Booger Boy wants a show and this is America and I’m his uncle, his stand-in uncle, so I’m going to give him one. The Fourth of July is three days out. My sister and I leave her central Jersey apartment to look at houses in Easton and Stroudsburg in the affordable promised land that is Pennsylvania. My wife threw me out. Or I threw myself out. Or time severed us. I’m not sure where the cause is located or who owns it. Freud said no one really owns any action in their life. He said volition is slicker than a wet frankfurter. Hard to pin down and encasing mysteries.
My sister is a psyche nurse. I’m a white-collar worker in the process of crashing out: midlife crisis; looming divorce crisis; laid-off from my warehouse manager gig crisis; considering going back to school for a therapy gig crisis. Mental health is a growth industry. While I collect unemployment and marshal my psychic resolve, I’m reading Freud and visiting childhood friends who now have kids. Kids who may be autistic and who relentlessly pick their noses and who I give nicknames to like Booger Boy. He’s in the anal stage, stuck in it. He’s four but wears a diaper and shits himself every morning. Likes shitting himself. Even though he’s potty-trained. I get it, kid. Sometimes you need to sit in your own filth. Sometimes it feels good to wallow but then you wake up forty and unemployed and you’re reading Freud.
I tell my sister that Freud said there’s an egg in us. A beautiful little egg. But the world wants to crack it. To scramble the rich yolk of us and devour it. Sop it up with toast.
“Freud never said that,” she says, ripping her vape in the passenger seat.
“How do you know?”
“Freud was a fucking idiot anyway. Did I tell you about the trans kid who had their tits cut off then came in for an eating disorder? I was like you just lost all that weight and you want to lose more? All the anorexics have the bones of elderly women. All we can do is make people calm. I’m not a nurse. I’m a pill dispenser in white clogs.”
“Freud might have said it.” My sister has a dark sense of humor. A cruel streak. But she’s equally cruel toward herself with suicide attempts every few years and relationships with bad men that may as well be. Not that I begrudge anyone their cruelty. How can one assign blame? Slicker than a wet frankfurter, Freud said. Mysterious.
“This Arab schizoid came in and he was in love with me. Kept masturbating at the nurses’ station. I made the mistake of telling him I’m half-Moroccan. He was all doped up during the intake and seemed harmless but now he’s obsessed with me. Says Morocco has the most beautiful women in the world.” She rips her vape and seems pleased with herself. I don’t think she’s unbeautiful but it’s hard for me to judge. I’ve seen her try to take out my cousin’s eye with a butter knife. When I look at her, it’s volatility I see. The sun reflecting off the butter knife. The girlish cry of my cousin the bodybuilder who encountered something raw and feral which no amount of muscles could combat.
We pull off I80 after passing through the Delaware Water Gap, what Freud may have called the birth canal ejecting the Jersey child, priced out of his home state, into the Pennsylvanian world where fireworks are legal and taxes are low. “You coming in?”
“Nah, fireworks are stupid as fuck. Literally burning money.”
“Freud said they made the latent wish of the viewer manifest in the sky. A libidinal launch into an explosion of—”
“Just go buy your shit. I need to eat something or I’ll throw up. The Ozempic is twisting my guts up and this bitch manager keeps texting me asking me to come in and cover a shift on the floor with all the shivering addicts. As if some pills will save us. As if sticking your finger down your throat will do anything. As if you cut off your tits or dick and voilà—you’re cured. All better. Life is good now. Who told them life is supposed to be good? Idiots.”
I exit the car and through the window fire one more “An egg, Freud said” then enter China. The store isn’t called China but I’m honoring that great nation for what it continues to bestow. At the warehouse I considered myself an agent of China. An emissary delivering pallets of China’s goodwill. I’ve never been to Asia and probably never will because I can’t imagine having enough money to fly somewhere but the idea of China, oh, the idea and me swept up in the fantasy, wishing to be one brick in its Great Wall.
My friend’s wife thinks Booger Boy may be autistic. He spazzes out a lot. Demands to eat in front of his iPad. Sits in a kiddie chair while he gums some dino nuggets. I told her it’s the sugar. They’re giving him cookies at all hours. I stayed there the other night and the kid ate a whole pint of Italian ice before screaming and running wind sprints in the park and then screaming in bed. Ahhh, ahhhhhh. I told her autism doesn’t exist in China because they don’t eat much sugar. Ahhhh. I told her Freud said China was civilization and America was discontent. Ahhh. I told her I think I was fired for eating out the boss’s daughter near the box crusher in the back of the warehouse. Ahh. She’s twenty-five and used to work in the warehouse in high school and we’d flirt and laugh and then she came in again from time to time and we’d flirt and laugh and then she brought a bottle of limoncello back from a trip to Sicily and we shared it, flirting and laughing, and she said Italian men are hot and that I looked Italian. Moroccan-Irish, I said. Marhaba, I said. We made out for a while then I fingered her for a while and thought, through the sugary fog of too much limoncello, that my finger was Freud’s finger and also the world’s finger and her father’s finger and my father’s finger but also of course penises because Freud. We didn’t fuck. I ate her out from behind lifting her linen sundress from Sorrento and wearing it like a veil until we heard a door close or what we thought was a door closing so she used her discarded panties to wipe herself, the part of herself I’d been psychoanalytically slurping as an agent of Eros, and I wiped my mouth on her Italian linen which made her giggle. I was laid-off a month later. It was probably a coincidence though Freud said there’s no such thing. My boss mentioned tariffs. Mentioned China and the changing times. I nodded, tasting that limoncello on my tongue, thinking about eggs, wondering if my tongue touched the shell inside her. If our eggs had met. Hello. Ahh.
