Medium Raw

But wait a minute. The poor kid is impoverished and clearly unloved. He wears the same clothes every day. Immediately on finding his balloon, he’s ostracized by society, banned from public transportation, chastised at school, even ejected from church. His parents are either dead or have abandoned him—as the hideous crone who cruelly throws his balloon out the window at first encounter is clearly too old to be his mom. The boy’s schoolmates are a feral, opportunistic bunch who instinctively seek to destroy what they don’t understand and can’t possess. In fact, nearly every other child in the film is depicted as part of an unthinking mob, fighting viciously among themselves even as they pursue the boy and his balloon through the streets, like a pack of wolves. The boy runs away, is assaulted, separated from his only friend—then reunites with it only to watch it die slowly before his eyes.

The happy ending? Balloons from all over Paris converge. The boy gathers them together and is lifted aloft. He drifts away, dangerously suspended over the city. The end.

Where’s the kid going? To an unspecified “better” place—for sure. Or to a fatal drop when the balloons empty of their helium (as we’ve seen them do just previously).

The message?

Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.

Nice, huh? May as well have put a crack pipe in my hand right then. Why wait? Maybe this was why I never worked at the French Laundry.

Then there’s Old Yeller. Even worse. A more cynical and unconscionably bleak message one could hardly imagine.

The story of a boy and his dog. A Disney story of a boy and his dog—which, as all children’s accumulated experience teaches them, means that no matter what kind of peril the heroes go through, things will always turn out okay in the end. This, by the time we sat down in that darkened theater, excited, sticky with Twizzlers, we had come to accept as an article of faith. A contract between kids everywhere, our parents, and the fine people at Walt Disney Studios. This was as powerful a bond as we knew, an assurance that held an otherwise uncertain universe together. Sure, Khrushchev was maybe going to drop the Big One on us, but goddammit, that dog was gonna make it out okay!

So, when Old Yeller gets sick with this rabies thing, little Tony is, naturally, not concerned. Pinocchio, after all, got out of that whale situation no problem. Sure, things looked bad for him, too, for a while, but he figured it out in the end. Bumpy ride with Bambi, what with Mom dying, but that ended okay. Like Mom and Dad never forgetting to pick you up at school, the Happy Ending was a dead cert.

It will be okay. It will turn out fine.

No one will hurt a fucking dog.

That’s what I’m saying to myself, sitting there between Mom and Dad, staring up at that screen, breath held, waiting for the miracle.

Then they go and blow Old Yeller’s fucking brains out.

I sit there stunned. “What do you mean there’s no cure for rabies? I don’t give a fuck they hadda put Yeller ‘out of his misery’! What about my misery, cocksucker! They were supposed to fix things! He was supposed to get better!! Don’t talk to me about reality! I don’t care if it’s a magical fucking rainbow shining out of a fairy princess’s ass makes him better. He’s supposed to get better!!!”

From that moment on, I looked at my parents and the whole world with suspicion. What else were they lying about?

Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay…

Then they shoot your fucking dog.

So, maybe that’s why until I got my first dishwashing job, I had no respect for myself and no respect for anybody else.

I should probably sue.

3 The Rich Eat Differently Than You and Me

I was holed up in the Caribbean about midway through a really bad time. My first marriage had just ended and I was, to say the least, at loose ends.