All My Experiments Are Social in an Anti Sort of Way
I might have mentioned Michael Harold Ryan in these pages before. We worked together in the chrome shop for ten years back in the wild west days of Hydra Hydraulics back before Michael got fired, found Jesus, and became an even more insufferable twit. He always claimed he did all the work while I sat around writing novels. This, of course, is the bullshit. I wrote many, many short stories and poems while he labored, but it wasn’t until I became a supervisor several years later after Michael got walked out the door that I was able to write a novel on the clock.
One thing I remember most about Michael Harold Ryan; he always insisted his middle name was Houston. He seemed inordinately proud of this supposed middle name for reasons I never fully comprehended. I hated that silly name. Didn’t care for the city. Absolutely loathed the Astros. And the Oilers. And if they had a basketball team, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to tolerate them, either. So, I just called him Harold. At least ten times a day, usually six days a week, for ten years. Not once did he fail to try to correct me.
“Houston.”
“Harold, I says.”
Then I’d write a poem about how Michael Harold Ryan had gone twenty-five years without a blowjob because his wife didn’t believe in them while the poor bastard fished cylinders out of the chrome tanks. Twenty-five years, man. And he still found Jesus…
So, by this time, if you’re an astute reader of the weekly Polish Hammer Poetry Corner, you’re probably asking yourself, where’s the next installment of the story featuring Trump, Musk, Musk’s unfortunately named son, )+(, traveling through wormholes of time in a souped-up Tesla? It’s coming, my friends. Eventually. Though, to be fair, if you subscribe to certain theories of the relativity of time, you could say it’s already finished. Just, you know, further on down the timeline. All I can say is that it’s been a rough week at the factory, and I’ve been preparing for an extended trip to Marquette, Michigan, of all places, and I’m trying not to think about anything, especially Trump-related.
I mentioned to Cracker McCracken I was soon to take my vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near the Canadian border.
“You going to Niagara Falls while you’re up there?”
“Nah… No… I’m… well, I’m definitely going to see the sights, but… Niagara Falls is way the hell out in New York, man.”
“Oh well, you said Canadian Border so I figured while you were up there, you’d check it out.”
“No, I’m gonna miss it.”
Cracker McCracken is one of Alabama’s foremost cryptid hunters in that he’s captured the most irrefutable proof of Bigfoot’s existence ever recorded. Which is fucking zero. I was beginning to understand how he was capable of mistaking a bunny rabbit for the Cullman County Mothman.
“Too bad,” he said. “You carrying your gun up there, ain’t it? You’re crazy to go ten feet without one, nowadays.”
I have guns for home protection. You’d be surprised by the sheer number of scallywags who are beating down my doors to get at my impressive collection of signed first editions. I’m just not in the habit of carrying shooting irons on my hips.”
“I’ll be coming correct,” I mutter cryptically (but not cryptidly).”
“Yeah, I don’t leave the house without at least one gun. I wear one of those belly holsters, can barely even see it under my shirt. Then, if I’m going somewhere I feel like the gun needs to be seen, I’ll strap a holster to my belt, carry my Sig Sauer where it can be seen and appreciated.”
“Hell. You have a bad experience recently?” In the wilds of rural Alabama. Had he run into a randy yard goat and mistaken it for a lusty chupacabra?”
“About a year ago I was at a Wal-Mart. First thing in the morning, too. I try to get there when I ain’t gotta deal with too many people. I turned down the cereal aisle and there’s six Haitians. Right in the middle of the aisle, man. Listening to music. In the store. Couldn’t even understand what they were saying.” Cracker’s eyes fairly glowed with the recollected trauma. “Six of ‘em. Every last one of them Haitian. Right in the middle of the aisle so that I couldn’t even get at my Lucky Charms. Since then, I just carry a gun every where I go.”
“Well, what happened? Did they accost you?”
“They were Haitian.”
“Okay…”
“They were listening to music in the store, Polish Hammer.”
“I see.”
My eighty-year-old, live-in, father-in-law also had problems with the existence of Haitians, but I chalked that up to too many repeat viewings of early Steven Seagal movies.
I repeated the Cracker conversation to my son, and he came to the sort of unpredictable conclusion he excelled at.
“He thinks you’re racist.”
“Me?”
My tone of voice could have been confused with mock innocence. Only I knew it was the real deal innocence.
“Yeah, you, Dad. Remember?”
I couldn’t maintain eye contact. Oh, shit. Remember? Remember what? I had a lifetime of memories to parse through. Could I have possibly made a racially insensitive remark during his youth? It was conceivable. I was born white, after all, which certainly increased the possibility that I spoke out of turn at some point in my history.
“You had me believing that Redd Foxx was Martin Luther King Jr for years.”
“Oh, son. That doesn’t make me racist. I respect both those men.”
“It makes you racist that you can’t or won’t tell them apart.”
“I can tell them apart just fine. One of them’s funny, the other not so much. Look, it may seem racially insensitive to you in hindsight, but I was carrying out a social experiment. Like when you were a kid and I kept telling you Cher was Pocahontas.”
“Yeah, Dad, that wasn’t cool, either. It made the first few years of school problematic for me. They thought they were going to have to put me in special ed.”
“Those were genius classes, son.”
“Who you think you are? Trump? I ain’t six years old. I know what’s what.”
“See, there. Then my social experiments were a smashing success.”
“Yeah. Obviously.”
This reminds me of the social experiment I conducted on Michael Harold Ryan. He had this dead tooth right in the middle of his mouth, up top. It was tombstone gray, as opposed to the gravel gray color of the rest of his teeth. Problem was, this tooth had severed its relationship with his mouth many moons ago, and he kept it amongst those other painful looking rickets by continually supergluing it back into its dead socket. It would come loose at the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it would pop loose while he slept. Then one of two things would occur. Either he’d find the dead soldier in the bedding or he wouldn’t. If he found it, he’d super glue the sumbitch right back in his yap and nobody would be none the wiser. Otherwise, he’d go the next few days, covering his mouth when he felt moved to smile and monitoring his feces for the escaped incisor. Once he separated the tooth from his excrement, he’d wash it off, glue it right back in his mouth.
One day, a day he happened to have his poop tooth nestled in his gumline, we were wrestling a filter out of the containment tank and Michael Harold Ryan lost his footing, slipped, knocking his chin on the edge of the filter, sending his tooth jettisoning out of his mouth and into the chromic acid, lost forever.
Michael Harold Ryan was disconsolate.
“What am I gonna do now? I can’t afford a dentist.”
He could afford a dentist if he stopped spending three hundred dollars a week on fishing gear. Nobody needs a fishing rod made from carrot fiber.
“Run down to Wal-Mart and get yourself a tooth repair kit,” I socially experimented.
“What?”
“Tooth repair kit, Michael Harold Ryan.”
“Houston.”
“They keep it next to the eye glass repair kits right by the register. It’s basically a piece of ceramic you sandpaper down to size and glue into the socket. I got a few myself, and I bet you never did notice, did you? It won’t last forever, but it will get you by.”
“I been to Wal-Mart, I ain’t ever noticed.”
“Why would you? It’s not a brightly colored fishing lure. Look, man, it’s right by the register. If you don’t see it, ask the cashier, she should be able to help you out.”
So, what I discovered with this social experiment is that desperation makes even the craziest bullshit sound oddly reasonable. What Michael Harold Ryan discovered that day wasn’t so much that some folks just can’t accept Houston as a viable middle name so much as you just can’t trust would-be novelists to tell you the truth about anything.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
