ABC

Albany, my last summer there, remains a gray speck on the cluttered map of my mind, seated at some oddly poignant intersection of memory and myth. Benches and streetlamps, a messy tangle of potholed avenues, indiscriminate and crumbling estates. Cat liked to say it was a “fixer-upper,” the whole city, just like that.
Down by the muddy banks of the Mohawk, a low sun painting our silhouettes against the river, we ate cheese sandwiches and sipped warm beer. Everything looked like a painting that day and I remember feeling big, like I was growing really fast but everything was growing with me so I didn’t notice; the whole scene was just getting huge. For a while, sitting there with Cat, listening as the echoes of our voices were trapped under the Rexford bridge, two giants tossing flat stones and bits of bread into the green water below, I was home. God could have swam in our shadows, we were that big.
Her little white house was the last on a dead end street. It had faded-yellow shutters, smelled of jasmine most of the time, and I knew she’d never leave it. Just because. Ken and Barbie dolls littered the floor of the pink room that had been hers before she took over her mother’s, their waxy limbs still reaching out, their forever-smiles glowing up in the dark. Leaving them there, I think, was her way of holding on to something, of not having to be the twenty-two year old girl sleeping in a dead woman’s bed. Maybe she just liked to play with dolls, I don’t know, I never asked.
Nothing changes; it’s been fifteen years and I can still smell her perfume, like lavender and watermelon. On summer nights, sitting with my daughter in our backyard, listening to the strange music of insects, I think of Albany and of Cat. Probably she’s still there, haunting the flowered walls of her sweet-smelling prison. Queen Cat, my gray eyed girl.
Rexford bridge still holds the sound of our voices, as they flutter up into its pigeon-cluttered rafters, the echo getting bigger, bigger, filling the sky. Someday I’d like to go back there, but I know I won’t.
There is a gray speck, a green river, a girl playing with dolls in a pink room. Ultimately, the words said, our thoughts, her touch, it all becomes color. Varying shades of memory. When I want to see Cat or revisit that summer, I press the tips of my thumbs hard into my eyes, until I see a thousand orbs of light, like technicolor stars blooming against the black drape of my lids. This is eternity, the mossy underside of a bridge. Years later, I am still trapped there with our voices. Winds carry me out into the river, but always back again, always bigger.

Supposed Angel - Intro

My father, no angel, will not simply vanish. We will watch him grow old and it will be his final gift to us, his two sons: teaching us how to age gracefully, how to die. My mother’s gift was different. It was singular, tragic and difficult to talk about even now, some fifteen years later. Her gift was that of eternal beauty. My mother was a metaphor. She sacrificed herself, I imagine, upon the alter of eternal beauty so that we might always recall, without the aid of photographs or drugs or dreams, her as Beauty, and derive strength from this. Our vanished mother, the Supposed Angel of Idlewild.

Library Vignette

There were old men sleeping in wire chairs with newspapers decomposing in their laps. The pale, round headed clerk at the front desk with his uncalloused body as soft and pliant as a rose. The gigantic diorama, the front steps of a cathedral, various parishioners frozen mid stride as they ascended. The giddy giggles of the bearded insane, rifling purposefully through their bags full of nothing. The air still and ripe as in a church, carried overseas in a thousand blushing balloons from the Vatican; it contains ashes from the fallen Rome, molecules of dinosaurs and bits of oil paint. The splashy fountain, its dark circles of coins staring up like shark eyes from the cool blue bottom. The ceiling hiding secret shadows and single-celled bodies of light changing shapes in the hidden crevices of its rafters. This building is ancient save the tile, is haunted save the children’s spittle matted around the softening corners of the children’s books. The black man with searching eyes, tries to sleep with his shoes off, pink and brown toes sticking through his socks, arms folded, wakes to the prodding of the clerk bent over him, and there is a scene which I pretend, in that other life which is a dream, to throw myself into, interjecting on his behalf. I tell her to leave him be, that sleeping, this red-eyed man means her less harm than all the ghosts in this ancient place.

valentines

Are not flowers perfect symbols of our love,
and therefore perfect gifts?
For in passing from hand to lover’s hand
they have already begun their dying.

the start of avery

Avery walks quickly through the narrow train station tunnel. Halogens flicker cancerously above and the wet clap of his souls against the shallow piss-puddles reminds him of his mother. When he was still pink and soft to touch she bathed him in a claw foot tub that smelled of rust and opium. He would slide beneath the warm bathwater gazing up into the strangely distorted face while she slapped the water’s surface, creating ripples that tickled his eyes and flicked the drums of his ears. He stares hard into the memory hoping to resurrect some of its comforts.

another excerpt

This was back when he still smoked cigarettes, and, calling forth the memory, it seemed such an indispensable prop that he knew he would either never have another moment of such naked sincerity, or, in the event that he did, he would desperately crave a cigarette. It was the distance between them, a cigarette; the smoke he tried in vain to blow away from his father. 

