the problem is that writing takes time. It takes a toll. It isn’t just a stream of brilliance, effortless and meaningful, although for some reason, always in hindsight of course, I remember it differently. But seriously, that’s the number one problem with writing; it takes time: it takes time to do, it steals time away from living to do it well. While writing you cannot live (shamelessly maligning Blanchot here), but in order to write you have to live sometime (i.e. ‘Write what you know…’). And I hate it taking me away from this distraction of a life I am living.
A funny little man showed up my door today. I had been expecting him although at the time, I had completely forgotten. A little old man was at my door and I knew he was Jewish before looking at him because his name had all the right vowels and hiccuping consonants that Jewish names sometimes have. And when I opened the door, my mother was peaking through the shutters whispering, ‘Who is that man?’ And he shuffled in muttering his name, asking which way he could go in, either up the stairs to our apartment or into my parent’s home. I pointed into my parent’s kitchen and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘well that’s as good place as any.’
He was going to give me a ‘paramedical’ exam: draw a little blood, take my blood pressure, ask for a urine sample. It was for the life insurance policy I had taken out, given that my wife and I were going to soon be buying a home. He set up his tools, a cardboard box of plastic paraphernalia, a pair of rubber gloves, a cup and a smaller cardboard box with postage. No little black bag, no chit-chat, nothing to drink thank you. He asked for my arm and he handled it rather weakly, not out of embarrassment or even that he couldn’t manhandle my arm into the position he needed it to take my blood pressure, but rather he resigned to some unknown fact about the situation that I was not privy to. He noted my BP (120/70, not bad at all), then fiddled around with the short nosed needle and the vials he was going to hook up to it. He asked me to make a fist repeatedly, he tightened the tourniquet, tapped the inside of my elbow just like they do in those old WWII movies. And I don’t know why I remember it that way, but it seems that this tired old man in front me, sticking a shunt of a needle into what was obviously not a vein, was somehow connected to that time, even if he would have been just a boy.
He didn’t talk, just sighed as he snapped off one vial and snapped in the next. And when he was done with drawing blood from my not-vein, he asked me to put my finger on the hole as hard as I could and even took the finger of my other hand to show me where the hole was. Meantime he took little bar code stickers off of my application I guess and labeled each vial. Then he fiddled with the urine cup, which turned out had one little nip on its edge, like a spout and handed it to me and placed two other bar coded vials into it. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, as if it was all obvious, which I guess, it must have been. I had been nervous during the whole time that I wouldn’t be able to ‘perform’ this part of the show, as the old man was drawing blood I tried figure out where my bladder would be at.
But it went alright, almost too well, and as I was handing him the urine samples, I noticed he had already taken off his gloves. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ he got up and shuffled into his coat on the way out, ‘stay well…’ And the little man who I had been expecting but forgotten was gone with all my blood and piss in a box to be dropped off at the nearest post office.
basements with cathedral ceilings
I dreamt of change. I dreamt of houses with cathedral ceilings in their basements that echoed my footsteps. I dreamt of cavernous halls and doors that dwarfed me; walking into a room and declaring, “Honey, honey, over here: this can be our work out room?” How ridiculous. I dreamt of the house we are planning to buy, and how it turned into a much greater treasure than we had anticipated.
I dreamt of teachers and chemistry, somehow the purchasing a new home and returning to school dovetailing together. I dreamt of a life that ran sideways to this one and split off into directions that held a bit more hope for myself, a little less darkness. I dreamt of talking to wayward urban youth who all lived like a tribe on the fringe of war in and around a loft owned by an African American couple. Upward and refined with little or no time for nonsense. And these were good kids, who when I first thought of buying that loft, I developed a keen interest in their affairs, I think in the dream becoming a kid myself, a teenager again, wiser I hoped, and there were problems with school and relationships and rivalries with other tribes in the neighborhood. But I had left them for the home in the suburbs, the one with the cathedral basement, and they went from surviving to pillaging, from artists to war mongers. In fighting and jealousies, while the world mocked and scorned them from the outside. When I returned I had pointed this out to them, almost costing my own life. I might have made an impact, if I had stayed.
