The original hipster was
called so for posture. He lay drugged somewhere last century and wore
sunglasses. “An art form uniquely American,” he’d say of jazz. He’d smoke opium
and it was his hip that bore the weight of his eyelids. I ponder her hip
because it bears her. Postured here like this, she is the origin of hip.
It’s day two and day
worst of her bout with ulcers of the mouth and throat. Hardly able to speak,
she is a series of hummed sympathies. She winds like highways among the hills,
which we call mountains. She’s a gorgeous slouch - languid, pitiful, and damned
pretty but try telling her that. On Saturday, she asks whether The
Enlightenment first caught fire in Denmark. I have the map in mind already, but
the five-century timeline eludes me. I count backwards from Voltaire. Galileo
to Erasmus, Luther, then Gutenberg.
“Germany,” I reply. “The
printing press set the whole thing ablaze.”
Used to, I didn’t know to
be flattered when she assumes I know everything.
“Everyone in this film is
so beautiful,” she says to me.
She’s right – the Danes
are beautiful. I haven’t watched any of the film yet, but the language is a
thrill. I hear, probably from someone who heard as well, that they’re the
happiest people on earth. If it’s true, I’d wager that the beauty of their
mother tongue has something to do with it. If you’re like me, you’ve always
wanted to hear English as an alien thing. Danish satisfied my curiosity. If
you’re like me, - which I would not recommend - you ponder that we naked apes
want to see ourselves as other naked apes do and hope to witness our own
funeral. I used to wonder, how does the world behold my talents, my looks, my
character. And then I married, and found that these traits are tolerable for at
least a lifetime.
After chores and errands,
I report back to her with this brief essay, which I penned for her on the backs
of receipts I collected while emptying the car. I hoped it might quell her baby
fever. For now, at least, we have no children and are each other’s.
What I Have Done Today
I have done some things
today. The first thing that I did today was that I woke up. Next, I went to the
drug store and to the grocery store. At the drug store I got medicine for my
wife and at the grocery store I got food for my wife. I got split pea soup and
I got ramen noodles. I got them for my wife because she is sick. I am sad that
she is sick. But it is okay because Olive The Pug - cannonball bug, little
black cub, bear you can hug - took care of her while I wrote an obituary for a
magazine. It was for Owen Prater, who was a really great guy and a really great
poet. I miss him a lot. A lot of other people miss him a lot too. I cannot wait
to see what he wrote right before he died. After I got medicine and food for my
wife, I cleaned the kitchen. It took a long time. Then I set aside all the
clothes that we are going to sell. We are going to sell clothes so that we can
buy more clothes. I need new clothes because I am getting bigger in my tummy.
All in all I have had a really good day. I hope I get to have more days like
this because I am happy. I like to be happy.
I left out the part about
swooshing her oral analgesic in my mouth. (I wanted to find out what smoking a
cigarette outside a dentist’s office feels like. I was thoroughly
underwhelmed.)
Around 3:30 the Times
sends me a breaking news alert e-mail. Two bombs have gone off at the finish
line of the Boston Marathon. I balk at first, but end up watching the explosion
on Russia Today. When I was a child, I venture to say that the notion of
someone videoing such an event, and by coincidence, would be called a damned
silly notion. How things have changed; if someone told me today, “information
super highway,” or “Wash your hands after you touch your penis,” I’m not so
sure I’d know what to say to them.
I wonder whether we’ll
look back on this and laugh. Of course, I can’t recite any jokes about
September 11th, 2001 or April 20th, 2000. No one jokes about April 19th, 1995 –
bombed a fucking daycare, the coward. And hardly anyone can remember December
7th, 1941 anymore. But here goes. ‘I finished the Boston Marathon and all I
lost was this lousy leg.’ I don’t pretend to know what the doers deserve, but I
personally would like to see a bounty hunter, or a clerk at the DMV, make the
asshole run like hell. I hereby sentence you to death by wind sprints. Papa
would have gone with ‘death by squats.’
“Looked like a pretty
wimpy explosion to me,” he answers.
“No, I mean who do you
think did it?”
“Oh, some right-wing kooks,”
he says.
“Me too. It’s tax day.”
“Taxachusetts, as they
say.”
“Marxachusetts, as they
don’t. So far as I know,” I say.
I thank him for the money
he’s sent us, and he tells me he is proud of me. He especially liked my
homophobic, country & western anthem, “Straights Rights.” I borrowed the
tune from “Sisters Of Mercy.”
Well the gays and the homos and queers ain’t
afraid to be gross.
And the fact that they’re married and proud
Ain’t the only thing their shovin’ down my
throat.
And now that they’re married,
My wife and I we’ve got it so tough.
How’re we supposed to make babies
When they’re doin’ their icky butt stuff?
Well, lovin’s just for procreatin’
Ain’t no such thing as lovin’ for fun
And while my wife, she’s got one in the oven,
These queers do something different with their
buns
Well my mind’s an open one,
But I won’t close my mouth when they come.
No butts about it, we’ve hit rock bottom,
It’s a bummer, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Well where I come from browntown means
Colored folks are livin’ next door,
And where I come from, takin’ a poundin’
Means you’ve got more touchdowns to score.
But I left for the city, and what do you think
that I found?
Huntin’ bears here means somethin’ different
Than it did in the woods outside my hometown.
Well my boy sucks at manly stuff
Sometimes he can’t get ‘er done.
And my boy sucks at a lotta man things,
But another man’s thing ain’t gonna be one.
