Epiphany No. 3 By Patrick Cole
We had nowhere to go, no money, my mother and her second husband had no jobs and no prospects, we had fled cross country after essentially wrecking a house through sheer hillbillyism and had stopped paying on it and had been receiving threatening phone calls, and we had recently arrived in the Great State of Montana, knowing nobody (thank God). Fortunately, it was summer. So we went on a kind of indefinite camping trip, living in a state park.
It was a beautiful place, with rugged hills, high meadows, and a thick brown river spilling wildly over smoothened boulders. We had a couple of tents, and all we had to do every day was look for firewood. The only problem was lack of food. And here I will tell the Wookie story.
The Wookie story is problematic because of its effects on people; just as it is nearly impossible for me to imagine what goes through the mind of a person who had a stable childhood (let’s call them “normal” people) when hearing the story, a normal person has no way to imagine what was going through all our minds at the time this occurred, or what goes through our heads now. My brother and I find the story hilarious now, but listeners rarely do.
After some months, my mom’s second husband – let’s call him SH; it doesn’t matter, he disappeared a long time ago (the last we heard he was on the run and hiding out in a Mormon community) – managed to line up some work with a rancher near a place called Fishtail. Eventually we would live close to Fishtail, which, for a remote place called Fishtail, turned out to be rather eventful. A bend in the road consisting of one general store, two bars with bullet holes in the ceiling, and a single restaurant/café, it was a busy spot on a Friday or Saturday night for adults to behave the way they really wanted to, and if you’re an adult reading this then you may have just thought uh-oh. But that’s adulthood: holding off on who you are most of the time, at least until the weekend. This Fishtail place was where my brother and I witnessed the most violent fistfight we would ever see – at this stage I am certain it will not be topped – and it was between a man and his wife, she giving as much or more as him. That brawl was the first and last time I ever heard anyone called a “whore-bastard,” though at the time I figured it must be common parlance among the adults, used when someone is severely vexed. Whore-bastard, as in, “You whore-bastard!” was screamed so loudly and so hoarsely and with such vehemence that evening that I can hear it exactly as I did that night, in my head, right now. Kind of like how you remember your first kiss.
I never learned if this Elizabethan-sounding insult meant a whoring bastard, a bastard who was found out when running around with a single, particular whore, or the bastard son of a whore. I had one chance to enquire, but as I was doing some extreme cowering in a car with my brother as the woman walked by on her way to standing in the middle of the rural highway and wildly flagging down the next pair of headlights that came along for a ride the hell out of there, I didn’t think to ask.
Keep in mind this was the 1970s, when people drank when they drove so they wouldn’t get bored on the way. Out where we were MADD was Mothers Adore Drunk Driving. The topside of the dash in our vehicles always had a few round wine stains from the bottoms of the mugs mom and SH used. I have to say that Fishtail wasn’t exactly the Old West, because a lot of America was still the Old West then. Fishtail and places like it were the Old West of the Rest. I didn’t kill a man there, and neither did my brother as far as I know, but had we stayed long enough it would have been an unsurprising development, and they would have been warning us for a long time that something like that was going to happen. The next thing you know we’re outlaws. It would have been all too easy to become The Cole Brothers, since we were already the Cole brothers.
Not the Brothers Cole, that would be a circus act.
As I said, SH got work with a rancher near Fishtail, and the rancher gave him an advance on his pay so he could buy some groceries. I honestly don’t remember what we ate most of the time we were camping, but I do remember the day SH and mom went shopping and rolled into the campsite with the food. The centerpiece of the groceries was a gigantic sausage. This was poor people food, plain, in bulk size, meant to last. My memory of this sausage I think cannot be reliable because I see it in my mind’s eye as being about four feet long and eight inches in diameter. I have never since seen a sausage of such dimensions and I have travelled the world. I’m sure it speaks to the desire for protein which possessed us all. It’s like the drawings small children do of their parents, where the mommy figures so largely in their lives that she is as tall as the house she stands next to. If I had made that drawing then, mommy would have been a sausage.
We lay the sausage on the picnic table, because we were definitely going to dive into it later, and went about storing the other items here and there. No one spoke, so grave was the anticipation. And then we were done, there was nothing to do but eat a big chunk of the sausage, and we looked at the picnic table, and it was gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
It was supernatural. The thing was huge, it had been right there, and now it was nowhere. We all set about looking for it frantically, which was ridiculous. Many things disappear, like keys, or – in the old days – printed airlines tickets, which had been tainted with a malign spirit causing them to either cease to exist or to remove themselves to the unlikeliest of slots in the fabric of reality, behind cabinets, under sofas. But sausages do not disappear. As foods go, sausage is among the most inert.