And lastly, dreaming of school, returning to school, again a teenager and discovering new interests. The kids of this chemistry class for some reason were all suddenly leaving or were being moved, displaced, I’m not sure, but I do know that it had something to do with our move, and both MZ and I were sitting in class, and while she was being supportive of my wrong answers and the chiding I received from the rest of the class (they saw through it all, they knew exactly how old we were), it was the fact that the professor, no the teacher, came over and signed my work, that encouraged me, that opened a new possibility despite it all.
slight bile on his breath
What I remember of my father? I remember the smell of bile on his breath, faint, almost embarrassed. I remember that he often carried me on his shoulders and would run through the apartment, grasping his short hair in my fingers. He was a very jealous man. No that’s not quite right, he was a man always unsure of himself, insecure, never quite knowing how to go about being himself. My godfather would say he was just on that side of paranoid, but he really wasn’t. He was a worrier, a verbal hand wringer that just didn’t know how to let something go.
daddio
He was a cool cat with no time for the boys on the block. They were out for stick ball and manhunter, dodging between hydrants and ducking into back alleys. Their mothers would call for them from 3rd and 4th story windows between laundry lines tied across rusty fire escapes. And the boys would whine for one hour more and in turn they were scolded that they had until their fathers came home, big burly men who lugged toolboxes and brown bag lunches day in and day out.
No, he was always on the Concourse, leaning up against one thing or another, be it the shiniest lamp post on the block, outside a 1st floor window drifting a salsa tune, or even, a 1955 Cadillac Eldorado. He would eventually own one, long before the 331 cubic inch overhead valve V8 became a dinosaur, and hang on it long after it became extinct. He wore zoot suits that he was too young to be properly tailored for, and one of them hats that earned him scorn from the local flat foot on the beat. The fuzz always pulled him aside for a word or too about the straight and narrow, and he would grin his grin, shrug his shoulders and slyly twist out from under his glare. “Easy Jack,” he would say, “the threads, they might be from Persia, but they don’t stand up too well to heat.”
While the other boys on the block chased each other between the folds of their mother’s skirts, he was trying to get under them. He was smacked around a lot at his advances, but he didn’t mind, it wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to. But there was a mother or two who returned his sly smile with something more alluring and he found himself, in the beginning, way over his head. But this is how it started and as the summers rolled by, he got better to the point where he didn’t to hang out on the Concourse at all anymore, slouching from one corner to another. He literally went from door to door, and a couple of times, particularly in the early morning or late evening, winding down his “route” , he even tipped his hat passing by the husband right in on stoop, or nudged by him in the stairway on his way up.
It was all well and good until he started hitting the clubs, that’s when it started getting expensive. For money, he could scrunch some change to get by, nicking from an unattended purse or even putting on the water works about his dying mother right there between the sheets and shamelessly right after they had done the deed. But his mother could only be dying for so long until he would have to admit she was already dead. He never used his father in any story as his father apparently had no use for him. His only memory of the man was that he held his saxophone more often and with more grace than he ever did his wife and child, but his father had never played them a tune. And now, no matter his disdain for his estranged father and the horn that man carried, he felt himself compelled to all sorts of music, and jazz in particular, although he would never admitted it until he was near dead himself.
One summer he found himself with a Maria, which wasn’t her name, but all Spanish women were Maria to him because of that movie West Side Story, and he would steal lines from it, which made the Marias in his life coo. “Boy, boy, crazy boy,” they would say, as he slid one hand up a skirt and another down a blouse, “be cool boy..” Unlike the other dames on his route, this Maria had a husband that worked the night shift, which made her want the sort of night life glamour the other women in the neighborhood would die to have. The only problem of course was that he was often penniless, all of his loot going to keeping his suits clean, his shoes polished and a bit of starch for his brim. He saved up here and there the first time, thinking that he had enough to paint the town red for her, until he reached his first stop and blew three fourths of his wad just on the price of admission. It ended up being the most expensive lay of his life and he wasn’t quite ready to stop dancing the tango with this broad.
