In Defense of the Raging Bull
A bittersweet taste of memory, from a place that already turns the stomach upside down.
WORDS BY Christopher Buchanan
IMAGES BY Benjamin Uribe and Johnathan Arellano
EDITED BY Pierce Whitney
Editor’s Note: It’s strange what begins to remind you of home when you're far away for long enough. Sometimes it’s a particular smoke that excites a similar tickle to the one you had in your throat years ago, thrusting you right back into the moment you could reopen your watershot eyes and finally breathe again. Other times it’s a smell or a sound or some other seemingly irrelevant fact. For me, it occurred this summer as I took refuge on my mother’s bed after a day of Inland-Empire nothingness and weed-drunkenness. I wrote this piece months ago for the very class that inspired the conception of Bum Diary called Creative Nonfiction for Journalism at UCLA. The professor is a wack-job professional writer whose approval I vied for every chance I got. He had already experienced everything I wanted in my life: far out journeys, genuine eccentricity and bylines in just about every magazine I’ve combed through looking for the key to writing something truly profound. After I submitted this piece, he complimented it highly and affirmed the very insignificant amount of faith I had that I could pull off something like Bum Diary. And just like all these memories, the piece came back around and landed in the present.
Years ago on a terribly cold, quiet desert night, the front screen door of my house crashed with such ferocity that it triggered a symphony of howls and car alarms for what seemed like miles. I had been sleeping comfortably with my Mother, well past the appropriate age of doing so. I recall seeing coverage of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign on the ill-placed television in the far corner of the dark, paint-chipped burgundy room. His empty calls to patriotic action, even in my youth, seemed inspiring. In my temporary state of roused hallucination, I made some unintelligible call for my Mother to hurry and wake up.
Thunderous, menacing footsteps came from the dimly-lit hallway opposite the foot of our bedded fortress. I quickly retreated under the thin, faux-luxury beaded comforter that my Mother refused to get rid of and my Father had vehemently protested. He never slept in the bed, anyway; he made a better situation for himself and our family in the living room. I worked up enough courage to peek at whatever force of nature had managed to cause such a level of sheer commotion. That menace, the bull, met my gaze.
“I don’t care what you do at the house, man, you know what I’m saying? You could do anything, smoke here, drink here, as long as you don’t start acting a fool, man. Just keep that shit away from my family. Take that shit to Anthony’s or something, keep that shit over there.” My stone-faced father said to his beloved, adored, and historically troubled older brother.
“Don’t trip, Chris! I’m not on that shit no more, I’m not about to put you in a situation where you have to be watching me or having to take me to the hospital in front of the kids, Chris. You think I’m like that?” My Uncle replied. The lie slipped out of his mouth like someone had oiled up the track.
My Uncle's years of incarceration were visible on his tattooed, bullet-wounded body, which was seldom hidden by a shirt, but rather draped by a rag over the shoulder with which he’d often wipe pools of sweat from between the rolls in his body. At times I thought he looked like a Greek god. He was 6 '3 and nearly 550 pounds, born and raised in South Central, unapologetically opinionated and eager for confrontation. He possessed an undeniable warmth that emanated most around his small circle of family, of which I was a proud member. His family had shrunk over the years, rather than having started small. During his many stints of imprisonment for anything from gang activity to fraud, he had lost some to death and many others to time. He never left a reliable line of contact, left relationships in disrepair, and took advantage of hospitalities whenever possible. I, of course, knew none of this at the time and adored him beyond description. He was just a big, funny bastard to me. My Father had the same optimism about him, and was content to take in his wildest brother for a temporary stay.
The beast rushed clumsily towards me, shifting his large frame back and forth, taking advantage of his width to gain distance. Fucking Frankenstein, I thought. I was unceremoniously dragged from the bed and onto the floor like some scorned crack wife. My face burned against the carpet — rough from stains in some areas, I took all the curses I knew to give bad karma to whoever did the half-ass bleach job. He dragged my junior twin-sized body until we were in front of my door in the middle of the hallway. I was tossed into my room like a ragdoll: prisoner and spectator.
My small, silent room — which had been untouched since I had watched some slasher film I can’t recall the name of a few nights before — collapsed all around me. All I could hear was yelling coming from outside my small domicile, presumably from my Mother’s room, but untraceable from within the luminous blue walls in my room. The thoughts rushed in faster than I could compute. What was happening? This couldn’t be a joke, my Uncle was not playfully testing my limits of irritation. What the hell did I do worth a Hell’s Angels type-beating?
“I’m Jesus Christ, and she’s Satan!” He proclaimed loudly, in chanting repetition. “She’s the devil, man. I’m telling you, Chris! She doesn’t want y’all to be together. She’s trying to break your marriage apart. I’m God, Chris. Listen to me. I’m God!” Visions like that might put me in a strange rut, too.