The neat rectangle of their back yard was blue in the moon shadow. A white puff of light streaked back and forth across the lawn. His father clapped his hands absently and called out to the dog.

He smoked casually and tried to hear his father’s words. But to look at your father’s aging face in the dusky light was to expose yourself to pangs of awful sincerity. In this moment, as the sun dipped out of view, and the little white ghost of a dog traced across the backyard, and a neighbor’s disembodied voice called out to his daughter, in this moment they were both too much inside their own heads, which was to say, asleep.

flight to freedom

How odd it was that he’d chosen the backdoor. Probably it was just easier that way. It raised less questions than leaving out the front. You don’t really have to ask a man where he’s going when he goes out the backdoor; he’s going into the yard. Except that my father wasn’t planning to stay in the yard. He must have hopped over our fence and then snuck through a few back yards to the boulevard that ran about a hundred yards south of our house. From there it’s anyone’s guess. We never heard from him again. The image of him hurdling over those fences is something I used to like to think about. It was his escape, with each picket fence he cleared he was that much further away from us, that much nearer his freedom. I know this and still that image pleases me. I like to wonder if he would have got a running start and hurdled over it, or, more likely considering the shape he was in, he would have had to put his hands on the fence, hefted one foot over, balanced his weight, lifted the other and kind of spilled himself into the next yard. It’s not a graceful image, but I like to think of it sometimes—the old man still in his lousy brown suit, tie loosened, hopping fences in suburban darkness, running for his life.

a bit on tv

Sarah poured herself another glass and sat down on the couch. The remote control felt strange in her hand, large and austere. She thought to turn on the television and watch for a while. Criticizing the programming always allowed her to feel smart. The stupid commercials. She liked to imagine their target audience as one real person. One very stupid person, overweight, with beady little eyes and a turned up nose who went out and bought every product advertised, faithful servant to the television waves. It could be mesmerizing, she had to admit. Days when she came home from work too tired to go for a run, too mentally drained to pick up a book or magazine, she’d flip in on and be soothed by the low expectations, the bright colors and loud noises that brought her back to an infantile level of appreciation, like some shiny set of wheels dangling from the mobile above her long ago crib. She drank some of the wine and stared down at the remote, which now looked fleshy and growing, alive somehow in her hand, resting on her thigh. Jason was supposed to have called her a half hour ago. It was like him to be late and she’d come to expect a delay whenever they were meeting up. She’s figured out a basic equation for determining Jason time. Figuring this out gave her a sense of power, a power to deprive herself the anger and frustration at his tardiness, to deprive him of the ability to piss her off. Maintaining your equanimity in this world was a full time job. Maybe that’s why people liked the television. It was never late, adhered to a set schedule, was always there, completely dependable. What did it ask from you? Nothing. It encouraged you to lay down on the couch with a can of Coke or a bottle of beer, kick your shoes off and turn your brain, if not completely off, than at least down, down, down, until you were at that near sleep stage. It was like meditation, or being hypnotized. Yes, that was it. It was hypnotic, the dependable rhythms of program and commercial, the steady flow of images and sounds. She’d often wondered at the efficacy of the commercials, hoping that no one was blunt enough to buy everything they were seeing advertised. But it obviously had to be working on some level or else the companies would find better ways to spend their money. It seemed odd that someone interrupting your entertainment could sell you something. It seemed like the advertisements started off on the wrong foot. It would be like someone jumping into the middle of a conversation you were having to try to sell you a tube of toothpaste. Most likely you wouldn’t even look at what they were selling, you’d be too taken aback by how rudely they’d interjected themselves into your conversation. But enough people were going home with that tube of toothpaste. And the interruptions just kept on coming.

Drama

There is Lafrois again with his thin wrists and wrinkled cotton shirts, always two buttons undone from the neck. The pale delta of flesh gleaming between taut tendons, stretching to rupture with each of his affected laughs.

What sweet proof of the fate’s existence, that men like Lafrois were born to these gentle posts, and allowed to find comfort—hell, even fulfillment—as high school drama teachers. Could this man have been anything but the frivolous, over impassioned, tightly wound teacher of the arts?

