A Pig in the Woods and Other Outcomes
Welcome, new subscribers and thank you! This is a monthly installment from Walking the East Coast, a serialized memoir. Here’s the PREVIOUS CHAPTER. Or if you wanna, start from THE BEGINNING.
“A hog?” He was incredulous. “What’s a pig doin’ in the woods?”
I laughed. “A hawk,” I said, like it rhymed with lock. My mind worked the difference. It was rounder, the vowel in my hog or schnogg, softer. “You know.” I held out my arms, soaring. “A bird of prey.” My hands snapped into talons, and I made like I’d dive toward him across the coffee table between us.
From the floor where he sat cross-legged, he surrendered an open palm face up, a freshly packed one-hitter lying in it. My two clawed digits morphed into fingers to accept the offering. “It’s /haw-uk/,” he said.
Leaning back into the couch, I took a slow pull, contemplated, tried but failed to come up with anything that rhymed with his two syllables to my one. The first was long, and to silently emulate it, I pressed the corners of my lips in like I would to say boy or coy. The second was crisp, lightning quick, almost inaudible, glued to the /k/ at the end.
“Say it,” Mike D urged.
I blew out a steady stream and then, eyes on his, slow-exaggerated my attempt. “Hawww-uk.”
We both shook with mirth.
“What’s that?” He pointed to a drawer on a piece of furniture that took up most of the wall of his one-room living space.
“A dresser.” I smirked.
Touché, said his eyes. “At least you didn’t say bureau.” I dug the ya in the first syllable. “It’s such an old lady word.”
“I thought about saying bureau,” I told him because I had.
He lit a smoke, rose to his feet, and paced to the window overlooking the front lot, exhaling toward the stars.
On a boxy TV set with antennae too short for its fat wooden head, Jesus and Satan faced off in boxing gloves. I’d seen the episode, so I knew Satan’s son, Damien, had been attending South Park Elementary. At the end of the match, having taken punch after punch on a fresh cheek, Jesus assumed his human side to deliver his first light jab, and his far larger opponent took a dive. Genius, I thought of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show’s creators, and reached out to catch a thought gliding along a path in my mind.
I seemed to have pinned it, at least till the next day, when I jotted a note in my log: “Commentary on humanity’s true strength as paradox? That our utter frailty wins out because it’s we humans who decide, after all, the outcome?”
What did I mean then? I’d been raised with a story about outcomes. Stay on this path, lined with a rod to cling to so you don’t even need to see. Net unending golden paradise. Step off. Break your parents’ hearts.
I was trying out a theory about how what came next would be whatever we each believed would come; let the gods do what they will. So, maybe I just meant, Aha!
I’d learned, too, that loss could sucker punch. You could, one moment, be waiting for a friend under a wink of moon on a cedar porch so you could drive together to the first gig of her new husband’s band. Then the next, you could be tearing up the country road she’d failed to emerge from, your gut hissing in your ear, just in time to watch an EMT close the door on an ambulance and turn to tell you where she’d be life-flighted to from a nearby field.
I was feeling bitter toward myself over my gratitude that her death had propelled me to veer once more, away from my marriage this time. What kind of person, I was asking myself, makes meaning from someone else’s tragedy—much less the tragedy of someone who, having seen the weight of your heart, had wordlessly taken a turn holding it? So, maybe I was looking, too, to soothe away the guilt that clung to my insistence on making my own why.
Stubbing his cigarette in a makeshift ashtray made of the bottom of a thick plastic juice bottle, Mike D returned to his perch on the floor.
“I liked meeting your family,” I told him, tapping out the one-hitter and passing it, enjoying the rosiness that rose in his apple cheeks.
“That’s one thing I’m glad about,” he said like a secret. “I don’t know too many people who know anything about their heritage. But I know mine.”
He and his sister had gone to Greek school. They’d been to the islands more times than he could count. At dinner earlier, I’d noticed both he and his sister said Ma the way you unwrap crystalware or hold a nugget of bread passed on a silver tray between your tongue and the roof of your mouth.
