5024
Jack Bordnick's sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones — aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves. I am an Industrial design graduate of Pratt Institute in New York.
Flash Bang
Barry Ziman
"Are you watching what's going on?" I ask, cradling the phone in one hand and balancing my Remington rifle in the other. The forest around me is serene. I am alone. Even with no homes nor highway in sight, technology miraculously permeates this place with a cellular signal. Roaming without a mask in the sun-mottled woods allows me a respite from the omnipresent pandemic nightmare and, of course, the other fitful turbulence of our time.
"Thank God we are both retired from the force. It's hell now. Everybody filming everything on phones." On his side, I can hear the nautical bells of the Florida coast, the screech of seagulls, and the background froth of waves. He pauses. "The cities are screwed."
"You're going out on the boat?"
"Yea. No mask. No crowds. No riots. Call me later." I stare at the phone for a moment. There are no messages. No texts. The phone chronicles my collapsing life. Into my pocket I slip technology's tether to the tenuous remnants of friends and family. Rifle in hand, I turn and head home, trudging through the silent, surrounding foliage that camouflages my existence.
With this virus plague, persons of a certain age, like me, languish in uncertain exile. We live only with elusive memories and past traumas endured while slipping further into obscurity. But thankfully, I can still gulp whisky. I can sip expensive wine and watch the bluebirds, robins, and mourning doves from my deck. The woods behind my home are now verdant and fertilely aromatic with the imminent arrival of summer. There are no piercing sirens here by a placid lake. The only disruptive shrieks here come in the evening hours from some agitated female fox, hidden in the depths of forest.
As I approach my rustic ranch home, I can see the roof needs repair in the form of shingles battered from a recent, violent storm. Nearing my green door, behind the outer screen, there is a white envelope affixed, not with tape but with a tack. There is one word scrawled upon it, boldly in black marker: "Neighbor." I lower my rifle to the porch, pull the flimsy screen door open, and remove the envelope. The note inside is on crisp white paper in large size computer font: terse, cryptic, and hostile. "I see you roaming on my land. Don't think you can get away with it. I too am armed and ready to defend myself and my rights. Your neighbor." This wooded retreat was intended to spare me from such vague, civilian threats.
I glance around the surrounding forest and wonder whose imaginary boundaries have been crossed. The note has a masculine, middle-age tone of brevity and umbrage; not the work of a youthful prankster. The only neighbors I am aware of are a distance away and elderly. I have not seen them in town since the day I stocked up on supplies. Dismissively annoyed, I begin to crumple the paper for the trash, but then my professional evidentiary instinct ignites. This could portend a feud about to escalate. I bring the crumpled note and envelope in the house, placing it thoughtfully on top of a hallway table as a cautious reminder, and lay my rifle beside the door.I pour another whisky over ice while television news blares today's burning ills, inciting for me more whisky consumption. My vicarious view of the world is seventy inches of enriched pixilated experience seen from the comfort of my couch. The liquid crystal colors project real life clarity while I observe, as a constrained spectator, the raging, pandemic-ridden world outside my isolated walls.
Flashes of my life erupt with stinging venom from the glass. I remember as a child the burnt scent of my mother's hair, singed by the flame of a pocket lighter. From the bus seat behind us, a youngster of another race tried to set her on fire. Our municipal bus ride was to the worn wooden pews of a diminished congregation on its own way to extinction. I can still hear the conspiratorial laughter of these pubescent perpetrators, echoing in my pleasant, deep-wooded home now like tangible taunts from my childhood. Entirely hallucinatory are these sounds, I know, but given vivid life by the distilled spirits and by the chaotic televised images before me.
It was not all dramatic back then. It was also petty. The indignity of denied food in a fancy restaurant while the wealthy, the golf and country club set, lingered by the bar, mocking us with the insult of their insularity. Suppressed scars from youth, those indelible injustices rubbed freshly raw now by the colorful kinetics of coalesced societal rage. The turmoil on the streets projected before me stirs a deep, fetid pool of memory from my youth.
Nights that raced with hurling bricks, swinging bats, serrated knives… that was my childhood play. Racial and ethnic combat called everyone to their street corner, without referees or rules. Caught in the middle of mayhem, I recall a school principal with a battered head and bloody bandages. I too was ambushed once, being the wrong race in the wrong place. The glint of a knife pressed to my gut. There was always blood on the pavement of Bronx streets: Irish, Black, Brown, Italian, Jew - a common crimson pool of despair. Everyone was poor. Everyone a victim in some way. Every group, both young and old, exchanging, with a shrug or fleeting glance of indifference, the currency of pain, cruelty, and misfortune, transacted on each other, or from some indifferent God. That was the intractable nature of the world, so we thought.
