Hamilton Stone Review #20

Nonfiction

 

Chris Echaurre

The Memory of All that                                                          

 

 

Our romance won’t end on a sorrowful note
Though by tomorrow you’re gone
The song has ended but as the song writer wrote
The melody lingers on
They may take you from me
I’ll miss your fond caress
But though they take you from me
I’ll still possess....

The way you wear your hat

 

When I was in 7th grade my father went into the hospital for the first time. This is what I remember: 

1. A crash.

2. A call for mom.

3. Footsteps, above my head.

4. Running upstairs.

5. My father on the bathroom floor, bleeding.

6. An ambulance.

7. Being afraid.

8. Not being able to go with him.

9. Sitting in my sister’s room, trying to make myself cry.

This is how I write the story, so I can remember it better:

I am reading in my bedroom downstairs. Hercule Poirot is just about to announce whodunit. I hear a loud thump, like somebody dropped something big. I hear Dad’s voice. It sounds like a sheep, or some kind of animal in pain, but I know it’s his voice. It sounds like “Maaaa”. I hear footsteps above me, and now the whole house seems to be shaking. I begin to run, up the stairs, over the shag carpet, into Mom and Dad’s room. Mom and my two sisters are standing in the doorway to the bathroom asking questions.

“Rudy, what happened?” 

“Dad?”

“Dad, are you all right?”
       I get behind them and this is what I see:  my father, on the floor, wearing only boxer shorts, his head in a corner scrunched against a cabinet. He looks stupid laying there. I want him to get up. I’m glad he’s not naked. Then I see:  blood on his forehead.

Mom is holding his cheek. Her hand is shaking. He’s just laying there, looking at us. “Should we call an ambulance?” she asks. He tries to nod but his head is in a corner so it barely bobs. My oldest sister runs to the kitchen where the phone is. I have a feeling that whatever’s going to happen I don’t want to watch, so I go with her.

I stay in the kitchen after she hangs up the phone. I can hear them in there. They keep asking him what happened -  “Rudy, what happened?”  “Dad?”  “Dad, are you all right?” - but I don’t hear him saying anything. He hardly says anything. Ever. But I want him to say something. Now.

I hear sirens. A red light is flashing in the living room. Two men rush  in, both wearing white. I follow the strangers into my parent’s bedroom. I feel over-full, like I’m going to throw up. They ask him the same question, “Mr. Echaurre, what happened?”  He looks at them as if he doesn’t understand the question then looks at us as if we might know the answer. I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure I understand the question.

The men put him on a stretcher and take him away.

There’s confusion in the hallway. We all go to grab our coats. One of the men says, “Only two can ride.”

Mom looks at me, “Son, you have to stay here with Annette.” 

I go into Cindy’s room. I like to play here when she’s not around. She has a make up mirror on her desk. I sit in front of it and open the butterfly flaps. It has three light switches - Day, Evening and Dusk - Day is my favorite because it’s the brightest. I don’t know what Dusk is other than it’s kind of pink. I flip to Dusk, then turn the mirror around so it’s on the magnified side. My face is now bigger than it really is, it’s huge, like in the circus.

I can hear Annette on the phone. She’s saying, “I don’t know. He fell in the bathroom and the doctors weren’t sure.”  Weren’t sure of what, I wonder. I know she’s talking about what just happened, but “weren’t sure” feels to me like Dusk, a color I’m now sitting under but can’t define.

I’m trying not to think about the look on his face, how the blood looked next to his eye.
      I pull on my cheeks so it looks like I’m in pain. “He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die.” 

This is a game I play. Whenever I want something bad enough I always ask for the opposite. Like, I’m not going to get Mousetrap for Christmas.

I’m trying to make myself cry. If I can cry then that means I love him so much he can’t die.

Come on, Chris, cry.

But what about this: I didn’t get Mousetrap for Christmas.

"Please don’t let him die. Please don’t let him die. Please don’t let him die. Please don’t let him die.” 

Now I’ve said both things. What if this is a game and this is one time when the game actually works. What’s going to happen?
           
The way you sip your tea

 

I’ve been listening to old songs lately, wandering around this city drying out, listening through headphones, the music directly in my ears, no obstruction. Funny thing about songs, I know I’ve heard them all before, and when I played them before they used to sing to a different part of me, a different shape. I sang these love songs to an old love, but now that I’m alone when I sing them I’m not singing them to any one. Sometimes the lyrics fall on someone new, perhaps a crush I have, something passing, faint and indistinct.  So, I ask myself:  Who do the song memories belong to?
It makes me think of fidelity. Or infidelity. I’m not sure which.

One winter I listened to Johnny Hartman sing “My One And Only Love” on repeat so often, an anonymous East Village neighbor left a note on my door that read, “Nice song but could you play the rest of the album sometime?”  I bought a pair of headphones then and a cord long enough to walk around my small studio in and then I could play Johnny to my heart’s content.

This was my imagining:  sometime during the middle of my wedding reception, while everyone was finishing up their food, I would walk out into the middle of the dance floor, microphone in hand, my bow tie loosened and dangling from my neck. As Coltrane’s sax would meander through the introduction I would thank everyone for coming, my voice faltering a little, nervous in the center, and then, slowly, I’d begin to sing my love song…to Mister B.

I haven’t seen Mister B. since that winter, he’s been out of my life for how many years now, but I know that when I get married it’s still the song I want to sing, even though that means the song that belonged to him I’ll now sing to someone else.

Is there a motion to memories?  Are they like the song-feelings, still the same but ever different depending on where they’re cast? 

 

The memory of all that

 

My father went into the hospital nineteen years ago, and now I’m thirty. My father’s been dead fourteen years (he didn’t die that time - his stomach was full of blood from his ulcers - but over the next seven years they would find cancer, and then he did. He died. He’s dead.). In the last six months my niece Jenny died as well, fell asleep at the wheel one block away from her house, crashed into a tree and, we hope, was killed instantly. My oldest sister Rina passed out from a bloody stomach just like my father - tumor the size of a fist in her kidney - and after two rounds of surgery left the hospital a day before Christmas missing both her kidney and her spleen, which the doctors damaged taking the tumor out. Cindy had an operation on her back and for the ten hours she was under we waited to see if she would be crippled for life.

And I?  I went into therapy, partly because I’ve been drinking too much.

 

No, no
      

My father was a bartender. I have a drinking problem.

 

They can’t take that away from me

 

I started writing the summer after he died. Mom and I had seen a movie called Thief of Hearts where a man discovered a woman’s journals and began acting out her fantasies. (Oh, yeah, and he robbed her blind.)  I started my first journal that same night, thinking perhaps that love would find me just as easily. I could have recited, no one will ever love me, no one will ever love me, but I’d gotten too old for that.

Besides, Dad did die after all didn’t he? 

If this is all you ever know about me, just this, then maybe I should tell you that I don’t only write about him, but I talk to him, too. And for all my efforts, for all the thousands of pieces of paper I’ve accumulated since I first began to write that night, for all the conversations I’ve had with this man in my head, he’s never, ever, been anything except dead. 

 

The way your smile just beams
      

Here’s a picture I have of him and me in a frame sitting on my desk. In it I’m two years old, a round-faced boy with skin much lighter than his, sitting on his lap, his left arm holding me tightly to his chest. The picture is black and white but I know the ring on his finger is gold, and so is the watch peeking out from his tweed jacket. (I know this because I have them both in a jewelry box, his jewelry box, which I keep hidden away underneath my t-shirts in a dresser.)  His right hand is holding a spoon to my open mouth.

My father was fifty-eight years old when I was born, the youngest of five and the only boy.  He was born on a farm somewhere in the Philippines, a place I’ve never been.  He was already old when I was growing up, a quiet man, something I attributed to his age, or that he couldn’t speak English very well.  It’s my mother who did all the talking.  I can hear her saying, “He used to love to feed you. If he only had a dollar in his pocket, he’d use it to buy you a hamburger after school.” 

I remember those trips.  I’d come out of the middle school doors and he’d be in the parking lot waiting for me in the white Mazda—he was retired by then, and he always drove me to school because I didn’t like taking the bus. I’d get in the car and kiss his cheek, the smell of after-shave mixed with vanilla from a car air freshener shaped like a tree.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Hungry?”

“Okay.”

The rest of the time was spent silent (sometimes I’d read) while we‘d drive to Herfy’s where I’d get a Wacky Burger Box--hamburgers I’d smother in blue cheese from the condiment bar, with a stack of sliced dill pickles on the side. Sometimes he’d have a vanilla ice cream cone.

Only a few years later when I was in high school and he was going through rounds of chemotherapy, I’d leave home on Friday nights to spend the weekend at friends’ houses, and we’d go out and do drugs all night and sometimes all day.  I’d lost a lot of weight because of it, and when I’d finally return home late on those Sunday nights, smelling like cigarette smoke, my eyes unfocussed, he’d cook me huge steaks, rare, just the way I like them.  I’d eat sitting alone at the kitchen table, my mom in bed, the only noise in the house was of him washing pans at the sink behind me. Sometimes afterward he’d fix himself a bowl of vanilla ice cream, with fresh strawberries from his garden if it was summer. This he’d take, I think out of deference to me, into the other room, leaving me alone feeling empty, with a bleeding steak and rice that soaked up the juice.

The caption in the photo reads “Over 250 Dads and Sons were in attendance at Seattle Council’s Father-Son Night, held on Monday, October 21st. No one at the dinner was busier than Rudy Echaurre, shown above taking care of a very hungry young man.”

 

The way you sing off key

 

The reason I didn’t actually sing that song to Mr. B., the reason it was just an imagining I had, is this:  Mr. B. was never mine. He belonged to someone else though he stole away for a couple of nights one December right around the time I turned twenty-five. This is how the next two years played out - I prayed for him and pretended that if I prayed hard enough that he’d come back. (Of course the drinking helped.)  Sometimes he did come back, find a few hours maybe once or twice a month, and when he did it was like...

Well, I told myself it was like having my father come back to me.  

Here’s a journal entry:  He just left and the sheets are dirty and there’s no condom to throw away because I trust him so much, I love him that much he’d never hurt me, and the sun is shining through the one window I have in this east village flat. It’s shining, and bright, and brightness is like God, like Heaven, and that’s where Dad exists. I’m in love.

Guess I took the whole Thief of Hearts thing too seriously.

 

The way you haunt my dreams

 

I have one of those names no one can pronounce, and because I’m racially mixed people have trouble figuring out what ethnicity I am. When I was in grade school, the other kids used to think I was Indian, or Eskimo. On the colored cutouts of stick figures hanging from a rainbow in classroom, I was brown, though it confused me when I checked the box that read “Asian/Pacific Islander”:  Didn’t that make me yellow?

Later, when I wasn’t a kid anymore and had traded the west coast for the east, people mistook me for Hispanic.

“No,” I’d say, “My mother’s Polish-Czech.”

I’d pause here, watching their faces trying to work something out, and then I’d add, “My father was Filipino.”

Filipino always came last for me.

When I was younger, I often bragged how he never taught us to speak his language because he thought we should grow up American.  He thought things would be difficult for us if we had even a hint of an accent.

And that’s not all he did for us. We didn’t eat the food with the strange sounding names (penukbit, adobo, or diniguan, which is pig’s blood), and we weren’t a part of the Filipino Association of America, the way our neighbors the Canarases were.

I knew that the dance with the clapping bamboo sticks was called Tinikling, and the laced shirts the men wore on special occasions were called Baron Tagalogs, but that’s because Wing Luke Elementary had an assembly on the Philippines once. 

He had no idea what he was teaching me, how glad I was that I wasn’t like Euhler and Aimard Canares, that our house didn’t smell like theirs, that we didn’t eat pig’s blood.  
And I had no idea, even when I became aware of what he’d inadvertently done, how much I’d included him in all of that.