After a while, we simply stood around, submerged in our bafflement. Had the Great Sausage ever really existed?
And it may have begun to enter our thoughts that this is how things went for us, this family. This is the reality we had been assigned, the one where we can’t ever get ahead, or just break even; where good luck in any shape, like that of a sausage, just walks. Even the cheap, heavy sausages. This was our luck, and your luck determined all. We deserved it somehow.
Enter Wookie.
Wookie, technically my brother’s dog, had not been seen for perhaps half an hour. (Yes, we had named our dog Wookie. 1970s, remember? The world was awash in Star Wars merch, I’m surprised George Lucas didn’t come after us for a royalty).
But how marvelously expressive are dogs, in both face and frame! Is this something learned from cohabitating with humans for 16,000 years? If so, their impressions of us are strikingly effective, if schematic, mime-like; that is to say, unsubtle in the extreme. Maybe in another 16,000 years they’ll have more nuanced imitations down, where at a minimum they will know that you should try to maintain the same expression as always when you’ve committed a terrible crime, that the giveaways should be harder to detect and limited to increased blinking or a hard swallow. At that time the poster of dogs playing poker will take on an entirely new significance. As it currently stands, when your dog has made off with and managed to eat a sausage nearly equal to her body in length and perhaps weight, a sausage on which your hungry family devoted a glassy-eyed reverence, it is pretty darn obvious.
I would say to the Wookies of the world that if you find yourself involved in such a scheme do not come trotting back into the campsite where your family lives quickly and silently as if nothing has happened, with lowered head so as to avoid calling attention to yourself, but while also LICKING YOUR CHOPS and from time to time GRINNING WITH SATIETY. If dogs could burp, we would have heard it.
Wookie: Worst criminal ever. I can just see her getting antsy and peeling away without us in the getaway car just as we come bursting out the door of the bank with sacks of cash and our clown masks on.
After SH chased Wookie out of the campsite with his arm raised while threatening to kill her, it was a sad and silent evening around the campfire. There was nothing to be done or said, we could only go to sleep and at least escape from this one day if not from what appeared to be our fate.
Now my brother, he gave up telling this and other stories like it, and not just because Wookie was technically his dog, but because first of all this story sometimes makes people cry, and secondly, most all of the stories from our childhood make people real quiet, because nowadays my brother and I mix mostly with middle-class folks, and when you finish one of these stories those people just have no idea what to say. It is evidently so far outside the usual experience in that milieu (talk about a class-separating word!) that it just gets a strange reaction, like fear, like no one wants to be seen to be ignorant of such realities in our very own society, no one wants to risk saying something insensitive, and more, other fear, maybe now they’re doubting us – my brother, myself – wondering who we really are, what we really think, and whose side we are really on; like we’re spies, maybe we know too much, maybe they’ve been too transparent with us in the past, that will have to stop, so shut up, now.
Maybe we believe something they don’t, and maybe what we believe is true. And that, my friend, is scary. So they shut up.
Class, as Marx said, is tribal as fuck. And it is tribal because if you have it good, you can only enjoy yourself by pretending that no one has it bad. It’s no fun being reminded that this isn’t true, since it makes you feel shame, the great silencer.
Now my brother, when we talk of it all, brings up how we managed to go to college and get middle-class jobs and work hard and save money and such to the point that, frankly, we don’t ever spend time with poor folks anymore, the trailer parks and taverns of our youth are gone, we don’t see poor people and we don’t know how to feel about that, other than guilty, and other than knowing – knowing from experience – that, in terms of life, we’re missing out on the real deal.
Wookie was canine non grata at the campsite for a few days but was eventually welcomed back into the fold. With her we went back to our usual state of precarious camping. We found Fool’s Gold in the river and pulled some out with cheesecloth and told each other not to tell the other campers, hoping it was real.
No, it wasn’t real. It was Fool’s Gold, I said. Nice to see you’re rooting for us, though.
The other campers were normal families, and they came and went like normal families do in state parks. Sometimes they pulled into the space next to ours, and sometimes we got to know them a little. They never seemed to notice we were desperately poor and camping out of necessity. It was the seventies. Everyone kind of looked like they were desperately poor and camping out of necessity, even at home.
