Dinosaurus

1960 found us living on Iberville Street, one block off of Canal.... I was 12.
It was the year Joseph, my grandfather, died after being hit by a car. He was on his way home from buying some Carter's Little Liver Pills, a bottle of One-A-Day vitamins, and some Brown Mule chewing tobacco at a drug store on North Robertson Street, right off of Broad.
I always thought that Joseph would live forever...that his mean, sadistic ways would go on and on.
The wake of brokenness he created in the lives of his children went on for decades.
Joseph made his drug store run at the beginning of every month when his check came in, and then he would go to the grocery and buy a whole case of Borden's evaporated milk...and that's what he lived on...canned milk and wheat bread.
If something was precious to you, Joseph would find a way to mock it, spit tobacco juice on it, steal it or destroy it... and then laugh....
When I was three, I hit him in the head with a fire truck while he was sleeping. When I got older I was glad I had done it..... Somehow it evened the score.
I remember my Aunt Selma commenting on the fact that they found the bottle of vitamins unbroken in his coat pocket after he was run over.... And I remember thinking that we never know what things in our lives will remain unbroken and whole and which things will be shattered.
There seemed to be no logic to it.
1960 was the year the Joy Theater, across from the Krauss store, showed the movie Dinosaurus.
The theater put a huge dinosaur on top of it's marquis... and there were loudspeakers that I could hear two blocks away in our apartment, on the fringe of the Iberville project.
Over and over...day and night..." DINOSAURUS!" (dinosaur sounds) "DINOSAURUS!" ...again and again....for weeks.
My mother did a lot of things to "make me happy"...and the majority of times, this involved her spending money she didn't have... (Mom was bringing in about twenty-five bucks a week at the time.)
I never knew how to tell her that money couldn't fix what was going on inside of me... that taking her money only made me feel worse....
The guilt!
What was wrong with me? Did I look so bad that it prompted her to give me money so that I could be happy?
Well, one Saturday morning, she handed me fifty cents and told me to go to the Joy.... When I asked if she could really afford it, she told me not to worry about it because she wanted to "make me happy" ...and "have a good time".
I took the money, went to Woolworth's and got some popcorn (two jumbo bags), and bought my way into the Joy for the first showing.
Dinosaurus! Seven times....
I left after the last showing of the night and walked home...numb.
That day, as I sat in that dark theater, I did a lot of crying. I felt bad about taking my mother's money, and I cried because I wasn't happy....and there was nothing to fix it...
Not even seven showings of Dinosaurus.
I felt alone...so alone....I cried...because of the loneliness...because I didn't like myself...because I wanted a real family, like on TV...because a movie is a poor substitute for a family.
And it was completely out of my power to make any of this better.
The T-rex that is accidentally unearthed kills a lot of people before the hero hops onto a bulldozer and pushes the creature off a cliff....and then the screen is filled with a big "The End?"
For the dinosaur, it took a bulldozer... for Joseph, it was a white, '59 Caddy.
The End?
I think about Joseph... His children have all died, except for my mother. Roberta, Clifford, Selma, Sydney....all gone. And I am the only grandchild who grew up around him in New Orleans that is left.
I hope that monster never returns to cause more pain.... I hope that it is now safe for us to have something precious....
Mom, that would make me happy.