Something else about that scene of him in the parking lot, and those years in middle school. When I exit the doors of that school and my friends go off to get on their busses, I sneak around the back to where the parking lot is, hoping they won’t see the man waiting for me there. I hope they won’t see the retired bartender who spent his life working at a private tennis club, actually serving drinks to some of their parents who lived in that neighborhood. I hope they won’t see the old man with the silver white hair in shabby jeans and cheap windbreaker. I hope they won’t see his wide, flat nose, his brown, aged skin, the small mysterious bumps like flecks of pepper on his cheeks, and the large black mole underneath his eye.

No, no

He’s going to die. Please don’t let him die.

 

They can’t take that away from me   

 

My niece, Jennifer, Jenny, is laying dead in her coffin. I’ve been called home to Seattle from my life in New York where I’ve been drinking, singing songs about memory to people who never returned my calls.

My eleven year old nephew Justin inches his way into the room, his mother, Cindy, lightly holding his shoulder. He sees the body in the coffin and begins to cry for his cousin. I am watching this as I’ve been watching everything else that’s happened this week, present in each moment, aware that the last time this all happened I couldn’t see through the pressure and need in me to escape.
Cindy takes him out of the room and I am left alone with my niece. In my head I keep thinking about words, just words, written all over everything. I’ve been trying to compose something to say at her funeral, because I’m supposed to be the only one strong enough to say anything at all.

There’s a comfort in this labeling of things.  If I can write or see the word of it, I won’t lose myself in the abstract threatening to take me over.  The words are nouns, safely concrete.  Jenny.  Dress.  Flower.  They help me hold on.

Justin comes back in, this time alone, and stands next to me. Out of all my nephew and nieces, he and I are close in a way that I’m not with the others.  He’s too young to be gay, but his sensitivity is deep.  I put my arm around him. It’s quiet. The room smells of fragrant flowers--the word’s gotten around that Jenny liked Stargazer Irises, and the room is filled with them, one last present for her.
I ask my nephew, “Did you touch her?”

I want him to know that it’s all right, but at the same time I don’t want to push. I move forward so I’m standing right next to the coffin, and then I reach in.  Her skin is cold, and hard where it should be soft.  I run my hand over the bare arm, trying to show him that it’s okay. He takes my lead and touches her as well. He looks up to me and says, “It’s not her, is it?”

For some reason I think he means the body is not really hers, that it’s fake, that Jenny is really someplace else, alive, breathing, her skin soft again and not cold. I don’t know what to say and, fortunately, he doesn’t ask anything else, doesn’t look to me for a response.

When we’re done with the touching, we leave the room.

It doesn’t occur to me until the next morning that what my nephew meant was not that the body was fake, it was that his cousin, my niece, Jenny, had permanently gone away.

 

We may never, never meet again

 

The way a mystery is solved is by asking the right questions. I’ve lost my father. I look for him through questions. Of course I do.

Where are you? is a question.

Here are some others:  what was the farm like where you grew up?  Were there hills outside your window?  Why didn’t we know anything about your family?  What was your mother like?  Was she nice?  Were you not friends with them anymore after you left the farm?  Why didn’t we hear from them?

I go to my mother because she’s the half of me I have left and this is what she tells me now that I am thirty, “Christopher, the reason we never heard from them was because Daddy could barely write. And they could barely read.”
      Words.

This is all I knew of my father’s family while he was alive:  once, he received an envelope addressed from the Philippines. In it was a small piece of paper with a few words scrawled on it in a language I couldn’t understand.

“That was the only time I ever saw him cry,” my mother says, “Poor thing.”

This is my father on the day he learned his mother died. He’s gone into his room and he’s sitting on his bed. My mother comes in and closes the door. She sits next to him and says, “Don’t cry Rudy,” though she’s crying herself. He hangs his head, the tears running steadily. My mom puts her arm around his back and pats his shoulder. She’s bigger than he is, and he leans into her arms for comfort.

He hasn’t seen his mother in thirty some years and now she’s been dead for over two weeks. There’s no phone number to call, no phone on the farms, and he wants to talk to his older brother Dimas, wants to ask him if she was in pain, if she died peacefully, he wants to know where they’ve buried her, if they buried her there on the farm. But there’s no phone there.  No way to reach them right now.  He could ask my mom to write a letter for him, but what language would he use?

 

on the bumpy road to love

 

I’m in the locker room of the Seattle Tennis Club where my father works. It’s Labor Day, the day before school starts and we’ve been allowed into the private club for an all day picnic as we are every year. Last year it rained, but this year it’s sunny so I’ve spent the day running back and forth between the free candy bar and the pool. Right before dinner I go to change in the locker room. There’s an area with a mechanical contraption with fuzzy buffers on it for shoe shining. No one’s around so I slide my bare feet under it and turn it on. It’s noisy, and I get scared but I don’t turn it off.

The lights go out.

When this happens at home it’s usually because one of my sisters has been drying her hair for too long while there’s too many lights on. I wait for someone to flip a circuit breaker. The fuzz is still rubbing the top of my feet. I move away from the machine, worried that I’ll be caught standing next to it and be blamed for the power outage. I remember to shut it off first.

It’s pitch black. It smells like Ivory soap and cologne.

I bump into a row of lockers. I decide to play a game and see if I can find my locker in the dark. I run my hand over the cold metal until it runs off the side and into space. That’s the first row. I keep walking. I’m closer to the showers now. I hear drips.

I pass the second and feel my way to the third row. Turn left. Slowly I make my way but then I trip over something, maybe a wet towel. My hands grasp out blindly in the darkness and land on a man’s erection, hard and hot. I grab it and squeeze.

The lights come on.

I’m right in front of my locker, right where I want to be.

I began having these fantasies the same year my father went into the hospital.
           

Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of

 

I got my first photo album for Christmas last year and recently put it together. It sits on my desk where I write so I can see it every day. In it I played with time. I started with my favorite pictures from the holidays, my thirtieth birthday weekend in the Adirondacks when I told myself I wouldn’t drink and I didn’t but my friends did and in the pictures they all look happy and festive but my eyes look indescribably sad.

When those ran out I found older pictures I liked. Each page could hold four photographs. Sometimes I didn’t even have four pictures of a particular time, so I started collecting random shots - photos I’d taken from someone else or was given, photos that had been mailed to me, photos I’d stolen (here is Mr. B on a motorcycle with his younger brother whom I’ve never met in front of a house he grew up in that I never saw, smiling at someone that isn’t me). With these I found ways to place them on the page so they seemed to speak to each other.

Look here. My father is standing on a log posing like a boxer. To get you there I have to go back, back to an early morning when I was small enough to fit lengthwise in the back of the seat without bending my legs. It’s early morning and we’re going camping. It’s just Mom, Dad and me. They’re downstairs in the garage and I can hear the motor running. I’m upstairs in the kitchen. I want something. I want some excitement, something cool. I feel all hot inside, ready to go. I open the freezer but there’s no icicle pops, no Safeway brand popsicles in plain white packaging. I open up the fridge. There, ice on the coils. I stick my tongue out and take a lick.
      My tongue is stuck, it’s not cold anymore, but hard, and stuck, and I flex the muscle but it won’t contract. Aaaaah, I make the sound but I’m the only one to hear it. Just as he hits the horn downstairs, I pull back, leaving behind a thin layer of skin, a piece of me.
      I don’t tell them of this crime I’ve committed on my body. I tell them I was peeing. I climb in the back where she’s laid blankets over the seats and we start to pull away. My mouth is on fire as if it was burned, as if I’d drank hot cocoa without waiting for it to cool. The stinging embarrasses me and I want to hide. I push the blankets down, down onto the floor of the Oldsmobile. I place pillows on either side of the bucket so my back isn’t arched.

And there, with only three inches of thick seat separating me from my parents, I fall asleep.

           

We’re going to the ocean. It takes a long time. People who don’t know the west, who don’t know Seattle, don’t realize that the Pacific is very far away. Some kids I know, they’ve never seen the Ocean, only the Sound. I just saw it myself for the first time a years ago, and I’m already ten. It takes a long time to get there, longer than I have to explain, so just know that it takes awhile, and now we’re there. Kalaloch. The longest driftwood beach on the west coast.

           

It’s on one of those driftwood logs that have washed ashore that I find him in that pose, like a boxer. He has sunglasses on, wide aviator frames, and whoever took the picture (Mom, or me) is standing beneath him. His hair is silver, the way it’s always been - the way it remained until the day he died, and he’s wearing a white sweatshirt. White, blue, silver, black and brown. His hands are in fists.

           

When I found the photo later, much later, after he was dead, I used the image in a story I was writing. He’s fighting against the cancer ravaging his stomach, I wrote, and it seemed appropriate, the way things can seem appropriate when you add meaning to them in fiction. But here’s a shot of me I now have in the photo album next to him:  In it, I’m standing on a white sandy beach on Long Island, posing like a boxer as well. My hands are clenched into fists.
      Maybe my body fell into that pose as a way of remembering him; perhaps my body, seven inches bigger than his, naturally behaves the way his did. I can’t fact check this obviously, so it’s just speculation.
      I do know this--if I stand up from where I’m sitting now and look into the mirror and replicate the pose, I think:  sexy. Masculine.

           

For years I saw my father through the metaphor I placed onto him in my writing, that his pose was a mask hiding his illness. It never occurred to me that he was being sexy.

           

I never thought of him that way.            

           

 

The way you hold your knife

 

The day before they injected him with so much morphine his body convulsed uncontrollably and my mother had to sit and whisper, it’s all right Rudy, until he let go, we took turns saying our good-byes.

This is what I remember:

 

1. My father on a hospital bed in our dining room, where the dining table should be.

2. Him telling me to finish school.

3. Crying.

 

I don’t want to remember it any better than that.  That’s enough.

 

The way we danced ‘til three

 

The last time I saw Mr. B, he told me he’d left the man he lived with, but was moving on to someone else. I asked him to visit me one last time, and he agreed. When he knocked, I told him from my side of the door to close his eyes. I opened the door and saw him standing there, dressed in a suit, looking sad. I took his hand and led him into the studio where I’d made a circle out of a strand of Christmas lights. I put on our wedding song and let him lead and when the song ended he said goodbye, and I lay down on the floor, pulled the lights around me like a blanket and wept.

 

The way you changed my life

 

My dad is buried in a grave in a cemetery. I go there and sit on top of him. I can’t see him, of course. What I see is grass and marble, a name that’s not really his.

Rudy wasn’t really Rudy. Rudy was Santiago. He was standing in a line somewhere in California and when Immigration asked, he said Rudy. My mother told me later he was thinking of Rudy Valee.
Santiago Echaurre isn’t him either. My father’s real name was Santiago Sabado. His father was killed when Dad was only three. Bandits slashed his throat.  His mother hid in the fields for weeks after, and when she came out with her small child, she renamed him Echaurre, gave him her name, so if the bandits weren’t finished with their revenge, they wouldn’t take away her son.

I don’t even have his last name.

But then I think about what I do have, or did at least when my father was alive, something that passed from generation to generation. I had his protection.
Across the street from the cemetery there’s a house where a man is sitting in his front window watching me.  I don’t bring flowers, but I do bring another gift. I take him a pen. I take an extra fine ball point pen, blue, the favorite kind I use, and with a small knife I begin to dig right next to his marker and I continue to loosen the dirt until I’ve made a hole big enough to squeeze my gift in.

This way, if he should ever want to drop me a line, he won’t have far to go.

 

Dear Santiago,
            I finished school.
            Love,
            Your son,
            Christopher Leo Echaurre Sabado

 

No, no,

 

Dad’s come home from the hospital and he and mom are in the living room watching television. I’m in here too, but I’m not watching. I have headphones on. I’m listening Donna Summer’s “Live and More”. I could be listening in my room downstairs, but ever since he’s been home I like being not so far away. Maybe now he won’t fall again. Or if he does I’ll see it, and I’ll know what happened if I am asked.

Earlier, they were laughing at me. I didn’t realize it but I was singing really loud, just singing along, kind of dancing while I’m laying on the floor. I heard them but I thought it was just them laughing at something on TV, but then I opened my eyes and saw them looking my way, laughing, but smiling, too. I got embarrassed, then I turned over so they couldn’t see me.