Had he been born to a harsher climate he would have no doubt fallen under, been crushed to gaily colored reams beneath the hooves of more stately, functional men. But, fortunate soul, he was born to Luc and Isabelle Lafrois, amongst the floral wreaths and glistening vials of perfume, amongst the deliciously forbidden charms of his mother’s secret female magic. And he clung to her bosom with a fervor unnatural for young men. A fervor that earned him little more than the passive disgust of his father, and the disposition that would lead him to life as a drama teacher in Sudbury, Connecticut.

Watch as Lafrois lifts the glass slipper to his eye, sweeps his large pale hands before the audience and collapses to a pile of rags beneath the proscenium. Hear the throat clearing itself in the back of the theatre, hear the ticking of one hundred veiled watches.

Murray Park

The park is sprawling, laid out over a hilly green. A creek divides it, rushing with brown waters supporting a full cast of the blackest ducks I have ever seen. Their chatter can be heard between breaths as I circle the park; its pattern that of gossip. Canadian geese graze along the banks, leaving their signature green and white-tipped crescents along the pavement. There is a strange creature who walks, or waddles, among them. A fat white goose. He is a sturdy looking fellow, with a white mottled plumage, and the same shade of bright orange on both bill and webbed foot. He looks very much at home among the more subdued shades of gray and brown that mark the other geese. There is something dominating in his presence there, among the meek geese along the creek banks. He is more alert to man. A guard goose. He will approach a passerby, cover half the distance between them as a demonstration of bravery and willingness to fight, then unhinge his bill and hiss. It is a small but distinctively ominous sound and it is enough, I think, to keep most of us walking on.

Just beyond the territory of the great white goose is a little shaded copse where for some reason photographs are taken, constantly. The photographers come equipped with tripods, complicated looking cameras, even lights and the white reflective ovals that look like the disembodied wings of fairies. Here a family sits crouched amongst the rubble along the creek bed, uncomfortably holding their smiles. The fading light mottles their shoulders with the shading of tree branches and leaves. Often there are scores of people in matching clothes, usually all white or all black. 

The question raised by the volume of photographers and subjects here is an interesting one: Is there such a paucity of scenic backdrops in this city that this particular park stands out? It is a handsome park; even grass flowing as waves over the hills; sage brush and spruce showing off green and blue; box elders ancient and imposing as dinosaurs; the craggy peeling bark of the crab trees (they are the witches of this place, pedaling their hard bitter fruits), the tumbling creek and stately pavilions…yes, it is a handsome place, but if I found myself suddenly in need of some portraits…I can’t say this place would come to mind.

At least a bride each night, the black shadow of nearly invisible groom at her side. Men are all but invisible on wedding days, even their own, even to their own mothers. The bride is suffused with this glowing white that radiates from beneath the dress, like scalloped waves…you are not meant to see anything else, the eye is drawn to white, away from black.

But here and there the couples pose, she is straight-backed and round shouldered, fully aware of the transformative powers of a wedding dress, its ability to pluck nostalgic chords in the hearts of women, to incite a respectful kind of lust in men...and the two of them together posed seem somehow insulated in their little frame, perhaps it is her light forming a shield around the two…there is something eternal about it. Maybe it is just the weight of ceremony and tradition, and has nothing to do with the individuals involved, but you look at this scene and it stands out somehow, you can’t ignore it. You can’t help but smile at the brides and young grooms, posed along the creek, or beneath the pavilion, her maid of honor holding fast the train, pushing it into frame. The image itself is more a picture than a living thing, even before the shutter has opened and closed. They are living for the picture in such moments. This habit we have or trying to immortalize if not ourselves than that at least our words and deeds, our lives, is as human as our procreation, and equally dubious. What care have we of future desert wanderers, kicking over stones to find relics of the past, our past. Will we be any more alive?

This is the park I run circles around on desert evenings, thinking of home, wherever that may be.

Grandpa

I was already unnerved my way to see my grandfather for the first time since his deterioration, and the rooster dancing inexplicably around the parking lot did little to help. If a black cat crossing your path was bad luck, what did a rooster foretell?

We caught them at lunch, the yellow castaways sitting over their dull ceramic plates, food in the corners of their mouths, on their shirtfronts and slacks. My grandfather had put on weight. The only real pleasure left him in life was eating, and so it seemed natural that he take part in that as much as possible, to make up for all the other deprivations he suffered. His life was a bed, a wheel chair, the well-intended condescension of his children, a cafeteria table… A man could only sleep and sit so much. So there was food to break up the monotony.

