Chlorine

I suppose it may not be the case in other cities, say for instance Los Angeles, California, maybe, but certainly here in Santa Teresa, the life of a "pool man" is not anything like glamorous or overly sexy or anything. I guess there's a kind of reputation for a pool man like for a lifeguard or a traveling salesman or a rock star. And I'm not saying that the reputation isn't possible maybe in a city where there's a lot of pools so the law of averages might tip in favor of "Dear Penthouse" kinds of experiences, but here in Santa Teresa there's about 25 pools all together counting four motels and the high school, the public park municipal and the Primitive Baptist's indoor/outdoor immersion tank (and this does not in any way shape or form include any kind of hot-tub or spa or Jacuzzi Brand bath-tub with built-in jets; I'm thinking to myself that maybe that's where the real action is for a town like Santa Teresa). Five or six of the private pools clean and service themselves, so I have about twenty pools on my clipboard and those are on different visitation schedules--some are weekly, some twice a week (usually Monday after the weekend and Friday before), motels every other day, high school daily, and municipal at least twice daily and emergency on-call for whatever (I wear a pager now; big whoop). It is seasonal work.

*

The most exciting thing to happen, really, on a pool job so far has been finding a drowned llama in the Purcell's one morning. I had to knock on the screen-door and say "Pool man" while Mrs. Purcell was fixing frozen waffles for her children. She came out with a very "what-is-it-now? what-do-you-want?" attitude even though this is a small town and I've known her since she went to high school with my oldest sister, Lorraine, and there's really only one supermarket in town so we do see each other from time to time anyway outside business.

"Could I talk to you outside for a second, Christy?" I asked her.

She just stood there at the screen door and had to do one of those wiping-her-hand-on-her-apron gestures but in like a real exasperated kind of way, like dragging her away from the toaster and her kids banging their sippy cups on the Formica was a total pain in the ass for her and I was a pointless jerk for doing it. She opened the screen door and stuck her head out the littlest little bit.

"What is it?" She sounded peeved. That is the perfect word for the way she sounded--peeved.

"Umm...that llama ya'll keep in the pen to the barn?" I started out asking her.

"Yes?" It was like she was deliberately trying to act like some teacher in grade school, the way she said "yes" and her voice rising up at the end.

"Well, he must of gotten loose last night or something," I told her.

She looked back over her shoulder for a second back into the kitchen like she had to keep an eye on those Eggo Brand toaster-waffles or something. You could tell that one of those kids was going to probably start crying pretty soon; you could hear it in all of their already-bored-in-the-morning voices all whining and irritated. And of course, the little color TV on the counter was also on about full blast with cartoon xylophone music and explosions.

Christi squinted down at me from the step-up when she turned around.

"Okay...?" She had an edge of the same whine as her kids building in her voice and she was waiting for me to fill in the blank, getting ready to say something like, “That’s not fair” or “Why do I have to do everything?”

"Well," I wanted to wait for just a few more seconds. "Well. I don't know how to say this...but...."

I could see her getting frustrated and she twisted around to look back at the toaster, two of the kids that were on the verge of a slap-fight, and quick back to me standing there already stinking of chlorine and hydrochloric acid with my ratty PE shorts over my bathing suit and my Chuck Taylors gray and falling to pieces from wading around in toxic chemicals with twelve feet of aluminum tubing and a leaf scooper in my hands.

I heard the toaster pop, that metallic springy noise they make, and I heard a kid sort of shriek and I heard a glass get knocked over.

"That llama's all drowned in the pool now," I told her and stepped back into the yard.

"What?" she said, her arm raised in mid-smack, one of her daughters frozen into a protective ball beneath her frozen hand. "What did you say? Hey, you...what? Get back here!"

But, I had already spun around and started walking back to my truck and dragging and banging my pole through the gravel on the ground behind me. I could hear at least two, maybe more, of those kids starting to cry back in there.

*

A llama may not look like all that much alive, kind of small and skinny, but they soak up pretty good and Starbright, as I learned that particular llama had been named, must have come in at six or seven hundred pounds of wet wool and bloated creature.

Cindy called Animal Control and that one-legged guy came out with his truck full of cats. First he snaked a loop around Starbright's hindquarters and we winched her out of the shallow end onto one of those blue plastic tarps we’d spread out on the lawn. Then the Animal Control guy turned his truck around and we winched old Starbright right up onto that little metal shelf on the back end of his city/county pick-up. All those cats made a hell of noise, too, their yowling kind of harmonizing with the whining grind of the winch. Then he drove her away and I dumped about forty pounds of chlorine into the water. You couldn't even see the bottom at the three-foot end, that's how much chlorine I dumped in.

Werewolves Everywhere You Look

Number One

Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.

Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.

The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.

Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.

Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.

"Whoa," said Mark.

Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.

"Hey, Don," she said.

"Hey, Julie," Don said.

She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.

"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"

Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.

"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"

Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.

"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"

Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.

"That was harsh," said Mark.

"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."

Number Two

It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.

At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.

I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.

I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.

""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"

His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."

The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."

I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.

Number Three

Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.

Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.

"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"

"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"

Stuff like that.

When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.

"Cleaning up in here!"

"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"

Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.

The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.

But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.

While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.

"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."

Silk Cut

The smoke from a Japanese cigarette
curls backward to this boy's mouth
against the current of typhoon.
No way will any divine wind change
the way these blossoms
fall
in flame
again and again
and then stop falling.


(Originally published in Wild Dog Nights, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993)

Another Step Toward True Democracy

(Xian, The People's Republic of China, 1986)

He remembered the oily feel of the mud as he dug bones with the rest of the work detail, the soft (almost silken) feel of the skulls and there were thousands of them, the way they tumbled in the air toward the piles heaped next to the Nanking riverbank.

He remembered the smell of yams baking in the marketplace oil drums, the cackle and cry of the yam men who held them smoking in their thick gloved hands, the miserable blister of yellow yam skin as it fell, peeled, to the dirty street.

He remembered the damp smell of forbidden books, the ones long hidden and poorly handled, the ways their pages opened as if the words themselves would tumble off the paper into dirty piles of useless ink.

He remembered the way his father gasped in the whitewashed hospital room, the smell of carbolic and the rotten mouths of nurses who could not even read, the way a choking man was mocked by medicines trapped inside glass cases.

He remembered the tears that wet his stomach, between the layers of quilted coat and threadbare trousers, and the way that Shan Nyu cried to create them with his penis in her mouth, the lights of the evening buses cutting through the dismal smokes of coal and diesel near the Bell Tower.

He remembered the way sugar tasted the first time it was in his tea.





[Originally published in "El Nopal: Journal of the Southwest Symposium" (University of New Mexico, 1991) and reprinted in Artificial Rats & Electric Cats: Communications from Transitional China, 1985-1986 (Camber Press, 2008). Click on title or book cover for more information.]

Sake, Beer, and the Rain

all day &
all night the
rolling voices of
other arguments bouncing
off the buildings rising
around us that
surround our
balcony hung with
children's clothes &
toys, some broken
by the bad kids in the
courtyard of grass & dirt & short bamboo &
a maple tree that will
turn serrated crimson long after we
are gone

She Saw An Eel

and it made her sick.
Sick and limply violent.
She wanted to put it in her mouth,
wanted to see how bad it could be.

"Quit that," he told her
and she stopped making her face.
She wrote E-E-L
on her palette with her tongue.


(originally published in the literary journal Tyounyi, New Mexico [1989] and reprinted in Slack magazine, Boulder, Colorado [1993])

Cool Turtles I Have Known

Okay. This is me and I want to tell you guys some stories I know about turtles; some of these are true stories about turtles, some are stories I only heard about turtles and some are maybe stories I made up about turtles.

Number One

I have a cousin and we’ll call him Gary because that’s what his mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, named him. His name is Gary and when he was a little boy, somebody brought a turtle over to his house and showed it to him. Gary didn’t know it was a turtle and he said “COOKIE!” really loud and he snatched the turtle up and he put it in his mouth.

Nobody got hurt. The turtle was okay and Gary was okay. Still, it was an important day for everybody that was there. We all heard about it later. It’s the kind of story that families tell over and over and over again. I don’t know what happened to the turtle.