Now Donna is singing, “And if you had the chance to live your lives again....tell me, how many of you would live your lives again?” The audience begins to scream, scream and clap.

And I am only eleven but something about the question gets me to crying and all I can think is, I would!

I would.

If I had the chance to live my life again, I would, because I have this feeling that whatever’s coming next, things will never be the same.

 

they can’t take that away from me

 

Saturday morning and I’m up early the way I normally am even when I don’t have to go to work. I’m sitting at my desk in front of a window that faces west. West, where my family lives.
I’ve tried everything to find him. I’ve buried pens in the cemetery. I’ve had lovers who stood at just about his height, or shared his same skin color, or shared a similarly strange sounding name. I’ve bellied up to bars and pretended it was him serving me drinks. I’ve pretended. I even had sex with a man who was dying, took him as far inside of me as he could go, and when he was there, filling me, my father came to mind and I thought, don’t worry, I’ll take the pain away.

 

Along with the ring and the watch, inside the jewelry box are several sets of cuff links. I pull out a few. In my closet I also have a tuxedo shirt. Most of the remains of my father’s possessions were divided up amongst us kids--Annette got his wallet, Cindy his money clip, Rina has a suit, and Elaine has his knife--but we all got at least one tuxedo shirt. These are not shirts he wore to the opera or the ballet. These were the shirts he wore to work.
      He worked nights. He’d leave the house sometime after four, and as he’d leave one of us would always call out, “Don’t work too hard.” 

I used these words in the eulogy I gave for him when I was only sixteen.

I take one of his work shirts out of my closet now and lay it on my bed. I’d put it on, but I know it won’t fit. I lay it out, prop it on a pillow so his head would rest where mine sleeps every night in this home I’ve built far away from where we were together. I see sweat stains. This is what is left of him. I lay on top of the shirt, take the empty arms and wrap them around my shoulders. Now he’s the bartender again, and I am still his son, and he strokes me.

It’s dusk now, and after all the years I finally figured what that means. It’s the time when the sun is going down. I can hear my mother calling me in. I run toward the sound of her voice. I run up the stairs. This time they aren’t standing in the bathroom doorway. Now they’re sitting at the kitchen table. He is there. He’s sitting in a chair next to his son, his right hand holding a spoon full of food.
I wish you could see the look on his face.

I wish I could.

But I write to tell myself that the look on his beautiful brown face is one of pure joy, so proud he is of me, his one and only son.

Once more he feeds me, and after all these years, I try to feel full.

 

They can’t take that away from me   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Randall Horton

Debbie and Me

 

The car rested rim to brick on four cinder blocks in front of an abandoned gas station with weeds sprouting through the cracked concrete that spread over an empty lot. During the day the car sat inconspicuously in the middle of a constantly changing landscape of rowhouses under renovation. Even so, the dwellings presented an almost identical design, the only differentiating factor being the coat of primer or the screen door or the iron bars securing the windows or their shutters. That the gutted out Toyota Corolla sat there collecting sun and dust, and the fact that every time Debbie and I walked down 14th Street, knowing that when the sun no longer willed itself to shine, there would be no doubt we would ease our tired bodies inside the metal bucket on R Street at some point during the middle of the night.

I met Debbie under the most contradictory of circumstances considering she sold her body and cocaine simultaneously, injecting as much effort into one as she did the other. It proved difficult to make a clear distinction as to which vice radiated more dominantly in her physiological makeup. Debbie walked confidently via Tina Turner legs, each stride as lovely as a long stretch of sun warming the Potomac River. Her legs had been sculpted by God herself. Whether or not one actually believed in God proved to be inconsequential. To see those legs underneath a black or red miniskirt strolling Logan Circle was to recognize a power greater than oneself. Her walk literally compelled do-good men to screech car tires, maybe on the way to their wives, and find fifty or sixty dollars for this long-legged beauty to work her mojo. Debbie could prop those carmel skinned legs on an abandoned stoop and serve myriad hookers—and the homeless and woebegone if necessary. She handled each starving customer differently because she understood the need to feed the body, the guttural hunger that craved for a swirl of smoke through a straight shooter. Debbie studied her customers before taking their money. She would reach into her plastic bag filled with smaller plastic bags to pick out the appropriate proportion of narcotic that fit her analysis of the addict before her. One might need a healthy bag, one that was stuffed heavy handed, but nonetheless a dime bag. Then too, one might be a greedy hoarder or geek-monster, playing and breaking every code of the streets, like robbing old ladies or selling their children’s food stamps or WIC vouchers. That addict would get a skimpy bag. There were many more codes that Debbie lived by and these codes would never appear in an official document to be reviewed and studied, yet they were part of the everyday experience for those living beneath the narrative of life.

Debbie became my woman on a night I made her feel something other than what it meant to be a street walker or addict. I reintroduced her to her womanhood, a woman sensitive to touch and shudders only intimacy can bring. In a moment of time, a night as unexpected as the next minute, the next day or night, we found each other in a crack house filled with sunken eye sockets, skin falling off bones and the indescribable smell of human waste. It doesn’t matter if I tell you which house, because they are all the same. Fiends banging on the wrought iron gate, which is usually double locked and has to be doubly unlocked to facilitate the flow of traffic. Little or no furniture, maybe a mattress for people to have sex, fuck, make love or whatever happens when naked bodies rub together. Lighters flicked, glass stems filled with white smoke, girls offering oral sex for one pull of the medicinal taste, and sometimes guys too. They are all the same. In an environment like this I found Debbie in a room doing nothing but trying to sleep off the fatigue. When she saw me, something that night clicked like she was looking for someone to help, for someone to help her. We formed a union that random night on 13th Street in our interlude of sex and drugs. I took her home with me, washed her, fed her, and after a couple of days fucked her again with the love I knew I would never be able to fully give her. To say she was my main woman meant I understood she would vendor her body of her own free will, and yet by the same token, she understood I would hold the money, would watch her back and maybe occasionally hit a poor sucker over the head and empty his pockets of the two-week check he had just cashed from the corner liquor store. To get to this kind of understanding in a relationship meant everything I learned about treating women, but more importantly, everything I learned about how to love was gone, vacated by this life I chose to live.

The power of love is a destructive emotion when operating under forces that are irrational and function as a gateway to undetermined circumstances of grief at the flip of a two-headed coin. Debbie proved to be an extension of Joanne and Antoinette, both former loves who walked the streets for money. Debbie chased shiny hubcaps down 13th Street on hot summer nights dressed in two piece spaghetti strap bras and matching thongs, hopping in used and new model cars with sunroofs, drop tops or just plain metal buckets, only to veer quickly into a alley, slide a condom on the penis and sexually perform for ten to fifteen minutes, maybe clip a wallet or dig into pockets when the john orgasmed. While Debbie advertised and marketed the one thing she would never lose until she died, I walked a grid of about four to five squared blocks using T Street as our base and rendezvous point. Our internal clocks synchronized to bring us together in front of the Whitelaw Building, which back in its hay day had all the great jazz musicians perform and stay there. Now the music that circled this building came from heel clicking street walkers whistling and crooning the johns, or the homeless who owned this area at night with their robbing and schemes of mayhem, and then there were people like me, men trying to make ends meet until the big payday came along, using any and everybody for self gratification. We made our own drumbeats, blared our own trumpets, daring the police to stop the Charlie Parker soundtrack playing in our heads. The smell of the streets. The freedom to run un-intruded with reckless abandon. To be in the midst of five o’clock shadow men hugged against redbrick walls with heroin dragging them into a slow nod, the brim slicing their face into a half moon shadow. I refused to leave this way of life. And yet the undeniable desire to fly over the blue Caribbean into Hatchet Bay and smell its salted sea. To ride in a fishing boat undetected by the coast guard. I wanted to do it all again.

“So you expect me to believe you smuggled cocaine. Why should I believe you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you sleeping in a car.”

“Thanks to you. You got me/us put out, remembered? I told you not to play the music loud and you played the music loud. I told you not to cook up cocaine in a spoon because the landlord came downstairs to use the laundry, yet you did. You stole the rent money out my pocket. I had a good thing going on my job. I must have stolen at least 50 brand new lap tops in the box. I should not be sleeping in a car.”

“Don’t blame me because you blew all of your money. Where are all of your so called friends now? If you such a big shot why don’t you get us out of this damn car? Go smuggle some cocaine to do that. Better yet, stay right here while I go sell my ass to get us out of this shit we in.”

How do you argue against a painful truth? How do you make your body disappear in the blink of an eye? Debbie knew how to bring me back to the sobering reality of how yesterday’s score doesn’t win today’s game. I was using history to pull myself out of a self-induced funk, a history that didn’t mean anything to people who stood in the soup lines and slept with me in homeless shelters. I represented the failure that they could not escape themselves, and yet in some way I wanted to be better than they were. The solitude of night makes you contemplate these transgressions, like sleeping in a car where only a block away, the slow hum of traffic is created by cars driven by people who are going to a destination, and you feel like the twisted streetlamp on the corner that is shinning—is spotlighting you—to inform the world: here lies true failure. The men and women passing on the sidewalk, laughing about the good times they incurred, had homes to slide a front door key into. I had brilliant stars and Debbie. She didn’t return to our make shift home that night, and I knew she was selling her body for herself, getting high for herself—it was always about the self. In the end, I had no right to expect money from her body.

By the time night released daylight from its creaky hinges, the abandon car did not have my body inside its metal structure. Too much shame to be observed in broad daylight sleeping in a car. Fed up with depending on another woman for my sole survival once again, I crisscrossed over to Rhode Island Avenue against the grain of rush hour traffic to where my clothes were being housed after the eviction from my basement apartment in Springfield, VA. All of that hard work to get a job and an apartment gone, again. One year before, I fled DC under the cover of the night because I owed a man for a package he fronted me, a man who killed people without batting an eye. Squeezing the trigger of a gun and allowing the bullet to stab me in the heart would not make him flinch or emotional. So I had to run—to get ghost—as in evaporate from the radius of his reach. That night I met my homeboy Jones on Florida Avenue. He gave Antoinette and myself bus money to head to Atlanta. Within my first month of being there I got a job as an inventory clerk as well as rented an apartment. My father, who believed me when I said I was trying to turn a new page, helped me get on my feet. He hid the pain of my self destruction with a love only reserved for those who have brought children into the world and truly care about their wellbeing. The Honda Accord I drove, my father helped secure with a promise that I would pay. Within one year I lost the car, the apartment, the job, and my self-worth all over again. When my father put me on a bus back to DC, I told him I was going to make it this time. I went to a shelter in Virginia, got a job again, saved my money, and got another apartment, again. After six months with Debbie, everything was gone. When I knocked on my old friend Mitch’s house to shower and change clothes I could feel the filth, not only on my body, but my spirit as well.

“Get me a laptop today and I got five hundred dollars to help you get on your feet.”

“Mitch, sometimes I can’t even feel my feet. It’s like I’m walking and the sidewalk is changing landscapes and everybody is moving except me, but I don’t got no feeling.”
       “Dude, what the fuck are you talking about?”
       “I’m talking about feeling myself walking forward. What it means to feel
something. I think I have forgotten how to do that?”
       “Dude, whatever. Where have you been staying?”
       “You really don’t want to know”

“Okay, I don’t want to know. But I fucking do want to know if you can get me a
laptop.”

People often say one can smell weakness in a person by the worry-lines in the forehead or the contortions the skeletal frame makes through body posturing. Mitch smelt my body language as much as he sensed the desperation in the crack of my voice. I hated Mitch because I felt he was helping to make me self-conscious about homelessness. I could have stayed with him for a while, but he would only use this as a way to feel superior to me, and I was trying to hold on to some pride. When I left Mitch’s house wearing a dark two piece suit with an ironed white shirt and burgundy tie, no one on the subway could guess I had spent the last two weeks in an abandoned car. As the old folks used to say, I cleaned up real good.

