Dark. It has to be. Darker than what’s surrounding. There
have been whispers. Though not about Them, not again — some say what’s
troubling is not necessarily people, or “not only people.” It might be an
address: a restaurant or bar, or just a lot without light with a freshly laid
fence set around (chainlinked, barbed); it might be no thing at all but a
feeling, a spirit. Just another unease. Still, It is undeniable. A new ethnicity has moved into the
neighborhood. And we, longtime residents, are very concerned. Man goes to the movies alone. Which, in my world,
constitutes betrayal. How? Why? Thou shalt not change, neither shall thine
be changed. This movie, though, “changes
his life.” His wife comes home from work (she works, he does not, he’s Unemployed),
and he jumps on her and says, you have to see this movie. Though she demurs, he
forces, drags her by her wrist hair into the car and out to the theater. This
instead of dinner. The wife is weak, wife is tired. But it’s a big theater,
biggest in Brooklyn, showtimes on the half-hour. They just made it, thank your
moldy Moses. He says again, buying tix, you have to see this movie to
understand me NOW! She sighs, is on a diet. But he allows her anyway to eat
chocolate, which he’ll purchase at concessions while she’s sent in to find a
seat. The concessions line takes time. He’s going to miss the film, but feels
bad for his wife. Waits, angsting. By the time he’s made it into the theater,
his wife’s asleep. Candy in his hand. But that’s not the punchline to the Tadels’ couple joke.
Because he (Mick) sits down next to her oblivious, begins narrating to her
what’s happening, elbowing her for the good parts. She laughs (garlic,
late-life orthodontia) as he tells it again, over dinner, their house. She
says, “elbowing my corpse.”
Dark
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When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city
When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the
city, we had: nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the
train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents,
nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but
insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street &
Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the
bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The
midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No
point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I
really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out
of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me,
more depressed.
Solo Show
Trying to Get Her Attention
“You look like a million bucks.
“In singles.
“Because you’re tall.”
On Location
It is a common problem in our cities today — When you don’t know you’re in a movie that you’re in.
The director yelled, Cut. I kept walking. He followed me down the street, asked me to back up a block and walk again. I obliged him, my mistake.
But no matter how many times I walked that block, no matter how many takes, he wasn’t satisfied. He said, Just do what you did. You were so much better before.
---
A security guard stands outside my building and won’t let me in until they’re finished filming in the lobby.
Last week I was mugged of a Find the 9’s lottery ticket and an expired credit card.
If only he’d be here every night, not just when they’re shooting.
I lost the pass they gave me, too.
I think he thinks he’s protecting my building from me.
---
When they need to film a movie set in the city but a decade ago, there’s a certain neighborhood to use. There are neighborhoods for every decade, for every year, for every month. The right cars on the street, the right house designs.
My apartment is very December 2006.
That’s when my girlfriend left.
---
A woman so vain she wants to look good even for the surveillance cameras.
A guard who falls in love with the woman he sees only on security footage. He stockpiles the tapes at home, he never erases.
You. “Who have I seen you in?”
If we ever make a date to go to the movies and you’re late I’ll already be inside the theater, not facing the screen, though, but looking out, J, turned around, for you.
Still Life, with Grapes
I plucked all the grapes and ate them up and was drunk. All that was left was a network of stems, the bunch’s tangle I tossed aside and stared at. It began crawling toward me, the stems, spiny, skeletal: from the floor, back up to the table up its legs, the animated mess like a hairy spider creeping up my chest and onto my face, pop, pop, digging two nubs into my grapelike eyes — rooting there, blinding me unblinking, dark and still, for another’s tasting.
Odessas
Sounds of Odessa
I was sitting at a café in the city’s historical center, surrounded by bubbly fountains, and refurbished façades. Romantic, very. From behind me I heard a resounding “clip-clop,” hooves on the cobbles, and turned to expect a leisurely coach, pulled by fine horses in dainty lockstep, but no — it’s only the sound of a woman’s high heels, the mating call of golddiggers, and whores.
Odessa Fashion
Odessa fashion is extremely resourceful: A sailor’s stripes are the same as a convict’s.
Odessa at Work
It seems that that man wants money just for owning a monkey.
Odessa Geography
Wherever an ashtray is, is the center of the table.
Traveling
While traveling, and sitting perfectly still, he could feel the many objects in his many pockets all pressing in on him. He felt his wallet press against his right leg, while his left leg bore the weight of an American passport, forty American dollars in tens, and an oversized key to a seventhfloor apartment he rented in Yalta, Crimea. Train tickets, clipped together, pressed against his left buttock. Three cigarettes left in a pack pressed up against his left breast from his pocket there above his heart. Their combined weight pressured him, regularly, constantly, pushing through his pockets and into him, until he himself was pocketed — all that was left of him an essential point, which had to bear these weights, still beating.
a
A lowercase a is the most difficult letter to form while writing by hand on moving train.
Tryst (euphemisms)
I met her in the lobby.
She spoke exclusively in euphemisms, like the menu of a
fancy restaurant.
I treated.
“Tatar’s Purse” was a heap of meats in pastry.
Later, “going up to her room” cost me ten years.