Not quite forty years earlier, Mike D’s dad had disembarked from a merchant ship that docked in Newark and stayed when it set sail a couple hours later. In the pizza parlor where he’d soon found employment, he’d found Gigi, too. Mike’s ma was seventeen then, though she’d fibbed and said she was eighteen. From day one, they’d been a pair. Mike’s brows bounced as he dished family lore—told how Gigi’s cousin, who worked at the pizza place, too, hadn’t cared back then for the suave Greek fresh off the boat, how she’d even once called immigration on him, and the clever dodging that had ensued.
Mike had learned pizza early. At 14, he’d worked in his dad’s pizza place. Customers would bring their kids to see him through the window in the wall that separated the seating from the kitchen, where, next to the hot ovens, he’d toss the dough high into the air.
“I was like a sideshow.” He lobbed an imaginary ball of dough with one hand; caught it behind his back with the other; and, bringing it round with a grin, offered me the reloaded one-hitter on the pie dish of his palm.
“I’m good.” I leaned back into the couch cushion.
Drop me back in that moment now, and I’d paint Mike D a scene in return: A young Sicilian steps off a boat onto Ellis Island. He spots a woman. She’s Gigi’s age when she met her swarthy Greek, fleeing pogroms in Odessa, and also traveling alone. She looks up. In a chance lock of gazes, generations that would lead to me are formed. But back on that couch, I didn’t have the brushes, only facts. It was there, on New Jersey soil, that my great-grandparents had made a life together—until he died in the Great Influenza Epidemic when their youngest of three, my grandfather, was a baby. But, while months later on a visit to Ellis, I’d scour records for their names, I hadn’t yet thought what it must have been like to come together—with their only shared tongue being an emptiness where home had been. So, maybe I mentioned a detail or two. Maybe I didn’t.
“We need music,” one of us said.
Mike D was near the dresser flipping through albums in a milk crate when a pause in the flutter of his hands made me look his way. Hands still, he went for it. “Did you learn ebonics in that class?” He was referring to the linguistics class from my final year of college I’d told him about. He drew out the e and enunciated each consonant so the soft b and the hissing s popped like the k.
“We talked about it.” I didn’t tell him my instructor had called it AAVE and tried not to act uncomfortable discussing it.
“I can talk like that.” His talk was like hawk, and I realized what it rhymed with—you rock. His brows pulled close, a collision of pride and shyness. “I spent a lot of time in the Bronx. Even when my parents moved here, I was always in the city or in Newark on the weekends. But I gotta be careful. That stuff slips in, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked softly.
“It’s just that.” He looked over at me. “I don’t want to say this wrong. It makes people look at you a certain way—like you’re uneducated.”
“But that’s just a stereotype,” I quipped, instead of listening.
“I know,” he said. “But, like, my boss—he thinks I’m a fuckin’ hoodlum.”
On his first day at the office, he’d responded to, “What are you doing later?” with, “Goin’ over to my boy’s to play some ball.” Someone had asked how old his son was. “My son?” he said now. “I’m thinkin’, Where in the hell did you get the idea of a kid from?”
To this day, it’s a joke that hangs on the tongues of his coworkers like a ritual, each taking turns asking whether he’s “hangin’ with the boys” later.
“What else am I gonna say?” he asked.
“Right?!” I agreed.
“No really. How would they say it?”
Do you hope like I do that the silence between us just then spoke what we didn’t know how to say? God, we humans are tiresomely awful at our endless need to apply meaning and make categories. Right?! I see you. I see you.
After a moment, I sat up straight. “I know.” I held my nose in the air. “I will be retiring to the abode of my adult male friend to participate in an exhibition my lessers refer to as ‘hoops.’”
His hands returned to their flight. “I know what we gotta hear.” He pulled a record from the cover, set it on the player atop the dresser, dropped the tonearm into place, and closed his eyes as the opening riff of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead,” the instrumental version, bounced into the room.
We’d started the evening in his local bar. By way of introduction, he’d thrown a meaty arm around the slightly stooped shoulders of a woman half a foot shorter than him. “Ma, meet Traveler.” And then, “I don’t get to see you enough, Ma.” He’d touched his temple gently against hers, adding with a wink, “You bring family together, Traveler.”
