Introduction
Sometimes, without realizing it, you look right through a pane of glass.
Right now, there are several all around you, so close you can reach out and touch them, if you knew they were there. But glass is transparent, unless viewed from just the right angle. These panes often go unseen. Invisible. They don’t exist. Without realizing it, you sometimes look straight through the sheen of those around you.
This won’t be one of those times.
Imagine, during a walk in the country, you come upon a tremendous glass pyramid. Its peak is forty feet high, its base massive within a field of alfalfa. How have you not noticed it before? Perhaps you’ve passed it a thousand times but looked right through it. Now, from just the right angle, you see it for the first time.
You approach cautiously. A moat surrounds this pyramid and continues inside, creating a liquid floor. It’s the most serene sea you’ve ever seen. No waves, no unrest. The undisturbed peace of this place calls you inside. You hold your breath, lower yourself into the water, and swim beneath the glass.
With a small ripple, you surface inside.
A wooden platform floats beside you. You climb onto it and the last of your splashes reverberate among glass walls. Standing on the wooden platform, you’re alone with the distant sky, endless horizon, and the sound of your breaths, immense inside the pyramid. A simple, black Corbusier sofa is beside you. Dusk darkens toward night. At your feet rests a Super-8 film projector and several 8mm film reels. You have to wonder, whose pyramid is this? The content of these reels is anyone’s guess. Just to see if it works, you flip the projector’s power switch. It illuminates one side of the darkening pyramid. Tiny lens smudges are gigantic on the pyramid’s wall, and the wall is, by comparison, no bigger than these tiny specks. You grasp one of the film reels, loosen a length of it, and bring a single 8mm frame up to your eyes. The image you squint to see is that of a wooden fort. Flames shoot from its rooftop. Its column of smoke ascends high into the air. This reel, you think, contains the history of a flaming structure.
Sometimes you do see the glass.
Sometimes it’s at just the right angle.
Your focus shifts and the world reveals the shape of something unexpected, right before your eyes. Whose pyramid is this?
You thread the film into the projector, adjust the focus knob, and sit on the wooden dock. The sky fully blackens with night. And the film reel begins.
(Portrait of a Future Architect)
I’m eleven years old, biting a cigar as I speed through the forest on my motorcycle. Its engine roars between my legs. My name is J. Elliot, and at eleven I have two beers in my system, a Swisher Sweet between my teeth, and a rib I assume is broken from a recent fist fight with the Rollins’ twins. I’ve gotten used to black eyes, jammed fingers, and the occasional busted rib. You don’t pamper frivolous injuries like these, even if a ride through the forest shakes a few broken bones. I squint through it. By now, I’ve cracked more than a rib. I’ve cracked a can of beer with my Grammy. I’ve smoked cigars with my mother. And I’ve treated myself to the most self-indulgent crybaby tears you can imagine. But I’m through with those tears. I’m on a powerful bike and my mind is ecstatic for this forest, for the vibration of the tires, for the sound of the engine and the contrast between one and zero.
Whether counting begins with a 1 or 0 makes all the difference in the world.
I’m not sure where I’m speeding to, just an endless pursuit of the something. And so I fly through these woods, cigar smoke perfuming the air in my wake. I’ve yet to meet my father, I only know he’s in prison and so far no one’s talking about it. I squint through the wind and cigar smoke and my youthful unknowns, hair blowing as I aim myself between hulking trees. By eleven, I have a working knowledge of curse words to rival the dirtiest linguist, thanks to Grammy. By now, my confidence is gaining. The tears of self-pity are drying. Trees whoosh by, my cigar glows. This was before I went to live with my other grandmother, a world-famous psychic. This was before I marched with the armed services and even before, as a boy, I built my first architectural construction: a sprawling fort wherein the world presented itself to me in ways that still capture my imagination. This wild and buzzed blast through the forest was before everything went up in flames.
I’m inquisitive at 11. Philosophies rush my mind faster than my Yamaha through this forest. Mine is a brain restless with questions, a body broken and bruised, and a bike ready to crash.
I don’t know why the bike flipped. I’m not sure why it smashed into a tree, twisted and spun midair, and came down on top of me. I know my chin connected with the crank case and when I hit the ground, I was out cold.
I’m tempted to begin my story here, lying on the forest floor, unconscious as the sun buries itself and nightfall cues the locusts; a boy of eleven, hurt and hungover and alone in the woods. That’s a tempting start. But I think my story begins earlier. I think there were several reasons to let it all burn, and some of them go way, way back.
What better tribute to something you love than watching it go up in flames?
If this memoir is my tribute, it will just have to burn. Every single embarrassing line of it, every absurd detail, burn as it pours out and perhaps it only extinguishes once it is complete. And so freeze your image of me, losing control of my motorcycle, fear upon my face, cigar spinning out from my open mouth. We can’t start from here. So hold it like a preview picture-in-picture in the television of your mind. Put it in the upper right corner. To trace it all back, I have to introduce myself earlier. Maybe at six drinking beer with Grammy, maybe earlier, to four years old, playing with my seat buckle in a car driven by my mom. That’s when I fell out from the youthful simplicity of her moving sedan and into a complex world of contradictions and philosophy. Or further yet, let’s rewind through the scene of my birth. My delivery works in reverse, my head sinks into my mother’s vaginal cavity, my scalp disappears. Inside, I shrink into a fetus while her belly begins to flatten in time-lapse photography.
Stop here.
Just before my birth, my teenage parents hold hands on stage. Here is our starting point. They’ve just been crowned Homecoming King and Queen. Beneath the ceremonial archway, my mother sparkles in an evening gown. My father stands awkwardly before the entire school, flecks of disco light crawling him. There is thunderous applause. Their hands squeeze. Inside the slight pouch of mom’s abdomen, I’m the size of their joined hands, arched in fetal position. You might think the crowd’s applause would be muffled through amniotic fluid, but through the red walls of this womb, beyond its tiny vascular webs and pulses of heartbeat, I hear them cheer. My mother and father lift their unified hands, which embolden the applause, make the crowd roar even louder in celebration of these soon-to-be teenaged parents.
Do you still have that image of me smashing against a tree in the forest? That preview window in the upper right corner of your mind?
Then, holding it there, I propose a toast.
Raise your book, or your glass, or your eyebrows if you question my starting point.
Cheers, to beginning with zero.
