Chapter 2

June 1972

 

Gwen Stynson and Johnny Harper met at a protest of the Vietnam War towards the latter stages of said war. The result was not in doubt at that point – neither of the war or the protest. The latter would end without making a difference and the first would end as well, just not that day. Both of them had been protesting for a couple or three years now, and both were old for twenty-two year olds. Theirs was the first generation to somehow prolong themselves forever in an arrested adolescence, a prolapse of youth for youths’ sake, living shrines to all that entailed, and yet simultaneously aging faster than their years, maturity maybe not dawning in the conventional cycle but the serrated edge of too much experience too soon molding their identities into some new hybrid, cynicism and jaded weariness coming ten years before the first gray hair, a hardness sprung from passion and disillusionment in equal measure, the fatigue of those committed to the thankless task of carving out their own morality.

He first saw her by the cyclone fence. Her features were etched and fine, she wore a cauliflower-colored bandana with a mustard-shaded eagle design inlaid in the fabric, spangles for the eyes and at the point of the talons. She was pumping a sign in the air: “NIXON HAS OUR SONS RIGHT WHERE HE WANTS THEM.” The writing hadn’t been portioned quite right on the poster board, so the words HE, WANTS and THEM were squashed and crimped at the bottom. Johnny watched her hollering – she was with a cadre of sister protestors, not hippies but college girls with patrician, New England airs about them, defined cheekbones, long hair that was regularly washed. Her posture was perfect. She was beautiful.

He was in love, or significant lust.

Later they would find similarities between themselves that in that first dizzying flush seemed amazingly synergistic. Both were Geminis, both were born in Illinois (Springfield, Evanston for her) and were moved to their eventual homes as very young children (San Antonio, Texas for him, Hartfored, Connecticut for her), both had nearly perished in childhood accidents. (Her father had plucked her from extinction, grabbing her up by the hair when she’d fallen from a canoe in Lake Woebegone; he’d been knocked sprawling by a locomotive while playing chicken along the tracks in Texas – he always won at chicken – an incident that somehow, miraculously did not kill him, didn’t even break a bone. Onlookers couldn’t fathom it. A minor legend about his immortality was born that day.) He watched her with the wary, practiced eye of an already veteran cad – his political convictions were real but they dovetailed with his other passion for girls at rallies, girls at houseparties, girls at sit-ins, girls at Jefferson Airplane shows, girls at marches, girls on the beach, girls in Chevys. She noted him too; he was crouched on his heels, a bit apart from the rest of the bloc, seeming not to really be taking part in the protest, a recruitment station in Delmar, California, four bull MP’s standing in front of the place with their arms crossed, their white helmets pulled low over scrappy, bulldog faces. The fence almost certainly negated any chance for a real altercation, but stranger things had happened, and this occurred early enough in the 70’s where the chance for actual violence still hung tangibly in the air. The establishment still sported fissures in its hull; the counter-culture still had some bite.

He had a disconcerting blue-eyed stare; later she would try and find the term for that blue. Not ice, not bright, not cornflower, not violet, not sea green … There was, she came to decide, an unfinished aspect to them, an ambiguity, or ambivalence, in their depths. The gathered mysteries about him, as an atmosphere more than a matter of biography, was a great appeal to her at the time, maybe the main appeal, though that particular fascination has a limited shelf-life. The fact that after some time she observed that he cultivated this very aura did a lot to dispel it for her.

What was not in doubt, ever, was the level of physical attraction between them. The pull was strong on both sides, no less so on his, who’d cut a wide swath in relatively few years and was prematurely jaded in that way. She was irresistible to him and always would be. A decade on, seeing each other only sporadically and then only on the matter of their son, he’d feel her magnet draw, and even though their romantic life had turned into a titanic fiasco, he’d find himself leaning towards her, the crackle of electro-magnetism, wetting his lips while his eyes drifted to hers. She felt the same crackle; but by then she was well and truly the stronger human being, and gave no quarter to herself or him. She never ceded ground towards him after 1982, though he’d show up often in her dreams and daydreams, in nighttime masturbation sessions in her quiet bed, flickering over the thousand and one memories of deep soul kisses, commands he used to utter to her to spread her legs wider, sex in fields and streams and in the shower and on the kitchen floor and in the back of vehicles and one time on the curved retractable roof of a planetarium. They remained forever the great loves in each others lives even after love itself had been razed and plowed under.

Practiced as he was he did not approach her – the chanting and jeering had come to an end, there was the wayward aspect there always is at the end of a political action, an ambling dispersal with everyone checking the most zealous among them for sign that their abandonment of the event was permissible by that point. He waited, and let her friends do the work. Because a couple of them had been staring at him as well.

One of his buddies meandered over at that exact moment, an inveterate head named Numi, scraggle-bearded and bright-eyed with whatever today’s hallucinogen had wrought. “Woah,” he said, as the four girls approached. Visions. “Ladies, does anyone want to retire to my casa by the beach? I got one of those.”

Johnny gave an indulgent smile, really one meant for the girls, really one meant for Gwen, whose name he learned in a series of introductions performed within the next minute.

Numi really did have a casa by the beach, a dusty one-bedroom apartment with broken window blinds and a mattress on the floor and spoiled food in the fridge. How he had it was anybody’s guess – someone else’s name was on the lease, a veritable stranger, but in the private permutations of the subterranean economy it had come to be Numi’s place, and he managed to maintain the lease through his pay as a cook at Galapagos Pizzeria down on the boardwalk. This was when beachfront property even in California might run as little as fifty-five bucks a month, and Numi took on a fair number of boarders, some of whom, like Johnny, were decent about dropping five or ten bucks in the till during their stay.

