“Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.”
— Louisa May Alcott
When Big Onion touched Lou’s hand in the casket it was a tight leathery old moccasin. Lou had been dead for six days now and in that time Big Onion had yet to cry or pout. In fact, as his Aunt Vanessa DiNunzio (prnounced dee-NUN!-zee-oh) had commented on several occasions, the man had barely displayed any sort of emotion at all. This was not entirely unexpected either. As Viv, his mother, often put it in conversations in which others feigned polite questioning when what they really wanted to do was advise or insult… or both, Big Onion “has his own ideas about how to live and love.”
In the beginning, when the boy had been a toddler, it had been difficult for Lou to accept things this way. He’d longed for another son, someone to toss the baseball and the football with his older brother, Marco Alpacino. He’d imagined that his two sons, only a couple years apart, might play on the same varsity teams in high school someday. Maybe they both get drafted and play in the big leagues together, he’d say to the guys at at work. Lunchtimes in early summer, at the picnic table out under the spread out shade tree over by the dumpsters, Lou would listen to some of the other mechanics talk about their own kids, people who’d already grown up. Some had starred in small college sports and a few had gone on to be successful business people and their fathers spoke with pride when they offered unsolicited updates on their lives and their accomplishments. The men’s eyes lit up with the gleam of blood when they mentioned, incessantly, the grandkids they doted over these days.
Still, nothing had turned out that way for Lou. Marco Alpacino had died in the street. And by the time Big Onion was 3 or 4, they’d known he wasn’t going to be who they’d thought he might be.
Or who they hoped he’d be before they understood everything.
One Sunday morning, in the spring of 1990, Lou had watched through the back kitchen window as Antonio, who was four, flipped his hands around in the air in front of his face erratically. As he did this, he strained his face so that it appeared as if he was in wretched pain, only to burst into smile a moment later. When that happened, it was accompanied by piggish squeal from the boy’s mouth. This formed a pattern that then happened over and over again. It was all interspersed with sudden short bursts of the boy running (or skipping hard, really) that moved him a few yards and lit up his face only to find him stop as quickly as he’d started/ hands up in front of his eyes again/ his gaze digging into the digits of his own hand rigor mortis curling only to watch them both break free as his muscles cut loose and released the tension. It was as if each of his very own fingers were a rare specimen of folding stick, a marvelous discovery for a lad to come across. And right there in the branches of his own slight body, of all places.
Lou had begun to focus then, in that precise moment, on a misty land appearing up out of the horizon. It was a very real place, he sensed, showing up here where there was nothing on the map.
He called Viv in from the laundry room and they’d both watched as the boy occupied himself that way for over an hour, until they’d both gone out back where Antonio had seen them. He had watched his parents for a few moments at that point, but with no expression, no curiosity or warmth or interest.
“Sandwich, buddy?” Lou had offered, breaking the glacier.
Viv bit her lip, held her arms out to the kid. But the kid ignored her gesture and turned his back on them both for a second or two. Cars passed slow out on the road and everyone could hear the dogs of the neighborhood barking half-assed at the first lawn mowers of the season being fired up here and there.
When Antonio spun around, he’d done so to both his mom and dad’s surprise. His face meeting theirs, something that rarely had happened thus far with their youngest boy, both parents were holding him in their eyes. It was as if he were a statue, a work of art in Florence, rather than their own second son who was, it seemed, destined for much different things than they’d ever imagined or even heard of.
“Got to make my sandwich a Big Onion sandwich!”, Antonio had blurted out in his best little kid Elvis voice. It was both charming and mesmerizing to his parents. He’d rarely spoke to them at all up until that point.
“Big Onion! Big Onion! Big Onion on toast!” he half spoke, half sang
He flapped his hands, skipped across the dog shit yard, and seemed to float a bit out over the sewage pipe cap that looked like a fat rusted seashell the size of a coconut, as he ended with the line that stuck.
“Got to call me up and say Hellooo, Big Onion!”
From that point on, all the doctors and psychiatrists and school personnel, the guys at the picnic table at lunch, Viv’s sisters and her mom, the bakery ladies with the hot donut for the boy, the T-ball coaches watching him rolling in the outfield grass in the middle of the games, the other kids in the public pool, the other kids at the wood chip swings, the neighbors, the neighbor’s dogs, the mail man, the Avon lady, everyone/ all of them/ they seemed to simply roll with everything. At times it even seemed as if they’d known all along that Big Onion was autistic. It was like they already had understood that he was lovely. And that maybe- what was required when crossing paths with Lou or Viv with their son in tow- what was needed was a bit of patience. A bit of patience they’d remind themselves, in return for the stark candor and the brutally honest assessments Big Onion regularly served up to those he would meet on his daily walks around the block. Or perhaps down at the Carvel, in the simmering glow of some summer evening twilight, as Lou looked on proudly: holding his sugar cone of soft vanilla: Christ’s cross glinting from the hay bed of thick black chest hair that vined desperately for his thick neck: only slightly wincing when Big Onion turned to the 30-something woman in the tank top with the frozen banana sprawled across two seats at the next outdoor table over and announced, unabashedly, “You, my good friend, have a very nice pair of sausage nipples.”