Rip off the wings of dragonflies
Rip off the wings of dragonflies, take their “spines,” their central lengths and a bit of paste, affix them down noses, between the eyes, one per customer. A dream.
Hosanna
My son has recently joined the palm-smackers, or Palmthwackers, whatever it is they’re calling themselves, if they call themselves anything; whoever they think they are or might be. To me, it seems less a group, fraternity, club, or congregation (apparently, it has no enrollment fee), than an accident, a mistake, or perhaps a refuge from mistake, I’m not sure. I understand so little.
As far as I can tell, it’s a circle, which they, our children, are eligible to join only after the completion of their formal educations, each only being required to bring with them a single length of palm. And with this, the son — because they’re all of them sons, and our daughters, too — joins the circle, this secretive, select loop of grown children who beat the earth with their palms, raising dust. I do not know how long their stint is for, I’ve often heard indefinite, or until the circle comes around again, the cycle, your son’s place therein. How long the circle exactly, I’m not sure of that either. We parents share talk, speculation. No one knows much. Not the circumference of this ritual, neither its purpose. I’ve overhead another of our mothers saying that the circle is so enormous, its breadth rumored to be so off-the-earth, that it’s actually a straightened line (intimating that they might not have enough volunteers to make, of themselves, an equator, as one husband pointed out). And so a straight line, pointed up and soon, groundless, whacking on endlessly, palm frond to planet then on into air, into space: beating out a fleetingly comprehensible, justifyingly ephemeral, signal, forever — the hardly coded message that you, my son, you will never come home.
A seam of concrete (Dream)
A seam of
concrete leading to a seal, of concrete. A seam, a vein: baby crocodiles, over
whom cement’s been poured — though they might, for all I know, still live. At
the far end of the seam, their cement’s already cracking. A hammer lies in the
corner of the temple’s last room, a sledgehammer. I heft it, approach the seal
of massed crocs, heft the sledge above my head. At first shattering impact my
body liquidates, pours out in a mass of silently shrieking concrete worms,
flung everywhere, spattered. Seal and seam crack on their own, slowly,
eternally, as I, worms, feed away, gnaw on the ruin. Only a hammer is left. And
a room. And a temple.
Two
Stains (and one more)
On the sheet, facing the head. To the right of the stain was another stain, made of the same liquid. The difference was that the first stain existed prior to the existence of the exact liquid (quantity, or only circumstances) that stained the second stain. The first stain had been wrung out, when she did the laundry, and the liquid saved in a dipper. The dipper’s liquid was spilled on the sheet to make the second stain. What made the first stain? Which is to ask, Who stained?
And
why did she have to do that?
Now
there’s a stain on the pillow. It is, I’ve told you time and again, a bleeding
organ. Be careful.
It’s a man’s heart — a man who was in an accident in our bathroom. You are responsible. You’ll have to donate yours to replace it. Your heart — it’s put on ice already.
The paint has flaked
The paint has flaked from my childhood wall in the shape of the country I’d like to found for you, my love.
(And that is as good a founding principle as any.)
Loop-de-Loop
We’d met on the rollercoaster, which she called the loop-de-loop. Said it loop-DEE-loop, loop-D-loop. Because where else. And why shouldn’t I have been there. What were the odds, what was the Vegas line (though this wasn’t Vegas, rather a pale reflection, the only desert here grained between my legs), on being picked as one of the seventy out of maybe two and a half thousand or three, who worked themselves exhausted — day shift, night shift, all shifts — in that amazing megamonstrosity on the beach and boardwalk of the touristed Shore.
How it happened, life, was I was working payout at The Wave. Meaning that when someone wanted to turn coins — nickels, quarters, half-dollars, silver-dollars, from slots — into bills, or else when they wanted to cash in their chips (in the figurative, but here also word-literally), they would lineup outside my lucite plexiglas whatever and harass, always accused my machine, and so me, of miscalculating, miscounting, of ripping them off. Coins, coins, coins — they once had Gods depicted, then they were worth something, then Kings and then Presidents and now, Municipal Works like the sewage plant, and so who could take money seriously. But I had to. Because I had plans, or would soon enough, and living in Plansville costs money. I needed my paycheck, didn’t steal. No one did, no one could. People were always watching. Once a kid stole two, three grand on his first night and they waited for him when he punchedout and they didn’t arrest him (they’re not the police), just smashed a stack of ribs, shattered knees into bonewhite gaming pieces, chips of hurt, and then they took back their money.
