From “Scat”

The first time I saw The Exorcist I was nine years old. My mom, flipping through the TV Guide, saw that it was coming on HBO, and she wanted to see it because my dad, a very reasonable man, asked her to hold off when it first came out. She was pregnant with my brother and people watching the movie were having miscarriages and heart attacks in the theater, both of which used to be evidence of a good movie. In twenty minutes or so, when little Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her white nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might watch Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun, she said. Just go to bed if you don’t want to watch it.

(Friends, I am here going to leap a boundary I shouldn’t, like some of your childless ex-friends before me, to tell you how to raise your children. My brother’s and my bedroom was, maybe, twenty feet from this television. It was maybe three or four seconds by foot away. But my imagination was vast. By which I mean to tell you not to watch The Exorcist with your children. Or The Shining. Or Rosemary’s Fucking Baby.)

Of course I was already too scared to do anything by myself, and when little Linda Blair was stabbing herself with a crucifix and vomiting in the faces of priests I was doomed. I sat on the couch pretending to read the Bucks County Courier Times as I heard the girl, about my age, panting and growling. I peeked beneath the business section to see little Linda Blair write, from inside of her Lucifer-ravaged tummy, H E L P. Of course, my dad, the one person in the world who could for sure beat up Evil, was down at Roy Rogers on Cottman, slinging burgers.

When I did finally go to bed, I sobbed, certain I, too, would be possessed by Satan, which my brother didn’t go the extra mile to discourage me from thinking.

Me: Matt, am I going to be possessed?

Matt: I don’t know.

Me: Am I possessed?

Matt (pulling the covers over his head): I don’t know. Maybe.

For the record, my mother now knows this was an instance of heroically poor parenting, in part because I rub her face in it often. She puts her forehead in her hand and shakes her head, while I bask in her shame.

When I mustered up the courage to see The Exorcist again, the redux, I was about twenty-six. I went with my friend Joanna to the theater between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut in Philadelphia. When Linda Blair peed on the rug this time someone said to the screen, “Oh no she didn’t!” And when her head spun around, someone yelled, “That girl is trippin’!” At which point I realized this movie, which had occupied for years a grave space in my imagination, was actually silly. I was freed from the grave. Or rather, I was offered another version of the grave—laughter in its midst. (June 25)

“Tomato on Board”

What you don't know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane, is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you're carrying a baby. A quiet baby. I did not know this until today, carrying my little tomato, about three or four inches high in its four-inch plastic starter pot, which my friend Michael gave to me, smirking about how I was going to get it home. Something about this, at first, felt naughty—not comparing a tomato to a baby, but carrying the tomato onto the plane—and so I slid the thing into my bag while going through security, which made them pull the bag for inspection. When the security guy saw it was a tomato he smiled and said, "I don't know how to check that. Have a good day." But I quickly realized that one of its stems (which I almost wrote as "arms") was broken from the jostling, and it only had four of them, so I decided I better just carry it out in the open. And the shower of love began. . .

Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said, "Nice tomato," which I don't think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it "my tomato," —Where's my tomato? How's my tomato? You didn't lose my tomato, did you? She even directed me to an open seat in the exit row—Why don't you guys go sit there and stretch out? I gathered my things and set the lil guy in the window seat so he could look out. When I got my water I poured some into the lil guy's soil. When we got bumpy I put my hand on the lil guy's container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the lil guy in place, the way my dad's arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favorite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures. (June 9)

“The Marfa Lights”

My buddy Pat and I went to shoot around at the courts here in Marfa today. We were warming up, shooting twelve-footers or doing slow spin moves and crossovers, when a young guy from the other side of the court (where the rim had a net) swaggered toward us, holding a ball on his hip, the light gleaming in his earrings, and challenged us to a two on two, pointing his thumb to himself and back to his buddy draining threes from the corner. We agreed, and went on to kick the shit out of them, 21-0. That is a horrible figure of speech, and I leave it in only to expose the violence we easily speak. We got more baskets than they did. That they were only twelve years old is irrelevant, given as this was their home court, and they even had a crowd watching, another little girl who, when one of the kids shouted to the gods, "They're kicking our butts!" said, "I hope so. They're grown men." (July 16)