Vikings by Jack Hitt
Since I am speaking on the record here, let me clarify a common misunderstanding. I was not the class clown back in school. That was a guy named Tim Trouche. I was merely the auxiliary clown, clown backup—class clown fils to Tim's class clown père.Not that we didn't collaborate. Our lifelong friendship was practically a sideshow to our regular huddles on matters of technique. By third grade, we had mastered most of our face work—making nasty lips with our tongues, the inverted eyelids, the ventriloquist's whistle. By fifth grade, our imitations of Mr. White and Mrs. Newton had us in frequent detention. And we had developed a symphony of fake farts, starting with the volcanic armpit blaster and working through the lesser notes—the sneaker skidded on linoleum, the knee-joint thunderclap, the two-handed flatus, and the rare one-handed poot.
By middle school, Tim had progressed into a cunning wit that, looking back on it now, was practically anthropological in importance. His jokes were not just funny but, like some medieval rhapsode, doubled as tribal messages.
We had a phys. ed. coach back then named Ed Fisher. Friendly guy, very friendly. This was in the 1970s when people didn't talk about things, so Fisher effortlessly trawled through the ranks of the 13- and 14-year-old boys, unnoticed, until the 1990s when the culture changed, the lawsuits began, and he received a life sentence. Back in 1973, though, much of my class was spared, I think, because Tim was always working the locker room with jokes like:
“Coach Fisher, I hurt my shoulder on the field”
“Well, then, son, drop your pants and let's have a look.”
Tim grew up in one of those massive southern homes you see photographed in pictures of historic Charleston, South Carolina. Big verandas stacked all the way up the side, and breezes playing throughout every room.
Every third floor board in the house creaked and I still know each one. When sneaking out at night, we used to be able to hopscotch down the steps without a sound. But that November in 1979, I didn't bother. The floor boards moaned as I ascended into the breezeless living room, made inert by so large a crowd. I hugged Mrs. Trouche and she invited me to sit on a stool, one of the last places left. I didn't say anything; didn't have to. Her 22-year-old son, my best friend, was dead of cancer.
Now, I know what you're thinking: dead friend, not the best setup for comedy or any kind of story that you might want to hear, but this is what you have to know: death and I go way, way back, and he's always been curiously kind to me in these situations.
I was still hiding out on my stool, lost in that bubble of stunned grief when I became aware of the couple on the love seat to my right, talking. To me.
He was a massively obese guy with a mouth of many fleshly, moving parts. His head, bald and lumpy, was situated above a trunk so barrel-chested his arms hovered out to the sides, nowhere else to go.
He chomped at his words, damply.
“It's a terrible thing that happened to Tim, such a shame,” said the man's fearful lips. “But it coulda been worse!”
His tiny slim wife appeared lodged in the crack of his armpit, in an R. Crumb kind of way. She said, brightly “Yes, it could have been worse.”
“Out where we live,” he continued, “a teenage couple came speeding down our road at 60 miles per hour and hit—smack—into a live oak tree.”
“Killed them instantly,” said the sing-song voice from inside the armpit. “In so many ways it was a blessing.”
Death makes everybody uncomfortable, granted, but does “it coulda been worse” really work here, at this moment? But my interior monologue on grief logic is interrupted by Mr. Potato Head, who apparently is not finished.
“They flew through the windshield and went face first into the tree,” he noted.
“A blessing in so many ways,” chirped his armpit.
“I had seen these kids around the neighborhood,” he went on. “But I couldn't recognize them. Can you imagine?”
My imagination didn't stand a chance.
“Pulp,” he added.
Mrs. Trouche asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee, and when I said yes, she seemed to leave in a sprint. There were a dozen Newsweek and Life magazines on a coffee table. I decided I would return to my bubble and make sure their edges all lined up at the bottom.
Like I say, I'm not normally uncomfortable around death. Let me rephrase that. Normally, I'm very comfortable around death. I'm the fifth child and what used to be called a surprise, and from the moment I can remember, everybody around me was pretty old and they were dropping all the time.
Wailing widows and swooning relatives were seasonal festivities for me, occasions for all kinds of encounters and wonderment. Lots of dead people seemed to like me. Like the little boy in “The Sixth Sense,” I too saw dead people when I was a little kid. Real ones, usually. By the time I was 10 I had found two corpses on my own.
The first dead person I ever found was a drunk who used to sleep next to an ice house down the street from me. I was peddling my way to church around 8 o'clock one Sunday morning and there he was, lying on his back beside the little building, waving to me. I waved back and he waved some more. In fact, he just kept waving. Waving and waving. Until I realized he was not waving. His arm was just up in the air, permanent-like.
Down the street I found a guy tinkering in his garage. He called the cops. Years later I majored in Latin but that morning I learned my first words.
Rigor mortis.
The other person I found was an old woman whom I knew pretty well. Every Saturday, when Tim and I were around seven or eight years old, we would circle our block and knock on the doors of old people. We would talk to them for a while or maybe tell a funny story and then expect a piece of candy. One of the regulars on that route, who lived right on the corner of Rutledge and Tradd, was always good for some butterscotch.
