Uncle Al

Uncle Al had this trick he’d pull where whenever he wasn’t paying for dinner he’d leave his Ushanka hat at the table and when everyone was on the way out he’d say like ‘oh shoot I’ve left my cap’ and strut back and swipe whatever tip was left—and if for some odd reason he was the one paying, well there’d be no need since he wouldn’t have tipped in the first place. He also taught me never to purchase an expensive tobacco pipe tamp, or really one at all for that matter, since God gave us opposable thumbs and they worked well enough for pressing things down tight. Uncle kept to himself and sang along to Mickey Gilley cassettes when he thought no one was home. He was dad’s older brother and lived with our family.

There’s this spindliness to tall graying men like Uncle Al that lends them this phantasmal quality in memories. I think back about him now and how he was almost always floating over whatever he stood above.—Regretfully the victim of this most terrible prank, Uncle Al was, and sadly never the same since. (All credit to my cousin Johnny who orchestrated it.)—We were both maybe thirteen, Johnny and I, when this happened. He came up with this plan to secretly pack Uncle’s pipe with some pot—harmless enough, right?/his idea of a prank I supposed…—; he thought it’d be a real riot to see him all mellow and fumbling around with the TV remote when it came time to watch his late-night reruns of M.A.S.H. Only later would Johnny disclose all this to me, mind all you—I played no part besides star witness to the impending madness.

Now, looking back, I knew Johnny had no way to obtain pot; he’d never smoked before, and only knew what the drug was from school D.A.R.E. lectures and after hours anti-marijuana adverts, i.e. kid takes a hit of pot and starts deflating, the classic fried egg/‘this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs’ one, etc. He tried buying the dried plant from kids in the neighborhood, kids riding around on bikes collecting crushed soda cans for candy money—yet, no luck. ‘Something’s gotta give,’ I remember he kept saying, ‘someone’s gotta know.’ Somnolent men at record shops who wreaked of the stuff were surprisingly unhelpful, Johnny told me. Why he’d even gone through all this trouble for what in my opinion was an awful prank was beyond me. It seems oftentimes kids don’t think things through; they get their minds set on something they’ve stayed up cackling about and don’t take their feet off the gas about it until the consequences have come and sat themselves down at the proverbial table and like grabbed plates, hung up their coats per se and stayed the long while…

So Johnny, still herbless, settled on taking the city bus deep into downtown to peruse one of those shady smoke shops that had loads of litter outside and those metal barriers that one could pull down over the doors and windows at the end of the day. The cashier was this corpulent Middle Eastern gent who handled all the transactions from behind a thick plastic screen covered with the remains of scraped off stickers advertising like local punkcore bands and parties you could only attend if you knew a guy who knew the girl who made the sticker for the party in the first place or whatever… Anywho, Johnny was entirely frank and earnest with the cashier about his purchase intentions and while he was informed that the store legally couldn’t sell what he was looking for, they could offer him something completely legal that was similar and reportedly made the ingestee feel way sillier. This offer would intrigue any teen—of course Johnny was all ears. The cashier directed Johnny’s gaze to some vaguely labeled, sealed packets behind him. The substance was Salvia divinorum; Johnny bought one packet labeled ‘60X’.

That next day, our family could tell Johnny was up to something sinister—Dad reckoned he’d hid some booze in a bush in the park to drink with friends later; Ma worried he’d lifted a dirty magazine from the corner store; I wondered about if maybe I’d be the punchline of one of his practical jokes…; Uncle Al… well, Uncle Al never knew what hit him. It was after the sun went down, Uncle loafed out to the porch with his Briar pipe and Ushanka hat. Night bugs whizzed about; somewhere from beyond the elms roared a train. Even crucial memories can be hard to recall; all I really remember was running downstairs to check on Uncle—the screaming was something to this day I cannot forget.

