The Fender of the Massey
I bounced along on the hottest of Tennessee days on the big scalding fender of the Massey 135, or negotiated an awkward balance on the ledge upon the bed walls of the IH pickup so as to facilitate jumping off and opening the next gate. The rope loops were easy, but the wire gate fasteners so often made you a fool before the old timers seated comfortably, watching critically. Plus, hornets seemed so often to be buzzing about in the torpid stillness. The old timers eyeing your dexterity with a rusted, twisted, ancient bit of baling wire already broken off short since the LBJ years.
Then the Mail Pouch guys sitting in the AC would drive past, with no recognition of my efforts, and I’d fasten the gate back the way it was and hop back up to whichever temporary perch, and we’d go on to the next one. Such was my job. I was the youngest boy. No arguing about it. Just jump off, face judgment, jump back on.
You could smell the honeysuckle in the still heat on those days as you ran your posts, back and forth from gate to green pickup or to red tractor.
There are so many benefits that derive from being the youngest. Your automatic reduction to gate-opener is a price of the position. Corn state youngests, one supposes, minded planter boxes.
But, and speaking for all of us, we invested just enough into it to keep you off our backs. And when it was over, we went right back to whatever had been drawing our attention lately but which we knew you would never get around to checking in on. We were on the hunt for the Goldilocks Spot: that point of least investment of energy to maximize our peace. Just enough, you see, to keep The Man off our backs for the longest amount of time. In my particular case, at that age, it was building model Patton and Sherman tanks, writing to the Pentagon to find out more about the Ontos and trying to sell eggs to other farmers with chickens, under the vaunted Refuge-E label. Oh, and also printing comic books reproduced on a Hectograph at $1.00 a pop (There was a premium for quality, naturally.)
See, we were managing you. Parent husbandry, if it were in 4-H.
Imagine me, slacker youngests, doing the minimum, counseling the first heir of a Yoruba chief. Dude had driven a red sports car down LSD before losing it, jumping the counter of the Harold’s Chicken on 87th by the Dan Ryan to fry his own batch after the late-night staff couldn’t seem to get around to it with due urgency, doing what you need to do to get by as a black man with a funny accent in Chicago.
He wore a vest at a big-box hardware place while he lived at a recovery home. Between guys looking for the right size slot screw for quarter-inch plywood, Dude worried about his mother and his siblings, including the children of his father’s other wives, and how to pay for so much schooling. And cassava and such.
I wouldn’t write down the prince’s real name even if I could spell it out. I just thank God he wasn’t Igbo. So many syllables. So few vowels to separate them.
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But who was I to tell a person with such cultural responsibilities to focus on himself in recovery? I mean, I wanted to tell him that he needs to take care of his fine self, that because addiction is the most self-centered exclamation in the world, that recovery from the same must and needs be just at f**king self-centered. But there I sat before an older brother. The oldest brother and first-born son. The one who took care of things. Fixed stuff so that it all worked out.
Thing was, his end goal for treatment was what I wanted to type into the form on the computer. This prince of a tribe said all he wanted to get out of treatment was to race down Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive in an open-top sports car. And I said What? Really?
What about continuing the male birthright and all?
“Yes, of course, Mr. James,” he said. “I want to do that.” But he also just wanted to race down the shoreline in a hot red Firebird with T-tops, the rich people condos whizzing past on his left, the expanse of inland sea on his right. And who wouldn’t — oldest or last-born?
I had done the paperwork, a long series of intrusive questions I had no right to ask and that no human being was ever going to read. Adegboyega answered patiently about his sexual orientation and so forth, calmly, behind tinted Calvin Klein eyeglasses. But then I had to ask what he wanted to get out of treatment. What was his goal?
He thought about that for a moment, and I indulged him. It was not for me to say what the Hell a real Nigerian prince wanted. It most likely wasn’t a $200 bank transfer.
“I want, Mister James,” he said, “to be free. That’s all.”
Well. Now how do you write that into a treatment form your supervisor needs to sign?
To be free from all the responsibility of being the first-born son of the first wife of the chief? To feel the release of the bonds that accompany addiction? To not send most of your check by Western Union each week so that the youngest can get braces? Or to put pedal to the metal on a slow August afternoon in your Firebird down Lakeshore Drive, chicks giving you goo-goo eyes as you whiz past? Or maybe freedom from the expected.
Not having to jump down and untie the rusty bit of LBJ baling wire and let the old farts through.
***
Come on over to the BuyMeACoffee page and we’ll look after that twisted ankle. There’s a trick to sticking the landing when you come off that tractor fender. But we’ll have plenty of ice over there to get the swelling down. And while you’re there, you can fry up some chicken if we’re not getting your order in with enough alacrity. Plus, you’ll get a chance to try your hand at untwisting the most brittle and oxidized baling wire as folks look on. And, beyond that, you can see some of the way this little birth-order essay was put together — and there were plenty of sentences that made the Mail Pouch guys in the AC shake their heads. Bloopers, outtakes, and a chance — if you care to do so — to drop a buck into the Harold’s Chicken tip jar to help the sundry half-brothers and half-sisters of the Nigerian prince afford piano lessons and such. We’ll see you there!
