Prepare....

I always wanted to be a good girl scout.
And when I wasn't...
when I wandered off on the way to meetings to stare at the Tinker Man...
scribbled on my sit~upon...
burned the house down on the way out the door to my first camp out...

I gave up.

And then I always wanted to dress up like one for Halloween.

Pretend to be a good Girl Scout...

To be prepared...


I wanted to parade around in my little green dress, and my anklet socks,
earning badges I was proud of,
and melting Smores on an open fire.

Instead,
I dressed up like hookers, and hippies, and David Bowie....
zombies, and witches, and a Box of Frosted Flakes...
faeries, and cinderellas, and neon bumble bees,
cowboys, and drunks, pregnant football players and butterflies...

I woke up every halloween and pulled a new face out of the chest of drawers, and wrote pretend Frank Kafka novels...
rang random doorbells...
And held out my bag for candy...

I don't have a sweet tooth anymore...

And I don't want to be a Girl Scout anymore...

Burn, baby, burn....

The terrazzo floors were cold. It didn’t matter that it was August. And gritty. Sand under my fat-padded little feet. I ran on my tip toes. A plastic bag of cheerios in my right hand. From the kitchen to the TV. Laughing.

The cartoons were on. In black and white.

He sat on the floor. In pajamas, too. Humped over. Scrunched close to the TV. I ran up behind him, behind the plaid flannel shirt and matching shorts, the greasy black hair . And flung myself. Bammm! Laugh! The rabbit ears on the TV matched his hair and for a moment, from the back , I had crashed into a giant Bunny! He made a sound, “hmmmmmppphhhhh”, and scrunched further into himself. He wasn’t fun. But he was here. Sometimes he smiled. Squinted his eyes and smiled. Most of the time, he didn’t.

Mama finished the dishes. Set the coffee cup upside down into the plastic drainer and sighed. “I’m gonna hang the clothes out. Don’t leave the room”. I didn’t know then that living at the beach had it’s drawbacks. We didn’t have a dryer.

“I was only gone a moment” she would later say. She had toted the wicker laundrey basket out the back door into the sandy yard, and just two or three swimsuits later, realized that the clothespins were in a little plastic basket in the house, leftover from the “take the laundrey down” game we had played the day before. She sighed and her barefeet prickled and high-heeled it through the the hot sand and back into the house.

She was horrified.

I stood silently screaming …

melting….

In the middle of the terrazzo floor….

pajamas engulfed…..

The back of his black head, wearing the silhouette of the rabbit ears, never moved. He reached over and turned the volume up……

The Tinker Man

His clapboard house sat sinking on the lot adjacent to St. Christopher’s’ Church. Bamboo stalks teetered everywhere, randomly squashed between the trees and lining the roadside like weeds. With their caney stalks painted fluorescent colors, I imagined them all to be plastic straws, the kind with the bendy thing at the top.

I had to walk past…around…. his house to get to Girl Scouts. In the broad daylight, of course.

Mama laughed when I told her he was spooky…. “Ahhhh, half the women I know have been to visit him” “and they’ve all lived to tell about it…..you’re fine. Walk fast if he scares you, but if you walk slow, you can hear them” “Hear who?” I asked, eyes a little bigger. “Never you mind, honey, go ahead and walk fast…”

So I didn’t.

I slowed down and kicked loose gravel in the street. Dropped my book bag over and over again. Picked up sticks and squatted down low…..examining…..torturing …..little mounds of ants. And I listened. And peeked.

That year I stayed in Girl Scouts five months longer than I made it the year before. I learned the facts of life from the Troop Leader’s daughter ( “They put their tongue in your mouth and then you have a baby”) and I fell in love with the Tinker Man……

I spied on him every Tuesday, under the trees. He whittled and spit and took deep swigs from his beer. He never once looked me in the eyes, but I wanted him to. I would hum and play hopscotch, sing, talk to the birds….Make all kinds of racket. He never once looked up at me….

But I looked at him.

His skin so dark , freshly baby-powdered by the dust that drifted around his grassless house. His black hair, twined, knotted and fringed. Paper moths and love bugs dancing on the locks. His mammoth left hand cupping the beer can, ( I knew it was HOT beer, not cold like Mama’s.) and his other, the right, painting, widdling, sometimes just tinking coins in a cup. He smiled. Not at me. But at the dirt. At his feet. At whatever was before him.

His trees were littered with tin-can faces, chicken bones and rag dolls blowing in the dirty wind. Nonsensical carvings. He was the voo-doo man. He cast spells and took them away.

