I was like a disheveled rainbow child whose name should’ve been Rain. I tried to learn from traveling and the streets, the inner workings of the world but I didn’t have a vision or even a simple plan. I had the more complex idea to take another run at college.
They said my peers were good with me but the professors seemed to get lost in the confusion of mixing proper with a pig in a pen having nothing to lose but his shit and a chance to ham it up with executives if he rut just right with the other swine instead of rinse his slop down with wine.
The slop didn’t have anything to do with alcoholism at this time in my life. It had everything to do with me not trusting people I didn’t already know. I saw most people as just people but if I liked you I would assign you an animal. For example, my dad was a dog and my mom was a lamb. I also knew a happy fish, an angry fish, an orangutan, a bear, and a whole forest full of other creatures. It was the bear that I didn’t really know, she sat behind me in class.
If I thought it was rough trying to get out of the trailer and into the classroom, how was I going to make it out of class alive with this bear behind me that had her eyes fixed on the back of this pig’s head? All I wanted to do was look at her, nothing else, just catch a glimpse.
Days would pass and I would just wiggle in my chair trying to get up the courage to turn around to face my fear of this mama bear. Instead I decided to face another fear and spoke up in class, something about comparing pizza to robots and their production in an economic sense. “Oh, and my grandpa, who is also a bear, produced Jeep handles for the war in Vietnam where my dad drove around colonel’s in a Jeep,” I boasted.
I decided to double down on the fear factor after my tirade so I looked behind me, rolling over in my chair spineless, to see her reaction. Right then I became a squirrel with all its paranoia and fright. I was crushed. Everybody now knows why I still came to class.
I had to defend myself so I started to talk gibberish about squirrels and nuts and roadkill until I heard keys jingling down the hallway, the size of a janitor’s key ring. Then there was the sound like a huge rubber band being stretched and released between two massive springs. Was it my furloughed friend? The keys stopped clanging outside the classroom door so I went on about roadkill, but before I could continue on with my own clanging there was the loudest inner speech I could never have imagined could possibly be barked by any human being or animal. It sounded a lot like “WAAAAR!”
At that moment I was reminded that it is neither good to see nor hear human beings treat each other like animals. Of course animals shouldn’t be treated inhumanely either, but they are.
Francis Erich McElroy 