 

~

            My movement mirrors Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the way I walk undetected on the streets with a suit draped around my malnourished body. I descend down the escalator into the hole in the ground, through the turnstile, into an opening subway car crowded with rush hour people. There are bodies close to mine, yet no one acknowledges I exist. I’m hidden right out in the open. In broad daylight no one sees the who of what I am. At times, even to myself, I don’t exist in this commodified self-centered city. Entering and exiting tunnels, moving from one state of existence to the next, then stop—start over again—move to the constricted faces focusing in and out of my eye’s lens. Doors opening and closing and I don’t know where to get off—without explanation I exit at the Farragut North station, float undetected up the escalator, ascending another hole into open spaced crowed with buildings. People walk through my body as if I were immaterial, not body matter, not a being.
     The building is arbitrary among a row of arbitrary structures that have nothing to do with each other, yet they are systematically lined in unison, cubed and squared as if they are linked together by internal mechanizations. Comprised of mortar and brick, the facial feature of each building is an expression of a perceived freedom: beveled or cogent glass, sliding or revolving doors, independent company logos. Basically they look the same. The Hispanic secretary thinks so too. They all look the same: a suit, a tie, a clean shaven face. A flesh covered machine that works nine to five.  I walk past her in my vagueness, moving like the insignificance I was or had become, peeping my hungry eyeballs into cubicles and open doors until I see the machine in a corner office overlooking K Street. Forty-five seconds and cables become untangled and disengaged from the modem—the power shut off, the server no longer able to backup information—the screen dark. The laptop in my bag. I scurry my outline past the secretary filing her crescent indented nails, take the back stairwell, skipping two cement steps at a time until a door opens into the lobby I just entered. I breeze through the revolving door that instantaneously spits me back among the walking. I turn the corner and descend down another hole until I am no longer a part of this scene. The subway doors close. I am still invisible.

In 1961 the most logical way to drive from Guntersville to Birmingham, AL was Hwy 59. Except in 1961 the fast moving freeway there now used to be narrow two-lane. This is the route you took the night the hospital called to say there was a small baby boy who could one day possibly look like you, and that his voice may grow into the one you use when you laugh or say hello darling. The call came one month earlier than expected. Most babies wait until the ninth month of conception to gain entrance to this hellashish world. He may not make it through the night. How does a newly anointed first-time father process that this newly born child, not bigger than a mosquito, may die before daybreak? He is in an incubator with wires attached to his body, monitoring his heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing patterns. All the electronic lights, beeps and gizmos say he lives, but the doctors say he may die. Come now if you want to see what your future may have looked like. 

You travelled this route back and forth on the weekends because there was a baby on the way, something special swelling inside of your newly vowed wife, a living being. You taught young kids in elementary school, hoping one day you would have a child of your own. The mental map in your cranium guided you through the dark contours of Alabama terrain—you who were caught up in a web of emotions. Press the goddamn petal to the floor. You had to say Can’t this fucking thing go any faster—must go—go faster motherfucker while negotiating the curves and then flooring the straight-aways. In some small way, lying there in that incubator between life and death, struggling in this strange new place, wanting to be visible after so much darkness, I rode those curves and straight-aways with you, wanting to see what my future could be. Get here—as fast as you can, get here. Daddy. I need you.
        

 

 

 

 

 

          

 

CL Bledsoe

The Old Grey Mare

I raced down the black tunnel of the interstate, my eyes locked on the ever shifting but ever familiar patch of visible road. Miles and minutes blended as I passed through them, lulling me into a soporific state. It was New Year's Eve and I was driving my ex-girlfriend, her suicidal, transgendered cousin, and their friend back to Jackson. We’d been passing out pills earlier, chugging them down with vodka, chasing it with more pills and some pot to top it off. I'd had some of the pot, some of the vodka.  I thought they were all asleep until Missy, the friend I’d been ignoring all night, spoke from the back seat.

"Hey, is your car supposed to smoke that much?" she said.

I glanced in the rearview for the first time in maybe an hour. A wall of white smoke rose against the black limbo of the night sky. I took the next exit into West Memphis while Missy tried to wake Ariel and her cousin, Everett.

The darkness of early morning broke into the grid of a Wal-Mart parking lot. It was mostly empty. I pulled into a spot not too close to the building and killed the engine. Smoke poured from under the hood and enveloped the car as I opened the door. No flames yet. Missy and Everett got out. I went around to Ariel's door.

"Come on," I said.

"I'll stay in the car," she mumbled, eyes still closed.

"The car's on fire."

"I'm tired."

"Sweetie?" Missy cut in front of me and leaned in close to Ariel, speaking in soft tones. "You've got to get out of the car. It's going to blow up."

She dragged Ariel out and we stood, blinking in the sodium light. 
      "Think it'll blow?" someone asked.
      There was a chorus of shrugs.
      It wasn’t until we’d walked to the automatic doors of the store that I realized I probably shouldn't have parked so close to the other cars, but I wasn’t planning on going back to that car now. I was in a kind of shock: one minute I'd been driving, the next we were on fire. 

Not that I was surprised. I'd had that car for two years, ever since my first car was totaled by a drunk driver (not me) coming back from a fishing trip with a truckload of empties and nothing else to show. My Dad spent a couple thousand on a 1986 Chevy Cavalier and pocketed the rest of the insurance money. It overheated the day after he bought it, so he took it to a buddy and told him to tinker with it. The next day, it overheated again. I was ready to take the damned thing back, but Dad held on to that car like a snapping turtle waiting for thunder. He would pay some buddy to fix it; I’d take it out and drive it till it broke down, which wasn’t usually that far.  Mostly, the car tended to overheat. Sometimes it idled too high, sometimes the alternator went out; these were all fixable things, but they implied a larger problem that no-one could pinpoint. It was the overheating that stumped everyone. My father blamed me. He thought I was taking the new parts off the car and selling them for drugs. I was impressed with his opinion of my mechanical know-how and business savvy.

After about a year, my brother-in-law discovered that the fan had been wired to run backwards. We gave him a beer, and he rewired it. I drove the car to town to get gas, and it broke down again.

*           *          *
      

Inside the Wal-Mart, I tried to convince the man at the help desk to loan me a fire extinguisher. He declined.

"Well, then can you send someone out there with one? My car's on fire."
      "Sorry," he said.

"Well, can you call the fire department? The pay phone's broken."
      This was a lie. I didn't actually know where the payphone was.
      He shook his head. I was astounded. I didn't know if the guy didn't believe me or was maybe worried that they'd be liable somehow.
      "Look," I said. "My car is on fire in the parking lot. When it explodes it's going to
take a couple of other cars with it. Your customers' cars. Now I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job, but I suggest you call the fire department before those customers come out to find nothing but shards left of their vehicles." He stared at me, unmoved.
      I’d done all I could, so I walked away. Ariel and the others were gone. I wandered deeper into the brightly lit maze of Chinese imports until I noticed an annoyed-looking manager and several stock boys heading purposefully toward the back of the store. I followed them to the bedding department, where Ariel and the bunch had piled pillows on the floor and were sleeping on them. I ducked behind an aisle and watched the ruckus as they were woken and led away.

I found them grumbling in the alcove where the video games and carts are, a sort of liminal space between the real world and the inside of a Wal Mart.
      Outside, flames rose from the hood of my car. They were small and quick, like when a piece of paper burns.
      "They said we couldn't come back in," Everett said. "I tried to tell them we're stranded ‘cause your car's on fire." I didn’t respond. His thin, pale face was sullen. Mascara circled his eyes, creeping down his cheeks. As people passed to enter the store, they stared at his spiky blond hair, made up face and rock-star clothes with a range of looks from curiosity to disgust.
      "I should fucking sue you," Everett yelled back inside the door.
      "Anybody got a cigarette?" Ariel asked. No one did.
      She turned green eyes on me as if for the first time. "Hey," she said, her voice softening. "Let's walk."

She took my arm. I felt my whole body grow warm.

Outside, smoke pasted the parking lot. She snuggled up to me, leaning blond hair on my shoulder, her breasts warm on my arm.

"I'll let you kiss me if you buy me some cigarettes," she said, turning full lips up to me. 
      "All right." I leaned towards her.

"After," she said. "And if you're nice, I'll be nice."
      We kept walking. "What kind do you want?" I asked.
      "I'm joking," she said, pushing me a little. "What's wrong?"
      I shrugged and motioned towards my car.
      "You're wound so tight," she said. "You should laugh. What else can you do?"
      We walked back inside and sat on a bench.
      "I thought you were going to get some cigarettes," she said. "I can't go in, or I would."                        
      "I thought you were kidding."
      "About the kiss, not about the cigarettes," she said, showing me a smile that meant “now”.
      I went inside for the cigarettes. Everett yelled orders as though I was a drive-through window, and I ignored him. Maybe I was spending my New Year's Eve in the doorway of a West Memphis Wal-Mart, but at least I hadn't been thrown out. I could come and go as I pleased. It was something.

 

*           *           *

The fire truck arrived and here came the guy who'd refused me a fire extinguisher earlier, running out with one and making a show of being on the scene. We lit cigarettes and watched the flames eat at the sky as they pried the hood open. The firemen sprayed the Wal Mart fire extinguisher on the engine, and had the fire out in seconds. Everett and Ariel cheered.

I went to meet the firemen when it was out.
      "Do you know what caused it?" I asked.
      "Maybe electrical," one of them said.
       "You might want to be careful," he added. "The battery melted pretty bad, so if you drive it, be careful of the acid."
      He was a young guy, with the plastic, angry face and dead eyes of a cop. "Do you think it would drive?" I asked him, suddenly hopeful.
      A thoughtful look crossed his face. "Well no, but I mean, just be careful."
      "Thanks for the advice."
       They packed up and left me with the ruins of my car. I tried to imagine all the money my father had spent to keep the thing running. All wasted, now. I’d pissed my fair share away, too. A few months earlier, I’d made big plans to move to Fayetteville to go to college, but the transmission had gone out on the car, and all the money I’d saved had to go to fix the thing up. So much for my plans of getting out. The car was a weight I'd blamed for holding me back. And now it sat smoldering in the parking lot of a West Memphis Wal Mart on New Year’s Eve.

I dug through the glove box and removed everything that might connect me as the owner of the car, though I would later realize that I forgot the license plate.
      After the firemen left, Missy called her mother's boyfriend. We spent the rest of the night and most of the morning waiting for him to pick us up, dozing on the hard benches. On the ride back, I sat on the van’s cup holder, in between Missy and her mother’s boyfriend. In the back, Everett kept asking someone to hurt him.
      "Twist it," he said, holding out his finger.
      Ariel twisted it and he moaned. When we were in school, there had been a tradition that kids would trash Everett’s car for homecoming. The football players beat him just like his father beat him. Eventually, he’d become what he thought they wanted—someone who enjoyed the abuse. Maybe that was his way out, or maybe he was just lost and didn’t realize there was a way out. Wherever he was, Ariel was there too, but I didn’t want to be there with them anymore.
      Missy's mom's boyfriend dropped us off. I stumbled through the dawn light of New Year’s Day, and for the first time in my life, it truly felt as though a line had been drawn.  This day, this new stream of time was separate from what had gone before. I went home and called my father at work.
      "My car burned up in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in West Memphis," I told
him. "I'm home now." And hung up.
      I went to bed, and he called back a half-hour later.
      "We need to get it towed someplace," he said. "And we'll have to pay for storage fees until we can get it. We'll have to get it towed back here, I guess. That'll cost us."
      "Why do we have to get it towed?"
      "If we leave it in the parking lot, they'll impound it."
      "And then what?"
      "Send it to a junkyard, I guess," he said. "And we won't be able to get it back."
      "We don't want it back, Dad. It burned. It's a heap. Leave it there. Let them tow it. They can deal with it," I said.
      He was quiet.
      "It's done," I said, and hung up.
      I waited for him to call back but he didn't, so I went to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jim McGarrah

A Question of Balance

 

Having been indoctrinated into the cult of manliness by my father during a league bowling night in 1960, I felt ready to handle any obstacle that females might place before me on the path to adulthood. In the men’s room of the bowling alley, a strange contraption hung, like a piece of Warhol art, above a row of porcelain urinals. If you put in a quarter, the machine claimed to spit out a small foil package containing something called a condom. Supposedly this device prevented disease and in a bowling alley restroom I could understand why that might have been a major concern. Terrified, I asked my father what was safe to touch.