Number Two

There was a turtle named Maybelline because she had such beautiful eyes because Maybelline is a kind of eye make-up that girls wear sometimes. Anyway, she lived here and there around the Rio Grande in New Mexico until one day a kid snatched her up and put her in a box and then drove her up the bosque into Albuquerque. For a while, Maybelline lived in the pet store that where the boy sold her. Then the pet store sold her to me.

It was pretty good when Maybelline came to stay with us. We had a bunch of pets then and she just fit right in and became part of the family.

Then, one dark night a terrible storm blew in to Albuquerque and, while the lightening flashed blue and the thunder rolled heavy, a strong blast of wind opened up the screen door. In her fright, Maybelline slipped out that open door and nobody noticed until it was too late! We looked and looked for Maybelline that night. We got some flashlights and we looked under the bushes and, even though it was a silly thing to do, we called out, “Maybelline! Oh, Maybelline! Where are you?”

And we were really sad when we didn’t find her. We stayed up extra late that night and got up extra early the next morning, but we couldn’t find Maybelline.

Well. One whole year went by and we sure missed Maybelline. We managed to get by, somehow, but we often thought of her and how her beautiful eyes would sparkle when she saw a tasty strawberry.

Here comes the good part. After all that time (remember, we waited one whole year) a friend of ours called up on the telephone.

“You guys like turtles, right?” he asked us.

We said, “Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.” And then we asked him, “Why do you ask?”

He said, “I found this really good looking turtle in the middle of a very busy street so I stopped and I picked her up but I don’t want to keep her so I thought I would call you and see if you guys together would want to see that she gets a good home.”

“Sure. Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.”” we said. “You bring that good looking turtle right over here as quickly as you can.”

(Have you guessed it yet?)

When that guy, our friend, came over with the turtle he had found we took one look and we knew right away that it was Maybelline. Who else would look at us with such beautiful eyes?

Number Three

When I was a really little boy, long before I could ever read a book by myself, I had a little turtle with red cheeks that lived in a bowl with a plastic palm tree on a plastic island in the middle. I named that turtle “Rockla” and it was the same kind of turtle with red cheeks that my cousin Gary thought was a cookie when he was a little boy.

Number Four

Just the other day I read in the newspaper about a man who called the emergency line in his home town, that 911 number, and said, “I hab a turdel ond by dose” and all the emergency operators thought he was joking until the paramedic guys showed up and had to take it, a real life turtle, off his, a real life guy’s, nose with some pliers.

Number Five

When I was a little kid I had some friends who were boys and who were brothers and they had a big turtle but I can’t remember what that turtle’s name was. Anyway, one hot summer day when little boys like us, my friends and me, start getting sleepy and turtles like theirs just start getting energized, that turtle that they had decided to go swimming and that’s the last we ever saw of that turtle and we all remember how the grown-ups that summer kept making fun of us because we let a turtle run away. They’d act like they were acting like us and talk in funny, slow-motion voices and pretend to run in slow-motion calling, “Cooommmme baaaaaack, tuuuuuurtle” in slow-motion voices.

We looked everywhere for that turtle but we could never find him.

Number Six

They told us one time that some people think the whole entire world rests on the back of one big big turtle and I remember thinking then, at that time, that if anybody could hold up the world, a turtle probably could. It might make a little, soft noise and it might make a little, soft tear, but you can bet that turtle would never let the world drop. No way, turtle!

Number Seven

On time when it was spring, we went to visit our friends Peter and Anne and they live way up in Taos, New Mexico. When we got up in the morning and they were making up the breakfast that we were going to eat, there was this big scratching sound from a big box they had. At first, nobody knew what it was and then we knew right away what we had heard. It was the turtles waking up. They had been sleeping all winter long in that cardboard box and then, that morning, they decided to wake up and look around.

We all went outside to eat our breakfasts and we watched the turtles blink at the sunshine they hadn’t seen in so long and then start taking big bites out of the daffodils which they hadn’t eaten since last year and we all kept taking big bites of pancakes and saying, “Good morning, turtles! Good morning, sleepyheads!”

Number Eight

One time a turtle saved my life. I was just going to college for my very second semester of my very first year and I was just walking down a very flat road in Sarasota, Florida, where my college was when I saw a sparkle in the bushes. I was much younger than I am now then and so I decided to go over and see what was sparkling there by the side of the road. It was a turtle in the weeds by the side of the road and the reason that turtle’s eyes were sparkling was because there was this crazy driver coming up behind me and he would have hit me unless his headlights had hit that turtle’s eyes and led me off the flat road to safety

Number Nine

Our latest turtle is really cool. We named her Cookie after the turtle my cousin Gary almost ate that time. This new Cookie got real sick one time and we had to take her to the veterinarian. The doctor told us all sorts of things we didn’t know about turtles. She told us they need Vitamin A for their eyes. She told us a vitamin shot every once in a while sure wouldn’t hurt them. She told us how old Cookie was by looking at one of her scales under a microscope. It turns out that Cookie is 6 years old.

Right now, Cookie is asleep in the garage in a box full of blankets and newspapers. That’s how she’ll spend the winter. When springtime comes, she’ll wake up and we’ll all be so glad to see her.

“Good morning, Cookie!” we will say. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

Bag of Guts

This is a true story and it happened in a town near here and it wasn’t that long ago. My friend’s cousin told it to him, he told it to me, and I’m telling it to you and it is totally true.

There was this kid named Tommy or Timmy Guttman or Tony Guttbaum or Guttfreid or Gutt-some-goddamn-thing-or-another. The important thing is that this kid’s last name started with Gutt. Maybe his family was from Germany or something. Whatever it was, his name started with Gutt and he was fat. I mean this kid was really fat. A complete pig. Enormous. Huge. Fat.

So, naturally, when this kid started school, the other kids, the normal-sized kids sort of latched on to him and started teasing him about being so fat. It was one of these really small towns with only one school so everybody knew each other from kindergarten until senior year. They started teasing Tommy or Tony or Timmy. Probably even some of the other fat kids at school teased him because, standing there next to Gutt-whatever, they didn’t look so fat anymore. It was practically fate or destiny that the other kids teased him, picked on him, and made up names for him. He’d been born for it. They called him “Jelly Belly,” “Porky Pig,” “Fatso,” “Blimp,” and whatever popped into their heads. By third grade, though, everyone had pretty much settled on calling him “Bag of Guts” because of his last name. And that’s the way it stayed until even some of the teachers thought of this kid as “Bag of Guts” like it was his real name. Hardly anyone even remembered what his first name was, that he even had a real name beside “Bag of Guts.”

By the time he got to high school, Bag of Guts weighed in around 400, maybe 500 pounds and his life was hell. He had taken so much shit for so long that it was pretty clear what the rest of his life was going to be like. He could barely make it to school anyway, could barely walk even, so he just sort of dropped out of school and nobody really came looking for him, no guidance counselors or truant officers came by the Bag of Guts’ house looking to get him to come back or anything. It made everyone’s lives a little easier to just not have him around. A few of the meanest, the most sadistic kids really did miss him but they just shifted their attention to the next closest, the next weakest kids and made their lives miserable instead. And some of those kids really, really missed the old Bag of Guts.

A year passes, maybe two years, and everyone is getting ready to graduate. Some kids are going off to college, some kids are going off to the army, some kids are just going to get a job, get pregnant, settle down, and settle in. The usual shit. Somebody spray-painted “Class of 19-whatever Rules” on some rocks. Graduation, caps and gowns, pomp and circumstance, best friends forever, don’t ever change, blah blah blah.

There was one big party on the night of graduation, a bonfire out at the end of a dirt road into the woods, woods just like these, and about half the newly graduated seniors were out there going “woo hoo” and playing music on car stereos, drinking beer and wine coolers and peppermint schnapps.

All I know, all anyone knows, is that no one came home from that party. When the cops went out there the next morning to check, the fire was still smoldering and the cars were still there, maybe just running out of batteries and still playing party music. What the cops did find out there in the woods, woods just like these, and what freaked everyone out so badly, was a huge burlap sack, a huge burlap sack that someone had made by taking regular size burlap sacks and sewing them all together, an enormous burlap bag stuffed full of teenaged hearts and livers and intestines. One big, gigantic bag of guts and nobody has seen that Guttman, Guttbaum, Guttfreid kid since.