Gwen at this point in her life had a travel writer’s sense of remove: I’m following my girlfriends and two dropout dudes down a beach road; we’re passing beggars on the sidewalk in army surplus jackets; the aroma of ganja is in the air, coming from no specific source, just a perfume-like incense carried on El Nino breezes. She tucked a braid behind her left ear. We’re heading to some place to smoke up. I’m really thirsty but am too shy to ask to stop for a glass of water. Maybe there’ll be beer?

And there was, miraculously four, and Numi doled them out to the girls in the den, everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor around the coffee table, one of the room’s only two furnishings. The other was a twenty-four inch RCA television on a wire stand, the rabbit ears snapped and hanging down like bowing bonsai tree. Numi rolled a chunky spliff, then spent the next minute hunting down a lighter. Johnny produced one, from the pocket of his shirt, handed it over to his friend. “Right on.”

Johnny declined the Schlitz. She noticed that. He handed it to Tabitha. She noticed that too. Which was fine – she already one in her hand, lukewarm actually, and warmer even to the taste than it was to the touch – but she noticed it. And how Tabitha, who’d slept with eleven boys and announced this figure often, never took her eyes off Johnny, who returned these stares semi-frequently. But he did it without smiling, with his eyes or his mouth, and whatever was behind his stare was difficult to discern – his eyes absorbed more than they relayed. All Gwen knew for sure is that he never looked her way.

That’s what made it so surprising when surreptitiously she went into the kitchen, under the auspices of going to the bathroom, to grab herself a glass of water. This required stealthily rinsing out one of Numi’s jam jars, which were coated in an indescribable gunk that clung to the glass like barnacles of spackle. And she felt his presence before she’d even heard him. Johnny was there behind her, checking through the kitchen window, at what was anybody’s guess, as the view it afforded was just a breezeway and the identical apartments with their side porches on the other side. He opened the door, let it hang open. “I’m getting out of here for awhile, walking over to the dunes. Come with me.”

That was it. There it was. Not a request, somehow couched in too intimate a way to be a command either. What was it then? It was him, the entire gobsmack of his appeal. Of course she went with him.

I am going across the main drag again, past the stores and gas stations, past a housing development with earth movers taking up large hunks of ground and men with clipboards and hardhats pointing with their free hands. Up the incline of an access road, the dry winds coiling and sandy fluff skittering along the macadam. She’d never gotten her drink of water.

At some point he took her hand – he was helping her up the first mount of a dune, up through sandy grass the caked, slipping soil. He let her hand go after that, she noticed. There was very little talk between them yet. He seemed to have a destination in mind. Along the way over the falls and lifts of the dunes, he came across something, a rusted hoe tangled up in brittle roots, and he pulled it free and used it like a staff while they walked.

She was working up gumption to say something. Her lips were parched and she felt them cracking. She actually carried chap-stick but was cowed to use it now, something too bourgeoise about it under the circumstances. She was intensely self-conscious of her upbringing, her parents’ money, her Vassar education, her covert attention to hygiene, her private love of Laugh-In. And her tendency, like now, to observe herself at a distance from her surroundings, to view them as through a periscope or under a microscope, she less a participant than a curious eye.

She watched him, his dark stubble, his defined cheekbones – there was Indian in him – his sure-footed gait, the way his body moved with an inherent agility. He had some sort of style … an innate finesse. She admired men who moved this way, didn’t lumber, men whose steps you couldn’t quite detect. He was lean without being thin, tall but proportioned, limber and fleet.

And then, something happened. He pulled up short. She stumbled into his back. “Stop,” he almost hissed at her. His hand was up, as in alert.

For the next four seconds, he did everything perfectly. It was a form of magic, or superpower. He nudged her backwards, and put his body between her and whatever was ahead of them. Like some kind of samurai or major martial artist he spun the hoe in his hand in three fluid circles, squared his body with his boot heels dug in. There was on the ground before them, arching into a coil, a red-diamond rattlesnake, thickly corded, plump headed, coloring skewing only slightly more copper than the sanded dirt it was nestled in.

Here it should be noted that Johnny was a huge Bruce Lee fan, and had seen Fists of Fury seventeen times already in matinee performances all throughout California and the Southwest. He practiced the moves in the mirror of lonely rooms wherever he happened to find them. In the shower he did the kung fu yelps. He’d done some scrapping in his life already, but it was more boyhood stuff with the jocks and blockheads in Texas – not yet had any chance to put his new-honed skills on display. Had he thought about it, he probably would have grabbed Gwen by the wrist and the two of them turned tail and run. But he didn’t think – he had a talent for immediacy in action that was almost reflexive, just as later in life he’d prove himself inversely poor at constructive action that required forethought, detailing, long-term dedication. Anyway, the snake’s rattle was shaking like a maraca and its tensile looping seemed to vibrate. On Johnny’s fourth twirl of the hoe, just at the arc of the circumference, he let it fall in a smooth downstroke, a slice of whipped air. And in a clean blow that was almost cartoonish in its decisiveness, the rattlesnake was decapitated.

He also had a talent for flourish, and for forestalling fear for at least a solid sixty seconds after he should have been well afraid. He swung his weapon back around, slipped it like a saber back against his shoulder, a soldier at attention.

I just watched a mysterious California hippie swordsman decapitate a viper that was three feet in front of me, and possibly save my life. Her mouth, formerly so dry, flooded with saliva. And just like that, she was in love. Johnny caught her eye; he was in love too, some with just the reflection of himself he saw in her (pale, tempered) blue eyes, but mostly with her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He saw his daughter and wife in the park one day. The little girl noticed him first, there from the other side of the pond. She was holding a pinch of bread in her fist, holding it out to coax some paddling ducks to come ashore. “It’s daddy.” The words came pristinely across the water. His wife lifted her head, blinked. Then she knelt down to whisper in the girl’s ear.