At the time there was a thing going on called the oil crunch. Probably almost no one really knew what was happening on a macroeconomic scale with the oil crunch, but they knew they had been through something similar only a few years before and it led to skyrocketing gasoline prices, in turn leading to panic buying and eventual rationing, effects which reverberated through the economy and produced large scale disruption. Of course everyone drove gigantic cars at the time, until the Japanese introduced smaller ones such as the Toyota Corolla, to which Detroit responded with such beloved and dearly missed models as the Dodge St. Regis and the Chevrolet Citation.
A citation is what a cop gives you when you get pulled over. It means you will have to pay a fine.
At some point we got new neighbors at the campground who stayed for perhaps a couple of weeks, and the mother of this family befriended my mother and the two could often be seen talking together. Also at this point, the rancher thinking of hiring SH had loaned us a small camping trailer, in which Mom and SH now slept. This old trailer – I can still smell the stale air inside its cramped and dim 1960s-style beige-and-yellow interior – it also helped us appear to be a normal family out camping for a change of pace. Not that we were really trying to fool anyone. I never even thought about it.
And then something occurred which I could not then understand but which would form a memory which would forever hang around in the back of my mind, occasionally waltzing briefly along the front of the stage. It was a sleeper epiphany, the only kind I’ve ever had, which carries a message I cannot at first decode but which my mind knows it needs to hang onto. It is the third such epiphany I have so far identified from childhood, and the most important.
I was inside the trailer one day doing nothing in particular, perhaps just for the novelty of being inside something other than a tent. When I decided to leave I opened the door and started down the two small steps to the ground, and I saw my mother to my right and the neighbor lady making conversation with her. And just as I hit the ground my mom was saying through a scowl, “There’s a shortage of oil like there’s a shortage of peanut butter.”
I hesitated near the women, contemplating the look of disdain on my mother’s face and the enthusiastic agreement of the neighbor lady, who nodded and said something like, “Oh of course it’s not true.”
Now as an eleven-year-old, peanut butter was the king of foods, and for a moment I was genuinely concerned for its supply. What kind of cruel world would have a shortage of peanut butter? Well, one in which the price of domestic peanut butter is kept artificially low but most of the peanut butter consumed is actually foreign and largely controlled by nations with which the United States has an ethically compromised relationship and which may limit production or trade to manipulate prices and to retaliate for us backing their enemies in their wars or for supporting their old despots when their new despots are trying to take over, that’s what kind of world.
As for a shortage of oil, most Americans thought it was a hoax, contrived by Big Oil to raise prices and therefore profits. Was it a hoax? No. But it had hoax-like qualities; money tends to leave a little hoax-dust on everything.
OK. I knew the peanut butter analogy was sarcasm. I just didn’t know about what or to whom it was directed. And what I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know for a long while, was how much was encoded in that phrase about peanut butter and a fake oil shortage, how incredibly rich it was when you looked past the specifics. Swimming down in that phrase was the shadowy but fundamental dynamic of the world, of the relationship between the people and the powerful, the notion that history is a record more of what people allow to happen – what a few get away with – than of what we agree should be done. All the while individuals are awash in the flotsam and jetsam of that society, its movies, its newspapers, its jobs, its unemployment, its discriminations, and the bits and pieces out of which they try to cobble together a present and a dream of some kind of immediate future.
Down in that phrase was hidden the key to many mysteries, and in it you can easily find the reason Mom didn’t have a job back then after the local newspaper she worked at closed, the paper where she as someone with a high school education who had been out of the workforce for many years raising children had been learning all aspects of a trade, as you do in small companies, and building an actual career – the local newspaper that closed as one of the myriad unnoticed knock-on effects of the oil crunch. And down in there you see her then taking a job working late nights at a truck stop bar while her three kids slept at home, a bar dangerous enough that her older son would lovingly carve her a knife out of wood which she could conceal in the leather moccasins she was fond of wearing, the bar where she would meet the truck driver who would sell her on dreams of escape out West, in nature, in the realm of the Native Americans, the truck driver she would marry against all advice and who would cheat on her and then disappear three years later. And now I know how it is someone decides to pawn their present life for something that sounds real, something found off the grid or at least on a different, more humane plane – all the while waking up wide-eyed in the night worrying that the trade still didn’t give you enough gas money to get there.
Patrick Cole lives in France. “Epiphany No. 3” is adapted from his memoir Notes from a Latchkey Child: How the 1970s Greenlighted My Crazy Childhood, as yet unpublished. Other pieces appeared in The Boston Globe and The Smart Set. His novel Gemini was short-listed for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction.
8 June 2023
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