Phuck Is Not a Four-Letter Word

Posted on Apr 1, 2011

Mr. Fish

By Mr. Fish

My mother was the first dead person I’d ever seen up close. 

This was in 2007, and I was in Maine when she died all of a sudden in New Jersey. Then, two days later, the funeral home called my brother to tell him that somebody needed to positively identify her body before the cremation, which struck me as odd. 

While I could imagine the lawsuit that a mortuary was guarding against with just such a policy—namely that a family was entitled to some reassurance that it would be receiving the remains of a deceased loved one and not the remains of a complete stranger—I wondered how a signature on a piece of paper could really guarantee the identity of somebody’s ashes. Unless you were there to actually strike the match yourself and slide the body headlong into the flames, you’d never know for sure that you were getting the remains of your dead relative afterwards—or even the remains of a person. After all, practically everything on the planet burns and, given the commonality of ashes, you could just as easily be getting an incinerated chest of drawers as half a horse and never know the difference. So why pretend that signing a piece of paper would guard against sketchy business practices? Common sense, particularly when bolstered by the evidence offered by the breach-of-contract cases forever overflowing every court docket in America, led to the obvious conclusion that paperwork guaranteed absolutely nothing.

So why would my brother even want to drive down to New Jersey to look at his freshly dead mother and then to sign a form saying that it was her? Why allow bureaucratic red tape to take precedence over the truth of the situation?

Of course, in the end, I told my brother to wait for me, that I’d go with him to the funeral home and help him make the positive ID and wait while he signed the proper forms, figuring that having our mother turned to dust and laid to rest in a timely fashion was slightly more important than me hijacking her coffin and turning it into a soap box, knowing that it could never succeed as such so long as she was in it.

Ironically, it was just such a disdain for genteel acquiescence to the dominant culture that our mother instilled in all of her children and made us self-made monkey wrenches all too willing to hurl ourselves into the cogs of what public opinion deemed as normal behavior. We learned to view convention as a total lack of imagination, and dissent as proof of our superiority, the evidence for which was not in any keenly devised set of alternatives to the commonly revered traditions of the day, but rather was in the visceral and decidedly nonintellectual joy that came from wearing sneakers to the ball or pissing on the countess’ good china. No doubt, such willful discordance, while being a most outstanding ingredient in the tastiest examples of joke-making, eventually revealed itself to be an all too destructive mental sleight of hand. For my family, it confused us all into assuming that by mocking the bogus elements of etiquette we must be arguing from a contrary point of view, which, according to the law of opposites, had to be from a point of view that was non-bogus and virtuous and absolutely correct. 

But, of course, condemning the light is by no means the best way to argue in favor of the dark, just as celebrating the arrival of the dawn is poor proof that nightfall is a tragedy. Standing there looking down at my 64-year-old mother with her mouth glued shut, I was able to all at once thank her for blessing me with such a rigorous distrust of convention—my whole career as a political cartoonist having come from a healthy skepticism of Establishment values—while, at the same time, damn her for allowing her own distrust of convention to become pervasive enough to cause defiance of doctors, nutritionists and the warning labels on vodka bottles.

I thought back to a summer day in 1975. 

His name was Sam, no last name, and he wore no pants. He was lying on my little brother’s bed in a filthy orange T-shirt staring up at the ceiling, knees slightly bent, with blue eyes and curly blond hair and small pink lips that were frozen in a strange suckling of the air, almost as if he were unable to wean himself from the invisible teat of some invisible God offering eternal invisibility to anyone willing to praise something that gave no real evidence that it was even ever there to begin with. Similarly, outside in the Ford Falcon station wagon that was idling in the driveway, my mother screwed a fresh cigarette like a new light bulb for a crappy idea into the furious sphincter of her lips, which were pulled into the familiar pucker that she’d been using to kiss her own suicide by heart disease and lung cancer ever since she was old enough to misapply her affection. Lighting the tip and feeling as if sitting in her driveway with the motor running was too telling a life metaphor for her to have to accept gracefully, she began pounding the car horn, effectively forcing the ghost of her aggravation up my 9-year-old ass like I was an empty puppet needing her hand to help me find the canteen that I’d need to stay alive during the day hike that I’d be taking with 20 other Boy Scouts through the New Jersey woods that afternoon. 

For the fourth time in a row the screen door at the front of the house opened and then slammed shut and in ran my little brother, Daryl, to shout at me from the living room that our mother was beginning to place words around my name that he’d only heard our father place around rusted lug nuts just before throwing his wrench and disappearing for an hour to drink a six-pack and to massage the tits out of his masculinity. “Mom’s saying focket again!” he said.

“Tell her that I can’t find my focking canteen and to quit it with that goddamn horn already! I’m coming!” I hollered, momentarily forgetting that a 6-year-old could often be as reliable a form of message delivery as your delivering the message, word for word, yourself. “Wait!” I said, to the sound of the screen door opening and then slamming shut again, followed by a moment of silence and then, if it was possible, blasts from the car horn pressed hard into shapes designed to enter my eye sockets like snowballs, Pow! Pow! My fists clenched around the emptiness in my hands as desperately as if gripping the rungs on an unsteady ladder.

New and Improved Comments

If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.