Soon they turned to walk away, his daughter looking back over her shoulder a time or two, still wearing her smile, still carrying on a patter with her mother. Only now they were too far away away for him to hear.

+++

Ash Wednesday. Not a Catholic, he queued up anyway outside the old Cathedral downtown and filed inside with the observant, the supplicant, the aspirant. The officiating priest murmured the penitential Psalms, the petitioners moved forward one at a time.
He came to front of the line. The priest dabbed a thumb in the canister and brushed him roughly across the forehead. Thus marked, he shuffled away, making way for the next person on deck.
He felt no change. No grace. No restoration. Felt no cleaner. He did feel stupid. There were ashes on his forehead.

 

Walking by the Mission. The tattered men in donated and remaindered clothing, in windbreakers too flimsy for the season, threadbare stocking caps, in layers of old pullovers and stained fleeces, in rotting sneakers and ripped boots, slumped against the brick façade or squatting on the ground, smoking cigarettes, a few of the more frenetic among them, the more industrious and acclimated, jabbering and moving about swiftly, impersonating people with plans and purpose, but most just lolling dumbstruck, as stranded as men marooned after a shipwreck, peering through small, sun-bleached eyes which stared into distances of thousands of miles but witnessed only themselves.

+++

The grandfather on his father’s side was a man of eccentricities, odd habits, a committed hobbyist, of the solitary kind. When he was not working at the post office he could be found in his garage, which doubled as a workshop. There he would listen to the opera he so adored, playing it on 78 vinyl records. He was fastidious about them, never failing to wipe one down with a polishing cloth before returning it to its sleeve, pulling another to replace it on the turntable. Verdi’s Rigoletto, a compilation of Handel’s arias, Callas singing La Traviata.

He made birdfeeders and birdhouses out of cedar shingles and balsa wood, stained the cedar roofs an English chestnut or Jacobean, used linseed oil as a finish. He had a craggy Germanic face, wore powerful reading glasses set low on a broad, tubular nose below which a mustache coarse as a pipe cleaner was hunched over his thin upper lip. In deft strokes he would apply the oil, swirling it over the surface with small sponges, his small hands graceful, teasing at the grain of the wood and working the tips of the sponges into the crannies of his little constructions. Then there were his hand-carved chess sets, basswood, turning it on the lathe to produce the pieces. Dipping the pieces in lacquer. And then his model ships in the bottles. He used narrow antique bottles of hand-blown glass with cork stoppers and slim necks. Out of driftwood he fashioned separate sections for the hulls, spars, and masts. Sanding them with the drum on a Dremel tool. Paper sails. The hull hewn within the dimensions of the opening, the hinged masts drawn back flush to the deck with twine. The Vienna Philharmonic and Birgit Nilsson doing Strauss’s Elekra, turgid bloodlettings and flayed passion while all the while a diffident, methodical old man, working with a magnifying glass and a network of string, raised the sails and masts inside the bottle, as the boy at his side watched the folded bud blossom into a boat. Watched how his grandfather then diligently kneaded the tiny pieces of string out of their loops, permitting none to remain and clutter up the tidy little chamber and mar the illusion.

“But,” the boy asked, being at an age when one thought toys were meant to be played with, “how do we get the boat out of the bottle?”

The old man’s eyes were impassive behind the lenses of his spectacles; the mustache gave a twitch. “Only one way. Here, like this,” and he grabbed the bottle by the fragile neck with his perfect miniature inside and hurled it against the wall, exploding it into smithereens.

+++

Where is the mystery once one has filled the appropriate notches in existence, once the required items have been checked off: a civilian, taxpayer, a husband, father, consumer, schlepping around his debts, a vessel for deductions, an imminent corpse? Dangerous youth—how gently it drifts into the lard-colored, tenebrous mass of unremarkable middledom, the ambiguities all unraveled, risks averted, furors quelled. This, the long slumber that is the extended prelude to the inevitable eulogy?
Solution: become the man who exiles himself. Run over the responsible life and all obligations therein, freeing the id, the momentous liberation of the transgressive self from bondage.

None of the above is specific enough. Specificity is a matter of color, flavor, of locale, of characteristics and context. Here we now seek to apply said context.

Doomsday will come with no man knowing the exact time or hour. Doomsday comes on meh Tuesdays, the veils of tepid afternoons, when the air is too mild to rightly be called pleasant, the days where motives are notable by their absence. This is the time when recklessness roosts to reign. Après my lunch break, I took a left where generally I’d have taken a right—and found myself on the outskirts of town, a nebulous zone of the forgotten, the buildings clandestine and ruthless, the fences cyclone, bars across windows, gun shops, beer joints and barrooms neither closed nor open, just barely beating like stubborn hearts pumping on out of habit and reflexive action. The valleys of the disappeared. Everything beautiful as a compound fracture. I don’t belong here, neither does anyone else; that is the majesty of an environ such as this. Where do you go to disappear?

I want to know what is going on…in there. It’s called the Two Dollar. A bar, basically. Some smear of a structure, broken like a boxer’s smile, smoked out like a cabin raided by Comanches, overturned like a settler’s wagon, tin-roofed, graffitied on its cinder block rump, circled thrice with gravel rings, gravel ulcered with weeds and crab grass and bits of brown and green sparkling glass, looking destitute in its allotted parcel of sunshine.

