Crisco and Ketchup

Creative nonfiction
by Noah C. Renn

It's the morning again, and I'm sitting here asking myself: What is it about mornings that make them so confusing? Maybe it's because mornings are the time when memories and dreams are indistinguishable. Maybe it's because I like the beginning of things better than the end of them. Maybe it's because I see each day as a universe and each morning as a big-bang, or something cheesy like that. Maybe it's because mornings are the most sober part of my day. Whatever it is, in the mornings, I tend to consider the little, invisible sequences that occur, and dematerialize, and then occur again. Take for instance, how the simple experience of waking up on the floor in my room can become an enlightening event.

The first thing I do is feel. I feel the fibers of the carpet scraping against my cheek. They feel like sandpaper. I think about each fiber as a little blade cutting away at the skin cells on my cheek. I feel my keys in my front pocket. Smashed between the floor and my leg, they gouge into my thigh. I picture the keys, round and worn out, trying to pierce the fabric, damaging the tiny square pattern in thread. I feel the heat of the morning sun radiating through my window. I perceive the energy traveling from the core of the sun through space, the atmosphere, the glass in my window, and eventually to the dehydrated body lying on my floor. I feel the cold puddle of drool I've moved my face into to avoid harsh light. I feel my head pounding. Like my pulse is lifting my head off the floor. I feel the blood engorge, and then empty the veins in my temple.

As far as mornings go, I could take forever to describe how it is for me to wake up on the floor after a weekend of alcohol and drug use, and how many small things are revealed to me when I wake up with such a novel view, but it would be more effective to describe one particular morning and how the revelations of that day continue to repeat themselves in the course of my daily life.

Then I smell. I smell the alcohol seeping from my body. The vapors steaming out of my pores like smoke from industrial smokestacks I think about each pore as a tiny factory pumping out whatever poison I chose to process the night before. I smell smoke. I smell like an ashtray. I am an ashtray. I picture the clouds of minute, solid particles blown into the air, and then settling onto my clothes, and into my hair and lungs.

Then I smell my own breath, the putrid scent of alcoholic jowls. I envision bacteria starting out as one cell nibbling on partially digested cow parts lodged between molars, and then dividing exponentially until hoards of gas-producing populations cover the entire landscape of my tongue. Then I smell my self. I realize my scent is the strongest of the three. It reminds me of when I was in eighth grade and was the only boy in gym class who didn't have deodorant. It also reminds me to take a shower.

So, after taking in the magnitude of my stench, I shower. In the shower, I realize that I am going camping today. (Mornings can also be useful in revealing run-of-the-mill things, like plans to go camping.) Before I know it, I'm packed up, and three of my buddies and I are on the road. That's when I start to hear things.

I hear music playing. I hear guitars and drums and harmonicas. I hear Bob Dylan's voice asking how many roads a man must walk down before he's called a man. I hear the road. Well, not the road, but the tires on the road. I can hear each little section of tread hit the asphalt at seventy-five miles an hour, and then I hear them peel away, leaving a bit of themselves behind. I think about the axles, and the transmission, and the engine. I think about how gasoline swirls with oxygen and how electric pulses ignite the two in a fiery blaze. And how, by controlling this explosion, we can haul ass across the face of the earth. Then I think about how I'm able to hear all this. How in my ear, tiny bones tap a thin layer of tissue packed with even tinier nerve endings, and that translates into the sound of a camping trip. Then I hear a snapping plastic sound. It snaps quickly and stops, and I know it's not morning anymore because it was the cap of a whiskey bottle and it's being passed around the car.

So if it's not morning, I think, how come I'm still seeing everything this way? Seeing life broken down into little machines, little worlds of complexity. Thoughts spin my head until I fall out of the window, wake up in the car, and fall back out again. I see cycles. Cyclical patterns in everything. Then I have a disturbing vision. I see a leg, a knee with an exploded thigh muscle. I see meat. White human meat, meat drenched in red. Cauliflower and Kool Aid. Crisco and ketchup. I'm going to vomit. I pass out.

We arrive at the campsite, and someone fires sixteen shots from their pistol. I feel the weapon's concussion. I hear the gunpowder explode. I smell the exhaust of the controlled explosions. The bottle of whiskey becomes a target, and the sun from my bedroom seems to have followed me into the mountains, reappearing as the fire.

Then I taste. I taste grass. The grass a cow ate as it grew and developed. I taste the sun. I taste its energy in the cow's flesh. I think about how the sun put itself into the grass, and how the cow put the grass into itself, and how we cook the meat over the fire and flame is just a remnant of the sun, and how we put the meat into our selves. It's goddamn night time, and I can't shake the vision, this magnified view of everything I do, this complicated, repetitive conception of life. I'm full of meat. My ears ring of gunshot reverberation. Someone lights a joint, and the flame consumes the weed and the paper. We inhale and exhale and pass it back and forth. I picture the weed growing under the sun. And then I see the plants that died and decomposed and sank into the ground and turned into the oil that became the butane that fuels the lighter to light the joint. It reminds me of when I learned about fossil fuels in science class and fell asleep during the lesson. It also reminds me to fall asleep.

As far as passing out goes, I could spend all day trying to remember the times I've lost consciousness and regained it in a situation so surreal, and how those situations force upon me an urge to analyze and over-consider, but it would be more effective for me to describe one regaining of consciousness and how that particular instance may have turned my view of life into a tragic ball of frailty, or something cheesy like that.

I wake up on the ground. It's the morning again. I know the cold soil and the dirty leaves. I see the rock beneath me breaking down. As rain and fertilizer run off, and our piss fills the stream, and the stream erodes the rock into sand, and the sand becomes the beach. Then I hear engines revving and my name being called. I picture the air in my friends' lungs being squeezed between their flexing vocal cords. And how the vocal cords resemble two little lips, screaming the same way their real lips scream. I picture how the moisture in their breath hits cold morning air, appears like a ghost and fades away. Why are they looking for me? I'm right here, aren't I? I hear dirt bikes and four-wheelers and my name being called.

Then I see. I see my leg, but it's not my leg, it's something else. It's white, not skin-colored white, but bright white. And red. Red like paint on red wagons and sports cars. I see the fatty tissue, shiny and gelatinous, and then I see the blood, flowing and flowing. I see how the heart works, how it opens and closes. I see inside my brain; how tiny sparks jump synaptic spaces to send messages to organs to produce white blood cells and platelets and to communicate messages of pain and to finally, after two days of unconsciousness, wake me up.

While I am in the hospital, I am told I got in a dirt bike accident and one of the metal foot pegs jammed through my thigh, tearing a V-shaped chunk of flesh away from my leg. The doctor tells me they had to do reconstructive surgery and that I would be in a lot of pain. Then he puts a needle in my arm and tells me that I'm going to go to sleep. I think about how the drug travels through the vein into my heart and the rest of my body. I feel the muscles in my eyelids relax and watch them slowly shade me from the harsh hospital lights.

It's morning again. I wake up on my floor. Stiff fibers scrape my cheek. My breath stinks. I stink. I think about my leg. I feel my leg. There's nothing wrong with it.

No bandages, no wounds, only the uncomfortable feeling of sleeping on my keys. I feel hung over. I feel sick. I'm going to vomit. I let loose. Everything inside me comes out on my floor. I see my puke. It's white and red. It looks like spaghetti sauce and ricotta, or mozzarella, or something cheesy like that. I hear a car horn honking in the driveway. It's my friends. I realize I'm going camping today.

Copyright 2007 by Noah C. Renn