The Giving Tree Review

My review of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree was officially expunged from the records of goodreads.com today with no notice. I am endeavoring to resurrect it. Thank you to Tracy for having the foresight to anticipate censorship. [UPDATE: I'm happy to report that the original review was reinstated on goodreads.com on 02/25/08. Now the world at large may at last enjoy this poignant, life-changing piece of writing.]

Okay, this is some motherfucking fucked-up shit right here. The Giving Tree is the straight-up wack story of how this selfish little ass-faced prick kicks it with this full-on saintly tree. Everything's fine for a while, with the lil' prick all getting up in there and saying to the tree, "Yeah, you know you my bitch," but then all of a sudden, this jumped-up prick goes through puberty, gets his chia on or some such shit, and so he's off screwing the skank-ass bitches on the block all damn day and can't spare one motherfucking minute for this poor old tree who is waiting for him and is looking all motherfucking sad and droopy. So this little punk-ass bitch comes up to the tree--this is a motherfucking tree, hear?--and asks her [it's a sexy-ass lady-tree] for some g's. Well, the tree is all, like, "I ain't got no cash, bitch. What part of me says ATM on it?" And she should have held up there, but--no--this tree gets all fucking benevolent and is like, "Well, I've got mad apples you can go hustle on the streets." So this ass-faced prick just, like, boosts all these damn apples and leaves this tree with, like, its weave all out and shit. So next, after working the streets with his crew, little bitch boy comes back, looking all old and jacked-up, and asks the motherfucking tree for a goddamn crib. So the tree's like, "Hol' up. Do you see Coldwell Banker all up and down in here? I think not." But then, being all kindly and shit, the tree is like, "But I got mad branches..." And what? She motherfucking takes it in back for this fool again. Later, another goddamn time, punk-ass bitch comes back, looking all old and saggy and wack now, and he's like, "Bitch, what you got for me now?" "Awww, hell no," tree says, but then she starts getting all soft and shit again and says, "Why don't you cut down my trunk or some such shit and go 'head and whittle a pimped-out yacht, full-on Hamptons-style?" He's like, "Yeah, I thought so, bitch." And then--guess the fuck what?--little shriveled up, played-out mack comes on back wit his ass all hemorrhoided and shit. He look nasty and old. Tree is like, "I know that you ain't come to ask me. All's I am is a motherfucking stump, motherfucker. How you gonna come back at me like that?" This punk-ass bitch is all drooling and jacked-up and just wants to sit the hell down. What does motherfucking tree do? Says, "Hell no! You motherfucking fucker get your motherfucking ass face out of here 'fore I cut you up good: give you some mad tree fungus, motherfucker!" The motherfucking end.

Okay, so that's not really the way The Giving Tree ends, but maybe it's the way it should. Some time ago, my ex-girlfriend and, afterward, long-time co-dependent friend gave me The Giving Tree as part of my birthday gift. I loved it, but I hated it, too, because I felt so bad for the tree who is endlessly shat upon by this worthless "Boy"--as he is always known, regardless of age; I longed to console the tree and, maybe a little, to condemn this book as yet another emotionally-scarring "children's" entertainment in the manner of Old Yeller. Don't give me any shit about learning valuable lessons. The only lesson I learned was that human beings are nothing but steaming piles of corn-freckled feces, and that I wanted to found a not-for-profit shelter for unloved trees and rabid dogs and any other nonhuman thing, living or not, which was either unwanted or despised.

Having said all this--and although I don't approve of the treatment of the giving tree--this book is very moving and very delicate. The delicacy is somewhat counteracted when the reader turns over the book and sees the author photograph of a thoroughly evil-looking Shel Silverstein. He looks like the sort of person who would burn down whole forests of rare giving trees just for kicks. Picture Othello just before he strangles Desdemona.

If you--and, yes, I'm talking to you personally--are not moved by the plight of the tree after reading this book, then perhaps it's time to check yourself: are you the giving tree or are you the motherfucking taking tree? Or are you the sneak-out-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-steal-all-my-shit tree?

Single White Little Bear Seeks Predator

I’ve never been molested (that I recall), but it would’ve been nice to have been asked. After all, I went to a Catholic grade school, where, in retrospect, one expects to be inundated with bad touches from every conceivable angle. Statistically speaking, I should have been like a clip-on tied Toshiro Mifune in one of those classic black-and-white Kurosawa films, parrying attempted blows, so to speak, from an encirclement of inept samurai. (Didn’t you always love how the opposing samurai thoughtfully took turns attacking, leaving Toshiro ample time to pirouette and meet them all head-on just before julienning them with his sword into a side order of samurai frites? It entailed all the courtesy and logistics of a modern gang bang.)

