor territorial squabble where we pissed on the obligatory fire hydrants that defined our boundaries. T was caught in a nasty triangulation move between the two nasty old queens, castigated for talking to the enemy while work needed to be accomplished. Me taking passive aggressive pleasure in my semi innocent way at S's discomfort. After a brief period of horseshit, we all decided to get along and it was genuinely wonderful again. Friends. They helped take care of me when I was throwing up and coughing up blood. Couldn't have made it without them this week. I asked them why we always had to go through this snarly rottweiler, butt sniffing routine ever time but I guess that we do. Our personalities are both too big. Poor T.

One of their clients came by at the last minute and made my show in a big way. Bought the tea service for my price with a second left in the day. Taxes can be paid, vacations can be taken, all is right with the world again, well except for my bronchitis. I owe them many thanks.

I am going to try and be more civil with S and not be such a shit. After all, we were both constructed in the same crucible.