Setting and exposition—consider it done. Now, who am I? Good question; for my money there is none better. Poor me, I’ve been fitted and fluted for maximum unremarkable effect; my pants, I’m not proud to say, are pleated; my hair is sandy-brown, my skin sandy likewise; I am sanded over in general, ground down of sharp edges, rounded like a harmless hillock. Any poison in me has, to all appearances, been drained, recklessness expunged, my superego left a spent shell-casing. I didn’t know I was conforming this entire time, nor did I know how fast and how completely I would be deformed. I am, by most standards, still a young man. But standards slip daily; anyone can take a look around and tell that much. Radio vomits wretched music that everyone permits; the dreck rises a little higher each hour; those who in a more civilized time would have been locked in cages in the town square and jabbed with pointed sticks now rule the world; and the stricken planet heaves ever more painfully on its axis and the wheeling rattles.

Listen to me, bitching about the state of things in these, our vacuous and amoral times. As I said—young, but not young. Pretty decrepit, in fact.

But I’m not an ideologue, or a proselytizer; I know no antidotes and I prescribe no cure. Diversion is all I seek, some sugar to make the minutes go down a little sweeter. That, and possibly suicide, seppuku dissolved in spirits, the bitter taste removed, the venom left undiluted. Life is labor but death should come fluently, with a minimum of fuss.

Cross the threshold, step inside. Dimmer than the day, the Two Dollar is, dark as the interior of pupa. Things hatch here; indeed, the first things my eyes adjust enough to see properly are the spinning specks of nuisance flies, making maneuvers over the slimy cocktail fruit. And a long, high-topped bar, and stools placed clumsily around it, and dusty glasses on shelves, and a pyramid of liquor bottles fronting a skuzzy tarnished mirror. And a couple of people, the last items to catch my eyes. The barman is a man only in the generic sense; lo’, in the spectral shadows he appears, devoid of sex, a foundling erased of identifying vestiges representing any true characteristic like gender. Small amber eyes flicker in the sun that also enters in my wake, a humanoid that doesn’t care for that surly envoy of daytime. His build is puffy, swollen, the boundaries between hips and groin and torso bulged and smooth by a carapace of fat, and the pudgy hands grip a bar rag, and the sloped shoulders lean into this idle work, not possibly affording the requisite strength to lather the formica clean of all its residual grit and grime. I walked to the station under the fume of his suspicious yellow eye, as if he distrusted my custom.

All was forgiven when he received my alms of folding money in his paw and I got a bourbon neat in return, which I drank, and then handed over more money, and drank my second, and it was about this time that it was forgotten that there had been anything to forgive. Mutual amnesia, speaking for myself here. I was getting more streetwise by the millisecond. (By the time I die, I’m gonna’ have been the first backslider inducted into the Mensa society posthumously.)

High up on a sequestered shelf behind a shroud of cobwebs and the jagged pour-spout of a bottle of some mysterious brand of brandy, was a scowling grey gargoyle, modular, plaster, about the size of an icon on an altar. Staring at me, the mischievous little bastard, like an heirloom with a snotty attitude. We locked eyes, a stare-down. Something bad’s gonna happen, it was telling me, with glee. Yes, I replied, something is. That something might involve me breaking you into pieces, for instance. Maybe crush you under my heel, you cheap piece of tacky, vulgar junk.

“Man, who you talking to?” This was one of those other…what do you call them…men, down at the other end of the bar. “You mumbling to me?”

“No,” I said. “Not to you. I didn’t even notice you. Talking to myself, working some things out.”

This explanation struck the guy as entirely satisfactory. He nodded with vigor. “Word.” Honesty is always the best policy. A fellow patron, he had no features, was dark as the catacomb shadows entombing him, and whether he continued to stare at me I do not know. It became irrelevant in any case because soon I forgot he was there. Or that I was. Hypnotized by the mechanical motion of bringing the glass to my lips, taking a gulp, setting the glass back down, swallowing, repeating process, indefinitely, a levering machine, like one of those hinge-jawed automatons miming gulps from steins of ale in Bavarian Village mockups. In inverted synchronicity, money disappeared from me like ambition. But there was plenty more where that came from. Time crawled. The day through the smoked blinds still appeared full and hearty; I was making good time. Not yet two o’clock, and me torn asunder and imploded like a defunct casino, razed to make way for some sterling new establishment. This I hoped was my immediate destiny—if I had to be fated for anything at all. Let me transmogrify into a new creature, a mutation of whim, and howl and gnash in the muck of afterbirth. Howl at the sun, at the moon; the stars neither will escape debasement. Nothing but insults do I see in the heavens, and for that more agony is my due and proper. I will spawn what I spawn.

Push away the flowery phrases and the poesies. At some point soon we will need an actual event to occur. Something with teeth to snare interest. Otherwise it is just vagueness piled atop ambivalences. And still, in spite of earlier stated objectives, I don’t believe any concreteness has been furnished. I don’t believe you can picture me. I don’t believe any invocation has triggered to perhaps imagine my face. Likely you cannot imagine trading places with me, can’t identify with me, have no compelling hook on which to hang your sympathy or interest. You can’t imagine how I feel under these same circumstances. It isn’t a superlative, relating things deciphered through such nugatory perceptions. The numbing doesn’t go so deep as to not acutely feel the lack inside. And to fail to compel the attention of an audience to boot, leads one to a despairing point.

I am considering the murder of everyone in this bar. That would leave me with three dead bodies on my hands. Four, counting me, myself, and I. This is not under consideration in any abstract way, in any sort of artistic fancy. This is substantive, this is pragmatic. This is a business of who I kill first, who I move to next, who comes last. How can I kill three men, separated each by dozens of feet, positioned one to the next like points in an isosceles triangle, me the center of the radius? This is no idle scenario. There are teeth to this new notion of mine; incisors. I commit murder, and I’ve jumped ahead stages, and detonated any possibility of ever slipping back into the normative existence.

