Bird's Eye

"We all live lives of private fictions; Narratives of perspective," he remembered his teacher saying one afternoon in class. Maybe, he thought, people are so quiet and desperate because they're scared their stories won't be published; that some tiny gremlin of reality will screw it up for them and they'll have to realized how pathetic their lives are. He looked up at the blackbirds whistling in the trees surrounding the long rows of picnic benches. He liked his job. Where else could you get paid to hang-out on park benches and play games with kids all day. One bird hopped into the ash strewn grill next to his bench, cocking its head to the side to study him. It flew back to the tree tops, like an anthropologist, rushing to share its find with the rest of the parliament. You tell them how pathetic we are, little bird, he thought. He was listening to John Fogerty on his Ipod dock, watching the kids on the swings. He was making sure they didn't break their necks doing triple axle dismounts onto the coarse tanbark of the playground. That was his job, saving them from themselves.

Some kid's dad had come to pick him up at lunchtime. The dad was celebrating some innocuous thing the kid did last week. Chicken nuggets for not falling asleep in church, something like that. He handed the camp sign-out sheet over to the dad mechanically, smiling but lost in his head. He wondered what it would have been like to have a dad instead of television raise him. A dad pat him on the head for his inaugural defecation on the big boy toilet or buy him chicken nuggets for faking piety. He might have gone to church more. Religion had a handy way to deal with stories. Death wasn't the final act in the play if you went to church. He remembered his teacher had gone on to talk about some French guy, who said that western society was logocentric. He said that we needed to find meaning. Which is why our little fictions were so important. The stories told us that everything happened for a reason. Cinderella suffers so that in the end she's rewarded with her prince but sooner or later, you figure out, life doesn't hand out fairy tale endings. He'd been seventeen in his sophomore year, and then his dad was gone. End of story. Where was the denouement?

"This music sucks Mr. D.," said one of the kids coming up to him with an Uno deck in his hands.

"Alright," he said. "I'll play something less white for you."

He put on a James Brown song. James Brown was ready to do his thing, he wanted to get up and do it.
-One-
-Two-
-Three-
-Four!

"What's this?" the kid asked.

"It's where your rap music ripped off all their beats," he said. "Well, okay, funky drummer's where they really stole from."

"Whatever," the kid said and walked off to another bench.

Get up, (Get on up)
Get up, (Get on up)

He wanted to get up out of this town when he graduated high school. The plan had been to get to Jacksonville Florida to see his dad; maybe he'd live with him and get back some of the time they lost. His dad would meet him and be proud to see his son was a real man, untouched by a single mother's effemination. They'd become a dynamic duo, righting wrongs, building tree houses, giving high-fives, maybe some low-fives. That's how the story went until he turned seventeen. His dad's girlfriend sent him all the un-mailed post-cards that had been written from the hospital bed. She'd included a brochure from Arlington cemetery. That's where they held the service apparently.

Should I take'em to the bridge?
(Yeah)

Take'em to the bridge?

(Go Ahead)
Hit me now

Five years later he was still stuck here, living with his mother and going to State. Someone in a class introduced him to the Coen brothers. He liked watching them because they used the same actors. Stephen Root was one of his favorites because he oddly reminded him of his father. Part of him wanted to feel his father was still alive. He'd never actually seen the funeral. If he thought hard enough, the funeral never existed. No casket, no death. The other day, he followed a guy with his dad's build for six blocks, hoping vainly. On weak days, he'd reinvent the story. His father was alive in witness protection or on the lam. Maybe he broke the rules and swung by the house, hiding in bushes for a glimpse of the man his son had become. A single tear drop would slide down his father's cheek, knowing he could never speak or touch his son. If he did the world would shatter. A shadow loomed over the park bench and he turned around sharply, fearing the birds had snuck up on him to snatch his story away.

"Are you sure you should be playing 'Sex Machine' for the kids?" His co-worker asked him. Her T-shirt was drenched from playing zombie tag on the playground. "People might think you're some kind of pedo."

"Whatever," he replied. "I've got a staff shirt on. Besides, they listen to worse music than their fathers ever did. Half these kids know all the lyrics to Soulja Boy's superman song."

"Ha. Ha. Well let's line them up for snacks so we can get up on out of here," she said and turned away towards the group of Chinese boys playing Uno.

Maybe his father was alive somewhere, in a trailer, staring at a photo of him three years old in tan overalls. Maybe if he had just dropped out of high school and hitchhiked to Florida his father might have survived. He liked to believe in the panacea of a young son's love. He'd probably never leave this city though. Outside it, he'd have to fly out to Arlington and have a long talk with a grave plot.

"Mr. D are we going inside?" A little girl asked, breaking him out of his head. She had on pink overalls with pink hair ties in her pigtails. He couldn't remember her name.

"Yeah, it's snack time," he said.

"Did you know that Thomas Edison said intelligence is 99% perspiration?" She asked him.

"Um..well, if that were true, Elaine over there would be a genius," he said. "Her T-shirt's covered with intelligence."

"Did you know that Thomas Edison also said, 'I have not failed. I've just found a 1000 ways that won't work?'" She said tugging on his wrist.

"Yeah, he did say that," he replied. He was watching a black mustang crawl through the parking lot. Three teenagers were sitting in the car, probably looking for a good spot to smoke. The blackbirds were flitting about in the trees. The dense leafy awning filtered the sun and gave them a green hue. Children were screaming as he stood up. They were all so small and new. He yelled at two boys dumping a large Dasani bottle on a little Mexican boy in a Chivas jersey. He could still hear James Brown over the line's cacophony.

One more time!

Let's hit it and quit! (Go Ahead)
Can he hit it and quit? (Yeah!)
Can he hit it and quit? (Yeah!)
Can he hit it and quit? (Yeah!)