"I fashion my future on films in space."
Go Ask Mr. Owl
These days, I got options. That’s nice. I like that. Women who come into the restaurant where I work give me these big tips because I always smile. Not sure why, because all I am is knees and elbows, but this smile I give is enough as I write down their orders and tuck them into my belt. Mike says I do it too much, but he says this when he’s smiling, too.
“Danny, listen. Listen,” Mike says, and I’m listening.
We are sitting in his driveway in rusting beach chairs that screech when you fold them.
“You got to cut your hair. It’s too long,” Mike says. “Makes you look like a hippie, Danny. It does. People think you’re this hippie burn-out.”
“Don’t have a car to get to the barber shop.” I don’t even have a license.
“I’ll drive. It’s on my way to work.” Which is a lie because it’s in the opposite direction. Mike is this scary ox with his hair shaved to his head like he’s still in the Navy, but I’ve seen him stop to pat dogs and joke with women pushing strollers. He’s a better guy than he thinks he is.
In his driveway, the moon fat over the acid orange streetlamps, I tell Mike about the tattoo I want. It’s one of the many tattoo ideas I’ve got. This one’s for Mr. Owl. It will be on my back beneath my right shoulder blade. Mike laughs hard when he hears it, but I’m serious - I try to frown in the bathroom mirror every morning after I shower, just to stay in practice for when I shouldn’t smile - and so he stops.
“No, man, no way. You can’t. Danny, why would you do that to yourself.” It isn’t a question.
So I shrug and say, “I got other tattoos.” I point to the front of my arm where I got an ace of clubs from the first deck of cards I ever bought. There’s also a pair of wings on my left ankle, and the reason why shouldn’t concern anyone but me.
“I drove you to get those.”
“What’s one more?” I say.
“It’s a commercial,” he says. “It’s old, like 1970’s, and it’s stupid.”
“It’s Mr. Owl.” That is the only point that matters.
Mike leans back, his mouth squeezed shut. He’s thinking about it as he looks at the streetlamps like he wants to reach up and tear them down barehanded. His voice is tight when he asks, “How do you know you want something like that on you?”
I tell him, because he’s Mike and he drives me places and stops to pat dogs on the head. I only smile because I’m too busy to remember that I should frown.
***
Danny’s mom taught him how to fry eggs when he was six and how to re-heat beans when he was seven. She said it was okay to use the stove even though all the other kids in his class at St. Gregory’s Elementary (Go Jaguars) weren’t allowed. Mom told him where the band-aids were in case he burned his fingers. Then she went upstairs to take a nap.
When Danny turned ten, she was fired from her job at the factory. She stopped sleeping all the time, eventually, and started leaving the house in July. She would disappear for hours, but Danny liked having the TV for himself. Hours become full days, though. In August, she was gone for a solid week, and then another. All the clothes in her dresser and closet disappeared with her.
For a while, it was just Danny, the television, fried eggs, beans when the eggs ran out, and a yellow and white bag of old Wonder Bread when the beans were gone, too. The phone didn’t work because the bill hadn’t been paid.
When Danny didn’t show up at St. Gregory’s in his jacket and tie, a truant officer came to his house. She knocked on the front door while he was watching Growing Pains. He muted it and told her he couldn’t open the door. She said very nicely that she wasn’t a stranger, she just wanted to speak to his mother. He said that wasn’t it; there were too many trash bags piled up and he couldn’t open it. He told her to come through the backdoor, instead.
The door hinges squealed as she entered the kitchen. She was a big lady with a bright blue suit. “Why aren’t these bags in trash cans?” Some of the trash wasn’t even in trash bags, like the open cans of beans on the counter. “These should be out at the curb.”
Danny hesitated. He admitted he wasn’t allowed to go out until his mother was home.
