Super 8

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These were the days of wheat germ and goat's milk, mowing the lawn your sneakers green and closets so deep with games and old women's clothes you thought you'd never come out. These were the days of gas lines, dials on TVs that turned, and the drive-thru foto-mat—memory deposits after trips, everyone miserable with a mile to go. An envelope full of the undeveloped past offered out the driver's side, the booth worker's yellow sleeve meeting your father's tanned one, a hand-washing of the whole vacation, the backseat full of children still as statues, strapped in each smaller than the next.

These were the days of memories kept in photo albums, ugly accidental muggings, sheets of grade school duplicates, your hair combed worse by gruff teachers. And then the movie camera came along, bright floods designed by your father, and bathing before bed, wet combs, terry cloth robes dragging in the shag because they'd been the middle brother's. These were movie nights, nights when a Bell & Howell projector sat on the kitchen counter aimed at a screen made of your sheets. Your father, in the dark with a flashlight in his teeth, threads film eight millimeters wide with his hairy knuckles, and when the feature on your sheets begins, you're told to do nothing but watch.

It's your dad beating the pasture down with a machete into a family path, single file to the barn. It's being made to sit on Ron, the inert goat, when you get there because your dad's named this day, this first rainless Sunday of the year, Rodeo Day. Next you and your brother will chase down chickens you later eat, the heads axed before the animals' last seconds of joyful hopping, your dad's undershirt a comet of scarlet stars.

But for now it's you on the goat the color of old pennies, your dad shooting you with the silent camera, voicing instruction to kick his fat belly and hold the horns that curl back into themselves. But the goat does nothing and the kicking only incites the pink goat penis to shoot out of its pouch at an evil angle, and Ron turns his head with your hands still grasping the horns, offering his pink member an even paler pink tongue because, like the dog, he can, he simply can and you cannot. Not until you get a license and beat the rural streets and strawberry fields to walk great stretches of linoleum decked with hair gel, raised collars and topsiders, looking for what the goat can have so easily, caught on film eight millimeters wide.

It's mowing the yard and your ankles turned green. It's eating chicken on the deck that tastes of earth. It's being held by your mom after a substance you thought was urine sprayed your calf and the camera dropped in the hay, left running as your dad laughed himself into a corner of baling wire.

The footage—still available in some cities—shows a scramble of feet and hooves before a transfer-cut to a final scene of pines and older hikers, the trail switching back and the camera swinging straight into the sun.

Posted at 8:00am in Stories