An impulse requires the will in order to exist every bit as much as any decision does. In the action which follows either, there is scant difference between the two. One has to do what one has to do what one has to do what one has to do what one has to do what one has to…

+++

He’d been staying week to week in a motel. The wee hours of the morning, he sat on the edge of the bed in darkness. His eyes had long since adjusted; everything was visible. Doubly visible, in fact; two of the walls of the room were comprised of mirrors — it was that kind of place. He saw the bed he sat on and its rumple of comforter and sheets and pillows, saw the nightstand and the lamp, the round table with two unmatched chairs alongside it. The dull glint of the dinged doorknob to the bathroom. Seeing it all twice over ik84221 this emphasized the meagerness of it all, the tatty scarcity.

And he saw himself as well; could not escape his own gaze. Every time his eyes were drawn to that area of the mirror, as inevitably they were, there his reflected doppelgänger awaited, the twin’s eyes a millisecond faster, already fixed upon him.

He got up and put on a shirt and went out. Across the street was an all-night convenience mart. Three addicts haunted the front of the place, and moved forward as he approached. He waved them away and they dematerialized back into the shadows. The fluorescents inside the store were merciless. He found what he needed, paid, went out again

Back in the room he switched on the lamp. Opened the pack of thirty-gallon garbage bags, took out his pocket knife and cut the bottom out of the first bag. Taking the roll of Scotch tape, he tore off pieces of it with his teeth. He started taping the sheets of the former garbage bags over the mirrors.

The job was almost complete when, in the last remaining parcel of glass left uncovered, he saw the bedding begin to move. First a red head emerged, then a sleep-smeared face, then white shoulders. “What the hell are you doing now?”

He pulled the plastic tight to the mirror and covered her image over, taped down the edge. “Working,” he said.

“You, work? When did this happen?”

He turned around. Now she was propped up on her elbows, and the bed sheet had fallen away from her chest.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Do you ever sleep?”

“When it occurs to me.”

She let herself drop back against the pillow, pulled the bed clothes over her head. “Goddamn the way you talk. It’s like shacking up with a private detective from a bad movie. You sound like you’re always reading from a script.”

A few hours later, full day came through the curtains. He was on the bed. The bathroom door was closed; he heard the shower running.

There was a telephone on the nightstand, an ugly, antiquated pea-green number a year or two younger than rotary models. He picked up the receiver and dialed.
“Hello?” His wife’s voice. In the background, the ambient crackle of a household in the morning.

“Yes, hello?” Her tone distracted, hurried, with no sorrow to it.

He placed the receiver back on the cradle. And waited.

From the bathroom. “What the fuck….”

The door opened. She stood there wrapped in a towel, her hair dark and heavy with water and dripping. “You really are fucking insane. Up to now I figured it was just an act. What did you do to the mirror of the medicine cabinet?”

He nodded to the can of black spray paint on the table.

“…so, you painted over the mirror.” She said it flatly, as a statement. “I’m sure in your head that makes sense.”

His hands were folded behind his head, and he stared up at the popcorn ceiling.

“Perfect sense. Wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

“Care to clue me in?”

“Can’t. Top secret.”

She loosened the towel and let it fall, slid on bra and panties from a pile on the floor, wiggled into black stretch pants, and put on a wrinkled white tuxedo shirt. Slipped on black, thick-soled tennis shoes. Her work uniform.

She made a point of ignoring him until she was almost out the door. “Well, fuck me for asking, but will I see you tonight?”

“Probably. Unfortunately.”

She stared at him. “You know what you’ve never done? Never once I can remember. Ask me something about myself.”

He considered this. “Interesting. You know, you’re such a good talker, I figured I’d just find out everything soon enough.”

“Ok. Pop quiz then. What’s the name of the restaurant I work at?”

“…give me a second. Begins with a consonant.”

“Eddie’s” she said. “How long have I worked there?”

“Too long.”

“A year and a half. How old am I?”

“I think, twenty-five to thirty-four.”

“Twenty-nine. What did my brother die of?”

“Same thing we all do. Shame and boredom.”

She swung the door wide. “Let’s say we just forget about tonight.”

“Ten o’clock it is. See you then.”

The door slammed shut.

He was relieved she hadn’t asked him the toughest question of all. Tough but fair. Tania? Tabitha? Tamara?

Freedom can mean long hours. He chose to spend his waiting by a phone that would never ring.

+++

A memory making like a dream.

A man walks with his wife and daughter to the county fair, the three of them holding hands, the little girl in the middle, linked in her parents’ chain. The Ferris wheel spins in the fading sky, red and green, green and gold, gold and red. Turnstiles and paper tickets. Clowns go slapping by. Carnies hawk at the people to try their luck in the stalls. Throw darts at balloons. Pitch a ring over a bottle. Win the little lady a prize.

Keeping up with a tiny life-form too new to the world not to be delighted. Her elfin self, in a pink cap and coat to shield her from the autumn, veering this way and that, breaking their handholds, running up to the attractions. See the funhouse, an enclosed pavilion. Enter. The maze of mirrors. The family ambles by the convex and concave panels, stops to look at their compressed reflections or their elongated selves or the warped and shimmying images of their likenesses. The mistaken parental assumption would be that the girl would be fascinated by such a crazy perspective; in the enigmatic child’s way, however, the scene holds no interest for her, and she is already charging off to the next thing. Does something pass between the man and woman though, looking at themselves in distorted glass, a chill of recognition, something too familiar for amusement? Children hurry away from one thing so that they can see everything else. Adults hurry so that they might see anything else.

