From: | Boudewijn Mcgrath (****@hotmail.com) |
Sent: | Thu 4/08/10 9:27 AM |
To: | ****@hotmail.com |
Leviyutra, Vhriagra $1, Cialqlis $2
He was a very concentrated, very intense young boy, about eight year
Mister Mcgrath,
You’re right about Hitler, he WAS a very concentrated, very intense young boy when he was about eight. I can remember hating Poland and Czechoslovakia a good deal when I was around eight, nine. No good reason, I suppose. Just…full of hate. I channeled that hatred, for a time, into my ship-in-a-bottle hobby. The HMS Blackadder, the USS Bonhomme Richard, the HMS Tayleur and their respective crews were my only companions while my parents’ marriage noisily dissolved. “If we can only make the Straight of Gibraltar, Mommy will make a hot dinner again!” I’d say to my crew, from the normal-sized side of the bottle. But the HMS Blackadder never made the Straight of Gibraltar, Boudewijn Mcgrath, and my mother left me adrift on a sea of fantasy while my father slipped inside an entirely different kind of bottle. A bottle named Jim Beam.
I stayed tangled in the rigging of the USS Prepubescent Trauma for probably another seventeen months. Eventually the clean dishes were all dirty, and I was convinced Jim Beam was a real person who got my mother to run off with him and that my father agreed to their arrangement as long as Mr. Beam kept his sweet, sweet brown bourbon flowing like an emotionally crippling geyser. I hated Mister Jim Beam as a ten-year-old; I associated the smell of a glass with just a ghost of a sip of bourbon left in it with unopened Sunday papers and omnipresent cat hair and applying my own band-aids.
Eventually my hate found its perfect mate: racket ball. I controlled that three-inch blue ball like it owed me a considerable amount of money. Let me back up a bit, though, and clarify by saying that I spent six months playing what I thought was racket ball before being told by Jaime my stevedore friend that what I was playing was not racket ball but jai alai. By that time I’d become so adept at jai alai that some profligate Saudis “arranged” for me to compete in the infamous children’s jai alai circuit, to much acclaim. Perhaps you saw John Stossel’s piece about the Dubai Underground Children’s Jai Alai League on 20/20 some years back? I only recently saw a tape of the program, and I have to say that 20/20 only captured 74% of the depredations I suffered under Salaid al Hazim al Yassir bin Quarzi. 20/20, ha! More like 14/20, right? That’s about 74%, right Boudewijn?
The thing about playing jai alai as a preteen is that they don’t exactly make a jai alai cesta for a moderately tall young man who’s about to turn 12 so for the first three years I played with a cesta that came up to my chest. Let me assure you that that poses its own set of problems, which I’ll address in a future email. Eventually the F.D.A. agents who rescued me (the DUCJAL doubled as an illegal hummus manufacturing/distribution ring so technically it was the F.D.A.’s problem) returned me to my father who had found Shiva and was as sober as the judge who dealt with Barney Frank’s boyfriend’s prostitute racket, which is to say my father was moderately drunk. This was a vast improvement from several years prior, however, and so I trotted down to the library one breezy Saturday and looked up what “racket ball” really was. To my delight, this “racket ball” shared some characteristics with jai alai, but without the threat of being conscripted into playing for the pleasure of an aircraft hanger full of swarthy, oil-rich Arabs.
I don’t need any Leviyutra, by the way. Whatever that is.
Be Well,
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