D666: The Devil and First Grade Bingo.

After the ABCs and 123s of first grade lesson plans, Mrs. Carol Boucher often called the G24s and F36s of a typical bingo game. I was a crafty and diligent player; cheating my way to winning at least once every time we played. We wrote the numbers and letters on a card ourselves before the game started; if I left a few blank white squares and filled them in on an "as needed" basis...

"Bingo!" 


Sometimes,  swindling the skinnier thumb sucking bed wetters out of their candied winnings lost its usual luster and I'd press my long curly lashes together in a sort of juvenile state of  meditation. It happened a lot (I started therapy early...).  Have you ever opened your eyes at night when the lights are off and stared into the darkness? The dark becomes dimensional. It takes on the form of a man or women or dog or serial-killing radioactive mutant who wants nothing more than to stand in the dark corner of your dark room and hungrily (and darkly) sneer at you.  This is not what happens when you sit in a yellowish, florescent-bulb lit, first grade classroom--not at all.  But, the beginnings of both experiences are pretty similar.

 First there are little green spots, then a splotchy green patch, then a solid green sheet, then it might turn a little reddish a little greenish, it might fade to little lines or geometric shapes.  Sometimes, you can even move these nonexistent color-shapes at will.   With my eyes closed, I exist as the chunky, Star Trek loving, mythology reading, color moving omnipotent god of my own self contained infinity.  With my eyes open, the chunky, Star Trek loving, mythology reading douche bag kid who is so desperate for attention that he sports the least aesthetically pleasing but very bold pattern of grey and florescent orange paisley on his sweatshirt and cheats at bingo.   Let's see...

"Bingo!"

The day I met the devil was an eyes closed day.  I pushed, pushed, pushed the colors as far back in the dimensional blackness as I could.  I squeezed my eyes shut--tighter, tighter, tighter--until there was a throbbing right in the middle of my kid-tiny forehead.  I was so immersed in my internal landscape that I could no longer remember where I was, what I was suppose to be doing--I was the little God triumphant--Le Petit Prince on my journey through the cosmos.

And then it stopped.

Everything stopped.  Not just the color, not just my breathing, not just the joviality of owning my own little space.  But everything.  Time, life, infinity and nothingness--collision.  I could taste the depth behind the stillness of the moment, the satisfaction of violence,  rending the flesh of my young amoral mind...there it was.  Crawling it's way through the carcass of my technicolor dreamland, with a smile on its sharp immutable face--beautiful, sad, with an ephemeral permanence. Terror.  The image of that creature is one I can never quite remember, buts its burned into me, etched into my heart like an engraved engagement ring: " For Forever."

The sound began: A hum, a whistle, a trickling of dissonant notes.  By the time I realized my eyes were open and the sound was my own screeching, I'd managed to send a classmate or two into convulsive tears and my teacher to her knees in front of me.

"John, JOHN.  What happened, are you okay?"

I looked down at a piece of paper I couldn't recall ever touching and smiled.

"Bingo!"