My aunt, Irv’s brother’s wife, was a children’s librarian who sent my sister and me some wonderful books when we were kids. She hated the word “kids” by the way, for reasons I don’t know. When I was older, and perennially un or under-employed, she urged me, several times over the years, to write and illustrate a children’s book. I appreciated her confidence in me but always felt my worldview might be a little dark for a children’s book. I also fancied myself a serious artist/philosopher, I’m chagrinned to admit, and probably felt the child-centered commercial endeavor was beneath me. My aunt’s suggestion also reminded me of the situation where you make a few good cracks at dinner and a well-meaning person tells you seriously that you ought to be a stand-up comedian.
“Well, aside from the fact that you need to be driven to survive the many times you might die on stage and the years of struggle and dues paying before you make any money as a professional comedian, the odds greatly stacked against you the whole time, and that you need to write routines, or pay professional comedy writers to supplement your weak-ass twenty minutes… wait, are you being funny?”
“No, I’m quite serious, you are very funny,” says the person.
“No, YOOOOO are very funny….” you say, with a half-hearted French accent, and then on with dessert.
One day, thinking of my aunt’s constant faith that I’d write and illustrate an award-winning children’s book (I think it was the Caldicott she mentioned) I came up with an idea. I don’t recall making so much as a single drawing, or putting anything in writing, but I kicked the idea around in my head for a while.
Visiting my parents for dinner, a practice that always left me exhausted, I mentioned the idea to them. My mother who was usually very supportive of my creative ideas probably gave a dismissive little laugh, assuming I was joking, but my father’s reaction has stayed with me. He chuckled with mirth, and recited the name of the never-written children’s book from time to time long afterwards, laughing again each time.
“Whippie The Slave Dog,” chuckles the skeleton from his grave in Westchester, “I always thought that would be a great book. Too bad you never worked on it. Whippie the Slave Dog!”
Sekhnet reminded me of my father’s sadistic sense of humor. She thought it was the idea of a whipped dog, a slave dog at that, that must have tickled my father. I recall that he was greatly amused by the image of Sekhnet’s psychotic older brother chasing her swinging a garden hose to whip her with. There is a decent argument to be made that my father was a sick fuck.
“Hey,” said the skeleton, “don’t be so judgmental. And don’t tell me you don’t get a laugh out of the image of that psycho greeting his now eighteen year-sister, returned from solo travels in Asia, with a garden hose whip. Certain things are just funny, whether you or your beloved want to admit it or not. You remember that kid in elementary school snarling ‘I’m going to take a whip and lash the skin off your backbone’? Great shit, my man.”
I don’t recall how much of the story of Whippie the Slave Dog I laid out to my parents at dinner that night. I remember only how much my father loved the title, the sick irony of naming the slave dog Whippie. Years later he’d recite the name out of the blue, a look of happiness eclipsing his usual dreaded aspect as he recalled that potentially wonderful, unpublishable, children’s book.
The story, as I recall, was part of my heavy-handed and ongoing attempt to impart my hard-won values to others. Whippie was a talented and affectionate dog who was eager to please. It emerged that she possessed the power to turn into whatever kind of companion her human benefactor preferred. She had magical powers that were activated by whatever she was called, she would become that thing. The boy who loved her would call her a dizzy bird and she’d sprout wings, cross her eyes, make a few lazy circles in the air above them and flap around when she landed. Then they’d both fall on each other laughing. That sort of thing. Whippie was a dream dog, although, the somber fact remained that she’d been raised as a slave and literally whipped regularly.
The idea was that we all have these inner lives, and the often untapped potential to do amazing things– some as simple as returning love with love and not mixing in any bad things — yet the world of humans constantly inflicts cruelties on children that obscure this plain fact. What we are called when we’re impressionable stays with us, colors our lives, but we are far more than the misguided, sometimes plainly fucked up, names we are tagged with by sick people with their own insurmountable problems.
“I don’t remember any of that,” said the skeleton, “but it does make sense that you’d come up with that kind of story. I mean, it’s consistent with your belief, as a kid and now as an old man, that few people nurture and cultivate their very best impulses, certainly not their creative side. It underscores that other part, that love and strength are needed to recover from the many brutalities of childhood. And that few people marshal those powers to recover.
“It’s also of a piece with your critique of capitalism, that people in a Free Market Society, so-called, generally don’t place any value on what isn’t sold. Your belief, unthinkable though it also is to most people, that the value of the work itself is often not related to the monetary value assigned to that work. The hack who makes a good living by being an industrious hack, studying marketing demographics and pandering to the audience’s lowest impulses, is placed on a professional pedestal while people many times more talented, who don’t game the marketplace the same shrewd way, are losers, amateurs, hobbyists, wannabes, suckers, frustrated artists, confidence-lacking chumps, poseurs, failures, douche bags…”
We get the idea.
“By the way, Elie, do you recall the term I learned in the Army to describe the accent, reasoning and manner of a man like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Turd, and I use ‘man’ in the loosest, runniest sense of the word?”
You used the word to describe the speaking style of Darius White, from Eagle Crotch, Arkansas, who often snorted ‘ah, batshit!’ An evocative term I couldn’t help thinking of just now myself as I watched the malevolent little cocksucker at a podium smugly describing our return to Nancy Reagan’s highly successful prosecution of Nixon’s war on drugs. Shit-eater.
“That’s the kindest way we can put it. Why you find it necessary to disparage cocksuckers by including an unredeemed racist like Sessions in their number, I’m not sure. But that he is malevolent, and little, nobody can deny. ‘Piece of shit!’ as Sekhnet would say if Sessions was driving near her. OK, Elie, that’s it for me today. Take a walk down to Chinatown, would you?”
Will do, sir.