The Wave built this enormous, three-loop rollercoaster out on a pier over the ocean. A ride on The Wave a wave on the ocean, while it was being setup, the whole city stopped to watch. Ennui, footlongs. Sunglassed husbands and wives, mirrored kids. Ridiculous shadows their gaping. It (the loop-de-loop) was to be the most modernly intense amusement experience or something to that effect in the world, an eighth wonder, seventh-and-a-half. Of def-defying thrills and upside-down air. Publicity wind. And for those purposes and also to inaugurate the thing the schmucks in HR selected at the gambling random us seventy employees to ride the ride first (as if we died, O well, bet again). And this virgin ride would be filmed and photographed for use in advertising spots, television, glossgavaged print. Perpetual sell, the dinification of sky, space, etc. And, no doubt, a spectacle for the tourists. A diversion for the whole fam, pagophagic pickpockets inclusive. I was picked, at random. My supervisor — whose name I forget, Dino or Deno, Nino or Geno or Something-Vowel-No, a Mr. D’A it was, this fake mafia name — handed me a piece of paper that had my own fake American name added onto it:
Attention My Name, you have been selected … and, despite the way that democracy’s marketed, the only way out was, or was said to be, a doctor’s note that you were ill or otherwise pregnant, had heart problems (because who wanted to refuse, get fired, file a lawsuit, still lose), but I couldn’t have been pregnant — that future’s still the future — and my doctor, a painkilleraddicted Sufi called Joshi, was down at this pediatric AIDS seminar in some place that sounded as good as Rio for the week or two and, well, his associates didn’t know me because I only went to Joshi. For the painkillers. Not my addiction, but a necessity. Silence, withdrawal. Numb more like num more like nu and then, n, mmm. Drooling. THE addiction for those like myself scared of needles but not too scared of other things like heart and liver failure and going purple, then white. Anyway who had the time, with my double shifts, to schedule and keep an appointment. I hate rollercoasters now like I hate nothing else (except work and being broke and dates that end early), but then found out, through yes at lunch in the Caf, that whoever did it, whoever rode the ride got a free hat and shirt. Which I could give my sister to sleep in, the shirt, so she’d like me enough to make breakfast. That and the fact that riding would get me out of work for an hour or so — and in the interests of employment-preservation, Plansville — was enough to resign me, I showed. They made me put on the shirt and hat, fluorescent yellow (but each in a slightly different shade, as if Asia was low on dye), which I’d never wear again except to masturbate in, the shirt only as my sister was interested in the hat, put it on top of a stuffed bear, cute — and loaded me into a rollercoaster car, the worst (knowing I shouldn’t expect any better), the last car, the whiplash car, with my waiver signed in triplicate on seatback. We, the seventy Wavers, sat there in insane heat while the crew — small men as round as baldness, in piercing glint appearing like flashes to redeyed polaroids, us — minced, adjusted their equipment.
Then G.M., General Manager of The Wave, all-around alpha male of the annual employee sporting event, stood on an oceanic dais of driftwood sprinkled atop vanilla softserve and addressed the press and tourists assembled and then joked with us in front of them, told us to smile and enjoy. We smiled. We were also instructed to put up our hands on every loop screaming, PHOTOGENIC — some PR guy at Pre-Ride Orientation (12:15, Ballroom D, the previous Fri.) told us that. Would our hats stay on our heads or would they fly off on the first loop and fall and land in the ocean and float across to Europe where more sophisticated people would find them and think they were a previously extinct species of jellyfish. Or would they not even get there. Would the dolphins swallow them and die because everything kills the dolphins. Or maybe not fall at all but float in air or fly to be mistaken for neon UFOs by those so inclined, so as not to admit loneliness, perish. It didn’t seem safe to me, but what did I know making minimum wage and a half. I was sitting in the middle of a three-seater. To my left, some fat sweating who I think worked Security. She was to my right. Maybe forty and a mix of a mix. Father black, probably Caribbean, mother Puerto Rican, maybe half Dominican, or half-Asian, but I don’t know why I think that. More like generically exotic. Her name was Maxine she said and I said my name was what it was. This Maxine was a maid in the hotel half of The Wave and I was me and she was attractive and a maid. She told me she was scared and I assured her and she told me again she was scared, and all the while seagulls circled overhead prepared to shit all over us, I thought, or drop clams on our heads to shatter open the meat.
Someone shouted roll (could have been the Director, but everyone was soon shouting roll, and action, sunlight, cameras, and cut), and the thing got rolling and it went hydraulic unhinged a gasp once and we screamed, then they told us we needed to go again for a retake and so we went again, take two and we screamed action again and Maxine she kept screaming louder and higherpitched nose even after we’d stopped and the sweating Security to my left kept on whistling, farting. And the waves kept shattering, surf rolling in under the boardwalk withdrawing in deference, humbled yet made all the more fundamental and lasting, leaving foam to sour in noonsun like many thanks wish I could but no, high tide. And at the top of the highest and last loop you could squint beyond the wake, crestless, crashless, only ocean further where it’s freest but still. Then the Director — a frustrated, flipflops on his feet wigwearer, said to have done upward of ten seasons of soaps, and that famous commercial for car insurance that featured a refrigerator freefalling from clouds — said one last time, one more take, and the photographer said one last time, and we all went again and we screamed, less so now, lights, camera, and cut and we stopped again groaning a hiss and the scalding metal bars raised to let us out of our cars with the melting lardo scooping himself out first, I was exiting myself as Maxine rose then turned to me to vomit all over, on my rising lap.
