In this examination of a problematic father-son relationship, Jim Churchill-Dicks takes the rollicking camp of the cult film Kung Fu Hustle and combines it with the manic weirdness of dreams. The result needs to be read to be believed.
Rage Fu Hustle
I am pinned down behind my father’s silver bullet trailer, while he, having the high ground…..flings scriptures down like arrows. Barrage….the sound each scripture makes against the trailer when it lands….like the beating of an empty trash can. Enough. I show myself, and bellow “Behold!” like some Old Testament prophet, like that woman in curlers inhaling her whole cigarette in one breath. Behooooooooold, You think you have the high ground!?…My father’s big cartoon eyes, another barrage of arrows….they pass right through me, and trumpets sound above his head. The opening of the clouds….gold and light, like Sunday School, like a flannel board bitch-slap Jesus. The trumpets, the trumpets-
Rush forward. All is quiet, we are both on equal ground. I am wearing the bathrobe I wore in church; the skit about Joseph, dreamer of dreams… Facing off, my father and me, Spaghetti Western, Rage Fu Hustle, we are samurai pilgrims at the edge of war. We are still….apart from the wind blowing my bathrobe as well as terry cloth can blow….apart from my father’s serene white comb-over wind-socking with the falling leaves…we are still. We are stone. Slow motion…..I begin, from the deep core from below my navel, a bellow……the wind shifts, follows the force of the bellowed leaves, hair, robes blown in the direction of my voice…..
My father’s ears pin back like a dog about to be beaten…a dog’s sad wince in a stiff wind…..Have mercy. Lord have mercy upon my father.
The dream goes on…. The harder I try to remember what happens, the tape ends…bubbles…melts away into light, but a voice, the narrator’s voice, says, “if you understand the beauty in this, you understand the beauty of your father.” (What was it? What was it!?)
This. My father, fat fish in both hands, almost bigger than he is, straining under the weight of his trophy, and to the camera, his young, self-conscious face.
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Editor’s Note: Jim Churchill-Dicks has dazzled us at The Good Men Project before. Read his haunting piece on father-son conflict, “Damnation by Firelight.”
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Photo by World Movies Channel /Flickr