“What the hell are babbling about, boy,” he said.

“Disease, disease. I don’t want to catch anything and die.” I answered and pointed to the machine on the wall.

“You won’t catch that kind of problem on a toilet seat or anywhere else in here. Men have tried to use that excuse for years and it just won’t fly.”

Confused, I asked him to buy one just in case. He laughed.

“Look, this thing is what we men call a cut rubber. It’s like a balloon only you don’t blow it up. You put it on your pecker before you screw a woman, if you ever happen to be lucky enough to screw one.”

“Why?” I said.

“Women sometimes have germs that make your pecker burn when you pee. Now, I’ve told you all you need to know. I’m trying to bowl a 200 average for the night, don’t bother me with questions. As ugly as you are, this conversation will probably be as close to using one as you ever get.”

Certainly, this was as close as my father and I came to having a discussion about dating and how a man might learn to pursue a relationship with a woman. My mother, on the other hand, felt differently about my prospects and my need for education in the not-so-subtle art of conquest. Yes, I said conquest. Mom learned gender roles in the 1950’s when feminism meant soft skin and crocodile tears, long before it could be considered a movement toward equality. Men were dominant and women were submissive. It was the hunter/gatherer Eisenhower era. It was understood by almost everyone. Nature desired each male and female to adhere to their natural roles.

However, mom believed also that any twelve year old male who aspired to success in his endeavors might someday require more than a cursory knowledge of the condom-on-penis conundrum as well. Women respected men who were civilized when performing their god-given duties as rulers. To that end, she enrolled me in Mrs. Kendall’s ballroom dancing class. This class, which the mortician’s wife Betty Kendall taught in the living room of their home, took place every Thursday after school on south Main Street in our little farm community of Princeton, Indiana. Connected to the makeshift dance floor by virtue of a single door was an adjoining room where dead people lived.

The fact that embalming went on a few feet from us as the record player whirred out sounds of “The Tennessee Waltz” cast a pall of eerie claustrophobia, like a wet wool blanket, over the airy space cleared of furniture each week. When added to the eclectic blend of shy, male little league ball players, confused female junior high school debutantes, and Betty’s bizarre appearance – a kaleidoscopic melting of purple eye shadow into black mascara into ruby red lipstick and orange foundation – the surrealistic atmosphere of my new reality generated a recalcitrant outbreak of acne, sweaty palms, and nausea every time I entered the brick building. As I look back on it now, the close presence of girls may have influenced my complexion too, along with new surges of testosterone that often left my stomach feeling like I had ridden fast over a steep hill in the back seat of dad’s Desoto.

I stepped on Susan’s toes every time we tried to waltz and Judy laughed each time Mike or Barry bumped into Mrs. Kendall’s coffee table or tripped over a lamp cord. Still, I survived the first two weeks of the waltz, the cha-cha, and the foxtrot fairly well. It seemed as if I might actually become a gentleman after all in harmony with my mother’s dream. Then, Denise showed up for our third session. Every anxiety any psychologist had ever imagined wormed its way into my rattled psyche upon the arrival of my seventh-grade goddess. My new red corduroy trousers looked stupid. My shoes lacked polish and white socks were uncool. The purple polyester shirt I got for Christmas from my aunt was showing rings of sweat under my arms. I should have applied more English Leather and made my father teach me to shave. During the first cha-cha, I lost my balance three times, tripping over my own feet and falling into Susan’s perky breasts. On the third trip, I saw Denise smile at me as she glided swan-like across the floor, her hand in Mike’s hand. My cheeks flushed. I could never raise my head and stare into those beautiful blue eyes again. My mother had ruined my life.

Then, our dance instructor, frustrated with the incompetence she was forced to witness, thought a change of pace might do us all some good and decided to let us practice more contemporary movements, undulations each of us had grown familiar with thanks to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and Chubby Checker. That’s when the beast was born. Judy called lady’s choice and now that there were three boys and three girls, Mrs. Kendall could rest from Barry’s toe-tapping assaults. Denise chose me. My knees buckled when she pointed her elegant finger as sure as if it had been a gun aimed and fired point blank at my heart.

White socks slipped and slid across the floor, buffing the varnished wood to the rhythmic angst of The Jarmels – A little bit of soap will wash away your lipstick from my face, but a little bit of soap will never nevernevernever erase, the pain in heart and my eyes as I go through the lonely years, a little bit of soap will never wash away my tears.

We swirled and bounced, shifting from foot to foot, dodging the collective smell of Clearasil and English leather, ignoring the tragic reality of the lyrics. Denise arched her back, and stretched her perfect little breasts against her black sweater. Those nipples made me dream about being a hunger that she might dream about. Her small hands replaced the neck of a Louisville Slugger in my sweaty palms and we danced, not just the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Swim, and the Bristol Stomp, but something greater, more intricate than the footwork, wilder than the 2-4 drumbeat. We danced till we became the dance, as if the rhythm remolded us into strange new creatures whose only desire was to feel the blood boil and rise in our veins, then fade while Mrs. Kendall changed the record and then rise again with a new urgency created by Berry Gordy and his repetition of language and rhythm and melody.

Do you love me, I can really move
Do you love me, I’m in the grove
Do you love me, nnnoooww
That I can dance. Do you Do you Do you
Do you love me, now that I can dance.

 

All too soon the brief respite ended. I returned to the iambic pentameter of a waltz and the self-consciousness generated by the discipline of form, grace and the intimacy of close bodily contact. I’d like to report that Mrs. Kendall’s six-week ballroom dancing class made me a civilized gentleman. Unfortunately, my mother was proven wrong. I have remained clumsy and out of balance around women for the last fifty years. Never quite able to adjust when the feminist movement took hold, I continued opening doors and giving my seat away on the bus even when chastised by militants for being condescending. Once, I suffered the indignity of an harassment complaint for mentioning to a co-worker that I liked her dress. During the evolution of the sensitive man in the 21st century, I have been unable to believe that my wife’s monthly desire for chocolate has nothing to do with PMS, really. I will never accept that the cult of Oprah is open to males, or that women come from Venus while men come from Mars. Denise has married someone else, twice. As for dancing, I quit altogether after I saw Saturday Night Fever in 1977. The idea that I would have to trade my levis and tie-dyed tee shirts in for a three piece white suit coupled with the fact that cover bands had replaced the Rolling Stones’ earthy tones with a sort of squealing Bee Gees mimesis terrified me to such an extent that I could no longer spend evenings in my favorite night clubs.

Throughout my life balance in all things great and small has been what I have needed most. When I struggle and gain it, I’m forced to struggle even harder to maintain it. Maybe that’s just the way we all live, stumbling back and forth, caught in the ever-shrinking space that separates life from death. Some days I wake up to the waltz and other days, the twist. Most days I find myself balanced somewhere between Tchaikovsky and Chubby Checker, between the smell of lilacs leaking through the walls from the last funeral and the flush of blood rising with Denise’s touch, between the need for stability and the desire for excess. But, it isn’t such a bad place to be when you consider that the alternative to the struggle for equilibrium awaits us all in that other room just off the dance floor.

 

 

 

 

 

Clyde Borg

Three Women

 

Not many references to Virginia Prince Barnbrook Jones can be located on the internet. Only her obituary gives any information about her life. However, she has a connection to two prominent women.

One of them, Sylvia Shaw Judson, was a renowned sculptor, and one of her most outstanding works of art sits outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston. It is a statue of a notable figure from colonial history, Mary Barrett Dyer, the third person in the link, and the most important of the three women.

On a late spring day, Mary Dyer was led to the gallows located on what became the Boston Common. The ceremony was accentuated by the beating of drums as she was led to a large tree where she was hanged. Her crime was being a Quaker and challenging the laws of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Mary Dyer had come into conflict with the established Puritan Church. She had come under the influence of Anne Hutchinson and was forced to leave the Massachusetts Bay colony. Later she visited England and met George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and became a Quaker.

She returned to Massachusetts espousing Quaker beliefs, and again was forced to leave the colony. In the mean time Massachusetts passed a law that called for the execution of any Quaker who returned after banishment.

Despite the legislation, she returned once more in support of two Quaker men who were awaiting execution. It was only through the efforts of her husband, William, that her life was spared a moment before she was about to be hanged.

Mary Dyer continued to defy the law by once again returning to Massachusetts. She was arrested and was finally executed. She had disobeyed the law of Massachusetts in a land that eventually would pride itself on the principle of freedom of religion. She gave up her life on June 1, 1660

In 1959, the eminent Quaker sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson’s bronze representation of Mary Dyer was placed outside the Massachusetts State House near the site of her execution on Boston Common. Copies of the Mary Dyer statue are also exhibited at the Friends Center in Philadelphia and on the campus of Earlham College, a Quaker institution, in Indiana.

The model for Judson’s statue was the aforementioned Virginia Prince Barnbrook Jones, a successful businesswoman. a director of a large boat building company, and most significantly, a distant ancestor of Mary Dyer.

 

 

 

 

Meg Morley

That Zombie Just Needs a Hug

I don’t know what sorts of preparations are being made for the Zombie Apocalypse. I imagine shelters, dehydrated food, and an underground water system. Maybe zombie drills in schools and emergency broadcast service zombie tests. Likely artillery and chemical defenses, developed by the world’s greatest zombie specialists. And I appreciate these efforts. When the pandemic hits and half the population tries to eat the other half, something, or things, must be done to prevent a complete global take-over.
But violence is never the answer.

As a young girl in church, I sang with my Sunday-school classmates a song that taught the importance of treating everyone kindly, even those who are different. We sang, “If you don’t walk as most people do, some people walk away from you. But I won’t. I won’t.” A defining characteristic of the zombie is its stumbling stride, a labored limp. And while some zombies can run at incredible and even unnatural speeds, some can fly, and others crawl in the pursuit of human flesh, any witness of a zombie shuffle can attest to the discomfort a zombie must feel in normal pedestrian activity. Sure, if I saw an approaching zombie my instinct would be to run. But that’s not what the song teaches, now is it?

“If you don’t talk as most people do, some people point and laugh at you. But I won’t, I won’t.” Again, wisdom to be heeded in zombie relations. Partly because pointing and laughing will only further aggravate the already irritable Zombie, and partly because if we shouldn’t laugh at the kids who can’t get their Rs right, (like Ryan in the third grade who said, the wabbit wan awound the wailwoad twack), how much greater is the sin of mocking the zombie who has lost all capacity for functional communication, who has been reduced to only grunts, moans, and bloody drool.

Zombies are people too. And they don’t have it easy. Imagine waking up one morning, hungry, and suddenly nothing in your fridge or pantry seems appetizing. After 15 years of eggs and bacon you’re tired of them. Cereal? No. Yogurt? That’s not it either. And then, as cravings always do, it hits you fast and hard—you’re hungry for human. This is when life gets complicated. You can’t find packaged person in the grocer’s freezer. It’s not available on any fast food menu. No McMan or Jr. Bacon Steveburger. Even online shopping will fail to deliver in a timely manner, and those shipping rates are outrageous. So, like our earliest ancestors, you are forced to hunt down your food. It’s a tricky prey, what with cars and guns and what not. The success rate is minimal, and you’re constantly trying to subdue the insatiable hunger.

So now that we recognize zombies as those who are starving, limping, and suffering from severe speech impediments, it’s time to rethink our defense plan. When confronted with a zombie, we shouldn’t sprint. We shouldn’t giggle. We shouldn’t shoot point-blank or reach for the napalm. Instead we should hold out our arms, ready for an embrace and say, “I’m here to listen, friend.” It’s a gamble of course, as you’ve made yourself easy lunch. But there’s a person deep down inside the harsh zombie exterior, and everyone needs a friend. I predict the zombie, instead of biting off a large chunk of neck or thigh will instead give in to the embrace, crying, “argh humph rooog ari dooot garg mook”, which in zombie means, “nobody understands me.” We should pat the zombie’s greasy head; let it cry on our shoulder, offering words of comfort, “I know. I know. It’s ok. Let it all out”. And then sing the final verse, “I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you. That’s how I’ll show my love for you.”