She apologized like mad and I told her okay, flapped it off to the decoastering area’s floor then went back inside, down to the tailors underground where I amid forms and grumbling, obscene joking threats got a new uniform, washedup and when I was about to take my break about five hours later, who but Maxine came up — Maxine who I’d never seen around The Wave before except for the loop-de-loop, because I never ventured into the hotel interests, wasn’t allowed to (didn’t have the right ID, for clearance) — told me she was on break, too, and wanted to share a smoke with me and apologize and then I suggested, because I was hungry, that we get some dinner at the Caf but she insisted, no, that she can’t eat for the rest of the day after throwingup and that just the thought of it (loop-de-loop, vomit, food) made her sick again. So we went to the on-break-and-smoking-area, underground — everything in The Wave worth doing was underground — and we were alone, ten minutes to six, smoking and when we’d finished, stubbed, she led me, silently, into the great gape of a walkin freezer down there where she pulled close to me and, slowly, kissed me deep in the freeze, her mouth full with tongue to pop that only hours ago had vomited up whole milk like wake and hunks of fatty sausage it was, and smoke, menthol, and she held me against her, my icicled thing, and kissed further, on the other side of the nose, and then pulled away fast, hot halation in the freezer, with nostrils’ smoke.
That’s an apology from me, honey. Yes, she said hon. Feeling like the lower hole you lose your lunch from usually, then suddenly, very tired. I left the freezer, fricked my hands together for warmth, went back to work, thinking, okay, that was unexpected, and not totally horrible, but you missed dinner and you still have to work, another six hours. Dumb. I worked another six hours — hours watching people pull arms for money, laying down good weeks four ways on an inspired birthday, anniversary, or some other faithed holy number, this one woman eating fried chicken from a bucket that also held nickels: nickelfried chicken, I’d guess, I was starved — then dragged home, showered the coindirt off me, fluoridated my teeth and fell asleep on top of my bed, wrapped wet in a towel, naked over the covers.
Next day, halfway through my first shift, on break, a hotel porter came over and asked (underground again):
You My Name?
I said yes.
Maxine gave me this note.
I asked him who he was and he said: Sometimes I don’t even know.
Then he left.
Why don’t you come visit me on Sat. night after your shift, done at 12?
### St. J— Pl.
XOXO
I stuffed it in a newly slit pocket of my uniform vest and thought, why not, nothing else tonight: This was busy with this new girl he’d met at this oyster restaurant where she was the hostess. Granddaughter of snowbirds, summer vacationers apparently senile enough, or forgiving. That was occupied with This’ girl ugly who gave great spread he bought mixmade margaritas for, daughter of a lifeguard he said as if that explained. I finished my shift, took the bus to the address (in the opposite, worse, direction of how it screeched me home), got out and found the house, an older shore-house, sand-in-a-shoe-box, three-floors-and-a-wreck-room-type that could house from one rich to three, four not families. Thing was I didn’t want to ring that late at night or early morning, might wake everybody up, the children. Must be kids because of the yard’s rusted trikes, those green leaves in spokes no one would steal.
No, not a good idea and the nine, ten-name mutilated mailbox.
I thought what to do, standing on this sad, saggy porch two blocks from an unmooned beach with a breeze a little too cold coming in from the ocean, from a voice that said:
Who you for?
I turned, quickly, someone sitting on a wicker chair coming undone about ten feet away, at the end of the porch, smoking a glow that allowed me to make all this out.
I’m looking for Maxine, she told me to drop by, and he said:
She told you to drop.
Yes, my name’s my name, and he asked:
What you want her for.
I don’t know. Honesty.
Fairly late to be visiting, think.
Not liking how this spark’s talking to me.
You aren’t from the police, are you.
No, I work at The Wave with Maxine, and he said:
How can I be sure?
Look at my uniform, and he got up, came closer to me and he’s old, an old man as just then another, this an older man even (never saw him, though, he’d fall on his face), came rushing from the other side of the porch, opposite end of where my questioner had been sitting, but I heard him in time to turn and just as he’s coming to me with a huge meat knife in his hand, he stops short, drops knife, bobble clatter, grabs his heart, screams — numb arm thrown to windchimes’ hollow thrum — arches back, falls onto the porch, a heart-attack, dead. The house, suddenly lit up — children shooting waterguns out windows, their tightywhities hanging from the sills, pulling back those stained curtains to shoot terribly hot water, must be melting their guns — what were they doing up at this hour, it sounds like people are they even people they’re running downstairs upsetting on their ways every possible floor sample of layawayed furniture: vases smashing, chair legs snapping, department store pictures pulled off walls and their pictureless, garniture glass shattering on the landings of stairs with the glass shards mixing with mirror shards, arraying themselves in incredible figurations they must’ve been of reflection, translucence. And the old man who was still alive, who had talked to me and asked, now screaming and pounding, his little tiny fists curled on my chest, fighting me — me who was not into returning a fight — like a prizefighting seahorse.
A month later I’m in New Plansville paying rent to waste away, generally love/hating but more of the latter my landlord/roommate who’s spending most of her time meditating to inner drones of mosquitoes or swara, playing with some pendulum keychain that tells her whether things and, like, conditions, are acceptable to who or not.
I was supposed to take this girl out tonight, another one, but me and her are even worse: Eastside upbringing (that being the borough of utmost fulfillment), father a doctor, mother a doctor, doctors all the way back to the Rambam or God, and she’s studying of all things the nondiscipline that is psychology, but surely she’s also premed, and I was going to take her downtown to hear some music, jazz, try to keep her at the two drink minimum for budget’s sake and tonight, there’s no cover. Her father set us up, her father who knows me from one of my father’s old friends, Professor Him who must not know me as well as he might think he’s expected to, he’s paid to. On my way over to pick her up — it was still light, I walked through the Park — I was walking slowly because I didn’t want to be too early.
