Uncle Search

Some of the songs I listen to while I walk, like the flute one a few days ago, feel like they enter every tube of my brain and have no gravity and no way out. Also some things that I read stay put like this by cartoonist Gahan Wilson: Those of you who remember how great it was to be a little kid, gang, don’t remember how it was to be a little kid.

I don’t remember before I was 12 which is not to say I can’t remember but that I don’t – I prefer not to – only the weekends like capsules when Uncle Search came for a visit I can handle, but for this story I have to dip back into my single-digit years so hang on here goes.

Uncle Search was a voiceover guy in New York, cartoons mostly, but some animated commercials, too, which he said was where the real dough was.

When my mom passed through the living room me there watching TV she’d once in a while say oh that sounds like Uncle Search and I’d imagine him squeaking the words into a microphone. I was only ever half-watching TV because my other eye, the inside one, was following my mother around the house – up the stairs the creaks from room to room back to the kitchen back through the living room down to the laundry room out the sliding glass door back inside to the kitchen the kettle boiling back through the living room take something what? from the closet – because my absent father had recently told me she was batshit crazy and to keep an eye on her. 

In spite of him being scary himself I thought maybe he had a point.

Uncle Search had a boyfriend instead of a wife. Ezra was a harpist from Gaza like a limerick. He was behind the music that went with magical cartoon events, things that went poof, fairies genies sudden wizards, shimmering etherial life-changing events in general, and he could jazz it up for disasters, too, plink gunshots one by one, release arrows and glide them into the open tops of castles or fat rear-ends and Uncle Search would cry yee-ouch!

When my father picked me up during Search and Ezra weekends, which I so hard wished he wouldn’t, he waited in the car down the street and I don’t know on what grounds he was angry with them but after we gunned it a while and made a couple of race-car turns he came around and started asking about sports and girls, giving me sideways glances, spewing startling stories from the corner of his beer-spit mouth that made me hate Saturdays.

And here comes the part it’s like I say through a tube or something but when I was 12 my mother killed herself on my watch and I was supposed to go live with my father (see? didn’t I tell ya?) and Molly or maybe it was Margaret out on Long Point, but after the funeral Uncle Search cornered him and next thing you know I’m in the back seat of a limo between Search and Ezra on my way to New York for the summer and they’re telling me about their dog and the swimming pool and Ezra says what colour do I want my new room but it’s funny, I couldn’t remember any colours.

All summer their big house full of wonderful people and food like I’d never seen and music and dancing and once Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, sometimes entire bands, movie stars I recognized from late nights on the couch trying to keep up with my mother’s nocturnal footsteps which faded into dreams.

Through the windows you could see forever and on weekends we went to a lakehouse where there were kids my age that weren’t scared away because of my dangerous parents.

September loomed and I waited for Search and Ezra to say hop in and this time all the colours melting toward black – grade six in a different worn-out school, my stupid father, the trailer that smelled like shit and cigarettes and beer bubbles and whatever perfume whatever woman – but instead there was a uniform on my bed and Ezra said make sure it fits and next thing you know I’m in a new school in New York and it’s like I was saying at the beginning about music in every tube of my brain no gravity and no way out except replace the flute with the big shimmer of Ezra’s harp.

ps. First time I needed a signature on something Uncle Search did it and that’s when I found out his name was actually Serge and when I told him about it he thought it was hilarious, so funny he called Ezra, and we all laughed but it was like into that tube again for me where it’s private because I’d been thinking for a while how appropriate his name.