           

 

 

 

 

Christina Holzhauser

If You Don't Know God, You Don't Know Jack

On a Thursday night I shaved my head and dyed the bristles red.  It only took a few local beers, a few hits, and one repeat of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust before I dug through my closet to find the clippers.  When I started that night my hair was a natural blonde and a little past my chin; as long as it could grow in three years.  I’d been thinking about it for a few weeks, since I’d gone on a float trip with Mark Dalton, one of my bosses, and we tried to have sex and I laughed.

I laughed because Dalton was a man, and the last boyfriend I had was back in high school.  It was only recently that I saw him across the dance floor in the city’s only gay bar.  Now, I saw him almost every week.  He’d fling his scarf around his neck and introduce me to the drag queen running the show, Aieta Buffet, as his ex-girlfriend and laugh. And now I was punishing myself because of Dalton, cutting huge chunks out of my hair, staring at my pale reflection in the mirror wondering what was happening to me.

Sarah and I met in a theory class in Houston where we were both studying anthropology.  At the time, I was conducting my own sort of social experiments, having all of my hair about an inch long, in stiff blue spikes, with only thin strips of long blonde bangs hanging in my eyes, a curtain to my face.  I liked it.  I liked how people would steer their kids across the sidewalk away from me. I liked that people assumed I was a club kid, that I did all kinds of drugs.  In reality, I wasn’t old enough to get into bars, and I’d never so much as smoked a cigarette. I liked when people came into the store where I worked and asked to see a manager.  I would smile and say, “How can I help you today?” while fingering the chain hanging from my wallet.  The specialty contact I had in one eye blacked out my entire iris, and had a white spiral where my natural hazel should’ve been.  If I looked around too fast, people got dizzy.
After we’d dated a few weeks, Sarah pulled me into her bathroom, kissed me, the Anne Taylor perfume her mom had bought for her filling up the small space. She cut my two strips of bangs, kissed me again, “There,” she said, “that looks better.”  And my hair had been growing since.

It was three months before the Thursday I shaved my head that I called Sarah in Muskogee, Oklahoma and she answered and said she couldn’t talk. That she answered and said her friends were leaving right now and she had to get a ride. And finally, she didn’t answer.  She was doing archaeology there, stuck in a Motel 6 room for a few months.  I’d made the six hour drive a few times, trying to patch up our every other month relationship.  Sarah, I loved.  Sarah and I ate jalapeño chips and drank Shiner Bock at her favorite bar in Houston on Sunday nights, when I should’ve been studying. And I’d moved back to Missouri after graduation to get away from her, but only until she got her shit together and followed me.  That was our plan.  We’d applied for archaeology internships at the Missouri Department of Transportation and we were both hired.  The people I worked with kept asking me when she was coming and I kept saying, “Any day now.”  And now it seems they were probably shaking their heads behind my back.

She never came.

So I was going out a lot. Maybe not a lot, but a lot for someone who hardly went out. I was trying to forget Sarah in any girl who asked me to dance, in any person who paid attention to me.  I had to forget Sarah every night so I could finally rest.

I cut my hair at funny angles, walked around my apartment for a few minutes looking like a cubist painting, wondering if I had the balls to go out in public that way.  Grabbing another beer, I walked back into the bathroom and bent my head over the plastic sack I’d set into the basin of the sink and contemplated the lumps of hair like I’d just thrown them up.  I plugged in the clippers and felt the familiar vibration running up my arm into my elbow and bent my head chastising myself for letting my hair grow so long and normal this’ll teach you.

Jack showed up at my door the next morning when I was hung-over-cleaning and dancing to the Bowie album left in the c.d. player.  I woke up slowly that morning grabbing at my head, a dirty fog sitting behind my eyes, the loud ringing of nothing after tooloud music all night between my ears.  I was coming to remember what I’d done the previous night, just before I went to the bar.  Something that looked like a person flashed by my window, so I turned down the music enough to hear the doorbell ring. I plodded into the bathroom, squinted at my reflection in the mirror and saw some dye was still on my scalp around my ears.  I answered the door anyway, wearing a slinky tank-top and my favorite cut-off camo shorts.  Bright blue eyes were staring at me, set into a feminine face with dark hair and long lashes.  He was wearing a suit and tie but he looked just a few years out of college, probably my age. His hand reached out, a hand that had never worked a day, “Hi, I’m Jack.”  I introduced myself, squeezing extra hard like I do and stepped outside onto the cement patio with him. Mom had always taught me to never let a stranger inside. 

“Are you familiar with the publication The Watchtower?” he asked, a sideways smile like he knew exactly why I looked the way I did.  I hoped he wasn’t laughing at me and my new bad dye job.  Where had I heard that name before?

“You’re a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said like I’d gotten the right answer on some cheesy religion game show. His smiled widened showing what must have been expensive teeth and he introduced me to his wife and toddler, who must’ve been standing there the whole time.  She nearly put her chin to her chest and took their son back to a sleek black car parked at the curb.
We stood there, my mouth tasting like I’d licked the bar floor the night before: cigarettes and drag queens though I hadn’t put either in my mouth.  He asked if I believed in God, and I told him, no, not anymore.  When he asked why, I told him I’d gotten an education. But then I lay into the story of how when I was little I really wanted to be a priest or a nun.  For some reason, my usual answer of “I’m gay” seemed too rude to the man who was wearing a suit and tie in the middle of a Missouri summer. I tried to let him down easy saying, “God doesn’t really like me,” and “The church doesn’t really support me.”  It was at least 85 degrees with terrible humidity; I was starting to get a sweat mustache, wondering if the dye on my scalp would run down my face like red tear drops. Jack looked hot, too. “Well, don’t you want to live forever in God’s Paradise?”  I promised him his people wouldn’t want me there, but he didn’t pause and explained all about accepting the lord and being saved and never dying.  “Well, of course I want to live forever, but I shouldn’t believe in God just because of that.  It’s cheating, Jack.” If he would’ve caught me a few years earlier (with spiky blue hair) I’d have already told him to fuck off and leave me alone.  But recently I’d started smoking pot and hanging out with old Christian friends from high school, so I let him talk. Of course I wanted to live forever.  I’d seen too many relatives die, felt the pain even when I was two watching my parents cry.  I was afraid to tell the Witness, though, that I was scared to death of death.  There was no way I could explain that the only reason I would choose a religion is so I felt better about dying, but then, as I learned in college, in classes and from being friends with Hindus and Muslims, no religion is right. My new religion was to be nice to people and leave them alone.  But it was hot, and I didn’t want to stand there trying to convince him of my religion. I figured he’d never leave.

My feet were starting to burn on the concrete porch, the hot crystal granules felt like they were melting into my skin.  I grabbed at the door handle, anticipating the wave of stiff cool air that would hit me when I went back in.  “Sorry, but I have to be somewhere,” I lied.  When he asked if he could come back the next week, I hesitated only a little, he seemed harmless.  Jack handed me a little book, “Read this and write down any questions you have for next week.”  I threw the book on my coffee table and laughed.  Then I picked it up and spent an hour looking it over because I had nothing else to do.I grabbed a pen and paper because Jack the Jehovah was giving me homework.  And I was ready to ask Jack anything. 
I forgot I had something scheduled that Saturday, so I taped this letter to my door:

So, I totally forgot last week that I had a softball tournament this weekend.  Here are my questions from the book you gave me:

1. Regarding the picture near the beginning of the book: How is it that koalas and tigers (both naturally ill-mannered creatures) are allowing humans to touch them?  Also, there is a Chinese couple. Hmmm… how many Chinese Jehovah Witnesses are there in the world?  And in this land of paradise, do women always wear dresses?  And must men tuck in their collared shirts?
2. Page 6: “The Bible says God counts and names all the stars.” Do you believe God is the ruler of all galaxies?  And do you find astronomy a valid science?  Do you think science is valid at all?
3. Page 7: The Bible is the instruction manual: so, is the Koran not the same for Islam?  Just because they call their god differently-does that mean they’re going to hell (or rather, not going to some paradise where koalas, tigers, and humans [oh my!] cohabitate)?
4. Page 7:  This statement is interesting “if what the bible claims is true” does this mean you (and others) acknowledge the possibility it could not be true?
5. Page 8:  Please read the first paragraph--ok so, we enjoy things on earth so much that we don’t want them to end and therefore, believe in God so we never lose these delights.  Wouldn’t you say that is being greedy and not the point of religion?
6. Page 8: Life in paradise.  If you feel science is valid, I should tell you that our first parents were from east Africa at least 400,000 years before Adam and Eve. (These are homo sapiens I’m speaking of, nothing earlier) also, wouldn’t Adam and Eve’s children procreating be incestuous?  And if we all lived forever (like we talked about) the earth would be over populated and disease and famine would do their best to thin us out… now, that’s interesting don’t you think?

 Did you and your wife Karin go to college/ seminary?  Are you theologians?  Does she ever get to speak?  Will you make your son do this too?

Sorry to miss you,

When I got home from the game sore, sunburned, and slightly drunk, I found a note on my door.  Excited that Jack had written back to me, I snatched it from the screen.  But it was the letter I’d written to him, so I read it.  I giggled at how clever I was like man, I sure showed him. But then I turned the note over and over, just in case he’d written something on it in response. Anything.  And then I was worried, did he read it and just leave? I spent the next days trying to fight off the guilt I felt for being mean to him, trying to convince myself it was o.k. because I’d never see him again.

Jack rang my doorbell, and I stumbled out of bed, dizzy, grabbing for the letter I’d left on my coffee table all week.   He read it standing in my doorway, a pressed white button down shirt tucked into his black pants and a black tie, his thick black hair glowing with sunlight behind him.  I imagined he was the kind of guy who went running every morning at six, or was the kind of guy who didn’t have to run.  And though his hair was dark, I bet his chest was smooth, God forbid there’d be any hair on his back. He sighed and frowned and shook his head saying there were plenty of Chinese Witnesses.  And no, he didn’t go to seminary, he had a degree in finance. I laughed in his face, and then asked if he’d like to come in.  He smiled, seemed surprised that I even asked, and I worried about what he must think of me, my apartment looking the way it did.

Instead of talking about science as a whole, we discussed evolution.  I had graduated college only a couple of years earlier with a degree in anthropology, I could go on for hours about the great apes and their glorious history, pull down textbooks for proof while Jack reached for his Bible.  The conversation went nowhere, so he asked if he could come back the next week.  I smirked, “Jack, you can’t convince me.”  His eyes were feminine, like the drag queens.  He’d probably look great with some black eye-liner, and those thick long lashes with a little mascara.  He could’ve been any man at the bar, a mesh shirt and trendy shoes.  In another life, we both must’ve been gay men, our sculpted shaved bodies not too sweaty, dancing together all night.  From the way he smiled at me and said see you later, I think he understood, too.

The gay bar that next Friday night was more fun than usual.  I liked it more when they played electronic music and I’d swirl and pretend I was back in Houston, at one of the clubs I could never go to, doing the drugs I always fantasized about, but could never bring myself to try. Though my parents never forced me, I was a good Christian girl.  In high school I watched my friends drink and have sex and I judged and lectured them.  When I went to college I promised myself that if I graduated early, then, and only then, could I finally party. I graduated in three years, and was trying desperately to make up for my lost youth.