His tremulous bulk heaved under a black rugby shirt and his snow-white hair looked so downy soft that I had to check myself from stroking it like a child’s. His scalp was patchy with dry skin and sores. He looked ugly, was the fact that I tried to conceal from myself, from the rest of the people watching—and to be sure they were watching—this little Saturday afternoon meet and greet. It had me thinking about the nature of family and the unconditional love that is buried not too deeply within that word. What did I owe this man? About a quarter of my DNA, sure. A few visits when I was younger, one in particular where he tried to teach me the secret to a curve ball and grew impatient when i failed to grasp the seams the right way, and another where he scolded me for something and for which I never truly forgave him, at least never stopped seeing him as a figure of some unpredictable menace.

But he was a good man, generous with his family, his indifferent wife and her shiftless brother who stayed with them on and off for an indecorous amount of time…the same brother who more or less stole his son, my father, away, who to this day thinks this brother, now deceased, to be more of a father than his own, still living.

So here is this man, with all the weight and significance of his history, sitting in a wheel chair with a white and blue absorbing pad separating his hair-trigger bowels from the upholstery of the chair, and I honestly don’t know how to view him. He had that twitchy air of a drunk, where something in your primal core told you to stand out of his reach, and that diseased look of scabs and sores to which your core also suggested you leave the man breathing room…but I was supposed to shake his hand, pat his shoulder, because he was family.

My aunt went up the stairway to drop off his rent check and left the two of us seated confab style in this mock-up living room they’d erected just off the cafeteria, complete with fireplace and the arbitrary spray of magazines fanned across the coffee table. Was this area meant to simulate the various lost homes these people would never return to but were cursed to be forever attempting to recall through the angry prism of their dementia? He asked a few perfunctory questions which I answered, detecting too much patronization in my voice, again like talking to a child, and after a moment I could tell he was bored with me. There was a flutter of his palsied arm towards his room, then he leaned forward and I was afraid he’d pitch too far and fall out of his chair. It actually occurred to me that he might shatter like a china plate if he hit the floor, his bones turning to silver and dust, this man of six feet and two hundred plus pounds, who’d been a basketball star, a soccer player, who was known as the jock of the family—he wanted to be pushed into his room. I cast a hopeful glace over my shoulder to see my aunt’s sandaled feet descending the steps just in the nick of time and I pushed him the twenty or so feet to his room, again, overly cautious that I might catch one of his splayed feet or dangling arms against the furniture and watch as it disconnected from his body with a soft –thuk.

In his room he made it clear he wanted to use the bathroom and so I pushed him as far as the door and then Diane, the RN, took over with unflinching alacrity. I could hear the sounds of their struggle echoed by the cheap plastic tiles as she hefted him from the chair onto the bowl, and then the immediate sound of his flatulence which came in an unnerving stream that sounded almost machine made, like the cartoon sound of a fart or whoopee cushion. While the two of them were doing their awkward dance I heard a plaintive voice calling out to no one in particular for help. It was a woman in a chair, white head bowed to her chest. Blue floral coverall, nervous yellow hands. I came out into the hall, reluctantly, and she said she needed help, needed to be at least pushed to her room. It seems when we reach a state of prolonged helplessness we ask for help from any source it might be given, a stranger standing in an open doorway, the mute face of a closed door, the carnation speckled corridor or a hospital/prison/cemetary...She said she didn’t know which room was hers but pointed forward and so forward we went. At the end of the hall she pointed to a door and I read the name, Della Hawchkins, on the sign.

--Della? I asked.

I pushed her in and she, like my grandfather, asked to use the bathroom. I found an aid in scrubs in the hall and explained the situation, extricating myself from it as quickly as possible and by the time I returned to my grandfather’s room he was just emerging from his own bathroom adventure. My aunt lay him down into his bed, a hospital type bed with the moveable guards like a crib, and from there we stayed on and talked to him, standing over him like angels or death, close but not too close, as he tried to piece some things together.

His wife, my grandmother, had died the previous spring and we’d spread her ashes up along a Colorado mountain stream. He knew this, or had at least been told, but still asked about her, had me fetch a framed photo of her from his bureau, and asked me if my “aunt” wasn’t beautiful.

We left after a difficult ten minutes of conversation and I squeezed his arm when I said I’d be back to see him soon, careful not to specify how soon. Then outside, taking my first breath of air that wasn’t laced with the sadness of age, the imminence of death, I caught sight of a speckled rooster, plucky and proud as life itself, and knew that, odd as it was, there was no more normal place for him to be at just that moment.

The sparrow

Here lies the body of a sparrow slain

who spent its life upon my windowpane

still but for the flitting of a wing

which even now attempts in vain to bring

its hollow body once again to flight

to soar above our houses, then alight

on some high branch that overlooks the plains 

through lightly falling shafts

of silver rain