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My Grandfather had been a stranger to me. He seemed incapable of compassion and had never demonstrated any interest in getting to know me. To be fair, I don't recall ever having gone out of my way to present myself as desiring his attention, so I suppose I am guilty of being an accomplice to the silent awkwardness which had defined our relationship. I tried to steer clear of him when I had a choice, and when they happened, our conversations were always restricted to quick requests for the passing of salt, sugar or butter. My Grandfather was notorious for taking nude mid-afternoon naps, spread eagle and snoring loudly atop the floral bedspread with the bedroom door wide open. Surely, he could have spared us this view and shut that door, so why hadn't he? One might be inclined to dismiss the following as a coincidence, but it seemed to my sisters and I that he had always timed these moments and positioned his body in such a fashion so as to allow an arc of sunlight to mark and warm his unmentionables. When he died, My Grandfather's estate was quickly divided and subdivided by my aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom have always felt as if cut from a different cloth than myself and my sisters. The leftovers were sold or discarded. It was amongst this pile of supposed refuse piled at the curb that I happened to discover four unique items which had been owned by my Grandfather, strange things which did not reflect the man whom I thought I had known, hinting at deeper mysteries now sealed within a cold mind six feet beneath the earth. I have presented them here in no particular order as I promised I would when you and I met last Spring. Please pardon my belated correspondence, but much has transpired between then and now, and it was important to me that I confirm my findings before I contacted you. This first item was simple enough. It was a black and white photograph, badly folded and torn at the corners, yellowed with age and stained with cup-sized rings of brown. Three men were pictured sitting on a pier beneath an overcast sky. They were casually dressed and holding fishing rods. The man on the right, closest to the camera, was clearly my Grandfather, though much younger than I had seen him in any other photograph, with slicked black hair and tanned, well-toned forearms. He was happily chewing a fat cigar with a devilish glint in his eyes. I have no recollection of ever having seen my Grandfather smile. Furthermore, he had always threatened that the only people who used tobacco products were drug addicts and sexual deviants. How then could it be that this was the same man? The man on the left of the photograph, furthest from the camera, was unknown to me. He had tight curled hair and a boyish quality which I felt could have quickly turned violent with little or no provocation. He struck as the same type of emotionally volatile character who would have been at ease blacking out in a puddle of his own creation within a modern college fraternity house. His left arm was resting on the shoulder of the man in the center, and it was this person's presence which most disturbed me, for here was unmistakably none other than Adolph Hitler himself. This was the classic Hitler of newsreels and text books: micro-moustache, penetrating stare, neatly parted hair, and proud, confident demeanor. And he was hanging out with my Grandfather. Why on earth had my Grandfather gone fishing with Hitler? It was a well-know but little discussed fact that his two older brothers had died in the war. The second curious item found amongst my Grandfather's belongings was an unusually heavy, exquisitely tailored black fur coat. The hair was coarse like a bear's and had a peculiar muskiness which I could not attribute entirely to its age. When I flipped over the hood, I was startled to discover a terrifying leather visage like a hardened corpses face sewn into it. I have asked two respected zoologists from the University to appraise my discovery, and their findings have confirmed my initial suspicion: this was no ordinary fur coat. It was a coat fashioned from the hide and face of a gorilla! I ask you this: where does one acquire such a thing? Do you suppose my Grandfather had killed it and had the skin prepared for him? Had he purchased it as part of some elaborate gag from some black market merchant specializing in exotic fetishes? Your guess is as good as mine. The next item was an oblong baby rattle resembling a flattened egg with a contoured handle stuck to the bottom. A translucent orange film had stained much of its surface and was still slightly tacky to the touch. A decal on one face of the rattle depicted a stylized kitten innocently toying with a ball of twine. But on the reverse appeared a deeply offensive Aunt Jemima-style black woman sexed-out in red fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots. A wet melon was ejecting from her hoo-hoo like a rocket, and a text balloon above her head said the following: "Lawd knows it's bin uh long time comin'!" My impulse was to dismiss this rattle as a random novelty from some lesser enlightened age, some mean-spirited relic which had survived its way through the river of years by hitchhiking a ride in my Grandfather's footlocker. But then, a deeply buried memory stirred in the archives of my mind, and I remembered that I had seen this rattle once before. In one of our family albums, there is a photograph from when my father was a child. He and his younger siblings are lined-up side-by-side in the living room of my grandparents' home. My Grandfather in kneeling beside my father, and he is holding this VERY SAME RATTLE. That which was once uncertain to me is now clear, for in that photograph, my Grandfather's attention is fixed neither