Bubba: an introduction

Introduction

You would surmise that, if one had a conscience, it would look exactly like you. Sort of like an identical twin.

It seems like now is the right time to introduce you to my conscience; a thousand pardons for not introducing him earlier, but it is only now that I’ve found the right time to bring him into the light.

My conscience is doesn’t look anything like me. First off, we aren’t even the same age. He’s always had a fixed one. He’s always either older or younger than I am. Second, he’s a boy and I’m a girl. But I shall refer to him as “it”, because, obviously, my conscience and I don’t get along. At all.

It appeared to me in Kindergarten one day. We were playing “Who Gets Dizzy First?” at the playground: the game’s objective being to run around in a circle and see who… well, got dizzy first. Unlike any other game, this had numerous winners, and just one loser. That way the game was more effective : losers were easily identified and shunned. The game would end when the someone tripped over the person who… well, got dizzy first. We were cruel, cruel kids. We laughed at the first girl whose eyes rolled to the back of her head, forming a circle around the floundering victim, screaming and jeering and pointing at her for getting dizzy first and finally dispersing when the teacher would tell us to stop or till the girl threw up, whichever came first.

Anyway, while running in a circle I placed my bet that Nina would fall down first. Her tongue was sticking out and her cheeks were flushed crimson, plus she was gripping at the hair on the side of her head as if her chubby fists would keep it from exploding. I had never lost a “Who Gets Dizzy First?” in my whole two months of Kindergarten, and I was confident that I wouldn’t lose this one.

The world spun round and round. My arms were outstretched for balance, as always (my secret weapon) and I was on top of the world, on top of the slide, on top of the seesaw. The world, it seemed, was my playground. I would ALWAYS have balance. I would NEVER fall down. I was INVINCIBLE.

And then, my conscience appeared before my eyes.

He was standing a few feet away, a box of Camels stuck in his shirt pocket. He didn’t seem interested in the game. He was just standing there, flicking an expensive Zippo lighter on and off, on and off. In mid-turn, my eyes widened.

He waved. “Hi!”

And that’s when I fell.

Seeing your conscience makes you feel as if you’re in two different bodies at the same time, but not necessarily split in two. It just feels weird, as if you had four eyes and two noses, four arms and four legs, two hearts beating in sync. Exhaling and inhaling are immutable; you can’t even try to lose the tempo of your breathing to see if the other can keep up, because of course, your conscience would be thinking the same thing and you’d basically be tricking yourself, which defeats its purpose because no one is fooled.

It’s very exasperating and aggravating.

My eyes opened weakly. White blurry shapes came into view, then slowly, like an amateur photographer finally understanding what that circle at the base of the camera lens was for, everything turned and focused.

The nurse was standing over me. So was my conscience.

“Are you okay?” said the nurse.

“Waaaaaah,” I bawled, and the nurse winced.

“I’ve called for your parents to take you home,” said the nurse. “You have a nasty cut on your forehead. You hit your head on the pavement, young lady. You shouldn’t run around like that.”

I wondered if I had gotten dizzy first, and if all my friends had laughed at me.

When the nurse was gone, the man flopped onto the dentist’s chair and grinned hugely at me.

“‘You’ve got a nasty cut on your forehead,‘ ” he mimicked the nurse. “Oh boy are you in for a major sermon.”

“Who are you?” I asked, since it was the only question you can ask at this point, don’t you all agree?

The man took obvious relish in answering the question. In a lackadaisical tone he answered, “I have so many names,” an answer which, a few years later, I would come to identify as the line he had ripped off from Al Pacino in the movie The Devil’s Advocate.

“Can she see you?” I asked, pointing to the nurse, who was adjusting her ridiculous nurse’s hat and admiring her reflection on the mirror.

“No, only you can see me,” said the man, and strangely, I kind of knew that already.

“Why,” I asked with wide eyes, “have you come here?”