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These Are Photographs

These are photographs, spread wing-like across this table,
and they sideways cut the membraned layers beneath my eyelids,
the slick part that slides across the part they call "hazel."
A twenty-sided construct rolls nearly as well as a sphere
and each side is a photograph
and when it stops rolling nineteen of them will not be facing up.
These clever arrangements of salts and metals
add together quickly, like an equation,
but can never solve, are never totaled;
the palm of this hand and the way it rests against that shoulder
remain so while other, clearer photographs develop.
This blur here implies motion.

Heroes of Language (Part II)

My grandfather told me stories about his friend, an Indian named Enchanted Medicine Dog, and it wasn't until I began working in the library that I was able to guess that his old buddy had been the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse.

My cat is named Pencil and it has recently become apparent that she actually wants to write. Her scrawlings, from stylus held most clumsily between paw and tooth, cannot begin to yet be called language, but there is a meaning rich with feline sensibility and a kind of creeping logic there.

My fish, lock in their glassy locus, have taken to strange loopings that, when traced with soap slivers or grease pens along the aquarium planes, reveal alphabets or perhaps pictograms that point to icthic futures.

My wife, when sleeping, groans softly and runs her hands along my scalp to trace another man's name there.

Accidental Seabirds: A Play

The Cast:

Natural Forces, male or female
Thing One, youthful male or female
Thing Two, youthful male or female
A Blacksmith, male
Mom, adult female
Dad, adult male
Junior, adolescent male
Sis, adolescent female
Little Bit, female child
A Booming Voice, male or female
The Crowd, male and female
(certainly, some of these roles may be played by the same actors)


[Pitch black stage. The sounds of movement--whispers, scuffles--grow to become audible but not nearly overwhelming enough to demand attention. Lights snap full on to bare stage with NATURAL FORCES way off to the back at the side. S/he speaks.]

NATURAL FORCES:

I am called Natural Forces and I will be hovering around the edges of things this evening. As you may recall from what you’ve called your educations, I am usually symbolically and always only dimly understood.

It is easier for your teachers to talk to you with puppets than to tell you the truth. They will tell you the sun is an orange in the sky and it is easier for you to conceive the sun an orange than otherwise. Your teachers will show you a few nuts and seeds; these will be called planets and set to turning around the orange sun. And it is fixed in your heads that you can imagine the solar system. There are so many people who think the sun is an orange surrounded by walnuts glued to thread and that is how they live.

They have shown you filmstrips about anthropomorphic subatomic particles, and have fixed in your heads the notions of emotive protons and neurons with subatomic attractions and repulsions and uncontrollable excitments and personal subatomic names on their subatomic sweaters. A molecule is conceived of as an arrangement of teeny weenie Styrofoam balls and toothpicks. And there is a glimmer in your heads of how the world is bent and stopped and started again every fraction of every instant and that glimmer is wrong.

There is no more comfortable way to see disease, the way in which the body falls apart to senselessness and rot, than to make it a cartoon, grimacing animunculus under Van Louenhook’s glass, little Disney germs in army helmets fighting against the little good guy germs of health and hygiene.

These illusions are better, make life much easier, than it would be facing the workings of my machinery. You may not perceive my motives; you are not equipped to see my consequences.

[dismissively]

Anyway, ‘nuff said. Check it out.


[Music of some sort. Nothing cheesy--a small ensemble of woodwinds or a gamalon or talk radio tapes played backwards.

THE CROWD filters onto the stage and NATURAL FORCES blends in with their activity, is quickly lost from sight. THE CROWD works in a friendly, cooperative fashion to construct a modular set that, at first, resembles some sort of medieval village. As the set is quickly completed, THE CROWD begins to assume roles within the context of the actions to follow; i.e. in one sequence, a particular CROWD member may assume the role of cafe patron while the principals emote and strut and, in another sequence, slip into the role of policeman. Etc.

THE CROWD breaks into small groups and begins to arrange itself in the manner of townspeople--shopping, selling, gossiping.

Enter two youths wearing THING ONE and THING TWO sweatshirts.]


THING ONE:

Oh, Thing Two. This whole Middle Ages stuff is absolutely terrible. I am getting absolutely, terribly sick and tired of alchemy and astrology. I ache for chemistry and astronomy. I need physics and biology. I want to read books written in a vernacular tongue. I want to grind lenses so that we can see some different things. I need to send and receive messages over great distances. I’m tired of talking to priests


THING TWO:

I’d like to go to Italy and sit in the sun and invent a machine, a machine mind you, that could fly. I would use it to find Prestor John in his Asian kingdom. I would fly to Africa and see the palace of She Who Is To Be Obeyed. I would like to visit the moon.

THING ONE:

Okay. That’s the idea. I think you’re on the right track. But rather than posit a future, I would rather take this time to dwell on the misery of the present.

You know. Cathedrals. Crusades. The Plagues. No cable. I really think we were born in the wrong century.

THING TWO:

Oh, yes, Thing One, I must agree. If we had lived in the Age of Philosophy or with the Noble Romans, think how we might have flourished! Think what possibilities for change may have existed for us. With what we know now, we could have constructed Pliny’s zoological garden. With the machines I may invent from linen and bronze, we could collect the griffen and giraffalope and those little pygmy guys with one eye in their tummies. We could do it, Thing One. We really could.

THING ONE:

Well, yeah. We could do that, too. But I thought more to think of things more new. To try to think of things not yet imaginable, to name a color unseen, to watch a sun blaze a dawn that is yet to be novaed into existence.

I was lamenting, Thing Two, our place in history when so much past and so much future weigh so heavily on this feeble slip called our present.

And we here, Thing Two, we rot in an Era of Closed Minds when change of any nature is viewed as heresy.

THING TWO:

Or the future! When things untold exist yet still in the minds of men unborn. Some earthly heaven yet to be terrestrial. The future time when all humors become equal within the tides of men; when angels return to earth to guide our hands upon the plows of Utopia.

[A member of THE CROWD steps slightly forward to insinuate his role into the consciousness of the audience. Things like this should happen periodically throughout the play; i.e., it would not be untoward for a member of THE CROWD to go offstage to retrieve, open, and drink a beverage. However and for sure, this time, THE CROWD member steps forward to announce...]

BLACKSMITH:

I am a character in another play altogether written by a friend of the author of this play and his name, the guy who wrote the little play within a play that I am in, is named Perry Novelli. I don’t know what the name of the play within a play is but I am the Blacksmith. I have a little part and it goes something like this:

[clears throat; THING ONE and THING TWO have become secondary, at least, and tertiary if possible. They fade while the BLACKSMITH takes his place]

[music/chorus/revolutionary opera]

Turkey and ham
Turkey and ham
The wind don't grow no
Turkey and ham

[lather, rinse, repeat]

[THE CROWD retreats to pantomimed applause as THING ONE and THING TWO casually wander back to their prominent marks]


THING ONE:

Ahem. Harumph.

Anyway.

Have you ever even thought about economics? I mean real economics, something beyond a tangible barter, something more than trading an animal’s skin for a bag of corn? About buying on credit? About the possibility of buying on a margin? About bankruptcy and rollovers and mergers and stock splits?

I’m just asking...

[THING TWO looks downright puzzled.]

And what about knowledge? What if everyone could read? What, Thing Two, if you can imagine, what if everyone could write? What new stories would we hear? What new languages would we learn? What kingdoms lie there dormant in those yeomen’s brains waiting to be structured and expressed through syntax? What empire of mind and soul is destined for some other aspirant’s grasp? And here we languish, dear Thing 2, in the Land of the Iron Sausage, under gentle dukedom’s hand, while even our poor local library has been sealed as tightly as the fists of our merchants and the knees of their glassy-eyed daughters.

[Some townspeople have begun to throw the two sidelong glances as the content of their conversation has become clear.]

THING TWO:

Perhaps our mouths should mimic our fellows’ minds and fists and knees. This broadcast of such sentiments might quickly be misunderstood.

THING ONE:

Hmm? Oh, piss on these, on these, on these...people!

[People have really started to notice now, have stopped what they are doing to listen, have even taken a few steps toward the two.]