The lady in the Thunderbird flew past me. She pulled in between the neon cane trees and jumped out, in a hurry . Her diamond tennis bracelet caught the sun and the tin cans sparkled as she hustled over the crackling sticks and rotting sugar cane, lifting her high-heeled feet in fast tense. She handed him the money and he never looked at her. She left the same way she came...only poorer.

I sat down on the curb. Skipping Girl Scouts. The little black convertible arrived within minutes and the man, who should have never fit in the car in the first place, lumbered out of the driver’s door. He stretched his arms lazily to the sky. He yawned wide open. A show. For me . Or the Tinker Man. He walked slowly down the same path she took moments before. He stopped at my love, reached deep into his right pocket and pulled out a wad. Slowly peeled green bills from the money clip. I counted. Five. And then I stared at my feet and wrote in the sand. I gave the big man the honor of not looking in his eyes as he drove off.

The Tinker Man smiled at the dirt. Took another swig from his Tuesday beer. And I heard them then.

The spirits laughing.

The King of Dread and Other Silly Insecurities

Artwork (c) Singleton 2006

Introduction to Fear of The Unknown

I didn't start out in life all iffy, itchy, ants in my pants, scared of the dark. In fact I was a brave little cowboy at two, Peggy Lipton from the Mod Squad at ten, and probably out of this world by sixteen. No fear. My children think their generation coined that phrase. They're mistaken. We lived life by the fly. Half the cars I rode in didn't have seat belts, and we flew. Rip tides meant a great day to surf...or float...or play maniac drift wood...and we zoomed, perinwinkles and jellyfish dancing, churning under our sandy shadows. The local news announcement" "It's 11:00 p.m., Do you know where your child is?" meant put a dime in the payphone and call home...throw out the safety net, put Ziggy Stardust on one last time.

And then I rode the Zipper. It was probably 1973. There were 10 of us, and Miss Molly, of course. I wasn't allowed to ride with the boys. So Miss Molly was there, in her penny loafers, smiling, trudging behind us down the dusty aisles of the carnival. The designated driver. The designated Mama. She was in charge of getting us safely to and from the fair on this Friday night, and she believed in freedom. Let them have fun. "But is he nice?", "They're just kids", all of that...but she trailed behind us anyway, because she had to count heads on the ride home, and as many that rode in with her had to come home with her. I remember her standing there. Just past the ticket taker. Candy apple and cigarette in hand, in her moo moo and loafers, smiling at us... As we piled onto the Zipper, two by two....

Trisha and I buckled in, the cage clamping Bang! and our feet dangling forever in front of us...suspended over the dirty landscape of popcorn boxes, cigarette butts and torn ticket stubs. We laughed. And wiggled our feet and shimmied the cage. Could we rock it? We tried. It barely swayed. Our little dog pen in the sky was weighted at the bottom and our hundred pound efforts were not even tweaking the ride. So we screamed. As loud as we could. As if we were at the top of a ferris wheel reaching the heavens, on the yanking curve of a roller coaster falling from earth, we screamed. And Miss Molly just smiled.

The music blasted, not thumped. It sort of screeched and rattled against the cage. We banged. With our free arms we pounded, : " Let us out! Stop!" and we laughed. We wanted it to never end. This feeling of being jolted and snatched and flying precariously close to danger. And then we heard the noise. I think it was a boom, but like a snake, the tail end of it hissed. And the world stopped. Or at least the Zipper did. We were hanging face down, staring at the dirt, screaming. And we were almost at the top of the Zipper.

We just kept screaming. No fear. Fun. Laugh. Kick your sandal clad feet. And then one by one, as the fire grew, they were cranking the cages down towards the ground. And everyone below us was climbing out of their naughyde nightmare and leapng to the ground. We were cranked higher. To the top. And then over the top. And then face down, to Miss Molly and the circle of faces holding the net. The net? Carnival canvas bunched up in a heap, held steady by a tribe of sunburned and wrinkled men, smiling up at us, (Is this supposed to be comforting?) hollering "jump" ! You're kidding right?


It was the smoke that convinced me to do it. To reach over and bop the latch. To send us free falling, clinging to nervous laughter and each other's jeans, through the air and into the makeshift trampoline. We landed with a thud, as 8 men came to their knees and Miss Molly watched. We had road rash from the flight, or the landing, or the twisting of our 'too-cool" outfits in the process.

And then we had free passes.

"Ride anything you like."