Back then, cops could dispense pugnacious enforcement, delivered with societal impunity, upholding the established civic order. My badge and gun conferred financial status and physical security. It enabled the suburban house, the mortgage, a wife and child. Our son, a perfect, unblemished blending of our better virtues. His handsome looks, a genetic symphony, harmonized from the descendants of two continents, defying racial definition. His social circle had no ethnic or warring tribes, and I had no complaints.
Unlike his dad, his baseball bats swung only at balls, and the knives he used were for whittling sticks or skinning fish, which we caught together after venturing out on my colleague's boat. The world for me was at peace for a time, until the divorce. She got him and I didn't fight too hard, as the whisky and a drunken, sex-driven affair was in the way. And then death came like a malevolent intruder intent on thieving the only thing of value left to a broken man who already had his love stolen.
On the screen before me, the pyrotechnics of police illuminate the city streets and my darkened entertainment room. The explosive canisters and visible wafts of tear gas are cinematic; the floating grey miasma drives young whites and blacks together, weeping tears of rage, with audio-enhanced cries of rebellion. Encased in protective shielding, the police appear as futuristic knights. At most, I only had to don a face-shielded helmet. The police discharge flash bang grenades to disperse the recalcitrant bands that pelt them with bricks and bottles. On the force, I never encountered such youthful defiance, unyielding to the phalanxes of police coercion.
Watching the television, I evaluate the crowds with indoctrinated skills. I identify the nihilistic actors who appear in belligerent black garbs and ubiquitous masks, concealing their identities. These transgressors smash the storefront windows, civilized lines of demarcation crossed. Smash it, grab it. ‘Revolution come hither,’ the graffiti scrawled words. ‘Fuck 12.’ ‘Freedom.’ ‘Eat the rich.’ To me, these riotous kids look like the progeny of the rich. They don't have the downtrodden look of those pathetic, young souls my blue-uniformed partner and I mercifully placed on stretchers after opioid overdoses.
There is a loud crash in my living room. Heading to the bathroom, I've accidentally collided with a table. I curse my pathetic condition. I mock my own disheveled life. Beer cans, half-eaten food, photo frames of my prior life, magazines, and a small box of brassy-colored ammunition spill across the floor. Bullets roll and scatter like fallen toy soldiers. I'm too complacent and depressed to organize this upheaval. After all, there will be no visitors to this mountain retreat, no complaining woman to berate me for my ongoing untidy and untimely bereavement for what life I lost in these last few years, compounded now by pandemic solitude.
My young son would never be a part of this revolution, I think, had he lived. Adam was my only son; the only good to come from my marriage to Laura, before she left me for a lawyer. The police came to tell me of my son's death. They said, with downcast collegial empathy, the kid driving the other car was high - a reckless meth addict who never survived his mangled wreck. My young Adam was impaled. DOA.
My grievances and grief have no justice scales to measure their weight upon me— all is buried in the grave with his young body. The only solace being that he would not endure some horrid, tortuous life. But to this day, I endure his injuries. A headstone marks my pain and progeny. I break from my melancholy reverie only when my cell phone insistently vibrates. On woefully unsteady feet, I step outside to take the call as the sun dips below the treetops.
"So why the call earlier?" It is my former patrol partner, off his boat, ensconced now in his seaside condominium with his sexy girlfriend at his side.
"I'm thinking about what happened. The kid in our custody. We should have handled it differently. We should have told the captain at least about how he fell. His head injury. A doctor maybe if he was called early." My thought is incomplete. My words are raspy and slurred with rueful retrospection, but not the booze. Definitely not the booze.
"You're thinking about that now? Geez."
I pause and quickly re-bury those memories, brought to the surface, of when we were uniformed guardians of society. "How is your son? Has he started chemo yet?"
"The first dose was brutal, but he is handling it." His voice drops with choked emotion.
"It's rough, but he will make it. He's got that young wife," I say with empathy couched as optimism.
"Don't let those damn rioters get to you. These kids burning and looting, attacking cops, what they don't understand is that life itself is not fair. Unfair. Right? Buddy?" he says.
I aimlessly wander into the woods again. The forest, like a breathing creature, pulsates with cricket sounds. Deep dusk has come, but I press on along a path I have treaded many times. I am too agitated to sit alone at home. I have again brought the rifle as my companion. The sky has violet light. The sun has set. Darkness seeps out from under the trees around me. If I do not hasten, it will soon submerge me. I scan the woods for trouble and plot my course back home. Then, in a darkened green gully, I spot that fox from fifty yards away. It should innately shy away, run for cover, but now it stares at me with aggressive defiance. I think it's the same fox I heard the night before. It is the grey-furred annoyance disrupting my inebriated dreams this week with shrill, almost human-like feminine screams, seeking the attention of a mate. Swathed in shadow, she is unmoved by my presence in her territory and does not flee from me. Her feral intentions are unclear. I shoulder my rifle and peer through the scope. Her black pearl set of predatory eyes focus on me. Who am I? The oppressor? The victim? All I see and hear is flash bang. And again Flash Bang. Flash.