Oh, God in Heaven, if only some wheel would turn; if only there did exist a lever and for that lever a fulcrum from which to start this dear world turning once again. And in which direction would such rolling take? I swear to you, Thing 2, that I would not care if this darkened rock climbed up toward some brighter light or teetered even further back toward the dung-heap from which it surely was once plucked. I wouldn’t give two snaps as long as we were moving.

THING TWO:
(anxiously)

I beg you stop this speculation and stop it in such a public manner in such a public place.

[THE CROWD is seriously interested in the conversation now and has begun to comment amongst itself. They mumble, “Peas and carrots. Peas and carrots.”]

THING ONE:

If there could only be a cleansing rain, a deluge of baptismal waters--or, of fire, if needs be must--to wash or burn or somehow scour these rusted armors of idiocy from the limbs of the brains in our heads. I crave the giddy liquor of potential, of chance, of uncertainty, and of transformation! I would drink most deeply from the cup of he who would offer me an unfamiliar draught.

THING TWO:
(emphatically)

Would you just shut the fuck up....

[As THE CROWDbegins to move in a concerted and menacing manner toward THING ONE and THING TWO, NATURAL FORCES steps forward to high visibility.]

NATURAL FORCES:

Pardon me; excuse me. The Mongol hordes are here.

[Stage goes to deep black. A single voice says “Oh, shit.” Again, there is the sound of shuffling. The lights slowly rise.]

[The village has been slightly modified and now looks more or less like a theme park. Fakiness is somehow emphasized, commercialism and product marketing can be reflected in the type and nature of visible advertising, souvenir-oriented “Shoppe” names, etc. Shopping type “musak” grows to an audible but unobtrusive level. THE CROWD settles into roles of park-goers, big animal characters, concessionaires, etc.]

[A family unit--DAD, MOM, SIS, JUNIOR, and LITTLE BIT enters. Costume cues should read tourist without screaming. Please no cliché Bermuda short, camera snapping, hideous sunglasses, etc. They are on vacation but they are more or less realistic.]

DAD:

Okay? Where exactly are we now? Who’s got that map. The one with all the zones in different colors. What zone is this?

[MOM pulls LITTLE BIT closer to her side and begins to dab at the child’s face with a tissue.]

MOM:

Spit.

[LITTLE BIT emits muffled, whining grunts of discomfort and embarrassment.]

DAD:

For Christ’s sake, who’s got the map? Junior? Come here, son.

JUNIOR:
[timidly]

I don’t know. I gave it to Sis.

[SIS is suddenly aware of the action and she freezes for an instant. Quickly though increasingly frantically, she inventories her pockets, bag, and immediate surroundings. No map.]

DAD:
[quiet, yet extremely menacing.]

Goddamn it. I gave it to you. Come here, son.

JUNIOR:

Honest, Dad. I gave it to her and she said she’d give it back and she didn’t and it’s not my fault, Dad. Honest.

[MOM looks up sharply at the sound of her son’s urgency and glances at her eldest daughter. LITTLE BIT has turned stiff.]

SIS:
[taking a hesitant few steps toward her father, a step back, another forward]

No, Dad. He’s right. It’s my fault. I used it to sit down on the curb and forgot to pick it up. I can get another.

DAD:
[doesn’t turn around, still stares calmly at JUNIOR]

Stay out of this, missy. Now, son, where is the map I gave you?

MOM:
[a gesture of reaching aborted; a glance at each of her children]

Frank?

DAD:
[as calmly as you please]

I said that all bitches should back the fuck off.

[They do, glancing at each other and at LITTLE BIT.]

JUNIOR:

No, dad, really, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry dad oh please I’m sorry I’ll go get another one right now.

[Passersby have begun to notice that something is wrong with the scene but it is not clear what the tension the family generates might mean]

MOM:

Frank? Please.

DAD:

I asked you a question, son. Where’s the map?

[NATURAL FORCES emerges from amongst the other park-goers. She looks at the family, the rage on one face, the fear on another, the loathing both self- and otherwise upon another. She gestures first to the audience and then to the family itself, an introduction of sorts.]

NATURAL FORCES:

An aneurysm, I think.

[S/he waves his/er finger around until it stops on MOM who drops like a rock, boom, as the lights go pitch black. A single voice says, “Whoa. Did you see that lady pass out?” More shuffling as the sets are once again modified. After a while, the small noises fade as the sound of rain rises. After sufficient duration, a lightning flash and a peal of thunder should startle everybody. The lights grow though only enough to simulate a dark, windy, rainy, thunderstorming night.]

[Dark. Wind. Rain. Thunder. And a figure against what we can now see is the parapet of a castle. Another figure carrying a flashlight or a lantern or a torch or something approaches from behind.]

THING ONE:
[sotto voco]

Thing Two! Thing Two! Is that you?

THING TWO:

Of course it is. Be quiet!

THING ONE:

Thank God! I’ve been out here for hours.

THING TWO:

Oh, Thing One, be serious. You’ve been out here for fifteen minutes at the very most.

THING ONE:

Well, it sure seems a lot longer than what you just said.

[pause]

Are you sure they’re asleep?

THING TWO:

They were. If you keep making so much noise, they’ll probably wake up.

THING ONE:
[whining]

Okay,. okay. I’m sorry.

[They move together closer to the edge of the stage and off to one side.]

THING TWO:

There, now. Do you feel any better.

THING ONE:
[drawing his jacket or cloak or space blanket or what ever closer about himself]

Yeah. A little.

[sniffles]

Okay. You start.

THING TWO:

All right.

[pause; deep breath]

All right. I like to pull the plug on the bathtub but then stay inside laying as flat as I possibly can and feel the sensation as the water drains away and the temperature changes and the texture of the change between bath water and air feels heavy like the gravity that follows the waterline to surround my limbs again with their own weight.

THING ONE:

Ooo. I like that. Do another. Do another.

THING TWO:

Very well, but just one. I like it when I am far away from the ocean, miles inland, days inland, with no trace of salt mingled in the atmosphere and I see a gull. There, somewhere near some pile of garbage, to see an ocean bird...it’s like being two places at the same time. The sound the bird makes.

THING ONE:

That was even better than the first. I like the ones about water. Do another one. Do another one with water in it.

THING TWO:

No. It’s your turn. You do one now.

THING ONE:

But you do them so well. I want to hear another of yours.

NATURAL FORCES:

I think not.

[Lightning crashes and strikes THING TWO dead. The stage, of course and once again, goes pitch black.]

A BOOMING VOICE:

That’s it, you two. I want you back in bed and asleep in five minutes or I’m coming down there.

[Again and of course, there is the usual scuffling and shuffling. The sounds of set rearrangement, so familiar and so comforting, again insinuate themselves throughout the theater.]

[Eventually, the house lights go up and everyone (audience, actors, staff) goes home.]

Most of the Twentieth Century and Practically All of the Twenty-First

Making love while bombs fell
Our narrow patch of floor
And dirt drenched blankets
All walls trembling as we
With shock and awe
Lamps swinging though not exactly wildly
In the age of “It’s just like a movie”
Not much like a movie at all
With Thanatos and Eros in the front row anyway,
On the glare horizon, cities burning.
Overhead, just above us here, cities burning.

Some other family’s heirlooms
And knick-knacks and trash now
Burned and dirty and water-damaged
Rarely worth even cursory scavenge
Just more things to walk upon
To kick aside to make a space
To make a space for dirt drenched blankets
To make a place to spend the night
And make love while bombs fall

11 Ways of Looking at Lisa

She's stealing, stealing, stealing money at work all the time. In her hands, credit card charge slips transform themselves and ones and fours and sevens become nines, threes fill in to eights, zeroes fall into unexpected but significant places, and the cash in the coffee can on her closet's top shelf rolls tightly around itself, a cocoon in which her brooding future incubates.

She never eats it herself but she often steals meat from the kitchen to bring home to her dog. Her boyfriend will often steal if from them both. She can smell it on his breath.

His drinks will almost certainly appear on some other drunk's tab and that is a kind of victory, a kind of seduction performed with alcohol and a BIC round-stic fine point pen and it will almost certainly work and he will certainly drink more and she will glow with the gifts she's given, setting up shots of raw vodka all around.

*

She's breaking things in the kitchen and it punctuates the things she says.

