Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [38]
My mother, who had been standing nearby having a smoke with my aunt Rose, must have come up behind me to see what I was doing. (I guess I hadn’t moved from where I was squatting for nearly a minute, and in my mother’s mind this was clearly reason enough for alarm.)
“Are you out of your friggin’ mind?” she screamed, nearly sending me sprawling into the mud.
“Oops,” I said.
Realizing immediately that I’d have to defuse the situation, I pointed to my wounded wrist. “It doesn’t hurt, Mom,” I remarked cheerfully.
“You are out of your friggin’ mind,” my mother shrieked, grabbing me by the nearest nonbleeding appendage and hauling me toward Aunt Rose.
This is not going to be pretty, I thought.
I should explain that when I was a kid, I had something like eight Aunt Roses. As you can imagine, telling them apart was something of a dilemma (“That’s Aunt Rose DiMango, not Aunt Rose DiDonato!”). So, inspired by the Peterson Field Guide series, I approached the problem by developing a set of identifiable field characteristics based on traits like “total body length” and “facial mole placement” (an original creation of mine). Within the Aunt Rose group, individuals ranged in height from a kid-friendly four feet eight inches on up to a towering sixty inches. This one was a midsized Aunt Rose, easily identifiable however, by her miniature poodle, Fifi, as well as her unique talent for combining body language and swearing into a kind of interpretive Italian dance. And as my mother dragged me toward the sidewalk, bleeding and ear tweaked, I couldn’t help noticing that my aunt had already initiated some preemptive hand gestures (holding an index finger to her temple, thumb extended skyward).
I don’t remember too much about the cleanup—although I do recall getting blood on one of Aunt Rose’s bathroom statues. (“Gracie, the sa-na-va-bitch is bleeding all over the Virgin Mother!”)
Many people have been and continue to be intrigued by blood, while others (like my mom and at least five of my aunt Roses) are—how should I put this?—somewhat less than intrigued by it. But whether you were fascinated by blood or repelled by it, as a child in the 1960s we were all starting to see quite a bit more of the red stuff. The assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, the student deaths at Kent State, and the Manson murders were beamed right into our living rooms, their visual horror intact. Color news footage from the Vietnam War seemed to take a hard turn toward graphic around the time that Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn’s glamorized versions of Bonnie and Clyde were going down in slow motion—in a blaze of explosive Technicolor squibs.
Forty years ago, the sight of all that red was shocking. Today, some of us are still repelled by blood. Others are titillated by it (think of the mountains of money brutal gore-fests like the film Saw have taken in). Still others have become acclimated to it. Similar to the way our bodies learn not to respond to inconsequential stimuli (you don’t feel your socks once you pull them on, do you?), we have adapted to the sight of blood with a corresponding decrease in sensitivity.
So what is blood, exactly? One answer is that it’s food for the creatures inhabiting this book. Because of that, I don’t feel badly about taking a few detours to explore the substance a bit.
An anatomist might start by describing blood as a connective tissue—just like bone, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. Confused? Well, not for long, once you figure out what it takes to be considered a card-carrying connective tissue. Tissues are accumulations of different types of cells (along with their matrix, which is the noncellular medium that surrounds them). At an organizational level, they’re one rung on a kind of hierarchical ladder that characterizes all living things. In this regard, tissues are a rung above cells and a rung below organs, which are structures that are composed of several different tissues. Taking this hierarchy a bit further, several organs, working together,