This comment seemed to irk the man. He looked petulantly at me, a frown twisting his mouth. “First of all, kid, I’m not an alien. Don’t treat me like goddamed E.T. or something. Do I say ‘E.T. phone home’ like a retard? No, I don’t, do I? Does my neck look like uncoiled intestines? No, it doesn’t, does it? I’m a person. See?” He beat his fist on his chest to prove his point. “I’m not even a ghost, not like those characters in The Sixth Sense or what-have-you.”

“I don’t know what the Sixth Sense is,” I had to admit, quite painfully because I was a very smart-alecky kind of kid and never wanted to admit to not knowing something.

“Right. I forgot, this is 1985. All the girls have cascading bangs and mismatched socks… believe me, we’ll tease your cousin endlessly about her 1985 fashion sense. We’ll tag team her till she cries. Well, you’ve got a lot of growing up to do, still. We’ve got quite a long ways to go, you and me. I mean, you and I. Which is which?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We haven’t started on pronouns yet.”

He looked even more irritated. He even said “Tsk” in the same manner my father did whenever I asked him where babies came from. I was beginning to get the impression that my conscience was going to be very acrimonious. “You’ll tell me next year then.”

“Well,” I said as he scratched an itch below his Argyle socks, “you never answered my question. Who are you?”

His eyes lit up. Clearing his throat, he stood on the dentist’s chair and switched open the operating light, moving it favourably here and there till he was satisfied that it enhanced his features.

“I,” he said in a deep voice, “am your Conscience.” He spread his arms expansively for theatrical effect.

“You ARE?!” I gawked, my mouth wide open.

After a pause, he jumped off the dentist’s chair and gritted his teeth. “You don’t know what conscience means, do you?”

“No,” I admitted.

He sat beside me. My feet were still swinging at the edge of the bed; my feet didn’t reach the floor wherever I sat at this age, still. He gave me a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “Like I said. We’ve got a lot of growing up to do. You and I, or me.” We grew silent, watching the nurse take down the medicines from the medicine cabinet, arrange them according to colour, then put them back again. We watched her for some time. Then I spoke up.

“What’s your name?”

This appeared to be a question he hadn’t thought of yet. I knew it because he chewed meditatively on his lower lip. He sat thinking for a long time. He thought for such a long time that my interest started to wane and I busied myself looking at the pictures of a colouring book which the nurse had handed to me, but of course she didn’t give me any crayolas so I couldn’t fill in the spaces between the lines.

Finally he said, “I haven’t really thought about it—”

“Obviously,” said I, dryly.

“—and, well, okay. Since I shouldn’t be calling all the shots here, what name would you like me to have?”

I paused, then brightened. “What about Bubba?”

He recoiled in disgust. “That’s nauseating! Do you think I belong to the circus, for Chrissakes? Didn’t I just illustrate that I’m not some kind of alien, or something to be laughed at? I’m a real person! Bubba is the name of a dumb football quarterback! Bubba is the name of a… a… an animal, perhaps. Or a pet, a very not cute pet. Or a fat snake. Do I look like a fat snake to you?”

I started to cry.

“What’s happened?” the nurse cried in alarm, abandoning her colour-coded tablets and rushing over to me. “What’s wrong?”

I just cried louder.

“Does your head hurt?”

I shook my head, no. I intensified my sobbing.

“Would you like a popsicle? I can fetch you one from the canteen… would you like one?”

“Yes,” I said, sniffling, cutting off my wails with careful control. “Please,” I added, not forgetting that I was a mild-mannered five-year old.

The nurse, obviously relieved, left to get a popsicle.

Bubba stood up. My suggestion had obviously shook him up; his hands were trembling. He took a cigarette from his box of Camels and lit one, inhaling and exhaling without pausing. When I look back at it now, he must have had quite a struggle in his head and heart about being called Bubba for the rest of his – well, our – lives. I’ll admit he can be very open-minded. It was his fault he chose to introduce himself to a five-year old, in the mid-80s nonetheless.