The carousel goes round, carnival music plays on a loop, pastel horses rock up and down on the brass poles. Now the father has the child on his lap as they ride, raising and lowering. He will keep her warmth here with him forever, inside his chest, a burn inside him of love and loss, and the sensation they create and the scars they leave are synonymous, one is the other.

The tacking grind of the roller coaster as the train of cars goes ticking up its wooden tracks. He kneels down to the little girl, directs her attention to the enormous structure of the thing before them, to the cars about to reach the apex. She is wide-eyed as she watches. And there at the crest of the rise, the cars hang suspended for a moment, and against the purple sky silhouettes of the riders are visible. Then the line of cars slips over the summit, there is a whooshing rush of sound, the clatter intensifies, silhouetted arms shoot up, squeals and yells. On the ground, the little girl claps wildly, laughs with her whole body, is a burst of wonder and light. It is her first time seeing anything like it.

This is the reverie of a man tossed about and adrift in the tidal night, gripping tightly at his pillow, mind wandering in from a different kind of autumn.

+++

A dream masquerading as a memory.

The shameless storm was backslaps on the night panes of the clapboard house, shuddering in the claptrap rain. And the drops alighted in arc lamps and eave lights, best defenses against the worldly threats, the restless terrors that scheme and stalk best at night.

But inside all is serenity and sleep, always sound and peaceful sleep here;
and the numberless mirrors reveal only the blameless glow on our guileless faces.
Within these sturdy walls there is no room for secret places. And our hearts, our hearts, are as clean in the purest rain as they are full in the purist sun.

The rest are at rest. My family, my foundlings, my nestlings, my needful things dreaming sweet dreams secured by the sweetest slumbering. As for me, I am awake, ever vigilant. Manning the forward position, roving hearth to hearth, a protector well-protected, well-known hereabouts.

And I am the reflection’s lie in a certain mirror’s glass, in a window’s bespattered eye. I pass from one room to the next—a good-enough guy in nice-enough orbit, soberly making his nightly rounds, a thousand winking eyes crying rain as he revolves.

Yet there is also my shadow; now he is a tricky customer. An imperfect mimic, this one. For one move I make, my shadow self pantomimes perfectly; then come the very next and my careless twin drags the beat, blows his cue entirely. Capricious, rebellious shadow, mind on other matters.

The wind burgles the chimney flue, gravel sifts the roof tin, gutters snipe. And a spare study’s desk lamp, shade tilted up, shines its light and hits me full-bore, and when I turn I find my duplicate is nowhere to be found. Deep within the cavity of the house I hear this other, my other, steal away. That camouflaged menace, melting into the dim of corners, shrouded in the gloom of darkened halls as it makes a break for it, slinking for the door downstairs. I hear the creak of the cracked wood of that one faulty step. I listen. In the silent instance lasting the lag between the pumps of a healthy heart, I worry that his purpose is something else, something more dire than escape, something more like malice. Nestlings dream about tomorrow in their beds, innocent. Why them? No, leave them alone. They have nothing to do with this.

But then come the pad-pad sounds of a beaten retreat, and I am reassured that flight is the wretched thing’s only intent. The sound of a tumbler undone, the hosanna of hinges overcome, and all at once the screaming chorus of a battalion of rain. Inside-out one sees only the onslaught, and in well-struck spears of electricity, the assaulted juniper leaves as water and wind strips away their green.

Outside-in, though — a different story: everything naked as the carcasses in a butcher shop’s window, vulnerable as diamonds in a jewelry store case. Dear things ripe for picking, for purchase, for plunder.

How I hope that freed he will now cast far away, fly far from this place. I hope he will not linger in the wilderness, to hound me and mine, wondering about a return inside. I hope he takes a new name, grows a new face, discovers a new country, finds another century. Gone, I pray, means gone for good, My hope being that each of us will be better for the going.

But I know about the nights out there, about the emptiness and chill. And I can hear his mutters and bays, as he claws at every passing storm. And I know now it is foolish of our home to break through the dark bodies of the trees like this with its foolhardy light, to blare like a braggart’s beacon into the black forests, to boast to the world of its warmth from golden picture windows — inside of which stands a weak and frightened man, rain curtaining the glass around him and falling like a waterfall to frame his fragile form. And on the other side stands the other, staring back at him. The man he eyes out there who eyeballs him back, as one thinks “I could be him,” and the other “I know those eyes from somewhere.”

And I don’t like the look of that suspicious-looking man, standing in the rain.

They said changes were in the wind,

And everything had to go

 

A relic of a man, leaning on a bar. “Railroad used to go through here,

now it goes through here.” He taps his chest.

The train makes a slow last roll into the ghost station,

loaded with cargo of cowards and cold warriors.

She hops freight with a knapsack of Chesterfields and K rations,

hears the phantom whistle blow.

 

The carnival next to leave town, the Tortoise Shell kid and Turpentine

Sally with her angel wings erect.

She knows something’s up.

 

Seagulls land on barn roofs and weather vanes,

two thousand miles inland.

 

Young hero fresh from the frontlines

marching home, and looking all over for his best girl.

Her daddy’s housed burned to the ground,

her mama dead from typhoid, dumped in an unmarked grave.

He hears she was spotted on the riverbanks, but when he gets there

the ferryboat is upside down, and an old crow on the landing bell says,

“She was here, soldier boy, but now she’s gone, gone, gone.”

 

Jericho is burning, Joshua is steaming his tea,

Helen of Terra Haute is lugging around potato sacks full of bees.

 

The Episcopalians started praying for the coming of a comet, and on the seventh

day the deacons formed a line down Main St. They gut themselves with Stanley

knives. The womenfolk drink a brew of sulfur and pin feathers and dropped like

falling stars.

Only little Maggie left.