Alas, I threw a party, and no one showed up. As a prepubescent, I wore the proscribed Corpus Christi grade school uniform: a light-blue long-sleeved oxford, a navy blue necktie, and matching navy blue cotton-polyblend pants, into which I packed what was, no doubt, a tantalizing young bootie that--sad to say--drew no takers. In my imagination, I seemed like ideal jail bait (or, I should say, cash settlement bait) to some lecherous priest who might prove creative in repurposing the darkness of the confessional booth; but the parish priest Father Blank [a real not a symbolically-assigned name] was all business and seemed to suspect only that I had shaved a few incidents of lying and/or dishonoring my father and mother from my sin tally and not that I had a seriously bangin’ eleven-year-old ass. (Or maybe he preferred huskier boys. The kind who are always somewhat damp and get red-faced from a single flight of stairs. In the end, who can account for the totalitarianism of taste?)

Somewhere around second or third grade, we were all marched, lock-step, by a glass-eyed nun into the gymnasium for a highly erotic skit known as “Big Bear & Little Bear,” which depicted the inappropriate crotch-area groping of Little Bear by another animal, the species of which escapes me. (The interspecies angle of the mammal-on-mammal action seemed to needlessly complicate the moral, in my estimation.) After some internal debate that bordered on the schizophrenic, Little Bear eventually joined the Hall of Fame of rat-faced squealers by snitching on his lover to Big Bear, whose name suggested his own proclivities. I don’t recall how the incident was resolved, but if the Catholic Church employed the fondler in any capacity, I suspect that Big Bear wound up with a “happy face” [slit throat] and floating in the river.

At first, I believed that this play (one of the lesser works of Edward Albee, surely) was a conflict of interests, very much in the manner of tobacco companies donating money to Stop Underage Smoking campaigns. But then I got wise. The Catholic Church craftily allowed these performances less as cautionary tales than as instructional guides. After all, we were just a gaggle of toe-heads without any sexual know-how… Little Bear’s initial acquiescence (“Ooooh yeah, dat how I like it, bitch.”) taught us (1) not to scream or gag and (2) to realize that we were intended to reciprocate before either one of us would be allowed to go to sleep. It is indeed very meaningful (and savvy from a marketing perspective) that I recall the fondling and not the subsequent litigation from this skit.

Of course, I didn’t allow stereotypes to limit my options either. There were, after all, plenty of pilgrim-shoed nuns with theoretically untapped hymens roaming around the halls of Corpus Christi, and perhaps my still-miniature love spigot would register as an insistent blip on one of their vaginal sonars. Then again maybe not: the particular beasts known as men accept sexual favors, as an axiom, with few preliminaries; women, on the other hand, prefer some kind of emotional connection. I shudder to think of what genre of connection was conceivable between me and Sister Geraldine, a visigothic elderly nun of abundant size and wrath.

These sisters, all over fifty years old, lived in a modest (although all-brick-exterior) convent across the street from the school with a mutt named Patches. Had the nuns of our school resembled the large-breasted, coquettish orders depicted in Italian nunsploitation films, the boys of Corpus Christi, nearing pubescence, might have been more imaginative in their conjectures of what went on in that convent. Perhaps Patches and a jar of creamy peanut butter might’ve figured prominently. As it was, we imagined only a great deal of gardening, squabbling over chores, compulsory prayer, and watching the local religious channel. Not exactly fodder for late-night Cinemax.

Years later now, I am considering suing the Catholic Church--that is, if all its assets have not yet been liquidated to pay off children who were deemed sexy and desirable enough to molest. My self-esteem has eroded to such an extent that I doubt that even the most salacious, indiscriminate priest would’ve touched me then if I’d been naked, goose-fleshed, and presented on a sterling silver serving platter along with a fifth of Dark Eyes vodka and a clove cigarette. In short, I fear that I will never properly recover from not being molested. Of course, a cash settlement in the amount of 1.3 million dollars (and a book deal) might go some way toward inhibiting my serotonin reuptake temporarily, but I imagine that I will never cease to be haunted by the specters of the myriad ecclesiastics who have failed to want to toss my salad when it seemed (to me) eminently tossable.

A Portrait of the Sandwich Artist as a Young Man

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