My Father was probably the last person in the entire neighborhood to be awoken by the nuclear ruckus. It took a pretty strong jolt to pull him out of his half-day post-work hibernations. My Uncle had thrashed and screamed my Mother into a corner for about ten minutes before I heard my Father sprint down the hallway out of his sleep. My Father is no formidable man. He shares my current stature, thin and small, but with a more muscular build. He took an opposing course than my Uncle had in his own life, despite being his partner at the starting line. He mellowed as his hair grayed, gradually extinguishing the same flame of anger my uncle had. In part, the extinguishing process is what led him to his new home on the couch.
I worriedly stepped out of my room. I knew that if it came to it, whatever it was that overcame my Uncle would’ve killed my Father with ease. I saw my sisters stack and peek their heads out of their door like two of the three stooges. My Father finally replied to the madness with an unusually deep bass in his voice, “Why are you doing this to me, man? I asked you not to smoke that shit in my house, Clay! That was all I asked, it was one thing, man. How could you do this to my family?”
I came to find out later that my Uncle had been smoking what is known on the streets as “sherm.” A deadly mixture of marijuana and PCP — or more likely in my Uncle’s case — pure embalming fluid. It is said to induce euphoric hallucinations, bouts of violence, seizures, agitation and many other sinister behaviors. To this day, no one has an idea if this was taken in combination of substances or standalone. Whatever he shot up, smoked or snorted that night, my Uncle ticked all the madhouse boxes, perhaps more than are currently known to science.
Looking to my Father’s face for comfort, I saw an almost cartoonish display of despair. His dark lips assumed a full frown, tears racing down his face onto the floor, looking straight into the eyes of the beast. Also there in his glare was disillusionment; my Uncle had failed to fulfill his fickle part of the living obligations. Like David and Goliath, they stood opposite one another in the hallway on both of my sides, prepared to fight to protect what felt righteous to each.
The bull’s frame took up nearly the whole hallway, eclipsing any of the perceptible light of the bathroom behind him. My Mother and sisters raced out from their rooms once my Uncle’s attention had been diverted to abstract theological debate with my frustrated Father. It was my slim turn for escape. I was in a peculiar place, I had to get down the hallway to my Father before my Uncle could descend upon me. I couldn’t even work up the courage before my legs moved unconsciously past my Father and out of the house on their own.
Before I fled the scene, I saw that menacing bull’s eyes in a moment that persevered in the foggy boyhood memory than any of the night’s other events. Those dark dilated pools spoke to me, as if to apologize for the beast’s bucking and lack of self-control. The more they talked, the more they told that this chaos was not his fault, but simply the whacked-out result of every disappointment that preceded it. Cross out another box of places to stay and get a good high out of it. Hell, even I might’ve done it on a drier Hemet night. How could one attempt that pure, bestial vitality? It’s impossible to put reigns on a steer who wasn’t brought up with them. To be free, they must also be wild.
I will clear all of the small administrative items; the police arrived, my Father was nearly arrested for threatening murder, and the bull was forced away in a tight stable to not be seen by me up until the last day of his wild, wild life. My sisters refused to forgive him. They were much older than me and understood well what the action all really meant. My Uncle had lost us, too. I was much too young to properly digest the events, so I bypassed the mental distress and went on misunderstanding the resentment. Still don’t fancy the idea of sherm, though, but his behavior made it tempting. Must be a pretty hot trip.
My Uncle had returned to his childhood neighborhood to live in his car outside of a convenience store down the block from his old home. One cold night last summer, very similar to the one in which the bull had been let loose, I received a weeping call from my mother.
“Clay is in the hospital. Someone came up to the car he was sleeping in and poured gas all over his body, they threw a match in.” She paused. “He was too big to move and open the door enough to even get out. I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”
It might seem out of nowhere to mention this, but death is one big associative memory. One line from The Beatles A Day in the Life played repeatedly in my head that morning. He blew his mind out in a car: He didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The bull’s chance for redemption, now permanently unrealized, floated around in the air post-mortem. Can you forgive someone who won’t even be around to hear it? Did he know I was never angry? Either way it spun, something had dimmed noticeably. When you burn, I still can’t help but wonder if the lights are brighter or darker than ever.
Blame is a funny thing, even in the worst cases. Take a murderer. It is probably the case that you could just pick out any plot along the long line before them and chart the blame for all the killer’s actions there. We don’t, though. We look straight in their eyes as if we can see their heart, and sometimes go as far as to watch them catch the Big Shock or take a Kill Pill. I think, or hope at least, that the bull’s blame is more spread out. It’s like that psychotic orchestra at the end of A Day in the Life. Every instrument plays a dissonant tune, indistinguishable when you hear all the chaos smashed together, but a part of it nonetheless.
I went to sleep thinking about the way my uncle’s eyes looked with tragic clarity. Blinded by rage, unsure of its cause. The man who had done the bull in was probably some revenge junky or scorned gang member. Let‘s all hope that he stuck around long enough to see those eyes, revealing the cause and effect for it all. There was hardly a car once the fire had been stopped. “Homeless man in Los Angeles murdered.” Unidentifiable until we came along. In all of this, there’s only one thing I’m certain of: the bull’s spirit had a fitting end. There was probably no better way to tame that wild and thrashing spirit that burned until the last, charred breath.