“All right,” he hissed in a deadly tone after pacing back and forth. “All right, you win, you little brat. I’ll be Bubba. No thanks to you. Shit.”

“Yay!” I said, very happily.

“Bubba. Bubba! For fuck’s sake.” He lit another cigarette and smoked testily.

“My Teacher said,” I reminded him, “that only bad people smoke.”

He temporarily forgot his anger over his newly-christened name and guffawed. “Well, tell your teacher,” he said imperiously, ” that you’re gonna be doing a lot of smoking when you grow up. Whooo-weeeee, a lot, I tell ya!” And he rolled over with laughter at some memory I was yet to call my own.

“Bubba?” I said meekly.

“WHAT?!” he roared irately, fueled once again with animosity at the mention of his new name.

“If I’m the only one who can see you, am I crazy?”

Bubba took another cigarette, but didn’t light it. “No, you’re not crazy. You aren’t even going to remember me at times, you know? You won’t really be seeing me, but you’ll be hearing me, whenever you want to. You might even take my advice from time to time. Just FYI, you know.”

“But why can I see you now?” I persisted.

“Because I wanted you to see me. Don’t worry kid, you’ll be seeing me from time to time because you’re the imaginative type of kid, god knows what that typecast can turn you into, but mostly, you’ll be hearing me. And I won’t be talking with words. Just with feelings. I don’t want to turn you into a goddamed schizophrenic, for Chrissakes. Is that clear?”

“What’s ‘schizophrenic’,” I wanted to know.

“Just… you’ll learn that word in vocabulary class in a few years. Be patient. God. Is that clear? About me not wanting you to turn into a goddamed schizophrenic?”

I didn’t understand what he meant but it looked like he wanted me to say ‘yes’ so I said yes.

Satisfied, he stalked to a corner and smoldered silently.

“Do other kids have Bubbas?” I asked again.

“Everyone who believes he has a ‘conscience’, has one,” he said testily, overlooking my use of “Bubba” in the sentence. “I’m not here to force your goddamed beliefs down your throat: that loopy nun you have for Religion class seems to be handling that department pretty well. But I wanted to get to know you better. Because I like you, and you like to listen to your heart a lot. That’s a way cool thing to do, for a kid your age. And you know what you want, and I respect that, so you can always consult me with things you need answers to, all right?”

“Will you give me all the answers?”

“No,” he admitted. “You will.”

“Then,” I said after processing that statement in my head, “you mean you will.”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh, and I wished he laughed more. “Smart-ass.” Then he winked at me. “Just think of me as a diary. You can tell me stuff, and have debates with me. I love arguments, and you do, too.”

“What’s ‘debates’?” I asked automatically.

“You’ll join the club in five years, don’t worry about it. You’ll even be the president,” he said, patting my head just to annoy me, because of course he knew I hated to be patted on the head. “All right. I really gotta go now.”

“Why? Where are you going?” I kind of liked talking to Bubba, and was a bit sad to see him leave.

“I’ve got things to do. Besides, I hate the eighties. If it weren’t for Platoon, I’d never have come back. There’s the nurse with your popsicle.”

And then he was gone, and I was alone again in the school clinic, wondering if I had dreamt up the whole conversation. Actually, to this day, I’m still wondering if my life is a discontinued dream I had never woken up from, and if one day I’d discover this hiatus and find myself still in the clinic, with the nurse still arranging those bottles of medicines.

I’d better ask Bubba about that.

The nurse entered the clinic and handed me a popsicle, and I put it in my mouth. It was cool and it was orange, my favourite flavour, too. She gave me crayolas for the colouring book, and I started to colour a tree blue and hummed a song whose title I’d forgotten.

* This is not where you jump to your feet in thunderous applause. Please reserve that for the end of this heart-breakingly moving piece of literatia

Copyright and all that shit. I sigh, mes amies…I sigh. I sigh very heavily. One day, I shall be famous. May everyone’s knees tremble in fright and rigid anticipation.