She's asking, "Are you happy now? [crash] Is this what you want? [crash] Is this the way you want things to be? [crash]" and the shards of Corning Ware and Pyrex and glass arrange themselves across the linoleum like messages, like codes, like hieroglyphic gestures and they glitter as they spin toward brief rest in litter under her 100 watt bulbs. There is a clarity to this performance, its meaning quite clear, yet it will remain a kind of performance.

"Are [smash] you [smash] happy [smash] now? [smash]" she wails, forlorn in anger and gathering repent.

He is thinking.

He says, "I'm thinking. I'm thinking."

*

She's working on the StairMaster and it's been 45 minutes. The sweat spreads but does not fall from her face, her lips, her chin; it outlines its own movement across her shoulders and down the furrows of her vertebrae. It is hard for her to concentrate on the article in the Harper's magazine she holds. She savors the movement of her thighs, her calves, her ass as she climbs and she lets the magazine slowly fold itself closed and then it slip to the floor beside the machine and she lays her forehead between her hands and she keeps climbing.

*

She's drinking and she's drunk and crawling around the living room floor, a mosaic of cassette tapes and CDs spread underneath her elbows and her knees and she's looking for something particular, a special song to accompany this special moment spread underneath her elbows and her knees and she's looking for something particular, a special song to accompany this special moment and she knows it here somewhere and if she can just remember who sings it and what album it's on and where that album is, she can listen to it over and over and over all night long and she keeps looking because she knows what she wants to hear.

*

She's dragging her nails across the plaster of the bedroom wall and making noise, plenty of noise, and it all means she likes having sex. Her back is arching and her shoulders toss and her breath goes in and out like cats gasp and it comes out like a long, drawn out "oh, fuck" and that noise rises and hardens as it escapes her swollen mouth and everything she does and says is absolutely inspiring and he's working at it hard, he's trying his best and she's rocking.

"Fuck, baby. Oh, fuck."

*

She's driving fast across west Texas plains in a car that's about to break down on roads she's deliberately not chosen, roads she's deliberately just taken for no reason at all. She has chosen not to add any oil to the engine and the temperature is rising and she's singing along to a radio station that has seemed to just appear on the dial and she really doesn't know the words to the songs, so the sounds she makes are just a split second behind the sounds the radio is making.

"Heartache hmm hmm hmm and whiskey hmm hmm hmm," she sings. "Lovin' arms hmm hmm hmm and freight trains moanin' hmm hmm hmm."

At the same time, she's thinking, "This is the life, sure enough."

*

She's getting ready for another party; she has them quarterly. She is vacuuming the living room carpet and cutting up the vegetables and working on her hair and working on her face and opening bottles of wine and setting out plates and napkins and silverware and picking out some music all more or less simultaneously and when guests start arriving she is more than ready.

*

She's screaming at the boys in the car who yelled at her but they're not listening; they're already way too far down the street for her voice to reach them though she can still hear the heavy thud the music they play makes.

"Fuck you!" she screams but it is a thin sound and is quickly lost in the air, unravels and disappears until only dogs can hear it.

"Fuck you, you fuckers!"

*

She's counting boyfriends like counting prayers with a rosary; she lays out their photographs like a collection of holy cards, like a dealer starting another game of casino blackjack with all the odds behind her. She makes a circle, she makes a star, she puts them in a long, long row. She picks them up like paper dolls.

"Hey, you!" she pretends one of the photographs says. "You were mean to Lisa."

"I was not," she pretends to make another picture say. "She's a bitch and she was mean to me."

"Take that back."

"Make me." And then she pretends the pictures fight and she jiggles them both across each other and the sounds she makes sound like fists hitting flesh and grunts of pain. She pretends the good guy's picture wins the fight and then she gathers all the photos together into one neat stack and puts them back in the envelope in the box in the drawer in the dresser in the room she calls "spare."

*

She's laughing and the dog is in the water and across the brown, flat river the new condominiums with red tile roofs are laddered up the mesa, rising like dull bees from the cottonwood bosque. Even Ray-Bans cannot control the vibrating reflection of the sun in the water in her eyes in the windows of the houses half a mile away.

*

She's sleeping while the morning sunlight enters the east window and he sits in the wing back chair that sits in the corner of her bedroom and he watches it, the light, and the way the sheets are tangled around her legs and the way the arrow of soft, fine down tracks her spine and the way the growing light has made her perspire and how each tiny hair has begun to glisten, to shine golden in the curves her back has made this morning.

A Good Fist

She begins her work as day becomes evening outside, while I cook another meal to eat later, and her pens are arranged in a spreading fan shape, points inward toward her left elbow and ink, a few kinds of radiance though darkly bottled in the low rays of another setting sun.

For money, she will spend some hours and draw the names of the invited, the hosts, the brides, and the grooms from whom the money comes. Like a schoolgirl in some study-hall daydream, she writes "Mr. & Mrs. Edward L. Middleson" over and over and over again in the same looping, copperplate script, the lines first fat and then thinning to a whisper of pigment and then fat again.

She will only work so much; her wrist and arm will tire and her eyes will blur the lines. One dozen in one hour and she will work for an hour and a half, two dollars per envelope, and then she will stop for two hours, work for 90 minutes, rest for 120. She makes $108 a day. A big wedding with a bigger reception might require days and days and days of gentle scratching, the fluid coaxing to track the shapes of her movements.

She has what they call a “good fist” for the drawing of words and her envelopes, her invitations, her ability to decorate the ordinary language of names and streets and times and dates is very much in demand by the women who live in the houses by the golf courses, behind the gated walls, in the foothills with panoramic views and I drive the boxes of cream and blue and peach paper back up there where they live to deliver the goods and collect the checks, to wish them the best on their upcoming party, wedding, christening, graduation, whatever this event in their lives might be actually, all the while holding the scrawled directions on a torn up piece of envelope she’s given me and, her handwriting then at leisure, I can only just decipher.

And, Yeah, We Found the Money. So What?

I couldn’t believe what the old man said.

“Say that again,” I told him.

“I said, ‘If you want money so goddamn bad, go get you some.’ Go dig up some of that money in the basement if you want money so goddamn bad, goddamn it,” he snapped. The old man snapped, barked, hollered, and yelled a lot. His volume knob never seemed to go below 8.

“What money? You’ve got money in the basement?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah, I got money in the basement. Buried in the wall behind that big old clown painting of your mother’s. Been there for years.”

I just stared at the twisted up old fuck, that knot of wasted human life just too furious to do anything other than rage. And drink. And use drugs. And fuck around on the mother. My old man was quite a guy in quite a few ways, but money-stasher was a new one on me.

“How much money are we talking about?” I asked.

“Twelve fucking thousand bucks,” he answered. “You little shit.”

“You have $12,000 buried in the basement? What the fuck for?”

“So you, your retard brother, and that nightmare corpse of your mother’s upstairs couldn’t never get your greedy fuckin’ paws on it.”

“So why are you telling us now?”

The old man clamped his mouth shut, his face collapsing around the toothless hole.

“Seriously, old man. Why are you telling us now?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Such as…? I mean, how long have you been sitting on this little stash of cash?”

“Long enough,” the old man answered. “And I got my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”

And, yeah, we found the money. Down in the basement in a hole in the wall behind one of the clown paintings the mother had done in her paint-by-numbers days right where the old man said it would be. Or, rather, what was left of it—a rotten, rat-shredded, moldy wad of slimy scraps and fiber. If you ever want to know what $12,000 looks like, do not ask me. All I can tell you about is what $12,000 looks like after my retard drug-addict old man hides it in a wet, dirty hole in our cellar’s wall and doesn't tell anybody about it for ten or eleven years. That’s not all we found, of course, but finding those sludgy lumps of cash pudding was awfully disappointing. The mother had died, chocked to death in her slum-queen’s bed on a chicken bone, and this was very much more disappointing than that. We never told anyone she'd died because, really, who would care? She’s still up there rotting away, though, in case any of us wants to visit with her for awhile and that doesn’t help the generally odiferous nature of our home much. I think the old man thinks she’s still alive.

Toby stood there for a moment looking at the money-slop and the rest of it; then he just bolted upstairs. I mean, he spun around and he was pounding up the steps and the next thing I heard was his heavy boots thumping across the floor above and the meat-sounding smack of his close-fisted blows to the old man.