He teamed up with a younger kid he once knew on the block named Lucky. Lucky had actually caught him with his mother once but Lucky, and Lucky being not all that lucky or all too bright, believed him to be his real father (or else why did he do that thing that made babies more often than his alleged “father” did?). Lucky fell into the trade at the time, the only one from the neighborhood to do so, while everyone else got hooked onto it instead. And the two of them started to really clean up. He caught his 1955 Eldorado and more money than he could spend on his ever increasing cadre of women. Lucky was like a pig in shit, never when any skills for the ladies, he found now that he didn’t have to say much at all, just from hanging out with “Daddio” (and he insisted on that instead of having Lucky following him around calling him “Dad…”), he got plenty of affection.
Upon reflection, Daddio wonders how things would have been different if Lucky hadn’t confused him for his father. Would he have done what he had did, would either one of them have something to say to the other today? But that was long ago and he felt he had put enough miles and clubs and women and cheap motels between them so he could finally sleep at night, until he realized, that he would never be far away enough from his past. Even worse, he knew he wasn’t ashamed of it at all, not for one bit of it. He damn well enjoyed every minute, punch and drop of it. And if his old bones weren’t so brittle, he would be out there now, spitting on the sidewalk, watching the mutts swing broomsticks for bats, tipping his hat at the newlywed he had last night or flipping the bird to the man stuck on patrol. Yeah, if only these wires weren’t holding down and this pump and these doctors. If only they’d let him breathe on his own, one last time and let him whistle that tune he never heard his father play.
remember the story
I once wrote a whole story out of thin air right here. right on a things like this, it was called, what was it called. I was sitting at my father’s shop, the autobody shop, there answering phones, I forget why, I don’t know if he wasn’t well or not, and that’s something I should remember because it could account for the type of story I wrote of revolution and language and torture and love. I think you could call it those things. it did get published after all and someone out there remembers it even though I don’t remember the name right now, it might have been “then” but no, that’s another story and I worked on that one I think, I don’t even remember, but it seems a lot of them write themselves, just sort of pour out, but that’s romance. sure there lots of stops and gaps and pondering with the pen to the lip and all that, but a rhythm was there from the start and this story I was first writing about, the one I wrote in my father’s autobody shop, that one I clearly remember as just coming out and going and going. like it was already there. there’s editing afterwards of course but that’s to be expected, I’ve always understood that part of it, the tinkering because you can’t ever really leave it alone. but I remember that there wasn’t much to do with it, considering the story it told and where it was, and I remember deeply being in awe of it, that it came from someplace I could not yet know, nor would I ever know.
come up with anything
the point is can you come up with anything in an hour, a half hour, in a minute? Can you come up with something worth writing, saying, in so much time. Can you come up with anything? Can you come up for air? Are you drowning? Can you come up for air?
I breathe and you leave. Our daughter turns in the night between us, careful, careful, each of us on edge, furthest away from each other with her between us. She turns in the night, one side to the next, arms out stretched, whisper fingers raking the air. Looking, grasping in the dark. Are you there mommy? Are you there daddy? She tosses and turns, scratch, scratch a back here, scratch, lightly, lightly, a face there. She tosses and turns, fitfully, throwing fits from side to side, restless and I cannot sleep any longer on this edge.
Scratch scratch. Scratch scratch. I’d like to be done with this. Is this all there is? It’s all seemed very dark, one long dark night punctuated with short bitter streaks of daylight. One year done, another four to go. I miss the sun. I miss you. The disconnect is profound and sharp in relief that I cannot find any relief any where.
pathetic and empowering
at some point it has to be enough, I am vomiting again and I feel a relief from it, from a certain kind of bloating that surrounds my life, insulates me from living.