Aieta Buffet’s partner was the d.j. that night, so he spun hip-hip which Shauna preferred to dance to, and we both knew Aieta, so we’d put in special requests. Shauna and I would dance together like we might fuck later, but thankfully we never tried.  She’d been one of my best friends since we were thirteen, and it seemed too weird.  But I loved dancing with her because she was good, and I wasn’t bad, and people would watch, smile, drink, remind me that there was someone out there who might want to be with me.  Shauna would bend me over backwards, yank me up quickly. When we danced, I let her lead because she needed to feel she was in charge. She dressed more masculine than me most of the time, her wife beater tank tops, sports bra and baggy jeans, but we are just at soft butch as the other.  In her arms I let myself be vulnerable, and eventually started wearing tighter pants, shirts from the mall until she accused me of trying to be too feminine.  We danced so that I could feel the heat from her lips, the smell of her drink, her bangs on my cheek.  More women hit on you when you’re dancing with another blonde.  We’d stumble from the bar when it closed at two, nodding confidently at the cops who stood around their patrol cars. I’d come home to the apartment I picked for Sarah and me, my cat already tucked into bed, and dig the toes of my right foot into the gold shag carpet to make the earth stop spinning.

The problem with shorter hair is that it gets more messed up while you sleep.  Hair that is a quarter inch looks the same as when you first went to sleep.  But hair that is nearly an inch will stick up everywhere, look like a field that’s been crop circled.  It didn’t bother me that Jack saw my bed head anymore.  And if he kept coming so early on the weekends, staring at my mussed hair would be the consequence. But without a warning or asking me, that week he brought an old guy with him.  Jack introduced us and the old man spent the next hour trying to persuade me that radiocarbon dating had been disproved, that it wasn’t completely accurate.  “Well,” I said, “It’s not like we need to know what month of what year exactly something died.  A few thousand years in millions of years seems close enough to me.” I tried to explain the concept of stratigraphic dating also, but he scowled at me. Jack sat on my fake red velvet covered couch, his arms crossed; nodding whenever the old guy said anything he thought was especially profound. He was the kind of old man who had floppy jowls.  His cheeks shook when he spoke, especially when he pronounced words which made his mouth puff up.  CarbonCarbonCarbon.  Saggy skin balloons on each side of his face.  I sat facing them, my legs spread wide, tapping my foot and offered the men orange juice or wine while my cat played with their shoelaces.  They declined both.  When I said goodbye to both of them, I’d figured I’d won that battle.  But Jack was always smiley and slightly sarcastic, so it was hard to tell.  I thought Jack would never come back because he didn’t ask if he could.  Surely the old man was the last trick up his black suit sleeve.  Didn’t matter much anyway.  I’d planned a three month trip to Germany, and I was leaving soon. 

My friend’s grandpa died in the middle of the next week and I was dressing for his funeral that Saturday when I saw a large white van roll by my bedroom window.  Jack had shown up the first time driving a nice new black car, but I just knew it was him when I saw the sterile van.  He hadn’t mentioned anything about coming back, so I ran to make sure my front door was bolted, then I shut the blinds and peeked through them, shaking my head and laughing because I was hiding from Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

The van’s door opened and Jack stepped out of the driver’s seat, his black pants and white shirt, tie flying in the breeze.  Then, a handsome young black man came around the front of the van from the passenger’s seat wearing the same thing. Jack came around to the passenger side and opened the sliding door and, like a clown car, people started piling out: an older white woman, a middle-aged East Asian man. Everyone was from a different ethnic background. Jack knew me better than I thought, but why was he trying so hard?  This crew had to have stemmed from a conversation about hell when I asked if he believed children in other countries, India, for example, technically wouldn’t go to heaven because they’d never heard of Christianity.  I’d learned when I was younger that those people went to purgatory, and I never thought it was very fair.  I sat on my bed peering through the blinds, petting my cat.  Jehovah’s army was coming to get me. All smiles, like they were the first guests to arrive with their covered dishes to a dinner party. They milled around on the porch a few moments, actors getting into character.  And since my bedroom window was right by the yard and a few feet from the front door, I saw the black man reach for the door bell, all their bodies erect and eyes focused.  I heard him say, right before the dingdong, “We’re gonna get her this time Jack.  We’re gonna get her.”  I waited and watched their expectant looks fall from their faces, as if all at once, as if they were operated by one big switch. They turned and left, heads hanging, patting each other on the backs.  I waited for a few more minutes before going back into my living room, just in case.

Thirty minutes later, when I was leaving for the funeral, a black car pulled up beside me.  I stopped on the sidewalk and turned.  The tinted window rolled down.  Jack sat behind the wheel, his Top Gun sunglasses perfectly fitted to his face.  “Christina?”  He pulled down his sunglasses, his long black lashes and, God, those blue eyes.  He seemed a little confused, or pleased and looked me up and down, the way the older butch lesbians did at the bar when I danced with Shauna.  I smiled, “You’ve never seen me dressed-up, huh?”  He nodded, and raised an eyebrow.  His wife was in the passenger seat, a scowl on her face, staring at the road ahead of them.

“I’m going to a funeral,” I said trying to tuck what little hair I had behind my ear.

“Oh, I’m so sorry” he said, like he was responsible.

“Well, it’s not paradise, so people die,” I said as I turned to walk towards the parking lot.

Opening my car door, the wave of wet heat hit me, the smell of sports equipment and hot dashboard.  Normally, I would roll down the windows, maybe leave the doors open for a few minutes while I waited in the apartment for the car to cool.  But I had to get out of there.  Had to make an exit, I wanted Jack to see me drive away.  My ass hit the seat, the scalding hot metal from the seat belt going quickly through my summer dress pants.  When I pulled out of the driveway, I looked both ways.  He was gone.

Meagan, a girl who dated me until I blurted out one night that I was still in love with Sarah, saw me eating breakfast with friends one week.

She asked how things were.  I told her about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the gorgeous young man, the “we are the world” van.  She asked if she could be a part of the experience, merely because she was studying sociology.  I was reluctant to let her into this new world I’d created for myself.  It was a part of me that the people in this town didn’t see.  To Meagan, to those people at the bar, I was just a twenty something lesbian who loved to drink and dance.  Most of my bar friends were surprised to learn I had a college degree or that the driver’s license I had wasn’t fake.  Even the drag queens were starting to recognize me.  But Jack was another, more interesting part of my life.  Having been out of school for a few years, I was starting to feel like I hadn’t used my brain.  Jack challenged me, was as big of a smart ass as me, was people candy that I loved to gobble up. And religion was something I wanted but knew I couldn’t have, at least, my old religion or Jack’s.  But, as it turned out, I wasn’t saving my virginity for Christ, I was just guarding it against boys. Though I was candid with Jack (and anyone else) with most details, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him this.  I knew it would be the last conversation we’d have.

When the doorbell rang, I said, “Hello Jack” though I hadn’t seen who was there yet. Meagan was sitting on the couch, with an anxious smile.  Jack stepped aside and I saw a small Asian woman behind him.  He saw Meagan, a slight frown, “Did I come at a bad time?” he wondered. Now, I thought, I’m playing your game.  He brought a video—Archaeology of the Bible.  I was interested until the video mostly quoted passages from the Bible and said little about the artifacts they’d found that might be Noah’s Ark or the Shroud of Turin. 

After speaking with Meagan for 10 minutes (her mother was very Catholic, her older sister a spiritual healer) Jack said, “Well, Christina, your friend Meagan seems to be much more open minded than you.”  He snickered to himself, pushed his thick black bangs into place again.  If only he could see himself, the only man since my boss who sat this close to me on my couch.

We watched the movie and talked about God and Heaven and Hell.  I asked Jack to look me in the face and tell me that he was sure I was going to Hell.

“That’s not for me to decide.”

“O.k., but that’s the way it works right?  I’m a heathen because I don’t believe like you, so I’m going to Hell?  Right, Jack?”  I think I really wanted him to get angry, red faced, storm out of my apartment.  Then I could run after him screaming, “Wait, Jack.  Wait.  I didn’t mean it like that!”

I raised one eyebrow and smiled and winked at Meagan.  He was known as Jack the Gorgeous Jehovah to all my friends.

Then he turned to Meagan, and said he hoped she’d be joining us again.  “It’s nice to have someone other than her to discuss things with.” He scowled and pointed his thumb at me and left smiling with the woman who had said nothing the entire time. I shouted after him, “It’s not like I’m begging you to keep coming.”  After the door closed, Meagan grabbed my hands and kissed me, “You’re right, he is beautiful.”  It was nice to finally prove to someone that I wasn’t making up this guy, that it happened almost every weekend.  But, having Meagan there might’ve made Jack a little uncomfortable but what did I care? She asked to come back.

Meagan came over and we waited for Jack to ring the doorbell.

"So, he doesn’t know you’re a lesbian?” She giggled.

We laughed and debated whether or not we should tell him.  I argued it wouldn’t matter too much, seeing as how we were already condemned to hell. The doorbell rang.  But for some reason, I still couldn’t tell him. Jack brought the next archaeology video.  It was long and boring and full of quotes from the Bible.

Though Jack was stunning to look at, and fun to mess with, I was feeling a little guilty that he’d been spending so much time with me.  I would never see things his way, and he had to know that, but he kept trying, saying he wanted me in his paradise. Now seemed the time to ask him to not come see me anymore.  With Meagan there, I felt stronger.  I tried to explain to Jack that he should spend his time convincing people who were more convincible. 

“Jack,” I said, “I think I’m breaking up with you.”

He smiled and made like he was grabbing his heart, “I’m so hurt.”  But it hurt me when I realized I was just another notch in his God belt.  Maybe after our visits he went back to a Jehovah’s Witness boys club to talk about me, how he was sure I’d turn eventually.  Then he was one of those guys in high school; he’d tell me he loved me, take my virginity, and then brag to all his friends.  I was Jack’s conquest.

It had been nearly two months since Jack first knocked on my door.  I had started planning my weekends around his visits, telling friends breakfast with them was out unless they waited until the afternoon, when Jack left.   Each Friday night I’d go out wondering how he’d approach me the next morning, what new information or skin color he’d have to try to persuade me.  If he saw me grinding against girls like this in the bar, all breasts and pelvises, would he still keep coming to talk to me? These good Christian girls, sorority girls the only people in the place with drinks colored pink, green, blue. The rainbow.  They come to the drag show, looking for girls like me; a tank top, baggy pants, a tongue ring.  Think they can treat me like I’ve never doubled in pain from cramps, like I’ve never painted my nails and called some other girl a bitch, like I’ve never had a five-o’clock shadow burn my face.  They flip their hair and pretend they can’t change tires, like this will get me to be interested in them, so they can reject me and tell their friends.  Like I’m a boy, but less than a boy; a woman who just acts like one.

Meagan came the next week, but I called Jack and rescheduled so she and I could go eat breakfast and gossip about people we saw at the bar the night before.  I didn’t have the heart to get rid of him over the phone, or tell him I was moving in a month and would probably never be back.

I came home from a rugby match and found a pamphlet in my screen door.  I picked it up, turning it over, looking for a note from him or a signature.  But he hadn’t written anything on it.  I looked again, just in case.

I was just waking up and saw a van drive by.  I hid in my bedroom for a good fifteen minutes, but no one rang the doorbell.  I called people I hadn’t talked to in a while, but no one answered their phones.  I went to my favorite coffee shop and watched homeless men with their dogs asking college kids for spare change.

It had been five weeks when my doorbell rang and I woke up, a naked rugby player in bed beside me. I laughed out loud and tried to explain who it was as I and ran to the door.  Jack said he wanted to show me the final archaeology video.  I agreed, but told him it wasn’t a good time, he should call me.  I was nervous that the woman in my bed might run through the house naked, I hadn’t known her long and it seemed like something she might do.  I couldn’t risk it, him finding out that way, especially her.

Forgetting that I scheduled with Jack, he rang the doorbell and I told my girlfriend rugby player to keep quiet, she mumbled something and rolled over.  Jack put in the tape of the third archaeology video, and for the first time he accepted my offer of something to drink.  We had coffee, the expensive kind, and I wished the girl in my bed would crawl out the window and never come back.  We sat for an hour, looking at the t.v. but not really paying attention, our hands warm on the coffee mugs, my right leg positioned so that it was only inches away from his. I let my bangs fall in my eye; sometimes I thought I looked nice like that.   We watched the video this way, two strangers in silence who just happened to have known each other six months, a naked college girl only feet away in my bedroom. When he left I asked if he was coming back the next week.  He supposed so.  What he didn’t know is that I was leaving, had been planning a trip to Germany for a few months so I could get away from the mess I’d created for myself in that town at the bar, on the rugby team.  There was no way I could tell him, maybe because I would hurt his feelings, or maybe because I was bad at goodbyes.

