Puny Runts
Kids around Piper and Charlie’s age of 8 or 9, they fascinate me. A lot of times they have, like, chicken legs for arms. It’s as if they have no muscle in there. I sat on the couch beside Piper the other night and while he was focused on the TV I put my hand on his bicep and it felt like an eel. It was gooshy and soft and it had no real structure. His arms are like bread bags filled with milk and tied at the end.
He looked me in the eye with his beautiful upside down smile and spoke very plainly, very clearly.
“Hey. You touching my arm makes you dumb.”
I laughed out loud and let his arm fall back to his side. It felt like dropping a paper towel roll. The sound it made when it hit the leather of the couch was exactly this:
bip.
Like a sparrow fart.
Like a butterfly scream.
Nothing there unless you are really tuned in, which I was because I was drinking red wine and I had taken a beaker full of hemp oil I bought from Amazon.
Obviously, the arms of a kid don’t tell the whole story, but there is something loosely magical about kids like Charlie and Piper and all of their classmates and friends, if you ask me… which you don’t ever do. But whatever. Because the thing is, I think that somewhere in the 7-9 year old range a human being hits the best stretch of their life. And they never even realize it either because they are too green and too naive to get it. But somewhere in these runaway days, as the spring moves towards summer and the school year falls apart right before our very eyes, the promise of a better tomorrow is still believable and real. For these kids, I mean.
Me and you? We are a different story. It’s no original philosophy I’m dropping here and I know that, but even so I feel this weird urgency to paint 2nd and 3rd graders with any spare paint I have just sitting around. Because me and you are a different story/ that crumpled red Solo cup/ that twisted plastic crushing sound of a party that’s over but still hasn’t been cleaned up yet. We have life behind us, don’t we? And a lot of it too. I know you know what I’m saying.
Walk of Shame.
Straws full of blow.
Fist-fighting other grown-ups.
Hangovers and eggs.
Fired from jobs.
Smashed heart; love hates you, just look at your eyes. Baggy eyes. Saggy tits. Your nut sack is a mountain man’s buckskin pouch of pebbles and you keep telling yourself that one of these days you will rise again. That you will rejuvenate somehow, with exercise and maybe a dietary change. Go vegan or some shit. You tell yourself that you’re going to fast/ eat inside a window of 6 hours/ gnaw on ice chips the rest of the time. Like a sick person in a hospital bed.
And by you, I mean me, of course. It’s me who is watching this unreal pageant unfold before me. It’s me lifting the young arms just so I can sense their airy floating sensation. It’s me smashing down into the couch with planetary heft as I watch these puny runts eating microwave popcorn and guzzling Dr. Pepper as we watch Bob’s Burgers.
It’s me I’m fucking talking about, man. ME. Not you, except unless you feel this thing too. This stuff I’m saying, these endless days winding down anyhow. These coming summers kind of planning ahead for a day down the road, closer now than ever before, when they can drop me off at the curb and head on down the road into an autumn that they will never circle back from. Last days of a last summer.
Goddamn.
You know?
Not yet, but, I mean.
It’s thrilling in so many mad ways. I am not afraid of dying. But then again I really have no idea what that means. I dream of silence. I long for quiet. I attempt to wrap my head around some humming void that doesn’t even exist as I pass on through a neuro-explosion of veins shutting down. Heart stopping. Brain sighing, blowing out the candle, shutting down the lights.
Puny runts remind me of living. Of happiness and laughter. Of unmitigated lunacy and idiocy, and it somehow all works so epically. Cut fingers bleed from a powerless arm that couldn’t hurt me if it tried. Unless it never existed. In which case I would have died a long time ago from just wondering what it would be like to lift some living runts arm to the sky on any old Monday night.
All my flustered notions, they make bewildering sense in that blink of an eye.
In that moment of the drop. Charlie or Piper’s arm dead falling to the sticky couch. Their eyes on the tube, they don’t even register me and my moves.
Imagine if we had never met, amigos.
Imagine how bottomless my fall if I had never won this particular lottery.
Billie Holiday Watching from the Sky
At brunch, you might hear Billie Holiday, or in the night at the hipster bar: you could find her in the jukebox. The voice misting out over the land. Morning fog rolling up off the river. Big old river. Looks like a silver field in the moonlight. Rolling along so slow that it plays with your tired eyes. Is it a river or is it a field? Can I cross it?
Then you walk off the bluff and step into it and you crash down into the star-speckled upside down sky. Catfish eat your face starting later tonight. Tiny pumpkinseeds peck at the skin of your eyelids as dawn comes down through the cool flowing time.
Billie Holiday in the car. Billie Holiday in the kitchen. Billie Holiday in the bedroom with my baby’s tank top in my fingers/ her body arching with the music/ she’s breathing heavy orchestras into the caves of my ears.
Billie Holiday in movies sometimes, I guess. And Billie Holiday on all these internet radio shows. Porky middle-aged white dudes playing Billie Holiday as her bones mold and never twitch down in the dirt of their ground where they laid her.
Billie Holiday sitting on a wooden chair in a late-afternoon city room. It’s winter. Everything is overworked. Everyone is tired. The Wars. Across the seas, but also her in her clothes. The wars up her sleeve. The wars in her teeth and down in her sore feet. Billie Holiday looking for a good man. Billie Holiday wishing for a little time to think. Time to listen to the birds in a Baltimore park. Time to drop some pennies in the creek.
Gimme a little time, Mr. Soundman.
Gimme a little time, Mr. Engineer.
Billie Holiday on an evening train watching the skyline rise up from the march.
Billie Holiday singing, alone, in the alley behind the club.
Solid rats freeze. Cunning cats raise their necks. Pigeons slathered in track smoke, they coo in their chests like country thunder miles away. Billie Holiday singing at the wet summer bricks. At the puddles of greasy rain. Singing at the unseen stars and singing at the cars on the bridges leading in and out of town. Singing towards a wall but also singing right through it like bombs.
Billie Holiday drinking muddy water from a buffalo horn.
Billie Holiday tap-tap-tapping a beat on the bar, with two ribs from a man, who once slapped her so hard.
Billie Holiday in the corner huddled up. Her puffy eyes. Her trembling lips.
Billie Holiday up on the stage/ the crowd going wild/ the lights catching in her sequins and flashing the message to a select few.
Something hiding deep.
Song tumbling down out of a ghost.
My god, man. These lives we lived. So many of us. A history of glances in an evaporating word, her voice was the voice of the stark understanding. So many of us had lived. So many of us had died.
So many of us, all come and gone.
Billie Holiday hovering above a school bus full of puny runts.
Billie Holiday in a jetpack, slow rolling across the wide silver field.
I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through
In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut trees
The wishing well
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way
I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