I’m vomiting again and it’s ugly with sticky veins of saliva between my mouth and the toilet bowl and it’s a relief because a little bit of pressure is eased, one hand steadying the porcelain and my knees pressing tile and it’s enough to get through the night, enough to want to go about it a little longer, just a bit more, I’m vomiting again to get the edge off my inertia, to get off, to ease the bloat.
I can understand the appeal of defeating my body this way, feeding it, stuffing it, then ripping it out. I can sense the danger in this, I can feel the measure of satisfaction it brings, I can see myself wanting it more. It’s grotesque and wonderful, pathetic and empowering.
I am broken in ways that I can never repair.
And he felt that he was filling up a place other than where he was, as if he was filling up some other aspect of someone he didn’t necessarily want to be, and he was leaking, leaking by dregs, by chunks. He stood over the toilet bowl and carefully, with one hand, teased away the remaining saliva that tethered him to the seat cover. With the other hand he furiously unrolled toilet paper and wiped his face, his shirt -specks of vomit had back splashed- even his hair. Partly anxious and ambivalent, he felt a sense of accomplishment. Something got done tonight, if not his work.
dark walls
you wait for something to come from the dark. Something to come out of the dark? No.
You wait
for something.
Some one?
I’ve been waiting in the dark for a life time, a generation. I’ve born you a granddaughter you will never know. Then again, I’ve never known you either. This relationship we have is so intimate and yet you’ve never known its heat, its groove. How deep it runs, how you haunt me, bring me still to tears. Now I have listless days with my newly born daughter, six months old. The past two have been amazing. Wake up, some crying the first day, the second lazy. It seems as if I had been talking to her all day.
All of you will never know her. None of you will and as cruel as that sounds, I want nothing to do with any of you, not uncles or godmothers or cousins or nieces. I do not care, this is the dark gift I’ve taken from our shared blood and I’ll put it between us and it will grow and I will fester it, I will tend to it, I will be ever vigilant to keep you away from me, from us, from this little bit of life I want to keep for my own.
at least an end to endings
you’d like for this to be the end of it. An end to beginnings, or at least, an end to endings. An end to the fear of the end, of endings, perpetual and continual, throughout the night, between breaths, in the long silence that falls between.
I’d like to have apologized to you because I had made such a demon out of you, but the truth of it is, holding my daughter, seeing her seeing me and knowing me, knowing that I am someone apart from anyone else and her mother is someone set even further apart from anyone else, seeing her smile when she first sees me in the morning…
No, I have no apologies for you and if I could, I’d let you die again and again without a word to me.
Three years ago tomorrow, the world changed. It is much more frightening and grim, unsure. The economy is faltering along, we are trying to buy a house. It’s a struggle: we found a home in an area that we really like and is convenient for both us, close to my parents, and just when we thought we were on our way, that our only problems were how we were to juggle the documentation of assets and debt to income ratios with the mortgage bank, the seller wants to uproot two trees.
Our lawyer says, well, people taking light fixtures is normal, but trees? Well, that’s certainly unique.
So, of course, your father’s reaction is pure spite. Sure you can have the trees, but knock off 2 grand off the price. And as a matter of fact, while we’re at it, why don’t you spend about another 10 grand on the repairs and replacements the engineer recommends and if you’re thinking of taking those swings that you’ve featured so prominently, well guess what, that’s another 2 grand.
The contract was supposed to be today as well.
Ba’s Birthday Note
Dear Baba,
Today we celebrate not one birthday, but three: one for the loving father who has provided and cared for us through physical toil and emotional strength. The other is for the husband, who’s kindness and patience has laid the most solid of foundations for a long time future of love and security. And more importantly, we celebrate the birthday of the man, always quick with laughter and wit, the very soul of this house.