*   *  *

 

It was some time during the next week that I picked up my phone, a weight in my stomach and called Jack to tell him I was leaving the country for a few months.  Lying, I told him the plans had just been made, that I was offered a deal I couldn’t refuse. He wished me luck and told me to call him when I got back to town.  What I didn’t tell him was that I was moving out of my apartment, so maybe I could finally forget the reason I’d picked it, forget that Sarah had only seen it once, forget some of the girls I’d brought home and then asked to leave right away. 

Days later there was a piece of paper in my door with phone numbers circled of Temples in Cologne I could go to and talk to someone if I wanted.  For a second, I considered calling one of them just so I could say I tried—if he ever asked. 

*   *   *

 

I came home two months early from the trip; rugby girlfriend had slept with my best friend Shauna a week after I’d left.  It was some months before I moved into the same apartment complex, just above where I lived before. There were days when I’d stare at my cell phone and look up the name “Jack” a couple of times wondering what I’d say to him.  For months I’d come home from weekend excursions and scour my doorstep for pamphlets or even a sign that he’d been there, or in the neighborhood.  One day I was sure I saw him at the grocery store.  I checked the basil plant on my porch once; maybe he’d taken some fresh leaves home, but he didn’t even know I lived there, so that didn’t make any sense.

The last time I saw Jack he was looking as comfortable as he could (in a suit) sitting on my couch.  We were sharing an hour of our lives together talking about the history of the earth, the mysteries of science and nature.  I knew when he walked out of the door I’d never see him again, but was embarrassed to tell him so, didn’t want to be the person who made some sappy speech about friendship. I mean, I couldn’t do that in front of him.  He couldn’t see me that vulnerable, because then, that moment when my voice started to waiver, he’d know that maybe he had me.

 

 

 

 

Ingrid Hughes

Ancestors

 

 

As a teenage socialist my grandmother  believed in unions.  The worker should be able to buy what he made.  When her father fought the unionization of the workers at his little factory that made vests for mens suits, she would say, “You want a better life for yourself and your family.  How can you stand in the way of someone else who wants the same thing?'”

Her older sister, Annie, considered a great beauty, fell in love with Sam Dukelski, and was rude to the men the matchmaker sent.  When one of the matchmaker’s picks came courting, bearing a beautiful hat from a fashionable shop, Annie took it from the box and tossed it to Bessye,  who volleyed it back, making a game between the sisters and leaving the suitor with no doubt about Annie's feelings.  Annie ended up marrying the man she loved, my Uncle Sam, who I remember as an old man with Asiatic features and a Polish accent making jokes about his name. 

When Bessye was fifteen her mother had a stroke.  “She could hardly talk.  She moved her lips and a little voice came out.  She told me, ‘Take care of the little one-- Paso av kinde.'”

Morris, the little one, was five then.  Her mother died, and Bessye, at her father’s suggestion took a course to become a bookkeeper, though she had expected to go to Hunter Normal School and become a teacher.  She got a job at a big garment factory near Washington Square  and managed to get herself a high school equivalency diploma in the evenings at Washington Irving High School.

Bessye attended the Socialist Party’s Rand School for three years in the evenings.  And she used to sell the newspaper down at Wall Street.  “I was very successful.  At that time it cost two cents.  I would say, ‘Get the paper that will teach you something.  Read the truth.’ And I helped to organize the Women’s Committee.  We would raise money to support strikes-- at that time the unions weren’t rich.” Her father called Bessye Madame President, because, he said, whatever organization she joined she became president.

Bessye told him she would have nothing to do with the matchmaker.  She would marry but she would find her own husband.  Her father was dubious but, contrary to his expectations, as my grandmother loved to tell, she met my grandfather, Jacob Blaufarb, at a meeting of the Socialist Party, where she was giving a report for the Women’s Committee. Her energy and authoritative air as she stood at the podium must have been irresistible. And besides, she was wearing a brown flannel suit with a pink blouse that tied with a bow at the neck, brown shoes, brown gloves and a pink felt hat with a brown ribbon that hung down in back! My grandfather was with a friend who was so impressed he said, "I'm going to marry that girl!"  "The hell you are, she's my girl," came Jack's reply. Walking home, Jack and Bessye discovered they were neighbors -- their families lived in the same building, 103 Avenue D near 7th Street. 

My grandfather, one of five children, had left school at fourteen to work pushing garment racks up and down Seventh Avenue. He had advanced to salesman by the time he met Bessye, and I’m sure he was kind, unassuming, and straightforward, as he was all his life.

When the time came, Bessye introduced Jack to her father and told him they wanted to marry; her father, already very sick, wrote out the marriage contract, wanting to see Bessye engaged before he died. My grandparents went to City Hall and married on May Day 1917, International Workers Day. Then, because Annie wanted to give Bessye a religious ceremony, they had another wedding on American Labor Day in September.  They bought a little house in Borough Park and brought Morris there to live with them.

And so ended their years on the Lower East Side. In later years, as anti-Semitism became more threatening, my grandparents traveled to Eastern Europe, first in 1931, and again in 1936, laden with gifts for relatives-- a dozen and a half womens blouses, a dozen and a half mens shirts, a dozen ladies watches, a dozen mens watches. They traveled to the Polish towns where they had family, wanting their relatives to come to the U.S..  They offered to pay their passage and get them jobs, just as Bessye’s parents had done.  But people couldn’t imagine the disasters to come.  Of them all, only one Hornig, a relative of my great-grandmother's, wanted to leave his home.  So Bessye and Jack brought him to the U.S. and his son became a matchmaker in the Chassidic community in Brooklyn.

These are the stories told me by my grandmother Bessye Blaufarb and my Uncle Morris Klein.

 

 

 

 

Sherisse Alvarez

Guatemala Sky of My Grandmother

 

                       

“Stop for a moment to observe the sun.  Take it in.  Slowly,” Paulino says, his arms delicately extending out from his well-built body.  He is dark from working outdoors, soft-spoken.  He is the man in charge of taking visitors through the plantation, la finca.  “These are small phenomena and when we observe them, we observe god,” he adds.  It is August, 2009.  But time is measured differently in Guatemala.  Many go by the Maya calendar and so when Paulino and others speak about dates and history, they speak about the sun and the moon.
I am visiting my grandmother who now lives with her son and his wife.  She has been living in Guatemala for three years, since my grandfather’s death.  My uncle has arranged a trip for me to a nearby coffee plantation so that I can experience something he knows I have not experienced before.

The man exhibiting the mystery of the sun reminds me of my grandfather.  As we walk I keep my body close to his as if to absorb his warmth and his knowledge.  He explains to me from the bird watching tower that he has only had one year of schooling but has learned a great deal by working on the farm, by observation, through his conversations with foreigners, and because of his will and desire to “become something.”  He knows about the medicinal uses of plants; the cultivation of crops; and various bird species, their Spanish, scientific, and nickname, and in some cases he also asks me the English name.  He practices his pronunciation as we walk, trying to align his tongue and lips so that the sound comes out as he intended.

We see the young women and children who are responsible for the shelling of the macadamia nuts, their primary export. 

My grandmother is at the doctor where they will run some routine tests, check her sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure.  Later, my aunt will take her to the peluqueria, the hair and nail salon.  I can tell she is depressed and I hope that this will lift her spirits.  Talk shows and cooking serve as a distraction but it is clear she is depressed.  She speaks in a low tone, rarely smiles, sits and stares blankly at the floor, her body twisted as though she were permanently reaching for something, for the man she has lost.

I ask Paulino if he has family living with him at the finca.  He says he does not, he is alone.  As we continue on our walk he pulls ripe lychee off the trees.  He shows me how to squeeze and break the skin.  I try it, fresh, for the first time.  It is one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten.  He speaks philosophically about his life, his birth, and his eventual death like it is something he has meditated on a great deal.  “I want to be strong, keep healthy, but if illness comes then I will return to the earth again.”  He talks about his own life and the life of the trees in a similar way; they were planted, they would fruit – or “sing” as he called it – and then they would become fertilizer so that more could grow.

Before leaving we have our photograph taken together.  He tells me a story about a woman who had visited from the Canary Islands.  She had taken a photograph of him holding a frog and sent it to him.  He was amazed that the frog in the picture was much larger than it had been in real life.  He asks me how that had been done.  “She sent it to me with my name on it and a note that said she would be back in fourteen years.”  I ask, “Why fourteen years?”  He says he does not know,  “That is when she thought she would be back and I suppose it’s expensive to come here from where she is.”  One of the other men who works at the farm says lightheartedly, “Well, just another four years, right?”  I see Paulino’s eyes smile beneath the brim of his hat.

The pale pink roses at my aunt and uncle’s house were wilting.  They looked less like flowers and more like pondering faces.

I can feel myself taking on my grandmother’s mourning.  That strong exterior and mysterious silence.  I don’t like myself this way.  I am sleeping in a twin bed and at night I miss her as I think about her sleeping in another room also in a twin bed.  I think about what she had said earlier in the day, “I told them I wasn’t going to be here like a doll.”  She had complained to her son and his wife when they insisted she let Nati – “the girl” who works for them – take care of the chores.  But my grandmother had protested; she wants to cook, wash, iron, just as she had always done.

The one place my grandmother can go is the market.  It is close and she can be dropped off and picked up easily.  She and Nati go once a week and my grandmother is very popular there because she likes to shop.  The day we went we bought fruit, vegetables, kitchen towels, second hand clothes, a few gifts.  There was raw meat everywhere, unrefrigerated, hanging, in cases and on tables.  My grandmother bought me a slice of watermelon.  The market was cramped and hot but I enjoyed walking through the tight aisles, carrying their bags for them, listening to their conversations, the way Nati consoled and lovingly touched the back of a woman she knew.

At the house, the palm trees reflect off of the glass coffee table.  Jacinto, the gardener, is pruning and raking outside.  My grandmother works on a word finding game, Nati boils beets for dinner.  My grandmother gets up every few minutes to check on her or to tell her a joke.  I can hear dogs barking, cars driving by, occasional bombing sounds that Nati says are part of a celebration although she does not know which one. 

My grandmother whistles.  She has finally gone to the bathroom after not being able to for two days; my uncle’s wife will bring the samples over to the doctor’s office.  My grandmother complains that her closet doors do not close properly.  I come in to help her; the room smells like deodorizer which must be spilling in from the bathroom.  She goes in to the kitchen and scolds Nati for not cutting the beets small enough.  They are like children, screaming and then laughing.  After, she tells Nati how to properly iron button-down shirts.  I realized that no one has asked me whether I have a boyfriend, when I am going to get married, have children.  For the first time I feel like my grandmother knows I am a lesbian but it is something we will not speak of, my sexuality. 

My uncle and I speak for the first time about his childhood.  He tells me about my grandmother’s first husband, his father.  This is also my mother’s father, someone that I know she adored but who wanted very little to do with her.  I remember spending very little time with him.  He lived in New Jersey for a while, in the suburbs, with his new wife, the same woman who had visited him in prison years earlier in Cuba while he was still married to my grandmother.

My uncle recounts a memory he says he will never forget: my grandmother sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of their house in Matanzas, near Havana.  An envelope in her hand.  Opening it, she begins to cry.  A premonition?  She is sitting in her rocking chair and she is crying.  He is her son, he knows something is wrong.  In fact, he knows exactly what it is.  His father has filed for divorce.  He will not speak to his father for nearly eight years.
At eighteen he calls his father who has by this time also left Cuba and started a business in Guatemala.  My uncle will move there and begin working for his father.  My grandmother will remarry a man she meets while working in an Italian foods factory.  He is also Cuban, and a divorcee.  Their marriage will last for over forty years.  Later, years later, I will meet a man who will remind me of him; he will walk me through a coffee plantation and speak to me of death in a way that makes me less frightened, the ripening of fruit, and the way to look at the sun and see god.

 

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