STRAY COUNTRY

Portrait of a junior high school.  Deep autumn.  A carpet of red leaves rolled out on the walk.  The sun sliding away into the trees.  But the glitz of Hollywood is far away.  This is a cheap sun.  A nickel and dime sun.  With a cheapness that goes past half-hearted rays and clocking out early.  This is a sun that sang its loudest songs somewhere on a stage last July.  Last August.  An aging lounge singer.  A faded star.  No longer part of the sky.  Eclipsed by movement of earth and time.  A tawdry little shine soon to flame out west.  Forgotten.  A sun that doesn't give a shit that it's leaving two boys alone, with a junior high school.

Billy. 

Jack.

Two boys who are now being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.

You are about to see the last microscopic puzzle pieces of Eddie Schneider lying in a latex dumpster, lying in a white plastic grocery sack moonlighting as a bedroom trash liner, soon to be carted away to a steel-rimmed garbage can, only to be swallowed by a mammoth steel beast, only to be vomited into a city landfill, where it will be buried and buried and buried until sunlight is some kind of fairy tale.  A puzzle that will forever remain a jumbled mess of jigsaw pieces.  Never to be put together.  So the story of Edward Schneider comes to a close.  A narrative much different, and yet the same as your average American smoker.

Edward Schneider.  Not the first, and certainly not the last American who died precisely the way he lived, chasing a hunger across shopping malls and retail outlets only to wind up suffocated by the little world he'd built.  Edward Schneider, body removed, just this morning lying on the floor of his bedroom between so much commercial flotsam, all his gathered goods worthless as the white plastic sack that carted them home.

If you entered the bedroom of a dead boy what might you find?

Maybe a stray corner of Stray Country.

There's an old saying, "Every human is put on Earth condemned to die.  Time and method of execution unknown."  Case in point:  Edward Schneider.  Lately deceased.  A brash boy, yearning to impress a girl.  Beaten by a cigarette, by his own ego, and by the shifting winds that blow somewhere in Stray Country.

What has he left behind?

Less than you think.

Billy.

Jack.

Smart boys.  Able to understand much.  Bound to be successful at most things in life, but not in the one thing all humans try and fail - looking over the lonely country we call death and grasping what they see.

Two boys still young enough to climb a tree.  Taking in the view every man, woman, or person must take in at some point in their life.  Forming a question that will never be answered.  Not by a poet.  Not by a pastor.  Not by a physician.  Not by a prayer.

How is it the knots that moor us here feel so tight yet slip so easily?

Edward Walter Schneider

1972-1987

Edward "Eddie" Walter Schneider was called home to a greater purpose in Heaven.  We will miss his smile, his voice, his calm demeanor, his laugh, his hugs (rare as they were), his late mornings (trying to pull 'the bear' out of his cave), asking him to turn down his music (again), and watching him grow into 'Switchback Jack' - the stage name he'd picked out for when he became a famous rock star.  Mom, Dad & Bethany miss you, Eddie.  Add some color to Heaven's choir.  In lieu of flowers, please support a musician. 

Just exactly how many cigarettes does it take to kill you?

Most smokers lose count.  But they say there's a guy in the sky who is counting.  Who will never lose count.  And they say come death there'll be a scoreboard of sorts, where a man or a woman or a person's life will be tallied-up and measured.  Something, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the witches calculus, hen-scratches and check-marks it takes to get a loan from a bank.  Where all your human activity is quantified, measure and weighed.  Where people are distilled into ones, zeros and decimal points to determine who gets into Heaven and who gets turned away.

Whether or not that is all true is irrelevant.

Because there's also another guy in the sky counting.  Perhaps a woman.  A person, up in the heavens but not as far north as God.  Somewhere on the 26th floor.  Philip Morris Building - 120 Park Ave.  These are people counting just how many cigarettes it takes to kill someone.  They have an answer.  A very specific number. 

I won't claim to know the number.  But, I can promise you one thing -  

That number isn't one.

In 1981 the Federal Trade Commission of the United States issued a report to the American Congress that concluded health warning labels had little effect on public knowledge and attitudes about smoking.  As a result Congress enacted the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1984, which required four specific health warnings on all cigarette packages and advertisements.

They are, as follows:

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risk to Your Health.

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.

May I suggest a fifth:

• SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: There is No Risk-Free Level of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke.

We've reached the part of the story where it may be time to ask yourself, perhaps it's time to consider the origin of the white plastic grocery sack.  What it is.  And how it got here.

Don't bother reaching for your phone.

You don't need it.

Because you already know it was made by a group of people.  Men or women who hog-tied one dollar.  A dollar they were trying to turn into two.  So they could take both dollars and breed them like dogs.  Men who wanted to stud Benjamin Franklin.  Women who took the forefather's maxim 'money begets money' quite Biblically.  People who saw Grant, and Jackson, Lincoln and Washington as heat-cycle bitches.

You see the white plastic grocery sack was not an invention. 

It's a byproduct. 

Same as soot.  Same as slag.  Same as smoke.  Same as straw.  A byproduct of breeding dollar bills.  Something that shows up once humankind starts studding dead presidents on an industrial scale.

The moral of today's chapter?

I'll let you decide.