In a well-practised manoeuvre to steer the subject away from the patriarchy and my role as its principal emissary
I tried to distract you with a question. What would you like to go back and tell your ten-year-old self?
Though you are, of course, totally wise to that routine, you dignified it with a sort-of-answer, saying
that you found the whole subject too upsetting and could we please drop it, which I thought was a great answer
and said so, to which you replied: That means you’ll end up using it in a poem, and I’ll get no thanks as usual,
only this time I brazened it out like an asshole and said Yep! Half the talent is knowing when something is worth stealing.
That still just makes half a talent, you said. You actually didn’t but you easily might have,
to which I would have replied with something flip like aye but the other half is what you’ve stolen,
and would’ve felt briefly clever until the stupidity of what I’d said had dawned on me
and you’d cut me off with No: the other half is being in a position to steal it, and then turn it into credit.
And that’s not talent. That’s just the unequal distribution of power. Though I guess someone has to labour the point.
While I was listening to you and wondering how I’d write this up, I was struck by the convention
of romanising words in italicised sentences to indicate emphasis. I don’t think it really works.
You have to mentally invert the whole sentence in a kind of typographic irony
where roman is now indicating italics, and so merely symbolising the stress, not operating on you as such.
Compare ‘Where was I’ with ‘Where was I’.
Asking myself the same question inwardly, the one about the ten-year-old child,
I was similarly stuck, mainly because I think that our paths are pretty much set from the get-go
and that nothing makes a difference; though I decided that the worst thing you can ever tell a child is
know that these are the best days of your life, kid! – given that (a) if it’s true you just ruined their lives right there and then
and (b) if they’re having the kind of day you’d have been having in 1982 – sitting in your mom’s ‘classic two’ off Riverside
in a fug of bong smoke, gum in your ‘nothing-coloured hair’, the wtf two-in-one ad
for Almond Joy and Mounds blaring from the corner while your brother took a shit in the bathroom
and the dog took a shit in the kitchen – technically, your next move is to hurl yourself out the window.
Then you asked me the question, out of politeness. Again I must emphasise you absolutely didn’t
since on principle you never do anything out of politeness; but, since you didn’t ask, I would have replied:
The best thing I could do for my ten-year-old self is ‘accidentally’ break his arm, or smash his nose,
or at least leave some kind of mark whereby he might remember the occasion, and if nothing else
learn never to trust strange men who say they are from the future and speak with great knowledge.
And as I type this in my vest, I’m staring at the new scar that has just appeared on my right arm
below the tattooed quote from Porchia, BEFORE I TRAVELLED MY ROAD I WAS MY ROAD, underlining the word WAS –
a stress that, frankly, I’d long derived from context – and I suddenly recall that day by the Ferris wheel,
and that weirdo with the boxcutters, the one the grown-ups had to chase away.