Only after a long while could Uncle open up about the experience.—For those unfamiliar, Salvia, despite looking practically identical to pot, is almost nothing like the plant at all. It’s more like if you force fed your pot magic mushrooms everyday for a year and then concentrated the result into a few shriveled leaves; really Salvia and pot aren’t even in like the same herbal zip code. The stuff Johnny packed into Uncle’s pipe was primordial, insanity inducing, and used by Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico for spiritual ceremonies where the plant would come to life and talk to you about fate and time…—My parents hauled Uncle to the hospital, but there was only so much that could be done; experts thought he’d had this paroxysmic, psychotic breakdown and had him stay in the psych ward for a month. (Needless to say the financial fallout wasn’t exactly cheap.) We got pieces and parts of his story from the nurses, doctors, then filled in the gaps with what he’d divulged to us once he was finally able to speak calmly about the whole experience:

Apparently he’d lived a whole different life in the span of like ten minutes where he was a seed that fell from a large pine tree in this lush valley. He (he as in the pine seed, mind you) was strewn deep into a void of pitch black soil and grew roots, hearty roots just teeming with sensation—Uncle said his roots were like a kaleidoscopic spider web of nerves bursting through the dirt. He felt this overwhelming warmth and underwent a metamorphosis, turning from a seed to a sapling, then from a sapling to an enormous pine tree; his elephantine roots now mature, sprawling. Nocturnal birds and woodland critters made homes in his branches, his trunk, and lived entire lives themselves. All was well for a while until one day faceless men with axes and machinery roared into the forest and began ripping roots from the ground, chopping down every tree they came across.—It was this fiery arboreal apocalypse.

Uncle compared the horrible pain of having an axe plunged into his side to being stabbed in the ribs and unable to scream. The faceless men who came for the forest chopped him into sections that got shipped off to a grayish-silver factory in this dreary city that seemed to expand forever in every direction.—I got jittery goosebumps all over just trying to picture the scene.— More faceless men ran the factory, controlling taut conveyor belts and industrial shredders that chugged along and squealed whenever the oil in their gears ran dry. What was left of Uncle was ground into a fine sawdust—a tan, grim mist of his guts rained about the factory and settled on equipment like winter snow across empty streets and sidewalks. He said it was all too horrible to go into detail about. Then his remains were mixed with water to make a pulp, and he was pressed flat, made into a thick sheet of paper, and sent through a corrugating machine that left his insides all rigid. Lastly, he was glued up, packaged and shipped into the city to this storefront where he was propped up in the window on crude display. This was when time slowed to a snail’s pace according to Uncle—it felt like years that he was in that storefront, still unable to move. The windows got dusty, the ceiling grew mold. Then one cold day, two faceless men passed by the store carrying a mirror. It was then that Uncle Al saw his reflection against the pale glass, that he was nothing more than a cardboard cutout of himself. He tried to scream, but nothing— suddenly, he came to under a starlit sky and returned to the porch from which he departed.

Uncle Al still lives with my parents, albeit he’s moved into the attic and doesn’t come down much. Funnily, it’s my brother Johnny I see less of. Last I heard he was washing cars for pennies on the dollar at one of these used dealerships—not showing his face around after family found out what he’d done to Uncle and all. Another irony was that after the whole event it was actually Johnny that stopped speaking. It was like he became incapable—perhaps stricken with guilt, shame, or something. Stopped attending family events too, probably fearful of looking Uncle in those eyes that have been hollow, empty since the incident. Sad how something like that can tear a generally happy in half is all I had to say about it for a while. But then recently I got thinking: Why? Why would Johnny do this? Did Uncle Al wrong him in some way nobody knew about? My memory seems to elude me on what his relationship with my brother was like when we were growing up… like I said, Uncle had this phantasmal quality about him.

One thing I do remember was that later that night, the night of the incident, when I was all alone in my second story bedroom gazing out the open west-facing window—family was still pacing about the emergency room lobby waiting for an update on Uncle—, I was suddenly struck by a gust of frigid wind like none I’d felt in my life. The room became bitter cold, inhospitable. Then for a brief moment my desk and bed seemed to lift from the floor, but only by half an inch, yet when I blinked a few times, everything went back to normal. The window was closed and I found myself sitting on my bed, running my hands across my blue tassel throw blanket, just making sure what I was affixed upon was real. The whole experience lasted a matter of seconds but stuck with me like how a bad dream would.