Oh, son! Lou would holler within himself, but never out loud. The supercharged atmosphere of one of his teenage boy’s random (but usually accurate) comments spitting itself out into this cruel world disguised as rowdy or rude when in fact it was meant as anything but. Big Onions straight face as the winner of the comment would drop their jaw and quickly attempt to ascertain the situation if they were even remotely aware of autism. Otherwise they’d be angry, go crimson flush, look at Lou and look back at Big Onion, trying to decide who was who and what was what.
Lou would begin the retreat then, gently guiding his son up and away from the table with a gentle touch on his arm. He never chastised the boy in public. And he never allowed anyone to go further than their initial dismay. Once a man had taken real umbrage to being told that “the butt crack sticking out of your pants is making me feel so sad.” He’d tried to approach Big Onion with his fists clenched but Lou had intervened on his son’s behalf. Putting his face deep into the other man’s Budweiser breath at the Chuck E. Cheese over by the animatronic band, Lou had made it clear to the man that Big Onion was innocent because he had no idea that what he’d said was hurtful or dark. Things got testy but the dude backed down and ended up buying Lou a beer after all was said and done.
“Now what though?”
“Now what though?” Big Onion repeated out loud, his voice cracking as he traced his plump fingers over Lou’s wedding band over and over and over again. Hundreds of times. Thousands of times. The red poinsettias behind the coffin. The low hum of the church organ moving everyone along or at least trying to. Viv dabbing her eyes with the used tissues of crusted sadness. Her bawling ripping the throat right out of the funeral parlor. The necessary reactions of the grieving were one thing, but now this was all too much. Big Onion asking so many times this question with no possible answer.
“Now what though?”
“Antonio”, his mother tried to say, but it came out sounding like “Ammonia toes.”
The chipped-tooth raw nerve power lines of absolute pain dangling from of his dad’s body in the box before him at first roused- and then electrocuted- something in Big Onion that no one had ever seen before.
“Now what though? Now what though? Now what though,” a litany of perfectly replicated questions shooting out of the son that rang out in all of their muted agonies to touch the hearts of the people in the line waiting to see the deceased when they realized, after some confusion, that the loud voice demanding the air in the room was that of the dead’s only surviving son beginning to come alive in the face of his unfathomable loss.
His champion was gone. His hero couldn’t save him now. Nothing makes any sense to the lovely mind that struggles. No one else was visible to Big Onion. He only saw his dad now. He leaned in and touched his own forehead to his father’s. His jet black hair brushing the bridge of the dead man’s nose, Big Onion detected the full brush of the Guess 1981 Los Angeles Eau De Toilette Cologne Spray for Men that had been part of the Guess men’s kit that he’d pointed at for his mom to buy at the Rite Aid last year a few weeks before the holidays. Lou had loved the present and had immediately applied a healthy splash of the first one he could manage to open as Big Onion paced the living room floor by the Christmas tree. It had been a connection that could never be broken, Lou thought. It had been the very first time Big Onion had ever given any indication of wanting to give a gift. And it had been for Lou. For Dad.
Someone coughed in the back and then someone else copied that cough as often happens. Coughs answering one another in the harsh wilderness. Coughs on one ridge finding out about coughs on another ridge. The echoes blasted through Big Onion’s brain with the explosive force of firetrucks roaring by. Consumed by disbelief and unable to create language or expression or anything whatsoever that might unlock his heart from within the dark box where someone else had rammed it in, he panicked and lost all feeling in his hands and feet. Then he only smelled his Dad now, Lou’s thick cologne mingling with the tender sweetness of the big Douglas fir all lit up out in the foyer. There was the stench of Camels and Parliaments rising warm out of the relaxed threads of the hard hit jackets of these new arrivals coming in from the cold. There was the smell of his own blood, liverish minerals and popcorn salt, dripping casually from his chapped upper lip onto his probing tongue.
In the world, under a mountain so far away, an entire kingdom of wolves began to stir as the wind carried word of a collapsing lie.