It was the wrong thing to say. The officer frowned as she began to look through the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and saw the last piece of Wonder Bread under the naked light bulb. She went upstairs to see the bedroom with its empty closet. “Get in the car,” she said when she came downstairs. Her voice was hard and mean. Danny thought she was angry with him, as if he had hidden his mom and had forgotten where.
The car wasn’t too bad, though. He was allowed to ride shotgun. The woman told him not to play with the radio. A few days later, he was at his uncle’s sharing a room with his cousin, Joey, and his Power Rangers. Danny and his uncle waited for his Mom to call. They waited for a long time.
For a while, Danny thought the days he spent alone in the small house had been an illusion. It was like the way he used to think the scent of Budweiser in his mom’s clothes and skin was a heavy, carbonated perfume. There beer in the fridge was gone the day she left, but the smell of it clung to the pillows on the TV sofa. Danny pushed them to his face and breathed in deep. Loose threads tickled his nose. When he went upstairs to sleep in his mother’s bed at night, he always brought a couple of couch cushions with him.
When he didn’t sleep, he watched television. He memorized the commercials that came on everyday the way he memorized lines from Happy Days, Growing Pains, and Cheers. He could quote from Cola and local car ads, but the only thing he knew by heart was the Tootsie Roll Pop commercial.
In the thirty-second version, the little outline of the boy is wandering across backgrounds of yellow and green. He asks the turtle and then the owl the question: “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a you-know-what?” That version came on during Saturday mornings. Danny mouthed the lines with the boy and the turtle as they showed up on screen, and he made sure to get the intonations just right. He never spoke along with Mr. Owl. It felt funny when he tried.
The other version of the advertisement, though, came on late at night, and was nearly twice as long. Danny thought it was a recurring dream. In the ad, the boy wanders across abstract fields, asking a cow, a fox, and then the turtle before concluding his journey with Mr. Owl. The ad played like a fable with a boy walking around with a lollipop, asking, “How many licks?”
That’s what the kids at St. Gregory’s would ask, laughing as they raised their fists: “How many licks do you want today?” They took his backpack, turned it over, and spilled the insides down the middle aisle of the bus. If Danny was quiet about it, which he tried to be, they wouldn’t use their fists.
Once Danny wasn’t quiet and they hit them. He came home with a plastic bag of ice over a newly purpled eye. His mom looked sad as she put her hand on his head and said, “That’s life, you know? Everyone bites, eventually.”
When Danny thought of the word “bites,” he thought of Mr. Owl as he crunches that kid’s sucker into oblivion. Mr. Owl does not think, he just bites; he does not pause, he just is. He gives the stick back, afterward, and announces the number of licks he gave it before biting. The boy has to walk away with that empty stick.
Danny became a stick as he sat in that house waiting for his mom to come home, the refrigerator empty and the television humming. She was not Mr. Owl, though, but the turtle, who could barely offer anything to the kid in the ad beyond feeble advice before turning him over to the awful cruelty of the owl. Mr. Owl, sitting in that tree branch, was God or a sort of god, and for all his perceived faults, at least he was honest.
***
When I finish, Mike says nothing. He digests it carefully. This is more than I have ever cared to share with him. Guys don’t share many things. I smile and wait.
“Look,” he says. I look as he struggles with his words like they’re lodged in his throat. “I’m not going to say, ‘No, you can’t have that tattoo,’ okay? That’s not my job. It’s not. This woman, like, she should have. You know.” He waits for me to fill in the blank, but I’m not sure what he wants me to add. “She should have,” is all he says.
It’s been years since I forced that fist size ball of fury out and threw it away. When I finally did, that’s when I decided to get the tattoo of the wings on my ankle, but that’s a story I won’t be telling anyone tonight. I nod at Mike and say, “Yeah.”
Then he says he can get me to the tattoo parlor tomorrow if I really want. I say sure, and we sit in the beach chairs with the street lamps acid bright above our heads.
Edit: Also! A cartoon NOT by me, but by another fan of you-know-what. (I suspect, somehow, this is copyright infringement.)