on his children nor the camera but on the rattle in his hand. He is lecherously glaring at the naughty face of the rattle. The final item was a large reel of magnetic audio tape labeled with a piece of masking tape marked "auto show June 1967." It took me a long while to track down an old reel-to-reel recorder which would allow me to listen to whatever sounds were encoded on that strip, but in the end, it was at the public library's annual book sale that I was able to procure a well-worn specimen for ten dollars. Following some minor repairs and replacements, the old machine was operational once more. It was well after 3 a.m. the first time I attached the reel and snaked the tape through the various channels. With a click and a whir, the wheels began to turn and the speaker popped to life. It would be no exaggeration to say that what followed over the next hour would have traumatized even Salvador Dali if the old Spaniard were alive and studied in the public life of the man who claimed to have been my Grandfather. The recording began with an unfamiliar woman's voice echoing with the kind of acoustics you might expect to hear in a washroom. I could hear the sound of trickling water and what I guess was the squeaking of feet on wet ceramic tiles. The woman was nervously naming types of flowers and their colors. Her list was punctuated every now then by a loud, towel-like SNAP! which would throw off her concentration. There was an abrupt cut in the recording followed by five minutes of tape hiss. The recording resumed, but the scene was different. It sounded like the microphone was being tossed around within someone's pocket. I could barely make out my Grandfather's voice-- I was certain it was his voice-- saying something in a conversational tone. The sound was muffled, but I could make out something about "a dozen by ten" and "owls don't fly by day" and "lunch orders shouldn't be included." Who knows. There was another stretch of hiss and then I heard a long series of whistles and chirps followed by the name of a specific bird species annunciated loud and firm in my Grandfather's voice. I distinctly recall his mimicked call of the brown-headed nuthatch (sitta pusilla), a call which consists of a series of high-pitched piping notes, distinct and very unlike the calls of other eastern nuthatches. I know a thing or two about birdcalls, and I can assure you that his pitch and timing was uncanny. The recording took a turn for the stranger when the birdcalls gave way to classifications of other non-animal sounds, the variety of which exhausted a major portion of the reel. My Grandfather would, for example, say "an empty trash can thrown down an escalator" and then mimic the sound with his mouth. In this manner, he described many unusual sounds, including "a Mexican having a barstool broken over his back" and "a clubbed foot being dragged through a shallow creek" and "a narcoleptic inmate hacking through the iron bars of his cell with a kitchen knife." What do you suppose was the point of his documenting of these sound imitations? To what end had they served? This was not a dress rehearsal, it was a performance which had been carefully planned and practiced. The strangeness of this session alone would have been sufficient to cause a love affair with prescription medicine, but to my horror, the greatest audio oddity of all was heard after a short pause. Another scene, another time, and on this occasion I could hear a television program in the background, though it remains unclear to me what program was being heard. My Grandfather cleared his throat, stated his name, the time and the date. Was it mere coincidence that this recording had been created five years to the exact time and date of his passing? I wonder. My Grandfather gathered his thoughts, mumbled for what could have passed for a rhyming prayer, then began a five-minute passage, during which he recited lines for picking up different types of women in various public places. Whether the recording was a documentation of fantasized encounters or recollections of actual experiences in unknown. I have transcribed the following fistful of lines in order to give you an idea of precisely what I'm talking about.
"Freckled
brunette. Bank lobby. Some weather we're having. My, you look
lovely today, Miss. Boy, would I ever like to make a deposit in
YOU." "Gum-chewing
blonde. Airport ticket counter. This sure is a busy place, isn't
it? Everybody's coming or going, going or coming. So, then, my
lithe young beauty, will you be going or-- heh, heh, heh-- COMING?
Hmm?" "Four-eyed
Asian. Discount office supply store. Pardon me, Miss, but would
you please direct me toward the three-ring binders? I've been
up and down these aisles and… say! You sure are a cutie! I'll
bet you could work some Oriental magic on MY sweet & sour dumplings!" "Perky-breasted
redhead. Mexican restaurant. Excuse me darling, but I can't seem
to decide between the chorizo or the chicken. Tell me something:
what kind of meat do you like in YOUR taco?" And they go on and on like this for the longest and most disturbing five minutes I have ever experienced beyond that dream I had about the Abraham Lincoln doll slowly biting out my eyes with its steel-colored teeth. Thankfully, my Grandfather's voice was cut off mid-sentence and the recording ceased altogether. I have gathered and buried these items in the you-know-what within the you-know-where in a heavy-duty plastic sack as we have discussed. Please pardon the crude manner in which I have dealt with this matter, but it was necessary to act quickly in order to retain our secrecy. I have absolute confidence that the relics shall be safe from moisture. I will await your response to this report before proceeding to the next phase.
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