Riddle, on the road to find his dad

Across from me on the ferry is a teenager with a mohawk and two silver earrings on his left, heavy and pendulous like you'd expect to see on kids in the eighties. Dressed in gray sweats, he carries a bedroll tied tight with a blue-green bandanna. He tells me to call him Riddle--says this is what everybody calls him.

The day before, his dad called him from a payphone in Arcata, California--he'd just been released from jail. Riddle took off right then, hitching down from Silverdale to Bremerton, now taking the ferry into Seattle. It's eight in the evening, and due to a heavy storm the sky is already dark. He'll sleep tonight in a spot the street kids called The Stage--a concrete dais near Westlake Mall where the shopkeepers let folks sleep in their doorways till morning. When he rises he will head on south to Arcata to seek his dad out.

His dad had been jailed for attempted murder, second degree; he was apparently defending his son against an attacker. At the time, Riddle wore Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch; now he wears his hair like his father does. Riddle's dad beat his son's assailant down but didn't stop once he'd won; he picked up a rock and kept hitting. Riddle says that this was why the cops had arrested him; had he not picked up the rock, they would have called it even.

Riddle's dad is almost 70--it takes Riddle a minute to get the math right in order to figure out when his dad had him (when he was over 50). Riddle says he's got seven brothers and three sisters; one of them, his closest younger, was killed driving drunk. It's his bandanna Riddle now wraps around his bedroll. His youngest is gone; Riddle put him in the hospital on what he tells me was his last drinking binge. His brother stopped talking to him, then disappeared soon after. He says he gets aggressive when he drinks, and this is like his dad, too.

He borrows my keys to jimmy the safety off of his lighter.

There is so much more he tells me: Riddle's young daughter lives in Arcata, but he's not allowed to see her; the girl's mother slapped her baby, then blamed the hit on him, he says, so he got the restraining order. He's seriously considering kidnapping the girl, he says, but he knows too that her life will be better with her mom--"because she's a, what do you call it? A gold digger." Her daughter's in a good house in Arcata now, and if Riddle finds his dad, the two of them can squat together in Humboldt County and keep an eye on the young girl. Then, after his dad's probation is up in two years, Riddle and his dad will go traveling, and Riddle will stay with his dad till he buries him.

He says he wishes he could kill his daughter's mom, and he's not proud of this. Regardless, Riddle says he'd take a bullet for any female, "beautiful or ugly." He attributes this to the pain and the duress of childbirth; he says that men owe their lives to women, so men must be willing to offer those lives back up. He also tells me that men have the same parts as women, just reversed--men's went out and women's went in. This means, he says, that men can get pregnant; that we have ovaries too, but we would never inject them with sperm because we cannot face the pain of labor.

Riddle tells me he can barely spell, that he is dyslexic and he has hit his head too many times. He's eating a snickerdoodle and drinking an energy drink (Rockstar, I think--whichever is sold on the ferries) and he says it's the first food he's had in two days. He's got fourteen dollars and is trying to decide between a new pair of shoes and a better jacket. The soles of his shoes have worn through and the sweats he's wearing are still soaked with water from his walk to the boat. He's fresh out of jail himself, he says, wearing the sweats he wore in, the same sweats they returned to him two years later on his way out.

Heading off the boat, he wishes me a safe journey to wherever it is that I'm going. I, too, am soaked--the rain fell more heavily than expected and more is coming--I tell him I'm just going home. It's not something I need to have emphasized. I leave him at the footbridge, he choosing now between the Stage for the night and the possibility of a bus down to Tacoma. He has new energy from the sugar and the caffeine, and Tacoma is one hour closer to Arcata, and somewhere down in Arcata is a payphone where his dad stood, newly free, just a day before.

Reflection on a soldier in a pile of bones

This pic from a Russian gallery called "Retrospektiva" caught my eye yesterday: a soldier crouches over a pile of bones--mostly skulls--all bleached white. Holding up two femurs and a skull (and using his fingers and knee to hold the jaw in place), he fashions a skull-and-crossbones on his leg. The expression on his face, to my eyes, is inscrutable--parodying savagery or menace, perhaps, or maybe with his mouth open in imitation of the skull and jaw he holds.

It's the nonchalance of his stance over the skulls that shocks me, and the symbol he makes (whether it traces back to the pirate insignia or the symbol for poison isn't clear) is too literal a take on something that, at least here and now, has fallen to the innocent savagery of childhood--you build pirate ships out of Legos, you see the skull-and-crossbones on old bottles in cartoons. You certainly don't see the emblem built out of actual bones.

This is, of course, the crux of the image's intended humor, but the effect instead hits like terror. It reminds me of the difference between old fairy tales and their Disney counterparts--and, though I can't be sure the picture itself is Russian (also in the same gallery--shots from Lewis Hine and day-in-the-life pictures from Nazi Germany) the banality with which the soldier crouches in the bones and raises them up definitely feels so. Even the inclusion of Nazi shots in the image stock--one is of a women's hocky team, all proudly displaying the swastikas on their sweaters--speaks of a comfort with horror that we here don't (can't yet) share.

This seems contradictory, considering our comfort with other types of violence. We love the bravado of it. We love guns, we love beef. All that shit. But something here pushes beyond an American sense of spectacular violence. Something here is too banal, really--too everyday, too easy. And in this, maybe, is its horror.