And this chip off the block,
My pride and joy, pretty boy son –
While he’s one the grass, he can’t catch a pass,
But he sure thinks the locker room’s fun.
While he’s on the grass, he can’t catch a pass,
But at least he thinks the locker room’s fun.
“All right,” I say.
“Okay, son. Bye. Love
you. Okay. Bye.”
I’d called him in 2008
when we elected a black president, I have to inform her, and called him when
Cairo, of all places, seemed the most hopeful on earth, and I can’t believe
I’ve never shared my first memory with her. Max and my father both know that it
was the fall of the Soviet Union. Papa told me I’d always remember it. Really,
he told me not to forget it. Think what could have happened had he not told me
that. My first memory might be of Terry Pendleton’s sixth inning triple - the
first time I saw a man hit for three bags, the hitter and I were in the same
stadium. Maybe I’d remember snowflakes melting on black construction paper, or
lima beans on a red plastic plate, scratched white by forks older than I. Her
first memory is the birth of her brother. She remembers nothing of her
childhood thereafter, save the Masonic rite she witnessed through a stained
glass window. “There were men in dark robes,” she says, “and a child.”
Hammered, enamored, I
demand a child, but I cannot come. Alas, and where’s the beer? It’s in
Springdale, because it’s Sunday. For all the jokes about slaughtering chickens
and Mexicans – excuse me, despite what people south of the lake say about
Mexicans and slaughtering chickens - at least they are savvy enough to accept
money seven days a week. To reciprocate for this kindness, Sundays I drink and
drive on their roads. Today it’s two tall boys, gone for good by the time I’m
home and coaxing her into a picnic.
“Get your sundress,
Beebs. We’re getting loaded in the park.”
We ‘ran into’ one of her
children not long after we arrive. In truth, she springs and sprints like
Blitzen, the reindeer, in heat. When the little blonde creature - somewhat
humanoid in its third year - and its mother appear some twenty yards away, I’ve
been a naughty boy, chiefing on a very conspicuous spliff and necking cup after
cheap plastic cup of bargain-bin pinot noir. “I’ll see you on Thursday,
Nicholas!” she cooed. The mother and child ambled on. To my surprise, she
informs me that the ‘running into’ was in fact a close call. I am becoming a
liability and so we show the scene our backs. Stumbling, I offer to drive us
home.
I plumbum on out of the
passenger’s side and into the house, where a vicious game of keep-away ensues.
Papa’s turkey chili, of course, is the kept-away, and I, poor I, the hammered,
hungry sap. Her arms may be half the length of mine, and her crown may be a
full foot closer to the ground, but today it seems the God-given just won’t
take. No motor skills, no recourse is I guess how it goes. We find ourselves
sol-sodden on the back porch; whereto I likely have been wormholed by a
universe that knows a hungry boy when it sees one. I reckon if we jostle, she
and I, we do it like a couple of sissies, as my lunch and manhood are hostages
both.
We reaching, tussling
fools are nearing the stairs. I am about to discover what I already know – that
this is not at all a clever place for the reclamation of snacks by force.
Stairs – these at least - are made of wood, which is hard and hurts to fall on.
These stairs descend into a yard-shaped, patch of weed and bramble. But who are
we not to descend, together, into our yard-shaped patch of weed and bramble? At
the bottom of the stairs, I’m already blaming her for pain not yet palpable.
Youngest sibling syndrome coming now to the fore, she laughs something so
hearty that I can feel the thick of that poor turkey chili. Its bowl,
microwavable, is about three shards now, scattered, but in no comforting
pattern. There is nothing linear about this trail of dead.
“Damn it, woman! The
invincible bowl has been vinced! That piece of plastic was a testament to the
fortitude of Chinese industry and now it’s just more shit for bare feet to
avoid.” My heavens, the nude sting of a bramble-bed is naught compared to the
painful notion that my drunk-by-mid-afternoon snack is nothing more than fodder
for the lawn urchins. She lies there laughing with me in the milk thistle and
the spiky gumball things, whatever they are. We’re looking for our lungs and
our reasoning atop the childproof gate, which our combined weight, hunger,
and cruelty have collapsed onto the ground. The baby slammer, toddler trap,
etc., had been a part of our porch longer even than it’s been ours. And yet, we
only first question this structure when the (wholly worthless) collection of
right angles has been so brutalized by my horrible balance and ardor for lunch.
She stands and helps
husband to his feet. He sobers far too rapidly.
With each fresh eyeing of
the havoc comes a new wave of giggles.
From the tree house, we
take vista of all three downtown steeples. I see her gazing down now at the
yard, where playthings are decaying and visible of a sudden. I cannot for the
life of me tell you why we’d never noticed them before. And The Lord said let
there be swing sets? Nor could I tell you, really, whether these ruins are
anachronism, or ruins that foreshadow.
“What was it, slide of
yellow plastic, that finally made you crack?” she asked.
“Once-orange basketball,
rotting unto vintage pink: how are you really?”
“My dear, dangling
fellow,” she wonders finally at the rope, “did you happen to catch the Hogs
game last night?”
Atop this backyard fort,
we are far enough from ground to be afraid, and yet the pain and the markings
say that we are fallen still. But at first clang of twilight, no gashes in
arms, nor pending bruises, nor snacks aborted in vain are audible
“Good thing you’re not
packing heat.”
I give her belly one pat
for each hour past noon, as another and another of the bells says to us that
light is leaving. My twenty-dollar nautical watch beeps in weird harmony.
“When the time is right,”
she says.
Her hand bloodied covers
a smile.
