Six Easy Pieces, by Pauls Toutonghi
SIX EASY PIECES
1.
When I was eight years old my mother gave me The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. She stacked them next to my bed one night—all eighteen dark blue volumes.
“It might be a little above your age level,” she said. “But you’ll grow into it.” She kissed me on the forehead. “I like Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, especially,” she added.
2.
We’d been driving around France in a rented Ford Fiesta and in Bordeaux some kids threw a brick through the back window of the car while we were sleeping in a cheap motel. My parents were both public high school teachers and it was their sabbatical year from teaching. We patched the window with duct tape and cardboard and kept driving around the Loire River Valley. I saw a lot of chateaus. I pretended I had a bladder infection and we’d stop the car four times a day and I’d go into the French gas station restrooms and masturbate into wet paper towels.
But also—I became self-aware in the Louvre, in Paris, on March 12, 1990. Fuck off if you don’t believe me. I was thirteen years old. It happened on that main staircase, the one with the long flat steps and there on the landing is the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It was luminous in the dusky light of the museum and the wings seemed ready to pull it up and through the roof—despite the fact that were made of rough-textured marble.
I looked up at it and I started sobbing.
3.
“He’s hysterical,” my father said. He was a psychologist.
4.
(Warm water.)
5.
The story goes like this: My grandfather bought the first Model T Ford in Egypt. He found a driver—not easy to do in 1926—and started traveling around the country. They were driving in Upper Egypt and the car hit a cow that had wandered into the road. It killed the cow. What would they do? How would they punish this transgression? There were no laws—no path for appeasement of the poor farmer.
So, they decided on something simple: They would put the car in jail. And they did. For a month.
6.
That story was true. Except for one thing. It was a boy, not a cow. The car struck and killed a boy. The punishment, however, was the same.
* * *
PAULS TOUTONGHI is the author of the novel, Evel Knievel Days, which will be published by Random House in July, 2012.
His first novel, Red Weather, was published by Random House in 2006.
Find more at Pauls Toutonghi, the official site.
Pauls Toutonghi joined us in February for Small Doggies Reading Series PDX006.
This piece was originally published in the Small Doggies Reading Series Chapbook #1, available for sale and chock full of other amazing pieces by each author from Reading Series performances 1 - 6.