Tonight taking my erection out for this walk in the cooling, dim Park I remembered Maxine and us underground and her house and I debated telling her, my date though the first name comes to mind, about it. Then, after my two drinks and her two drinks (watered gins), I told it up to the porch with the quick quietus punching, but she stopped me to promise she’s tired, which I don’t believe, and after only the first set ended, and then, with surprisingly decisive energy for someone so tired, so wrecked, demanded that I take her home, like immediately. Here I am. Outside her palest window, up on the Eastside, where there’s nothing to do and, without enough money to stay out alone, only the dark tongue of Park between myself and anything even remotely. Cymbal splash. Familiar.
Ten men control the world
Ten men control the world, one said; and another said, no, the number is eighteen; said a third, no, the world is controlled by no more than eight or nine; one said, the world’s run by a paranoid named Albert worth six billion in telecoms and crude; another said, wrong again, it’s run by the Asians or irresponsible Jews, an Arab plot, a conspiracy of Catholics; while yet another said, it’s undeniable that women are behind this, because
These very interlocutors, it should be said, control the world.
Or could.
A Certain Angle
Remember, he said, when loaning it to me, this pen won’t write unless held at a certain angle.
The most important thing
The most important thing, about this pen, is to maintain ink flow: (the idea that) the ink must flow and continue flowing, at all times.
Aphorisms for Karl Kraus
Know that to write even one perfect aphorism is an achievement, the glory of which lasts in direct opposition to length.
Know that to write even one imperfect aphorism is to reveal that art is less inspiration than effort, and ultimately less effort than skill, which is talent when known as perfectible, or made conscious.
It is difficult to write a good aphorism.
It’s easy/simple to write a bad…
Thoughts on Translating Augenblick
Walter Benjamin (though he was not the first to find this image) has the following to say about essentiality, for lack of a better term, about knowledge, hope, and regret:
He describes a man or an object standing, as we all stand, under the sun. As the sun rises in the east, our shadow is cast forward, as we ourselves are projected into the future. Later in the day we call our lives, the sun turns toward the west, and our shadow is cast behind us, as we look back upon what we could have done or been, or loved. Benjamin was concerned with what transpired at zenith. Noon was his favorite canonic hour. Then, with the sun just overhead, no shadow is cast, and man is revealed — in what is called an Augenblick, “in a moment,” more literally, “in the blink of an eye” — as essential, as if denuded by the light of self-knowledge. Though Benjamin does not admit that such atomization or reduction to point renders man without history, or tomorrows; and though a shadowless life might be realized in that Zarathustrian moment, it is a life more alone than ever, and man’s experience becomes, suddenly, impossible to translate. He lives within himself. He lives only.
Neither does Benjamin mention what happens after sunset. He — who killed himself before the Nazis could kill him, a refugee at the Spanish frontier — never mentions what night or darkness might portend, when we’re all cast, both backward and front, into the shadows of the gods.
Composition (for Morton Feldman)
Take
an airplane that’s lost its wings. Or else, land a plane without
wheels. Go crash it in the desert. If not already missing, take an
egregious circular saw and cut off the nosecone. Then, cut off its
tail. What you should have left is the fuselage — a tube.
Take the saw, and cut into the top ten holes of equal size, one for each finger.
Now, summon your people to the desert. Gather them around the plane on a day the wind blows through it.
Wait for the hand of God to come down and manipulate the tones.
Sinking
He had killed her with a mallet, the knife, which had lay on the counter throughout the whole ordeal, was only used to chop her up.
Mallet went whystopgodie.
Knife, countered.
She, of what was left of she, was then, hand-over-fist, stuffed into a styrofoam trunk, into a cooler such as you’d convey spoilable foods in, perishables to the beach.
