exitwound

In the third or fourth grade I got in trouble for drawing Swastikas in the left-hand margins of my math homework (I self-taught how to draw them from the number four); I drew them not because I was some sort of young neo-Nazi, obviously, but because I'd just seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, on no less that twenty television screens simultaneously, in the electronics section of a Wal-Mart in L--. I can clearly recall my dad and uncle P-- laughing when the bald, mustachioed German guy boxing with Indy got ground up by the propeller and all you saw was his blood painted over the Swastika-laden tailwing. They laughed because the villain had what was coming to him, yes, but more importantly they found the unrealism of it all corny. Unreal things make fathers and uncles laugh.

But I remember sitting under the dining room table the next night, pushing my bare feet up on the underside of the Italian wood, as if I had the power to push the table into the air. My father sat at that same table, above, and lectured me why the sign was wrong and hateful. Apparently, the teacher had called. I could hear only my father's voice but I think he must have been folding his hands. I could see only my father's brown slacks and his brown shoes.

On Monday, August 30th, 2010, I sat alone at a four-person conference table in the RLM library at the University of Texas at Austin, making marginalia in red ink on the second page of a computer-printed journal article and I suddenly remembered all of this.