A POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE SITUATION

It hasn’t happened … yet. But in the foreseeable future someone’s going to get slapped with a sexual harassment claim, someone’s going to get burned. And why not?

Yesterday, I’m making copies of worksheets when a coworker says, “This is the best weekend to hit the bars.” He’s not speaking to me, but to another coworker, a female. Still, the conversation is meant to be an open invitation for anyone to participate.

“This weekend?” she asks, somewhat puzzled. “What about …”

Before she can finish, he starts up again. “It’s the beginning of deer hunting season. While all those husbands are in the woods looking to shoot Bambi, their wives will be in the bars looking for some action of their own.”

He laughs; she laughs.

I’m not amused. He’s married. She’s married. I’m married.

On another occasion, I’m waiting my turn to speak to this same female coworker when a male coworker steps out of her office, and for reasons I’m not sure of (maybe he thinks I’ll be impressed) he leans back inside the door frame and says, “You can put your shirt back on now.”

He laughs; she laughs.

I do what is starting to become routine: I turn and walk away. No sense in being part of the situation. It’s hard to believe this type of behavior takes place inside a prison. It’s no different than playing with matches inside a place that manufactures fireworks. Soon enough, sparks will fly; soon enough, there will be a chain reaction of explosions; soon enough, there will be depositions and lawsuits. What started out as innocent banter between the sexes will careen out of control. It always does.

A SECOND CHANCE

I had asked my father what he had asked his surgeon, “Prakash. Why does that name sound familiar?” The young phlebotomist (half my age) ignored us, content on searching for a good vein.

“His niece,” my father answered, “is a news reporter for a TV station. I can’t remember which one.”

“That’s right. Anu Prakash,” I replied. The name stuck with me—don’t ask me how?—but I couldn’t recall her face. A week ago my father was changing the plugs on his four-wheel drive truck, preparing for his annual Wyoming hunting trip when he doubled-over in pain. In forty-some-odd-years he’s never missed that trip. My mother rushed him to the hospital where he underwent a major operation. Now he’s home, still bed-ridden, but healing.

“I asked the Doc, ‘Where did the name Anu come from?’” My father never did have a problem striking up a conversation. “The Doc told me when his niece was born the hospital requested a name from his brother. His brother held the baby high in the air for everyone to see and said, ‘A new Prakash.’ So the name stuck—with a variation in the spelling of course.”

I never met my father’s surgeon; I’m sure he fabricated the story, reconstructed it to perfection. My father had one set back on his road to recovery: His surgeon redid his navel, re-cored and tied it; however, due to a lack of blood flow, the skin died back. As for the origin of my father’s name—I refuse to make something up.

A CAN OPENER

Dean Bakopoulos, author of “Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon,” recalling his Detroit prep school days in Mr. Bean’s Honors English Class:



When we finished reading “The Nick Adams Stories,” Mr. Bean gave us the task of finding the “perfect Hemingway sentence,” the one that summed up worldview of this writer that so many of us suddenly wanted to become. If we found it, we’d get an automatic A for the semester.

The next morning, our searches proved fruitless. We went around the room, making our best guesses, all of us wrong. Then Mr. Bean stood up in the center of his room and, in his booming voice, he turned to “Big Two-Hearted River” and read the perfect Hemingway sentence: “He liked to open cans.”

We were baffled. We groaned and complained and said that we’d been had. Seriously? That?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

So here’s Jimmy O, the one-eyed hunter, propped against a tree sound asleep. Like Roy Ferris before him, Jimmy O never wandered far from camp, whereas, those of us who pilfered cans of peaches, beef jerkey and toilet paper eagerly headed for the woods. We dressed in layers, and when nature came a calling, we begrudgingly propped our rifles against trees, peeled off enough clothing, and did our business.

I haven’t hunted in years, but if I decided to join my dad and brother, I’d be sure to pack my own can opener in my Pabst Blue Ribbon hunting box. With each ticking second ... minute ... hour spent in the woods, you never knew when that eight-point buck would come your way. We all wanted that one chance, that one shot, to be successful, to come back and retell our stories of how it all happened. Plus, it would be inexcusable to confiscate that designated can opener from hunting camp—that is, unless you dragged a trophy buck into the clearing.

My brother emailed the following picture below. Seems a buck is walking around with a tin bucket caught on his antlers.

I'LL TAKE WHAT I CAN GET

When you videotape a fawn peacefully walking across your front yard, dub in some heavy artillery followed by a crowd cheering for its successful escape, then post it on YouTube under the title “Ted Nugent Visits My House,” you’re bound to get a few NRA / Hunting Enthusiasts cussing you out. They assume you’re anti-hunting, anti-gun. I sometimes wonder: If I dubbed in a crappy new song by the Motor City Madman would they have given me the benefit of the doubt, that I’m poking fun of the Nuge?

I remember my first year of hunting, my uncle and I slung the hindquarters of a deer on our shoulders and headed back to camp. We explained that it was too difficult to drag the carcass out of the swamp. “We took what we could get,” I said.