***
Roman candles. The empire of our associations, explosive dreamwork. The unconscious bottle rocketing into light. A pack of four missiles called the Four Fiery Phalluses of July. A horde of high college kids emitting patriotic musk in the aisle of sparklers. A warehouse was my Yale College and my Harvard. A ground spinner in the shape of Saturn which promises its rings are sexier than all the emperor’s concubines combined, than all of your wishes fulfilled. Poppers and fountains. I think my boss’s daughter groomed me. Rich kid calling in the help to get on his knees and pleasure his betters. Not that I mind. Hey mambo, mambo half Moroccano. Reloadable mortars as if these revelers are so many Doughboys going off to liberate Europe. The trenches are vaginas. Our heroes scrambled through them, olive drab loads. The vagina, entrenched. Jumping jacks, the whole brood incubated and hatched. My wife, where are you now? Are you happy, habibti? Did you envy my penis? Fireworks are transferential, Freud said. We’re not in love with them, per se. We merely love the people we see burning in them. The cinders of our parents and first loves. Dreams selves wished into aerial spectacles courtesy of China. Airborne troopers raining down to liberate us from our complexes. Happy birthday, America.
Majestic brilliance, the package says. $846 of majestic brilliance gifted to you by your unemployed uncle, Booger Boy. You’re very, very welcome.
***
My sister is in the car, sweating, vaping, and furiously typing. I load all the Chinese goodies in the trunk and sing a little song to myself, a ditty about America and Sam Adams and Booger Boy and sugar. “Booger Boy, I’m in love but Freud says I’m lazy…” Once we’re on the highway, my sister says she thinks I have ADHD and need to be medicated. I want to say maybe she needs to be less medicated so she wouldn’t go through life in a numb trazadone stupor and assume anyone with an ounce of energy has ADHD but I remember my cousin’s fear, the butter knife.
“It may be so,” I say. “Even Freud said the world is full of mystery.”
She rips her vape and says “This old bag I work with refuses to change the sheets on the beds and she’s an aide, not even a real nurse. She thinks we’re supposed to change the sheets. She thinks I have beef with her because she’s black and I’m white. I told her I’m not white. I’m Moroccan. And that we did 9/11 so she better watch her ass around me.”
“Everyone deserves fresh sheets,” I say, imagining the soft cotton as the shell of an egg protecting the life within.
Even though I can’t see her because I’m driving, eyes forward, hands at ten and two, I know she’s rolling her eyes. “This is why you were laid-off. You’re fucking naïve.”
“I love you too,” I say.
She rips her vape. “Everyone is so fucking naïve.”
***
The Fourth is here. A heat dome summer. A sweltering Hurricane Carter Jersey night in West Milford where my friend lives with his wife and Booger Boy and all the other working-class guys who drive an hour or more to rewire warehouses in New York or repair foundations on McMansions in Bergen County. I’m setting up the firework show for Booger Boy and company in the playground across the street. The lakes are evaporating. The soil is cooking. My ass crack is the meadowlands. Heat, heat, and more heat. “There’s an egg in us, Booger Boy,” I yell. Booger Boy squeals. Does he understand? He breastfed until recently. Melanie Klein said such feeding was essential for good little boys. Something about the maternal nipple as a doorway to a well-adjusted adulthood. My friend is drunk, sitting in the swing and swaying back and forth. His wife is struggling to hold Booger Boy who is experiencing one of his might-be-autistic fits. I want to struggle against her breasts with him. I want to shit myself too. I want to pick my nose and have some strange man put on a fireworks show just for me and tell me about eggs and Freud and China. Darkness encroaches. A welcome wind shakes the surrounding trees. Bats zig and zag feasting on mosquitos. I set off the first bottle rocket. Zip, pop, glory. Booger Boy is crying now but I know they’re tears of joy. My wife cried all the time so I’m an expert at deciphering the meanings within and behind them. “An egg, Booger Boy, an egg. Look at me. Be a good Booger Boy and look at your uncle. The egg is in us and so smooth, smooth as your ass before it’s coated in morning shit. Smoother than your mother’s gorgeous breast.” I’m firing off bottle rockets now. I’ve stuck sparklers in the grass so it looks like I’m dancing on flames, feet flicking embers. “A beautiful egg. Perfect. Whole. Something even the best factories in China couldn’t produce with all the stolen technology of the world.” Bang, whizz. Pop, pop, pop. “It’s all ahead of you, Booger Boy, ni hao,” I yell as his mother fails to wrangle him. He slips her hug and starts running down the block, away from me and the exploding world. Ahhhh. “Run, you little bastard. Find your own cunt to eat. Your own warehouse to manage. Your personal China. It’s all ahead of you. Seize your happiness. You aren’t forty. You deserve fresh sheets. You’re an independent country. No taxation without representation. No death drive without the pleasure principle,” I scream, firing off another Roman Candle, firing it after Booger Boy, watching the colors nip his heels. I yell all the things I’ve longed to hear. From my parents. My wife. My boss. From the egg within me. Ahhhhhhh.
I continue yelling long after the sparklers cease sparkling and the aerials have landed and the parachutes with their toy soldiers hang trapped and strangled in the forest’s dark limbs.