When I rang her bell, though, I looked through the screen door and saw that she had her face in a plate of grits at the breakfast table. I ran home and told my dad. He called the cops. After we broke in and the ambulance guys took her away, I noticed the glass bowl of candy she kept by the door for our regular visits. It was full.
I asked my father if Tim and I could take a piece and he said no. So we peppered him with some kid logic, machine-gun style.
“She would have given me a piece had she lived through breakfast,” I ventured. Dad looked at me, alarmed.
“No,” he said.
“It's not like she's gonna miss the candy,” Tim added. Dad seemed impervious to our common sense.
“No,” he said.
“Does she even legally own the candy anymore?” I commented.
“No,” he said.
“Our visits made her so happy,' Tim observed.
“No,” he said.
“Since she would have given us each a butterscotch, aren't two of those pieces of candy technically ours
anyway?” I remarked.
“No,” he said.
My father mussed Tim's red hair and then mine. I like to think he admired our youthful exuberance, although he might have been probing for the 666 birthmark.
And those are just the bodies. Long before “Harold and Maude,” I loved funerals. My family didn't come together for full reunions that often. But at funerals they did.
Before that, though, Mom thought the final sick days of some ailing relative were too depressing for my budding sensibilities. So, she'd send me off to “stay with cousins”—typically folks wealthier than us with big amazing houses. Then afterward, I'd return to two days of family parties. So, the sequence was fun vacation followed by fun reunion. Pretty soon, I came to look forward to news that Aunt Agnes wasn't feeling so well.
One summer morning, when I was 11, my older brother and three sisters flew in from all over the country and I learned that my father wasn't feeling so well. A few days later I was sleeping in a cousin's fancy house under a big fluffy comforter.
Alex and I didn't hang out that often. We had gone deep sea fishing a couple of times. He had a big motorboat and back then, I really loved to waterski.
Alex was two or three years older than me, and one night we each got into our single side-by-side beds and I noticed he was doing something under the covers.
“Whatcha doing over there?” I asked him.
“This,” he said, and he flung back the covers to show me in exact detail what it was he was doing. He told me I should try to do this myself. He said it was really easy to do—indeed the hydraulics were fairly simple—and that it was better than anything I could imagine—even Christmas, even waterskiing.
The next day my father died. Love and death, right? You probably had to go to college and read a French novel to learn just how entwined those two are. In some twisted way, I've had a sense of it since I mastered the two-wheeler. Mom decided it might be best if I just stayed at my cousin's straight through the funeral. It's a southern thing, trust me on this, but on some level my mom thought that the less I confronted the brutal truth of his death, the less I might notice that dad wasn't around so much anymore. Two days later Bobby Kennedy was murdered and I remember feeling that I now had the whole world for company.
What I really had was Tim. He was right there with me all that summer of 1968. He came by the house a lot. He had been reading about Vikings and he told me that Vikings didn't care about death. They laughed at death, he said. In ancient Viking culture, he told me, the true mark of the hero was to confront death and laugh. If you got fatally stabbed with a knife and you could act like nothing was happening, that was good. Or, better, if you were gutted by another Norseman's disemboweling spear, and then could get off some smart quip suggesting that what was happening was like nicking your finger on the horn of your helmet, then that was the height of Viking cool.
I didn't know a lot about Vikings, even though Tim insisted that all redheads like us were Vikings. We read all those Viking myths and learned a lot about Norse valor. Somewhere in that summer, I finally worked up the nerve to tell him I had learned some very important news at my cousin's. More important than Vikings. No kidding, I told him, this was more important than waterskiing. After that, Tim and I didn't talk about Vikings again for a long, long time.
A decade later, I was living in San Francisco on Van Ness and Union streets, on the corner there in a white apartment building owned by an angry German lady. She was big and mean and red. As far as I could tell, she was a Viking without the funny.
I had just moved there after Tim and I had celebrated the summer and our college graduation and his cure from cancer by living together at my sister's house on the California coast. It was a lovely couple of months. We saw “Alien” at the local theater when it opened. We went to Clint Eastwood's bar, the Hog's Breath, and drank legal beer. We honed our skills at a new thing called Pong. Afterward Tim returned to Charleston to find a job, and I thought I'd give San Francisco a chance.
One day the phone rang and it was Tim. After the initial hellos, he said something that I had trouble hearing. He said that his cancer was back and that he was calling from a unit in a hospital. He said: “This will be the last time we will talk.”
I struggled to understand what he was saying. The words broke apart into little bubbles of sound and drifted off like lost balloons.
I insisted that there must be things the doctors could do. No, he explained, trying to say it plainly. Nothing they could do. This is our last phone call.
I heard him and yet I could not hear him. Literally, my brain could not process this simple sentence. “This is our last phone call.” I remember thinking that I would just keep him on the phone, then, for the next 50 years. At some point Tim realized that I couldn't hear him and that I required euphemism. He might not have hope, but I couldn't talk without it. So, not having any himself, he gave me some.