She spit her potion out after her mother went to heaven,

and took a seat in the dandelions to watch the cattlemen haul off the old steeple.

 

Harvey Wally has a tourniquet for his blasted liver,

and dreams about his vaudeville youth in the Paris Island Revue.

His trademark—The Reeperbahn Hat Trick,

where hands tied behind his back, chewing on a toothpick,

he would give his best stare and slay everyone in the audience. (Three shows daily).

He sleeps at night on a waxpaper pillow,

his dreams invaded by ventriloquist acts.

 

Carpetbaggers begging for bottle-tops in the barren weeds,

chrism and purple sage bristling under the steel breath of God,

electrical towers strung like a shark’s tooth necklace from

the valleys of the Psalms to the peaks of Olympus.

 

Redwood trees laugh in the night with no one around,

drinking gin, throwing dice.

 

The mayor is a bleeding ulcer, he figures he has to do something

about the calamity.

So he hangs Gary Cooper in the town square,

fucks the town’s last virgin,

and telegraphs Washington for help.

 

In retrospect: a miscalculation.

 

They come at dusk, in delirious whirlwinds of dust,

the cavalry inside the funnel clouds. Screeching demons, faces painted red,

monsters of hell drinking plasma and blood like well-water.

It’s a rank and file massacre, the regiments’ saber tips wink in the sun.

They put the mayor’s head on a pike and fix roman candles in the eye sockets.

A raucous good time. Snipers on the boulevards, champagne on the balconies,

crocodiles in the canals, a horseman for every maiden. They’re foraging for the

feast, blasting cans off fence posts, commandeering the sacristy of the mission

for any rites that come to mind.

 

At the following elections, most vote in absentia.

 

The hundred year drought comes to an end.

It rains muddy water, it rains locust shells, it pours bone-fish on sand and shale alike.

 

Cactus needles blow like tumbleweeds in the prairie,

blue flame licks the sky where the moon used to be.

Jackdaws and ragmen and fishmongers and wharf-rats peddle their wares under the cypress trees by old City Hall. New City Hall was just razed for a parking garage.

So much blood now, it doesn’t even draw flies.

Corn fields flooding with fire.

Bonfires atop every hilltop in the land. The night wind carries the scent

of buffalo meat the Apaches cooked two hundred years before.

 

But business booms. The black market is a bull market, record gains at the end

of every day’s trading. The town’s remaining thirteen citizens? Every one a millionaire.

Debusschere with the machete between his gold teeth, crawling on his belly through the muck of the marsh. Up to the big ranch house, up to the Spanish windows,

up to the mother knitting and the father with his pipe. Their twin sons at the table.

Debusschere, up to the unlocked door.

The remaining nine citizens? Every one a millionaire.

 

The El Dorado, with big fins, rolling down the intersection of Commerce and Division Avenues.

The top down, she holds her daddy’s hand. A shift in the breeze, now he’s downwind.

“Daddy, is it just me, or do you smell like a butcher shop?”

 

The long hairs come in their vans, in their sandals. In their naiveté.

They dig up the turnip fields, they find iron slave chains. They find them in coal bins,

in the smoke houses,

find them in the wheat silos, under blankets of grain.

 

A drive-in where Klausman’s store used to be. A penitentiary built in place of that.

Beatrice to Buella to Bertha to Betsy to Bethany, telling the calendar year

and time of day

by the gas light glow off the refinery towers.

 

Jet planes screaming across the sky, white-nail scratches of exhaust in the blue ceiling

of the world. A great flash, the crashing wave of impact.

The comet finally come.

A black moan in the earth,

the cowardly sun slips away unseen.

The moon splits wide open.

The sky unzips and nothing is behind it.

 

Time to start over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economic Policy
The Hope Diamond,
Balanced on the tip of a rusted syringe.

Rock City
North Country deer stampeded Eliot St yesterday,
Where sage grass and heather smother the sidewalks,
Where my grandfather triumphed, where Dad just got by.

Trees of Heaven reclaim my city, the alleyways
Clustered with their prides, and on the roof of the Whittier
Falcons have nested and there they lord like envoys of Gabriel,
Angelic hunters, scouts running reconnaissance.
While the pigeons make homes in the old cinemas, cooing,
Roosting in the arches, above the balconies, the heavy velvet curtains,
The tapestries, The National and The Adams and The Eastown,
Mausoleums of baroque memories.

Winter hibernates the decay, freezing the rust and factory works
In crystal time; feline militias convene in the railway yards;
And along the streets are frostbit deltas of obsolete steel, tractor trailers propped
On blocks, empty, euthanized cars no one bothers
Anymore to strip, shunted fire escapes flayed and hanging off caving
Host buildings, cyclone fences torn open like chain mail on dead knights,
Street signs and stop signs and mile markers that testify to a time
Of organization, efficiency, mobility, naïve determination.
Outside of the excreta, nothing. Nobody. Nobody lives here anymore.
Total desertion, the structures all sarcophagi, the network of streets and boulevards,
Catacombs.

Peregrines take to the sky and explode like dreams to sail
Over the crawling green rooftops, over the city cemeteries,
Over past dignities, lost opportunities, the houses embraced with green necklaces
Of ivy and the hungry vines, sail over the moaning graces of Eight Mile,
And make smoke-hewn revolutions in the purged sky,
Signaling a battle nearing its end.
There is enchantment in this reclaimed wilderness,
Where nature swaddles Twentieth Century relics in older magics,
To speak incantations over the pilloried bones, to weave fresh mysteries
Around the vestiges of ambition and emancipate the aspirations of our departed
From cold fanged electric eternity.