The trunk had gone in the trunk (spare-tire garaged), the car of his almost father-in-law, loaned for the weekend (the car AND the father-in-law), in return for their babysitting his the he’s almost half-brother, last week when he… drove thirty six miles out to where he knew a man, he’d known a man, an old friend, horrendous influence she would say, would have said, a faceless from the drinking days, the days of week losses, weekend blackouts, superquick camaraderie, quicker fists and holds, memory-holes, back-back-when, when it was still all, when the world was still air, sane and alive, and all was possible, apparent … after he’d gotten sober for the nth, first time and last, three-four dates into their thing, what they had whatever it was, it was that first … apparition, as the sun, it was that their future had evidenced huge, shining, power, once, very … apparent (to him at least), they’d met at the airport, sized each other up, then stared, Officer, they’d only she’d’ve said properly met in the airplane, introduced themselves enplaned some 36000 feet up, soaring immobile as he would eye it when later grounded, reclined, and she, heading south by southwest she was flying that day to start a new job, it was her new job this flying, he’d taken the flight on his mother’s money, she’d taken a job as a flight attendant, a stewardess, and so she flew for free, too, worked for it, at it, this was her first run, trip, that day when they met, she was to be based DOWN THERE, you understand, they always said “down there” even after they’d moved to live down there, lived down there together for years, he’d just lost the latest of last jobs, at-ends frayed, a string of failures with which he bound himself to her, coming unraveled, broke, down-and-out homeless, crashlanding couch to couch, his mother offered mother, food, a free roof, on the plane they talked talk, said, said, said, introductions, pasts, hopes and dreams same-same, airplane up through the clouds gathering darkly white, intestines with muscles massing, then at flight’s height raining down their weight in foam pellets (packing material), balls falling, balling with such force the pellets they became pressurized, atmopshered into hard force, falling together tight into slabs over which they flew, solid swaths below the air and clouds and air, a ground of foam the open land, people pelted and hard, the balls battering, shattering brains, rendering the expanse empty, the world voided for them alone, the life of their love… after it was she who’d suggested dinner at a white plate place nearest the airport, the home down there destination, but he, having no money, knowing or wanting to the future that very night he took her home to meet Mom, took some jobs, she flew in and out every week, a two room house almost became home without wheels or hitch, not quite but it was working well for a while, though first class there were businessmen, corporate-types he suspected, he followed her to the gate, suspicious as security, jealous as all husbands, as all unemployed, ex-alcoholics, are entitled to be he at least wanted to follow her, intended to, felt entitled to plot in the shower, late-nites dry, reclined and televised too idle, too tired even to fantasize he knew, these were swift men, without dependencies, lived luxurious lives, did and afforded everything he couldn’t, didn’t, all, and so laidover he sat up late, awake, suspended, timeless, exhausted to rise at middle night with bladder burning, to go, to ascend an aisle of dusted light streaming from his middle eye or to, but at aisle’s dim there were all these stewardesses, a uniformed mass, nine of them or so all limbs, her friends, colleagues she always said, blocking his path with skirts and nails, pleats and glitter, badges, caps and pins, but he pushed past, beyond them, sleepless and high on air he lunged past suits and trays, reclined seats and protruding knees, fresh haircuts and polishes, parting these stewardesses with fanatic signals, semaphored with frantic, twitchy hands, with two feet pow he kicked in the cockpit’s hatch, to gust, windy whelp … his bedroom’s door … inside the cockpit was his bedroom (with the window open, she always left the) … there’d been a pilot with her, if it was her she was a mess of switches, levers, and wavy, wispy sheets … fish and fowl she was malleting in the kitchen for dinner … he’d walked in, air, blips and commands, confronted the pilot within, got knocked out, after the hospital that night, last night there was another fight, again, she was malleting fish and fowl for dinner, theirs, a spread, maybe we should invite Mom, What’shisname and he, grabbed the limb from her shock, held it moon-high, malleted her head in, beat her black then the knife just washed, dried to dirty he sharpened it with his tongue, laid into her, had a few pulls of whiskey he’d hid from himself (top-shelf), from her who knew his problem and dependent God, hacked her up, stuffed her part by part, stacked her limb over limb over limb, over herself and into a styrofoam trunk, an old beach cooler, his, he threw into the trunk of the car of his mother’s new boyfriend, a sedan the man drove sick kids around in, registered to and insured by some religious organization he drove drunk but steady-knuckled, out to a friend from his third job, once he knew how to be down there, how to function once he knew how he’d made this man a friend, more than that a fellow addict in recovery, a meeting-helpmate, the man owned a boat, twelve-foot for angling and sun, to get near space and far away from bars, he’d called him up early (neither had slept), woke him, said it was a surprise for Ilysa (who’s Ilysa? the friend had asked), my mutterfucking girlfriend he’d explained, all of one year, wife-whatever, the trip’s a present, a surprise! I know how to drive one of those things he assumed a past, military foreign service he patted his friend’s gut, went after the keys, sideswiped his trailer on the way out of the park, another ten miles to the marina, reek and shell, which boat was it they all bobbed the same? hefted out the trunk, beers and bait, tackle no one would notice no one around as he loaded the boat, pulled the hulk out put-putt, fast past NO WAKE, out into open ocean, still, knuckle of sun, middle’s edge where
He hefted the trunk to boat’s horizon, placed it in the water with care.
Trunk floated, bobbed, buoyed by spirit she wouldn’t sink.
He killed the engine, too.
He went for absolute calm.
Still.
Boat floated. Alongside chum of girl in their trunk. He removed his hat from his fifth job, gas. He aired his head, scratched, picked lint from his testicle sac.
Oppressive the day under weight of sky.
One leg over stern he went.
Boat tippled under him, rocked.
He paused, stepped back, reeled a leg in.
He removed all his clothes, laid them out on deck.
Naked, exposed, he was scandalous to air.
Steadying with a hand the boat, with the other the trunk, he stepped a leg over stern again.
He removed the lid of the trunk, placed it gently on the deck spattered in sun. And heat.
Inside the trunk were mash, mush and bone, it was baby.
Lid regained, held high to shade his face, he stepped himself down in.
Commodious, the trunk had room enough. It deepened.
He climbed himself in, all the way to spoon her grist. He crept in near, atop, packed, compact, blood-close.
As the trunk began its slow slow sink, he replaced the moony lid, pulled in on, down tight.