“You stupid, worthless piece of shit,” Toby’s voice, though muffled, was clear and the space between each word was filled with the sound of another blow. “You…insane…piece…of fuck…shit.”

Stuff like that. I couldn’t hear much of anything from the old man, but that was not in any way unusual. I can’t remember the last full sentence I heard him speak aloud before tonight and I’d stopped reading his little notes years ago. They didn’t make sense anyway when I did read them. “Cancer dog at the back door,” I remember one of them said; “Claws and beaks are all you eat,” was another one. They were like fucked-up fortune-cookie fortunes or something.

So, I just stood there in the basement leaning on my shovel, listening to my brother beat the crap out of our father, and staring at all that ruined money and the skeletonized remains of one of my childhood classmates. Sierra Lebonowsky disappeared when we were in the 8th grade, her folks moved away a few years later, and she slipped away from my memory. But I instantly recognized her sweater; it was not a particularly noteworthy sweater other than that I remembered it as hers. A cardigan thing with a belt, it had a geometrical pattern in gray and cream colors. I could see her wearing it while she waited at the bus stop in the morning, steam from her warm breath pluming away from her mouth. Obviously synthetic, it hadn’t deteriorated much in eleven years. Sierra had, but the sweater hadn’t.

Toby came stomping down the stairs from behind me.

“Asshole cocksucker,” he announced. “Fucking useless perverted toothless piece of shit.”

He was talking about dad.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Toby.

“Fucking bleeding, man,” Toby answered. “Sitting there in his fucking Laz-ee-Boy recliner, crying like a bitch, and bleeding.”

“Did he say anything?” I asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” He answered my question with a question and I hate that.

“Did you know about any of this?” I asked him.

“About the money or about Sierra?” Again with the question for a question.

I gently poked her ribcage under the sweater.

“Any of it.”

“No,” he said, almost indignant.

I poked a little bit more.

“Then why did you ask?” I wanted to know.

“Why did I ask what?” Toby was having trouble answering me straight on.

“I asked you if you knew about any of this,” I explained to him. “You asked me, ‘About the money or about Sierra?’ If you didn’t know about this, why did you ask which one?”

“Why did I ask which one what?” This was getting painful.

“Why did you ask me which one—Sierra or the money?”

Toby just stood there, blinking and thinking, while he tried to figure out what to say next. He already knew it was too late and the shovel in my hands was connecting with his nose, splitting it open with a gush of crimson, before he could adequately frame his next question. Toby sat down hard on his ass on the basement floor next to the pile of worthless cash and what was left of Sierra Lebonowsky.

“You fuck,” I told him. “You fucking knew. Didn’t you?”

“Glub?” Toby answered through his already blackening, swelling lump of a nose and the gush of bright blood. “Glub glum glub?”

“Stop answering my questions with more questions, you asshole,” I told him and smacked the top of his head with the flat blade of my shovel. It made a dull ringing sound and vibrated in my hands.

“Ooowww,” Toby moaned and at least that sounded like a statement. My family had a suddenly renewed interest in beating up each other.

I thought about Sierra Lebonowsky for a second. A flood of quick memories followed my recognition of her sweater: Sierra on the school bus sitting next to Debbie Skinner and talking about boys; watching her dance with another boy at a school sock-hop about 6 weeks before she disappeared; Sierra in 5th grade crying when she got 2nd place in the science fair because she had worked on her project entirely by herself and the winner, Mike Tullman, had so obviously gotten help from his dad. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t gotten any help from my dad, of course, but my project sucked. I can’t even remember what it was, maybe some last minute thing with lima beans or food color or something. I couldn’t believe Sierra had been in my basement this whole time. And I had almost forgotten about her.

Toby was curled on his side on the dirt floor.

“Anything else I need to know about?” I asked him, ready to kick him if it even sounded like he was going to ask another question.

“Nobe,” he straightforwardly answered me. “Nuh-ting else.”

I looked down on the little corpse and damned if it didn’t appear as if there were tooth marks on the long bones of her little legs. The old man hadn’t always been toothless; before the meth fucked up his mouth, he’d had quite a set of choppers.

“You sick motherfucker,” I told him and then, realizing what I’d just said, had to smile a little bit. Fighting wasn’t all this family did with each other.

*

“Tommy has a girlfriend, Tommy has a girlfriend,” Toby, chanted while he danced circles around his big brother.

Tommy lunged at the gadfly, narrowly missing a grab at the boy’s winter coat.

“Shut up, brat,” the older boy commanded, though futilely.

“Tommy and Sierra, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Toby sang as he dodged a punch-kick combination. “First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes Tommy pushing a baby…OW!”

Toby rubbed his thigh where his brother’s boot had left the beginnings of a good-sized welt. Tommy was able, in general, to land only 1 blow in every 6 attempts, so he tended to make them count when he could. It was the same strategy their father used to raise his boys.

All the way to their home, the younger boy limped in front of, behind, and along side his older sibling in a manner both mocking and defiant though he made no further vocalization. Tommy scowled, though not at his brother’s teasing. In fact, Tommy scowled because he did not have a girlfriend and that Sierra Lebonowsky specifically was not his girlfriend. Toby’s teasing reminded Tommy of that fact and, since he truly wished that Sierra was his girlfriend, that the two truly were k-i-s-s-i-n-g, in love, getting married, pushing baby carriages, and since Tommy knew that something like that was never ever going to happen, Toby’s teasing ignited a slow red fire in his head and in his heart that, once smoldering, would be hard to dampen. What had started as love was already becoming rage.

“I HATE HER,” he roared at his brother as if that would stop the frolicking.

The boys slammed into the house, dumping their coats and backpacks onto the jumbled pile of clothing, sports equipment, and assorted detritus next to the kitchen door. Walking into the house was walking into a wall of overheated, moist air heavy with the odors of cat-piss, stale cigarette smoke, rotten food, old grease, and unwashed bodies. Those smells were just one of the reasons Tommy would remain without a girlfriend; among many other things, the way those smells clung to the boys was off-putting to their peers. The boys jealously suspected that other households hid secrets just as foul as their own. The only difference, they hoped in their impotent squalor, was that other households merely applied Lysol to the stink with more vigor. And for that, the boys hated those other households and the children reared in those households for having the luck, if not the blessing, of good hygiene and the USDA food pyramid. The boys could have accepted and lived with the foul secrets, for foul secrets were part of all the life they’d ever known, but good food and clean clothes would have made a difference and to be denied such simple amenities infuriated the boys.

“Where’s the fat bitch?” Tommy asked his brother as he looked inside the barren refrigerator.

“Probably stuffing her fat face,” Toby snickered.

“I’d like to know with what,” Tommy said. “And then I’d like some, too.”

“Fat chance,” Toby laughed. “Get it? ‘ Fat’ chance?”

Tommy reached behind to idly swat at his younger brother.

“I get it, asswipe.”

“Got any money?”

“You wish.”

“No shit, I wish.”

“Well, shit in one hand and wish in the other. Watch which one fills up first.”

“Quit trying to talk like the old man. It doesn’t fit you.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

Tommy closed the refrigerator door. His stomach was knotted with hunger and shame, his feet burned in his stinking boots and unwashed socks, his hair hung in greasy ropes across his crusted eyes. He honestly didn’t know how much more of this he could take. Later in his life, Tommy would be sadly surprised to look back and see just how much more it had been.

*

To stand there looking at $12,000 and a perfectly good girl wasted like that just made me madder and madder. All those macaroni and cheese dinners right out of the box with no milk or butter; all those rotten socks and gray underwear 2 sizes too small; all those empty Christmas stockings, forgotten birthdays, and that sick fuck upstairs had been sitting on 12 grand, letting it rot away rather than spend a dime of it on his kids.

He’d apparently kidnapped the object of my schoolboy desires and, at the very least, chewed on her legs though I know that’s not all he did, and he didn’t even tell me or ask me if I wanted some. Like I was ever going to get another chance to be with a girl like Sierra Lebonowsky no matter how long I lived. Just looking at her bones wrapped up in the remains of her clothes was giving me a hard-on.

I kicked my brother again.

