A Reverie on Failure Part 10: Crossing Mental Lines

Commentary

My dad (rest in peace) had a series of weird, elongated, triangular scars on his forearms. I asked him about them.

“Curly Barnett used to beg me to ride with him in his car. It was a souped-up 1939 Ford he’d rescued from a junk pile. ‘No one will else will ride with me!’ Curly would say. ‘Yeah, there’s a good reason for that,’ I’d say. ‘You’re crazy.’ ‘Ah, come on, John. I’m just having a little fun!’ And he’d go on like that until he shamed me into riding with him.

“So he gunned the motor and let her pick up speed going down one of those steep hills on Old 31. Once he got her wound up, he started laughing like a banshee, and coming up the hill, he crossed the center line to take the crest of the hill on the left side of the road.”

“No way,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you, son, it was terrifying, so the next time I rode with him—”

“What do you mean, ‘next time,’?”

“So the next time I rode with him, I warned him: ‘Curly Barnett,’ I said to him, ‘don’t you dare cross that center line.’”

“So you felt safe,” I said, incredulous.

“He gunned the motor, as before, winding her up. Since the last time I rode with him, he had taken the headers off the motor, so she was absolutely roaring, and when he gave that laugh of his, it made my blood curdle. He floored it and we went flying off into the left lane again, up the hill. Sure enough, there was a delivery truck coming the other direction. Lucky for us that truck had given her all just to get up that hill, so it wasn’t really moving.

“Well, Curly jerked the wheel to the left and—crash—there we went, into the embankment, which was bad and good. Bad because the nose of the car caught the ditch going in and started to roll her over, and that’s when I went through the windshield, arms first, like this.”

Here in the telling Dad crossed his arms over his face in defensive posture. “Good,” he continued, “because the embankment took all our momentum in the angle, and stopped her rolling, so I came back through the windshield before I got all the way out. And that’s how I got these long, triangular scars on my forearms: cut on the way out, and cut on the way back in.”

“What about Curly?”

“I looked over, and at first I thought he was dead, blood coming out of his wide open mouth instead of that stupid howling laugh of his, but after a minute or so, he suddenly sucked in a huge breath of air. He was laughing, that son of a bitch, laughing like he’d just pulled off some sort of crazy party trick. With his next breath he turned it into a rebel yell, and that was the last time I ever rode with Eddie Barnett.”

“Curly.”

“Right, Curly was Eddie’s brother. I forget sometimes.”

“Did you really never ride with Curly again?” I asked.

“Now I can’t remember if I did or not. Look, son, the 50s were a long time ago.”

I think of that story every time I make an automobile climb a steep hill; I recollect it as if it happened to me, as a kind of ultimate-stakes thrill ride, defying a collective mental construct: a painted yellow line. I like it that my dad couldn’t resist it. I wonder if I inherited any of his defiant nature, and, if I did, whether any has survived to my midlife crisis.

November 6, 2020

The blue jays, as long as I can visually ascertain where they are, have been 100% correct in their assessment of a moving body of prey. This season has been thrilling that way: I have yet to not see a deer.

On the other hand, the tease has been excruciating. Including the buck I shot at, not one has been in bowshot range. For example, a dozen doe and one buck did an hourlong minuet in front of me, never closer than seventy-five yards. I am now prepossessed, more than a month of intense hunting

[author’s note: I have no idea what happened in my mind and writing at this point. There’s no punctuation or explanatory notation of any kind, as I normally did when I was interrupted or weary. This is evidence I began to lose grip on my center right about now.]

Later:

“Across the road” is an interesting phenomenon. A strip of asphalt makes a division; it may as well not even exist, but crossing that road is like walking through the looking glass. All the dynamics are changed: there are different species of birds living here; the wind swirls differently; and there is an animal in these woods, bird or mammal I do not know, whose call I have never heard. It sounds like a quiet version of a guiro. How many hours of how many days for how many years have I sat, stultified, in woods all over Western New York, and only now do I hear it?