A younger cutout of the woman rolled eyes that shined like her brother’s as she joined us. “We see each other plenty.” She held her hand out to me. “Nice to meet you.”
Don’t you wish that my logs contained the details of our dinner conversation? I’ll share what I see emerging from the kaleidoscope of my memory if I narrow my focus: We four tuck into a booth, red and mustard naugahyde, over plates dripping spaghetti and meatballs. We lean in, our faces and voices narrowing the gap between us and a pitcher filled with liquid amber in the center of the table as the night moves on. One of the two women brings the first round of Patrón, setting a nest of four silver snifters next to the pitcher. I knew with our first toast I needn’t have paid for a night at the resort next to Mike D’s apartment—that I’d end up taking him up on the offer of a couch to sleep on.
It’s not till sharing this with you that I’ll see there may have been a fresh loss among them, clinging to the shoulders of the matriarch.
Another moment comes forefront—Gigi and I meeting at the bar, in my attempt to beat her to getting the next Patrón round. She pulls me in with her eyes, so our conversation is a huddle unmarred by patrons jostling around us. She admires what I’m doing, she tells me. But she worries. Do I know how to take care of myself—a woman out there alone?
Meeting her gaze, I must have seen calculations—the ones I hadn’t had to make, those I had, and those I was still learning to figure. “Yeah,” I probably said at last. “I do.”
“I love you, Ma,” Mike had called when the two women left, a third pitcher still half full.
It had remained so when one or the other of us said, “Let’s get outta here,” and we’d strolled in the moonlight to his apartment.
Back at the window with another smoke, three songs into Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic, Mike D closed his eyes. “Isn’t soul the best kind of music?” He put his hand on his heart. “It hits you here.”
I don’t know what to say now about frailty as strength. I only see that, hand on her own chest, matching heartbeats with a fellow seeker, awash in rhythm, that younger woman who was/is me wasn’t, for that moment, worrying whether or what she was moving away from or toward. She was learning then—as she was while camping with bears and ants in a corner of an ancient forest—that she and he and the hawk were each led by the now in their bellies. They would spread and fold their wings again and agin until they lay still to feed what comes next. And that was enough.
Mike D motioned with his head toward the resort a block or so up the road and blew out a smoky chuckle. “You really gonna stay at that crazy place?”
I nodded. “Tomorrow.”
“You’re far-out, Traveler,” he said.
“You, too,” I said.
NEXT CHAPTER … Coming soon
Thank you all for reading and subscribing. You make my heart happy.
A shoutout to paid subscribers. Thank you! You’re keeping this desk rolling. You’re changing my writing life. You’re voting for the Rolling Desk and the 700+ rolling here together to grow. You’re giving monetary value to the hours of work that go into this project.
You can subscribe for as short a period as a month and unsubscribe at any time. It’s part of the churn and why new paid subscribers are so important. Right now, you can upgrade to a paid subscription at a monthly rate that’s less than a latte or an annual rate the cost of a hardcover book. I’ll send you a new piece each week. Along with monthly chapters of this memoir, you’ll get stories of the way we show up for each other, access to a thread where we ask for what we need from fellow travelers, and introductions to awesome people.
Paid subscribers have access at no additional cost to workshops on what I’ve learned about how we can transform our own writing from draft to polished vision over two decades of editing other authors’ hearts work.
If you can, please upgrade to a paid subscription.
I feel like I've just paged through a photo album, only the pictures were moving - the rush down the lane to the ambulance; the huddle around the coffee table, in the red and mustard booth, at the bar; the Greek boy flipping pizza dough in the air. Great post, Holly!
This chapter really stays with me Holly. The Bruegel painting is such a perfect visualization of your young self trying to understand her own agency in a fragile existence, how one person can carry on with dreams while others nearby drown and suffer. Interesting to read too that your parents did not want you to stray from “the path” and yet you chose to anyway. Even as a young woman, I detect a philosopher’s heart!