“You asshole,” I reiterated before climbing the stairs into the kitchen.

I sat down at the table in front of a cold cup of instant coffee. I could see through the doorway, past the dining room, and into the living room. The old man was sprawled on his recliner, blood was trickling out of his mouth, and whether he was alive or dead did not matter to me in the least. I brought the mug to my lips, blew upon the liquid as if it were scalding, and took a sip.

“That hits the spot,” I said to no one. “Nothing like a good cup of coffee to really hit the spot.”

*

The hungry boys roamed through the bottom floors of the house searching for something to eat or money with which to buy something to eat. Toby carried the sugar bowl with him, dipping his finger into its hardened, darkened crust and licking up the grains that stuck. Tommy puffed away on long butts rummaged from overflowing ashtrays. If they didn’t find something soon, they’d have to go into the garage and huff gasoline. No matter how hungry they got, a few lungfuls of gasoline vapor put them in a drooling stupor in which food had no place. The headaches could be fierce, but everything was always a trade-off.

They could hear the television from upstairs.

“I wonder if she’s awake,” Toby said.

“Go and find out,” Tommy answered.

“You go.”

“I’m not going. You go.”

“I’m not going.”

If the mother was asleep, they might be able to swipe some food from the debris in her room. If she was awake and saw them, she would either scream at and vilify them or wish them closer so she could slobber upon and touch them. Neither prospect appealed to either boy at the moment.

“Shit,” Tommy muttered as he headed for the garage and the gas can. Toby followed behind, silent and limping.

*

I’m not sure how long I sat at the table. The old man never moved and Toby never came upstairs. It could have been hours. It could have been five minutes. I just kept thinking about the money and about Sierra Lebonowsky, about what I could have done with either or both.
I’ve often wondered how it is possible for me to stand such a cruel life surrounded by such cruel people acting with such cruelty. I search my own interior for that same cruelty and, rather than dismay, greet it with joy when I find it. As fucked-up as the family may be, we don’t get to choose our relatives and I would rather fit in with my own blood than be a stranger in the world. I can’t imagine how lonely it would be for someone to not have blood kin, people who aren’t just like you but are actually part of you and you are a part of them.

We talk about blood a lot amongst each other.

“It ain’t no gaddamn cliché,” the old man used to say before his brain melted. “It’s just true. Blood is thicker than water and thicker than mud and that means they ain’t no kind of binding or any kind of holy oath that’ll put you closer to another human being in this world than the blood you share in your veins. That’s why I married your mother and that’s why the blood inside you boys is holy.”

That last part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the first part rings true. Even monsters have mommies. Even if their mommies are also their aunties or maybe their big sisters, it still counts.
I remember being real little, just probably 2 or 3 years old because, in my memory, all the furniture and stuff is really big. I remember standing in the hallway and looking into the big bedroom and watching the old man and the mother go at it in a sexual way. Now I know she couldn’t have been much more than 15 herself, but at the time she seemed old as water and about that solid; she was just sort of a wispy, misty old woman even when she was still a kid. It wouldn’t be too much longer before she got real fat but back then she was still just a skinny little thing. She was probably pregnant with Toby though how would I have known? The old man was doing her and it was either really good or it hurt her something bad because she was making all sorts of noises and you know how sex is—sometimes it sounds like people killing each other. I never knew the mother’s mother, the old man’s wife before they had my mother, but I know her name was “Jeanette” because that’s what the old man would grunt when he was fucking his daughter and that isn’t the mother’s name. The mother’s name is Dumpling and he never grunts
“Dumpling” when he’s fucking her. That’s kind of weird, I think.

Anyway, I remember standing there in the hallway and being just a little kid but still having this vision of how we are as a family, how we are like a silver ring or a group of interlocked silver rings and no matter which ring you set to follow out of the group, you always loop back and find yourself tangled up in someone else’s silver ring. That’s the family for sure. The reason the rings are silver is that gold doesn’t tarnish.

The range of her cruelty had been limited by only and both her lack of intelligence and poverty and I thanked heaven every day that she was both stupid and poor.

One of her favorites was to make me wear a dress and watch as she fucked the old man or one of her tricks. She’d stand me on a chair and she’d suck cock and take it in her smelly pussy and her dirty ass and she and the old man or the trick would laugh at me there crying in a dress on the chair watching the mother fuck strange, drunken men including but limited to the old man. She would be drunk, too.

She must have known what she was doing. How else to explain why she’d punish me with bare-bottom spankings while jerking my little prick. She must have known stuff like that would have long-term consequences. Why else would she make me stand naked in the bathtub, flick burning matches at my crotch, and all the while whisper how she was going to cut my penis off and make me into a girl?

Toby was still moaning downstairs. I was sitting in the sick heart of the rancid rat’s nest we called our home and I was just sick of us all, tired and sick and bored and infuriated and deeply saddened by our lives. There I was surrounded by illness, decay, and deviance with a pile of rotten cash and the corpse of my childhood sweetheart down in the basement and I just didn’t know what to do anymore.

The old man was making some choked, wheezing sounds from the living room, so I guessed he wasn’t dead, that Toby hadn’t killed him. Yet. Of course, my own boots felt like having their own chat with the old man, so he was by no means finished with the evening’s entertainment. I was just waiting for him to rise to a suitable level of consciousness so that my efforts could be properly rewarded. In the mean time, sipping my ice-cold coffee, I turned back to my mental family scrapbook.

*

We were having one of those father-to-son heart-to-heart talks I’d learned to love so well.

“When the fuck are you gonna get you some pussy, boy?” the old man asked me. “Don’t you like girls? Are you a little faggot? I’m not having no cock-sucking, ass-fucking faggot in my house, you know.”

It was at times like these I wished at least one of the television sets piled in the living room would work. I could watch Dialing For Dollars or The Match Game and pretend the old man was talking to someone else.

“I’m talking to you, boy,” he reminded me. “I’m talking to you, you little faggot no-pussy-getting boy. Jesus fuck Christ, I had kids in school when I was your age.”

I was 15 then, which meant that if the old man was telling something even a little bit truthful, he’d been since he was 10 or 11 and that seemed almost reasonable.

“I reckon you know what pussy is, don’t you?” he asked while peering at me. I think he thought he was making a joke. He was drinking something white and caustic out of a cracked, milky ceramic coffee mug in between hitting his glass pipe. They’d just invented crack and the old man loved that shit. “I mean, you seen pitchers of pussy, ain’t you?”

I’d indeed seen pictures of pussy and I’d seen the real thing between the mother’s legs and was still confused how the one could look so tantalizing and beckoning and pink while the other looked dark and ravenous and foul. I kept that thought to myself.

“Do I have to go out there and drag some pussy in here for you?” he asked but I was pretty sure the question was rhetorical. But, thinking now, perhaps it wasn’t. “Do I have to go out there and buy some fucking pussy for you to stick that little wizzer you call a dick into? Do I have to hold it for you and push your bony ass up and down, up and down?”

That was a thoroughly ugly thought and I pushed it quickly from my head.

“I know girls,” I said in a moment of weakness.

“You know girls. I’ll bet you know girls,” he cackled. “But do girls know you? Huh? Do the girls know you?”

I know I blushed. I hated myself for doing it, but the old man had me pegged. Sure, I knew girls from the neighborhood and from school, but not a one of them even looked at me. How could they with me in my dirty clothes, dirty hair, and smelling of this madhouse reek? How could I even approach them? I wasn’t totally resigned to a sex life of the mother’s intermittent blowjobs delivered while she wheezed and pinched my nipples until they bled, but I was getting there. I wasn’t happy about it, but that’s what resignation is all about; I’d give up even the hope of happiness and holding hands and sharing sodas and making out in the back seat of parents’ cars and resign myself to the fully awful sexual ministrations of the mother. She’d flop over amidst the filthy detritus of her bedclothes and hiss.

“In mah ass, boy,” she’d rasp. “Stick that dinker of your’n in mah ass.”

And I would.

*

I could hear Toby start to stumble up the stairs and I had no idea what his intentions might be. I could hear the old man starting regain his senses in the living room. I wondered which one I’d have to beat senseless first.

When he made it to the kitchen door, Toby leaned against the jamb, blood dripping down the front of his shirt.

