English: The Eye of Horus, done in Photoshop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
22 September 1998
I was thinking just now about this ring I used to have, the one with the Eye of Horus on it. It was just a cheap metal thing, seemingly entirely forgettable, and yet it was my first ring, and I really liked it. Curious about what it looked like? I Googled Eye of Horus ring and found one almost just like it, except mine was sheet metal.
I lost my original ring in a parking in Arizona in 1992, when I was on a pilgrimage to see the Grateful Dead at the Sacramento Speedway. I was with one of my best friends and his then girlfriend, who we’ll just call Bella. My friend, Gene, could be a real dick, but he could be sweet and was, in any case, attractive and a real cock tease, especially with his friends. I was really hung on him, but he was one of my best friends, and we were on a buddy trip with his girlfriend to see the Dead when we happened to stop in a parking lot in Arizona.
I no longer remember why we stopped at that point, but it was such an intense trip and even though we had a destination, we had a bit of time to get there, so we were probably just tired of driving. I remember it was nearly dusk, and we were just hanging out, talking shit, and kicking the dirt. At some point, Gene started teasing me, which was a favorite pastime of his. He grabbed my key ring and began throwing it up in the air, blocking my attempts to catch it, letting it hit the ground, and then snatching them away when I tried to pick them up. If his girlfriend hadn’t been there, we would eventually have gotten to wrestling for control, and if the ground wasn’t too rough, we might even have ended up rolling around in the dust until he had me pinned. Knowing him, Gene would rub in the fact that he had the upper hand by pinning me with his crotch or his pits in my face so I could feel how fully in control he was and smell his dominance. I can even now remember many times in our room at college when he would pick such a “fight,” and we would wrestle for control. We’d roll around, knock over furniture, twist the carpet into a ball, and nearly always we would come to an impasse. Gene would pin me in a wrestling move. I would twist out of it, he would pin me again, and many, many times, I can remember feeling how excited pinning me had made him. Gene wasn’t bigger than me, but he had played competitive sports for most of his life, so he usually had the upper hand. We occasionally had these wrestling matches when he had a girlfriend, but mostly I think they occurred when he was in between girlfriends and needed to work off some sexual frustration by dominating a friend.
But back to my ring and that parking lot in Arizona. His girlfriend was there, and he couldn’t really properly torment me in public anyway, so he was taking it out on my key ring. He threw it up, blocked me, and caught the key ring, or the key ring hit the ground while he was blocking me because he was, after all, not superman and sometimes he couldn’t control both the ring and me simultaneously. Anyway, the second or third time the ring hit the ground, there was a little flash of metal, and when I retrieved my keys, the ring was gone.
Truly, it was just a sheet metal ring, but I can remember being really irritated. It didn’t help that Bella said, “Well, maybe you weren’t supposed to have it, ” as if cosmic forces instead of common rudeness might have been to blame.
*
[This next bit originated when I still did a radio show on a community supported radio station, which I is something I did for about a decade between 1996 and about 2006.]
Last night I had a “grandfather moment.” What happened was, in the last half hour to forty-five minutes of the show, I got in an increasingly discordant mood. I finished the show with ten minutes of a fourteen minute piece featuring rusty hinges. About six minutes before two AM, this furious older gentleman called and hissed through clenched teeth that he was a card-carrying member of the station and that he did NOT like what he was hearing through his radio. Then he hung up on me.
I let the track go on for another three to four minutes (I am not one to let go without a fight) and then eased into “Coil” by Robert Rich off of his album, Seven Veils, a stunningly sinuous album of experimental electronica and percussion that is well worth hearing in its entirety. As was my habit, I slowly faded out of the rusty hinge track while gradually blending in the Robert Rich track and in my best, soothing radio voice, I described “Coils” as soothing to the savage beast and ruffled listener.
Later, after I had signed off, I realized why the incident had both upset and unsettled me. It’s not just that I don’t like upsetting people. There was more to it than that. I was flung back into my childhood, when my family was visiting my Cape Cod grand parents one summer. I was still a kid but had developed a habit of locking myself in the restroom when I needed to use it. (Don’t ask me what that was about — maybe bathroom shame, I don’t know.) Anyway, my grandfather tried the door and found it locked. I guess maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get out, and he’d be left to figure out how to unlock the door. Instead of going away and leaving me to poop in peace like any normal human would, he hammered on the door with his fists until I fumbled it open, and then he stood towering over me yelling without explanation until I ran sobbing to my parents’ bedroom and hid behind my mother.
I had forgotten about that moment right up until that old man yelled at me and I had my “grandfather” moment. For a drawn out, discomforting instant, I was back on that pallet on the bedroom floor with my mother kneeling at my side trying to comfort me. Sobbing, I saw over her shoulder, through the partly closed-door, the reflection of light off my grandfather’s glasses.
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