He started in with the usual chitchat that you talk about on the phone.
So, had I been to a disco yet? And why was I living in San Francisco? Were my years of dating girls a ruse? When would I be coming home to Charleston? When would we go to the beach and waterski?
We talked and talked, happy to be back on familiar ground. I told him this story about how my landlady, the German woman, hated my guts and how there was no way to please her. I once dropped a white plastic garbage bag, tied off tight and bloated, down the garbage chute on the third floor. When I stepped away, I heard a funny loud bang.
I opened the hatch and stared down three stories of straight pipe to see my landlady's face, flecked in garbage, staring straight back up. Tim and I howled and roared and then he said he had to go and all the phone-ending chatter started.
“Wow, that's a great story,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, gotta go.”
“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”
Chuckling, Tim said, “See you later.”
It wasn't until his brother called me with the news, two days later, that I even got that joke.
Tim died in the fall, which makes sense. Before I graduated from college, most of the people I knew preferred to die in the summertime. Death didn't like my missing school.
I remember one July, back at a time when every Saturday my mom and Great-aunt Dee Dee would go grocery shopping. Dee Dee was very old then and lived on the ground floor of an old house. Dee Dee hadn't checked in, so Mom got worried and called my older brother, Bobby. He was renting a beach house with some friends, who were all struggling to attain a single goal: staying stoned the whole summer.
Under Mom's direction and totally baked, Bobby broke into Dee Dee's house to find our aunt lying in bed, three days dead. He called the cops.
While we waited, Bobby explained to me with stoner amazement that Dee Dee was lying on her side, in the reading position, with a Perry Mason paperback open to the last few pages.
“That's called rigor mortis,” I explained. Bobby looked at me with astonishment. I just smiled back at him and, given the amount of weed he'd smoked, I decided it was probably best not tell him that I also suddenly felt like masturbating.
At Aunt Dee Dee's funeral, my recently widowed mother and my recently widowed sister (that's another story) and other family members filed into St. Philip's graveyard.
As we approached a somber crowd at the grave, my widowed sister whispered, “Do you think that once Dee Dee gets to heaven, God will tell her who done it, you know, tell her the ending of the Perry Mason novel?”
By the time we were all standing graveside, my mom had managed to contain the situation into barely repressed snickering. The actor playing Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason show had just died and had posthumously released some anti-smoking television spots, so one sister suggested that Dee Dee might find out who dunnit from Hamilton Burger. Another sister said, simply, “Ham Burger?” And all I remember after that is that the entire Hitt family was off the funeral A List for a long time.
The day after I finished arranging the magazines on Mrs. Trouche's coffee table, I prepared for the funeral. There would be six of us serving as pallbearers. Me, Lucas, Preston, George, Dolph and a guy I didn't know who went to UVA with Tim. Six 22-year-old men, all gusty and ripe in our trim black suits, we stood around in front of Tim's house until we were shooed into the limo. The long stretch sat idling for a few minutes. No one had much to say.
So I told the story of Mr. Potato Head and his armpit-dwelling wife, but it didn't get that many laughs. Maybe I should have picked some other arena than a funeral cortège.
At last the driver opened the door. He made a big noise plopping into his seat. He wore a Greek fisherman's cap and a slightly wrinkled jacket. He pulled the big boat of a car away from the sidewalk and began the lugubrious cruise down Legare Street. Quietly he took a left on South Battery, and quietly again, he turned left on Meeting. Uptown we headed to the Catholic Church.
“Terrible thing about your friend,” he said. “He was way too young.” His words sounded practiced.
“But it could have been worse,” he continued. A peculiar silence seized the car. “I had this client last week. He was a teenager. Fell off the front of a motorboat.”
We all looked at each other.
“Went right through the propeller.”
Poor Preston. He was up in the front seat and he turned around to see our mouths open wide with soundless laughter. In a panic he rolled down his window and hung his detonating face out the limo. The rest of us simply exploded; nothing could stop us. Then the driver, somewhat surprised, spoke up.
“There's nothing wrong with men crying,” the driver said earnestly. “Let it out. That's actually good.” When we realized the driver mistook our terrifying howls for sobs, this ratcheted the whole thing up to nuclear levels of hysteria.
“I totally understand,” the driver said. “I drove this family a week ago whose son was electrocuted while putting his sailboat on a trailer. A terrible mess.” I feared his tinted windows might shatter.
And then, there we were, at the church. We piled out, roaring with the most daring laughter, generous young-man laughter, full of swagger and piss.
It gusted through the massive wide-open doors and echoed to the altar. An older crowd of men and women stood before us. Their somber faces hardened into disbelief as we staggered about, blasting squalls of pleasure in every direction. They stared at us and then, we saw them. For that brief moment, time slowed down enough so that nothing registered other than us—wondering what was the matter with these people? Why were they all looking at us so? And how could anyone have reached their age without ever seeing a band of Vikings?