“Whadda gonna do now?” he asked me around the mess on the front of his face.

“You’re asking me?” I answered and felt good to give him a question instead of an answer.

“Yuh. Whadda gonna do?”

“Well,” I said and raised the coffee to my lips. “I’m going to sit here until the old man wakes up enough so’s I can go back in there and kick the shit out of him all over again. You got a good start, brother, but I’m going to finish the job.”

“Buh whadda gonna do den?” His busted nose sure made him talk funny.

“You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. Maybe I’ll call the cops and they’ll throw us all in jail where we belong. Maybe I’ll take some of that $12,000 and go to El Paso.”

“Bud thad muddy no good,” he answered me for once. “Ain’d no good fer nuddin.”

“Well, dear Toby, we’re aren’t much good for ‘nuddin’ either.” I was wishing the mother was still alive so I could upstairs and kick the shit out of her, too. “So, I guess it sort of works out the way it was supposed to work out. Maybe I’ll join the army and kill people legally. You might want to try it yourself.”

“De arby?” he moaned. “I d’wanna go inna arby.”

“Okay. No army for Toby. Maybe you could be a cop. You’ve got the temperament for it.”

“I don wanna beeda cob,” he moaned again and I think he may have been crying. It was hard to tell.

The old man was stirring in the living room. I heard him fall out of his chair and I got the beginnings of a plan formed. I stood up to go back in there and stomp his head open, grind what was left of his evil brains into the scarred woodwork of the dirty floor and, if I still felt like it afterward, I would walk out the door and keep on walking and never come back. I felt the intense need for new blood in my life and I figured it was about time to spawn. I was going to look for some pussy. Some real pussy.

In The Days When GI Joe Was Twelve Inches Tall

I am five years old and I'm sitting on the living room carpet and my sister is eighteen and she has brought me a present, she has brought me a GI Joe dressed as a combat ready United States Marine, and the package lies half stripped of wrapping paper on the floor in front of me and I can see the face of GI Joe through the cellophane window of his carton and he has blue eyes and he has a welted scar on his cheek. My mother's face is gray.

I'm not sure why I am getting a present when my sister has come home from the hospital. I know she is sick but I won't know how sick until she dies later that year and I won't hear the word "cancer" until several years after that. What I do know is that my sister has a misshapen face that hurts her, that she often carries an unpleasant odor with her, that she is gone for long periods of time that require long drives to hospitals where I sit in waiting rooms while my parents visit with her, that I must be a good boy and not draw attention to myself while my sister is sick. Perhaps this GI Joe is a payment for my good behavior, a bribe for continued goodness. My father kneels next to me, glances at the doll, and tousles my hair. I find the gesture disturbing, unnatural, and false.

My sister smiles at me from her wheelchair and I thank her for my GI Joe but I do not unwrap it further. My mother reaches down to remove its wrapping paper but I do not open its box. Though I know I could play with it, could make up a story in which to put GI Joe and act out a violent adventure with him, I can't think of a time that would be good to do that. I know I should wait, I want to wait for the right time to enjoy my present, and I'm not sure when that right time will ever be.

I stay on the floor near but not under the feet of the grown-ups and with my hands I turn GI Joe and his box, which even then I realize could also be his coffin, but I am really listening to the conversation that moves back and forth between my parents and my sister. They are talking about "keemo" again and I have learned to hate that word and the way it makes my sister cry when she goes to get her "keemo" and the way she shakes and vomits and cries after she has gotten her "keemo." They have told me that "keemo" will make her better but I have never believed that and I secretly wish for "keemo" to go away and leave my sister alone so things could be the way they were when my sister would play with me and my parents could smile at both of us. Now, when my parents smile, it is like clown smiles painted on. It's the kind of smile GI Joe would smile if he could smile at all.

Soon, I will leave the living room and be a good boy in my own room, quietly, and I will leave the toy in its carton and I will put the carton in my closet and I will not even think of playing soldier or of playing pretend death until someone asks me to do it. And, even then, I will do it quietly in a waiting room so as not to disturb the others.

To the state electrical worker

who was killed while working on a giant steel pylon supporting massive power lines suspended over the Wei He River north of Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, the People’s Republic of China, in the fall of 1985:

I still now as I did then wonder
What it must have looked like to you incandescent
Eyeballs ribboned with blue fire and below you spreading
All horizon, the city slowly pulsed, hot and dusty for this late in the year,
Everyone says so.

Who knows, who will ever know what caused your fatal spark,
The brilliant arc that clenched you tight, convulsed in one long spasm when
Everything inside you jammed up with electricity rampant and when
You began to smolder, I wondered then as I still do now if you even noticed
You were on fire?

The river bridge was jammed both ways, typical post-revolutionary rush hour and
A quarter of a million people stopped their bicycles and put one leg on the pavement so they could safely stare up goggle-eyed and open-mouthed at something different, at
A man two hundred feet in the air who twitched and blackened and
Was never coming down.

The wrongness of this all is huge, and still now as then I consider what it must seem
To you there among the wires thrumming harsh, the river silver and thin along the wide sandy bottom, just diesel smoke from idle engines like mist in a scroll painting
One thousand years old, this same river and this same city, now hanging in a temple in
The mountains far to the west.




(Sotto Voce, June 2009. Click on title the magazine or the title of the poem for more information.)

In the Era of Machines

She has never understood the difference between driving and
being driven.
There are wheels in her hands even when
they are empty
and those wheels are always turning,
meshing like gears with the wheels inside her head,
grinding backward but
never in reverse.

These are fundamental mechanisms and
they propel her toward a misunderstanding of what
"action" really is.
She does things,
she moves, she speaks,
she reaches out or pulls inside, but
where the energy arises, where the fuel is burned that
creates these motions,
is of no concern to her.

This heat
will just create more heat and
wheels and gears will turn or not turn,
sync smoothly or strip themselves;
a pile of metal shavings gathers around her and
these little slivers of brass and iron and steel
can be extremely sharp and
they cover everything around me like
some kind of vicious dust,
a lethal pollen,
the kind of thing we put in hamburger for the neighbor's dogs.

Beneath Each Mark And Line, The Paper

We only know how to preserve one kind of thing--a dead thing.
Peter Matthison
The Eyelids of Morning

The lines formed by fabric and flesh
become this mind's memories of that body
and no representation, no self-expression at all is needed
to know what that face looks like.

I think I've seen it all before
and knuckle deep inside herself is how I think of her now
even though I don't think that ever probably really happened.

I supposed charcoal the best way to represent,
burned grape vines all smudged across thick gray paper,
an intimation of a suggestion of an impression of those lines
implied by flesh and fabric
and the perfect way to avoid a foolish draftsman’s vow of precision.

So much more comfortable now to remember a concert of smudges,
to see a lazy group of shadow and stroke hung inside a frame
and arranged for archival extremes of storage.

Condensation Trails Light Up In The Western Sky, The First Stars In The Eastern

My roommate got a big kick out of being jet-lagged. For days after his return from Maryland, he walked around saying things like "It's already 2:30!" at twenty past noon or "Time to eat lunch" during the second half of Regis & Kelly.

I told him my best jet-lag story, the one where my ex-wife and I spent 22 hours rolling through some pretty feverish bouts of rapid eye movement in a sweltering, pungent Shanghai hotel room--a two o’clock snack of beer and boiled duck eggs; soft, greasy noodles for a 7:30 meal but we never knew if those were breakfast or dinner.

My roommate and I sat together in the backyard on flexible lawn furniture and told each other about airports and hotel rooms, cattle-car flights to Newark or DFW, foreign airlines and trans-Pacific showings of Rocky IV, our childhood trips by air when stewardesses gave us real pilots' wings and trips to the cockpit, when our mothers wore hats and gloves to fly.

The sky was green above the horizon and we talked about Philippine volcanoes and the extinction of species. We listened to the cicada thrum and wondered how loud a sound would have to be to register on radar. We thought about the beacons that webbed the sky above us, the connections between control towers and pilots cutting through the ether, and we thought about satellites standing in synchronized orbit, all the ships at sea, and the California Zephyr twelve hours out of Denver at 80mph with only a few dim lights in the club car.

I stayed out there after it got dark but my roommate, he stood up and went inside. I heard him say, "It's really 11:45 for me."