Big Onion, a grown man who often seemed like a child, began to weep. And the whole place began to cry. And then Big Onion began to choke and bawl. And the whole joint began to choke and bawl. And finally Big Onion turned around, unexpectedly, and looked out at the crowd looking up at him, his eyes were over top their heads and his tie was crooked and the clip was half coming loose and he threw his meaty fists up into the air in front of him and then he did it again. And then once more. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again. Everyone was looking at him. His mother was swatching him so closely that she’d stopped hurting for her husband and began hurting for her child.
Big Onion rocked his body this way and that way. He turned back and looked at Lou laying there handsome and pale and still gone from life.
He wiped his running nose with his dark jacket sleeve.
He shifted his weight from one brown winter fur-lined Croc to the other and then back again.
Then he opened his mouth and the room went silent.
Then he screamed to deafen into their faces like Godzilla when his world was on fire and so was his sea.
• • •
This next bit is the entire blog post that I told you about. It appeared on Chris Tissad’s blog, McRib Boy, a few hours after the tragedy at the Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale at that Best Buy.
Long Island Man Changes Humanity Forever
What was supposed to be a celebration of the kickoff of the holiday season ended in tragedy a few hours ago, around 12:11am Black Friday morning, at the Hempstead Turnpike Best Buy. I was there and this is what I saw. At approximately 12:01 am the doors were flung open for a crowd of at least 500 activated holiday shoppers who were gathered for Best Buy’s Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale and almost immediately it became apparent that all law and order had been abandoned. In the ensuing onslaught of retail madness I found myself swept along by a tide of unstoppable, insatiable humanity. Then I watched what happened to a local Long Island man I believed to be named Lou (no last name as of yet), who was apparently trying to get a large-screen TV to the front of the store to purchase.
Said Lou was in the midst of some very chaotic and violent unfoldings all around him when I witnessed (and I know this sounds insane) a bolt of bright greenish gold lightning shoot out of the mouth of a man who had just been kicked by several others as he attempted to hold tight to at least four separate boxes, each containing a hot-listed Ring Video Doorbell 2 ring camera. The obvious lightning (what else could it have been) hit several bystanders who were either fighting over coveted electronic deals or attempting to get out of the store alive with their soon-to-be-purchases. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly depending on what kind of person you are, I did not see anyone attempting to flee the overrun store without at least a few items purchased or just flat out taken. As in looted.
Like I indicated, Lou was struck directly in the chest by the lightning emanating from an injured man’s mouth as wild-ish packs of rogue shoppers were doing battle with one another using broken shelving units and smashed glass and what appeared to be long, hard sound bars (as swords!). That’s the point at which a deep monster-like voice was heard coming over the store’s intercom system. It spoke a foreboding recording loop that I have a recording of on my phone if anyone cares. Here’s what I hear on the recording: “This is the end of what you have each manifested! I am the chosen agent! I will not release my grip until the Christmas spirit is regenerated and renewed! Stand by for course of action!”
It was while that eerie warning was blasting through the store that I saw the lightning emerge from the fellow’s jaws and hit Lou, who was a fairly big guy as far as I could tell. It struck him square in the chest as he was running towards a young mother who was holding a toddler boy in her arms just prior to the lightning strike almost as if he had a premonition of what was about to happen, although again, I know that sounds like total bullshit, but I’m just telling you what I saw. Said Lou reacted to the recording somehow, I just know he did. The lightning thing that would have struck that mother slammed into Lou instead.
He knew what he was doing when he ran towards that mother and her child. He saved them. Like a hero. They need to be interviewed but the last that I saw of them, they were attempting to pay for a deeply- discounted Simplehuman Rectangular Sensor Can trashcan even though they had scorch marks on their clothes from where Lou had taken the hit for them and caught fire briefly. It was almost impossible to get to Said Lou to offer aid because by then total and complete anarchy had unfolded in the store. That said, he appeared to be gone. He was lifted to the top of a stack of Beats headphones no one was buying and his body left there for whoever was going to deal with it later. The local and national news outlets that picked up on this story have, for whatever reason, completely ignored the fantastical components of it including the lightning from a man’s mouth, the apocalyptic loudspeaker loop, and the horrible but heroic death of Said Lou. They have reported on a variety of people injured in the melee but there seems to have been some dire effort to silence anyone who saw what I saw. Doubtless others witnessed what I witnessed! But why are they not saying??!! The media claims Said Lou was crushed under an “over-excited” crowd pouring into the store. But that is not what happened.
More later.
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christissad.
I don’t know why the fuck I bother writing these fucking things when no one ever reads them.
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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.