My answer seemed plausible, dusk came quickly. However, my brother, not buying it—he never gave up on a potential kill, and a few days later, with ammo flying, made hamburger out of a spiked buck wheezing on the river bank—questioned our story.

We fessed up. It was a doe, like we had mentioned (the story wouldn’t have been plausible if we had imagined an eight-point buck), and we discovered it bloated and dead. My uncle suggested I practice gutting my first deer. When I stuck the knife in I punctured the sack, releasing a rotten egglike stench. We gagged. Then cut.

That night we cooked venison and ate it, hoping the next day would bring better luck.

THE ONE-EYED HUNTERS

The rusted-out husk of broken down Buicks and Farmalls sunk into Roy Ferris’s front lawn; His bygone possessions amongst the jimsonweed, dodder, and dandelion. His clapboard house never felt the bristles of a loaded paintbrush. The quack grass grew undisturbed, swallowing two mower decks—obstacles for feral cats chasing field mice across his postage-stamp lot. My late grandfather, forever the good neighbor (their socio-economic disparity as wide as the cornfield separating their homes) invited Roy to our Kalkaska hunting camp.

Roy Ferris had nothing in common with the well-paid Detroit autoworkers arriving in their new F-150s. Still, he became one of us, the camaraderie natural and unforced. The deer need not worry about Roy’s marksmanship either; he tended the campfire, never wandering too far from the heat in his thin layer of clothing, his glass eye rolling inward, his good eye darting back and forth from smoke and flame to the surrounding forest, waiting for us to reappear from the swamps, waiting for someone to drag a freshly gutted buck into the clearing.

I’m not exactly sure how many times Roy stayed at our camp before his death, but my grandfather soon found someone else to converse with on the ride to and from camp. Enter Jimmy O, another poor chap, a younger version of Roy, collecting disability and working odd jobs whenever the opportunity arose. He had a lisp, his tongue smacking against the back of his upper incisors with more frequency after each swig of Jack Daniels. If my memory serves me well, we only had one one-eyed man per hunting season and not two.

The above photograph shows Jimmy O taking a much-needed rest. The prisoner drawing, aptly titled “The Eye in the Sky,” is a belated tribute to Roy Ferris.

THE SWAMPS OF KALKASKA

I quit deer hunting a long long time ago, not because I didn’t enjoy the sport of killing, but because my wife refused to prepare or eat the venison. I remember traipsing through the Kalkaska swamps of Michigan, searching for that isolated place deemed too thick with obstacles for other hunters to venture. I would sit for hours listening to the slightest of noises stirred by the wind and trees, only to feel violated by the smell of cigarettes coming from pinpricks of orange eyeing me through the brush.

Back at camp we’d cook beans and franks and wash it down with Old Milwaukee or Pabst Blue Ribbon. As night approached, we’d sit around a campfire and kibitz, laying claim to our own areas of expertise. One such hunter, Ray, (the big fellow standing to the right), became an unwelcome regular years after my Uncle Ivan invited him along, the year prior to my uncle quitting the hunting group altogether.

Ray was an expert on everything—cards, firearms, automobiles, investments, you name it—the Cliff Claven before Cliff Claven existed on "Cheers" type of guy. I suspect Ray’s arrogance and bravado were ways for him to mask his own deficiencies. He was deathly afraid of getting lost in the woods; he never ventured too far from camp by himself. And who could blame him? A young man turned up missing in these very same Kalkaska swamps, and a couple of years later his decomposed body had been discovered by another hunter.

No one liked Ray, particularly my grandfather (seated in the middle). I distinctly remember both of them arguing, which led to Ray tossing another log into the smoldering ash and my grandfather snuffing out the remains. “It’s time to hit the sack,” he said, “big day ahead of us tomorrow.” Of course, I threw back the rest of my beer and checked in early, leaving Ray to smoke another cigarette before he called it a night. In the morning, it would be my turn to lose him in the woods.

THE ACCOMPLICE

I held the ammo in my left hand and the chipmunk by the tail in my right. The instrument of death—a pellet gun, proudly held by Denny Wentworth, one of the locals near my parent’s cottage in the woods. We stood off Shady Lane, my shoulders tense, feeling the heavy burden of the chipmunk’s soul, an indelible mark in the form of a large shadow imprinted on my coat. It was true, I had been outnumbered—the photographer making us pose with the kill. “Smile for the camera,” he said. So I did. My smile forced, as if I had been an unwilling participant, an accomplice if you will, while Denny seemed relaxed, ready to slaughter more, ready to show off our trophy victims.

It’s hard to imagine that the boy holding the chipmunk would become a teacher for the Michigan Department Corrections. By his own volition, he had chose to surround himself by murders, rapists, and thieves to earn a paycheck. What was it that made him change? What was it that made him gain the necessary confidence? What was it in this photo that didn’t add up? Perhaps Rod Stewart had it all wrong when he sang, “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”

Now that I have misrepresented the facts based on what you saw, let me tell you what the picture failed to show: 1) I appeared to be uncomfortable because of the cold, damp autumn weather, 2) the pellet gun and ammo were mine and 3) I had been the trigger man, not Denny.