As the ocean screamed steadily up, his ballast took them down, down, down, to their eternal, ultimate bed.
Like a Detective Story
It’s like this, he said over brunch at this diner I liked.
My sister called me up three weeks ago at work.
He worked at an office, in public relations.
She almost never calls and never at work, it was a Thursday and more, what’s more strange was she wanted to have lunch in an hour.
At noon, he said, already giving a Statement.
We work a half hour away, live ten minutes away, different aways, but we don’t see each other, we hardly.
She’s married with kids, with a husband.
That’s what it was about, “the marriage” (the fat waitress, as opposed to the doable, dropped our order on the table, wobbly white plate silence descending; we never talked when they might’ve been listening, not because we’d talk about them, but because we wanted to).
He said, I agreed to meet her at this restaurant she knew because I only eat at this one restaurant for lunch or else a cart for halal but she knows them all, she expenses.
I love her but it’s not like we’re close.
I gave her an email I use only for credit card transactions and porn.
He said, she told me:
Every Friday night her husband dresses up in a suit.
Or did.
Different from the one he worked the day in.
Says he has an important dinner, a meeting with associates, vague but that’s what he tells her.
He goes around nine, gets back late at night.
Drunk, though he’s quiet, gets into bed, falls asleep, one a.m.
Says nothing to me, she said, I’m awake.
I think he’s cheating, no, she said, I think he’s finally cheating.
I asked, so?
Ask around. Follow him.
She said, that’s what I want you to do.
I’m too scared myself, she said, I’m no good at these things was what she said, he said.
And I am?
She nixed asking friends, engaging private detectives.
What if I’m wrong?
It would be, suspicious.
He’s always so loving, but.
Begged me to go.
Asked any favor then this was it.
I had to call and cancel on Z. to follow the schmuck, he said (so you took the tail job, I joked).
Husband doesn’t know my car so I drove it.
I waited outside, first time I’d been there in awhile. Their lawn trashed with kids’ stuff and leaves.
Around nine he left in a suit. Got into his car, drove. I followed. Out past the casinos, over the bridge by the marina, the docks.
He stopped at that dirt road by the pier and got out, Sea-Vu, you know, by the lighthouse.
He opened his trunk, swung something out, shut it and walked.
I parked on the street by the asphalt, walked down toward the pier and then it was dark because the cars’ headlights went out and I waited and breathed.
Don’t know what I thought, was there a woman out there or drugs?
He sat on the pier.
Amid crab traps tangled and rotting wood, cobweb splotches the shitting of gulls.
He dangled his feet, splashing with his shoes off and socks, pants rolled to the knee, suit jacket draped over a piling.
The thing he took from the trunk was a sixpack of beer.
He was on his first.
I saw this by the lights across the bay, the casinos and bars.
I watched him and waited as he drank six in silence.
Three hours later, I was freezing but interested, sad. He walked back down the road and I hid in the reeds by the marsh.
He got back in his car and I watched it putt off: green convertible.
Once he was gone I ran to mine and sped sixty.
His car was back, parked in the drive at the house.
I went home.
Got the flu.
He finished my coffee then went at my toast.
An accusation at knifepoint, stabbed with butter, red jam.
I told my sister her husband went to a dinner meeting with clients where he smoked their cigars, at a restaurant I ate at two tables away.
She offered to reimburse, but when I refused she smiled, she hugged.
Though she was angry, too, said he shouldn’t be smoking and drinking that much.
But I said the clients were Asian, so they seemed important and God, was she glad.
It was Thursday again, three days ago and what happened, happened (he’d already told me, but over the phone: his girlfriend of months, Z., had left him, allowed herself to be penetrated by a managerial prick).
I was fucked, he said, terrible.
I called sick into work, stayed home to watch the teevee: Nazi docs and arts specials where foreign symphonies play, gambling world championships and sitcoms that weren’t funny the first ten times the son fell in love and the daughter got in trouble at school.
You were working.
Didn’t want to disturb so I went to get liquor.
Bought a fifth of imported, drove out.
Thought I’d tell my brother-in-law hello, I usually come out here on Tuesdays or Wednesday, but that I couldn’t make it last night or the other because, I’d tell him what happened, how Z. had told me to go screw the glovebox I’m gone, what else: didn’t expect you of all people, how’s my sister? and we’d, you know, bond.
Thought about him alone by himself.
Not just lonely, but lonely for any emotion.
I parked next to him, walked up the rest.
Walked all the noise in the world.
Pier was empty. The jacket flapped like a flag.
Shoes there, too, and beer bottles and cans, empties and caps. Crab cages, hooks, rust, line and weights. An airplane and stars, maybe I’m making this up and a moon. Lighting up the water and I, he said he leaned over the edge.
Water there it’s still shallow, ripples and minnows.
He wasn’t floating yet.
I said, suicide?
He flicked a crumb from under his thumb.
I haven’t told my sister, and she hasn’t called.
Still haven’t called the police.
Fat came over to pour us more coffee.
Sunday noon.
He wrung my collar.
Pulled me over the salt.
His eyes, he asked what do I do?
Two Sentences Upon Ending a Relationship
If I told you that two people were in love forever would you think that by “people” I meant “ideas of people,” or only ideas in general, or two bananas or brands of cigarette, mainframe computers or maps?