This morning at dawn timber wolves descended on Oakland Avenue,
To prowl. I saw them in the brilliant winter’s gap between the skinned trees,
Their ginger topcoats, their snowy bellies, their silent steps,
Their blue eyes older than my wisdom.
They stalk me and mine, circle us with their patient shadows,
But I circle them too. And they need to always be on watch,
To see if next time it isn’t my shadow, my ribbed silhouette on the ice,
Returning to retake this inherited parcel, armed again with powder, with flint, with steel.

 

Then after twilight we slashed the traffic

To ribbons and bivouacked a downtown

Path into the locales of sprung rhythm

And tin-pan magic. A naked skull with thumbs

In his eyes, puppet-skulled, cauldron-mouthed,

 

This the man in the doorway on the stoop,

Heated hands, fencing with air,

The over-heated air, the page his biography

Is stamped on, a ballast inherited from no father.

One hand calls us up, to attention.

Young men are not noted for their resistance.

Here the strobed corridor, mosquito smells,

Orange neon and grindhouse splatter lighting,

 

Up the stairs, lunging three

At a time, fingerprints melting on the banister’s

Fogged varnish, vanishing ghostly alms,

Stimulant eyes, caffeinated sounds, transistor

Music, alert atop alert, demanding all.

Then, then—the cool nightingale thrush of a cold, dark

Room. Blast of replenishment. Make way for the silence.

The Asiatic blue light of a plug-in waterfall, cascading.

 

Sweat springs up, ice maker hum, frigid metal,

Eager mouths, arms flexed at the ready,

Hands doubling for fists.

A belt buckle,

Boot heels on the wall,

The enviable speed of the quick-jab now,

The slow languid lush contrapuntal to the ruthless

Dervish hissed here.

 

Back to the streets,

The yellow cab streets,

The Chinese lettering signs,

The bamboo roller blinds, the sidewalk grates,

The pull-down gates. We the nocturnal beasts,

Mercenaries, exiles, wormwood boys busting our brains

On bricks and on bottles.

 

Euphoria is the vein tapped when you believe the world’s cries

Are hosannas to your unquenchable identity.

Over the rooflines the Devil appears, a berried Beelzebub blazing

In cartoonist’s ink. He crawls and climbs and rears,

Uses water towers for handholds, spears the tent of night

With black felt horns, levering the hinges of his jaws and letting blast

From that furnace a howl to put the cosmos on notice.

He is the peal of the primordial world.

I am the sky.

 

 

Is the State secure?
In itself?
Does it preen?
Does it check itself
In mirrors, pull faces,
Lip-sync?
Does the State strut?
Does it realize when it is strutting?

Does the State believe in itself?
Does it harbor doubts?
Does the State even understand that it exists?
Does the State feel itself divine,
Does it accept the notion of divinity?
Of morality?
Of mortality?
Is the State afraid?

It is claimed that the State has no friends
Or enemies, only interests.
But is the State interested in its interests,
Is it fulfilled by them?
Is the State curious?
Does the State recognize interests
That are not its own?
Does the State empathize?

Will the State ever cede a victory,
Willingly take a defeat
In order to further a greater good?
Does history have one example of this?
Is the State capable of altruism?
Does it wish to be?

Does the State malfunction,
Does it require maintenance,
Does the State break down?
Is the State ever bewildered
By its own structure, its complex
Character, as an aging person
Is of her recalcitrant faculties,
As an anguished parent is over a wayward child?

Is the State systemic?
Is it centralized?
Is it erroneous to conceive of the State
As an entity, an integrated whole?
To refer to it as such?
Is it instead a loose consortium
Of disparate parts, a chaotic compound
Of motley elements, rival factions in uneasy truce?
Does the mutiny of one component
Lessen the State? Does the component’s
Recalcitrance cause pain?
Does the State suffer?
Silently?

Does the State contemplate,
Does it cope?
Does it sulk,
Does it lash out?
Does it regret,
Does it grieve?
Does it forgive?
Does it forget?
Can it forget?

Is the State passionate?
Is it intelligent?
Is it intuitive?
Is it ruled by rationality,
Or is it a creature of instinct?
Is the State superstitious?

Does the State ever yearn to be
Other than what it is?
Does the State evolve?
Does it dream?

Will the State die?
Can it die?
Can it be killed?
Should it be killed?
Can the State be redeemed?
Does it require redemption?
Should the State be believed?
Should it be taken on faith?
Would enough faith make it true?
Is there anything in this world which keeps its word?

Seduction Song

The lagoon lights of a blue bar of a night,
A street made of bourbon,
A bullion river washing away moonlight,
A panicked man rubbing a last drop
On the back of his gums,
As clarity, unbidden, returns.
Ochre walls, a caged iguana, pool table missing the eight-ball,
A gun under the bar, a truncheon by the gun,
A countertop rag, accordion breaths,
Music with no author.
Solitary satellites scattered round the room,
Housings for rent, for auction,
Skeletons for hire, cigarettes for tender,
I am going to kill them all.
A dime spinning, a favor called in,
An agreement in the stalls,
A scratched record,
The point of a pick,
Ten pints of blood to the average human,
Otherwise we’re talking water.

Bacteria Unrequited

A lot like a paramecium eating your brains
To find a woman who doesn’t want you.
How the truth stares you down and
makes you blink, how it brooks
no argument
But how you make them anyway,
Like a circular saw screaming,
Looking out for loopholes and caveats,
Disclaimers to the conviction of certainty.

 

North Carolina sleeps soundly tonight.
North Carolina never wakes up.
Crisis-stricken, conscience-laden,
Under radical threat,
All burdens have climactically lifted,
And the goodness and mercy is
Restored. Sleep well.
From here out, time will never
Advance, not one more second.
You can be sure of that.
You win.