Would you? Could you love me?
Because only two inanimates could stand each other, and so closely, for so long.
M.A.N.I.F.E.S.T.O.
Man – I – Festo
any celebratory gathering of men with big egos.
Mani Festo!
an exclamation traditionally given in the presence of bad skin, common to all Romance languages.
Manif Esto
any half-French-Algerian, half-Spanish transsexual who sells you overpriced hash at Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany, New Year’s Day, 2001.
“Man, If Esto…”
an unfinished thought, indicative of fear, suspicion, or delight in transgression.
“Man, I festo…”
an embarrassing revelation, an admission of failure, See FAMOUS LAST WORDS.
M. Anifesto
b. 1929, Nutley, NJ.
MANIFEST – O
the draft upon which Manifest-I is to be based.
Let us suppose
Let us suppose we are the most advanced species on earth.
Let us suppose we are human.
Let us suppose that the earth was given to us in all its bounty so that we might be sustained and enjoy.
Let us suppose that we should keep covered our genitals.
Let us suppose that it is better to talk than to fight, though we should always be ready to counter violence with violence.
Let us suppose that what comes to us naturally or instinctually is good or correct.
Then —
This is what we have supposed.
Aim
He was six or seven and this was fun, it was fun being in the woods, doing everything in the woods with dads and his dad and the other boys their sons, hunting or pretending to hunt or fish, making fire with three matches (collecting tinder, branches), pitching tents and breaking it all down again, the campfire stories, the gear.
When you had to piss you’d go deep into the woods away from camp, always bring another boy with you; it was good and not shaming if the other boy had to piss, too, or only said he did.
Then, if he had to piss, you’d stand about five six feet apart and face each other and, careful not to piss on each other (though that sometimes happened), piss at each other, trying as hard as you could not to cross the streams but to merge them into one stream where they would deflect each other down to the ground. But this skill could only be sustained for a moment or two, at a uniformity of flow.
Later (years) aim was tested from the train platform, the El. Waiting was boring so you’d talk sex while smoking cigarettes with other friends from college. When the tobacco taste hurt your mouth and the cigarette was almost done you’d spit over the railing to the street (careful not to hit a passerby), then drop your lit cigarette butt trying to land it and so snuff it directly in the spit puddle (again, careful not to hit a passerby). You tried for three years including summers, you dropped out; you only hit it once.
For your grandfather it had been taking the gun they’d given them, loading it with bullet then shooting that into a German, and with your father it was similar in Asia: you pulled the trigger and suddenly, motion stopped, behind that shed door outside Aachen or a stand of bamboo … Sometimes you saw your victim, before or after you killed him, other times not. Still, there was no doubt he was there: He, in turn, could kill you. He took aim and you, too, were a target.
Not him. He sat at a desk embedded with a screen. When a light blipped on the screen he pressed a button, a bullet was launched remotely, then the light disappeared, eventually, ten nine eight, the light was destroyed. There was no danger to this work. There was no aim, and his finger could not miss that little white circle that was the same size and shape and color as his mother’s nipple. What was necessary was only that he “Pay Attention.” Every three hours he was relieved from duty to eat dinner, or take a piss — which he did, pissing, alone and with his eyes closed the entire time.
Four Art Pieces
There once was an artist so great that none could tell whether he made paintings, or photographs. When stupid people asked — casually, at a cocktail reception — he would tell them he painted, and so they would flatter his talent. When the intelligent asked — the culturally active, or critics — he would tell them he took photographs, which answer would flatter not him, but them.
Looking back on the statuary that has survived from Antiquity, we could assume that the men and women (to say nothing of the gods and goddesses) of those earlier days lacked arms, or legs, and often heads or noses. Just as a future civilization, looking at our busts set atop our columns in the halls of the museum, might conclude that we possessed no bodies at all, that we were only heads set atop poles as if the expressionless victims of the cannibal of fame.
In a sense, they would be correct.
It would be better to be an amputee divinity than a disembodied brunette. Even the possible pasts have been set in stone.
Painting a portrait of an animal on that animal’s hide (as in primitive painting, on deerskin), or with a brush made from that animal’s hair (ermine), is like writing a book about paper: It would be better blank. Let the creature loose. Let it find its dark or tree.
An alternative: To turn our women into paintings of women (which is photography), and to turn our paintings of women — from Dutch girls to pink, three-eyed monsters — into women themselves, who walk and talk. Which would be intolerable, especially on trips to the museum …
Art exists to make life more beautiful. It does this by being inept.
I was expecting
I had been expecting someone of another race. Or older. Or less fat. They were offended. I was intrigued. My face betrayed me. Who I was …
Then I was offended that they were offended.
Then they were intrigued.
Their face betrayed them — fatter, older, of another race.
Intriguing.
I was expecting a man. She was expecting a woman.
She treated me like a man.
I pretended, treated her like a man, too.
That made us both men.
And happy.
By his voice on the phone, I was expecting someone who looked like my father. But he didn’t. By the time I’d gotten there, he looked like nothing. There in his chair by the phone. My father was dead.
I was expecting to see myself in the mirror. I was expecting a mirror. Not a window and rain.