The bland shadows thrown by her relaxed march through the living room, from the kitchen and to the hallway that led to the carpeted foot of the attic stairs, crossed the usual witnesses to the family’s daily affairs: the white statuette of an embracing Romeo and Juliet, a souvenir from a trip Nonna had taken to the Old Country, the artwork’s base of opulent Renaissance clothing a flume of tumbling creases and folds dusted in soft brown paint which arrested the casual observer’s eye, which was a good thing, because the tragic hero’s head had been removed –– accidentally, unceremoniously –– by the boy and his two, older brothers in a fit of roughhousing one summer afternoon; and the framed family snapshots, all of the children and some cousins; and the fuscous sofa and loveseat, their arms matted from years of use and, at some edges, frayed, and the chocolate leather recliner, a former star now way past its prime though struggling valiantly and pitifully to retain its old sense of dignity –– a few of the rounded gold tacks that once trimmed its legs in orderly rows were missing; and the beautiful faces of the celebrities and models on the covers of the ladies’ magazines and department-store catalogs, crowding the chipped coffee table and the chipped end tables, each facial expression a wanton plea to be consumed; and the plastic cherubs, with their curlicue’d tresses and their tiny, fat digits and limbs suspended in the service of translucent glass bulbs and teardrop beads and plastic ivy, all of them cheap details on cheap, gaudy lamps and wall fixtures; and some of the boy’s colorful drawings of Biblical passages, including his mother’s favorite, a gently clunky but impassioned and colorful reckoning of the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane; …

… the domestic effects, all of them, were normally merely visual background noise and nothing more, but now, she noticed, they did not dutifully, humbly regard her passing in hushed indifference but seemed to revolt, rumbling in protest to every footfall, every bang produced by fuzzy slippers beneath doughy feet as tired and worn as her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s, and the rest of the world’s mothers’, which slowed her and triggered a start of clarity, so needlessly intense was her blind execution of righteousness, as charged as if she were tramping off to confront the damned at the gates.

She never truly understood the difference between her childhood and her children’s, though she was aware that the number and gravity of outside influences on children, especially American children, outstripped what her generation had known. “Do unto others,” she felt, was steel-clad and impervious to manipulation: The Crusaders were as evil as the Nazis were as evil as the executioners on Death Row. Father O. and the rest of Immaculate Conception might have argued otherwise but only, she believed, because they were, virtually, backsliders. They may not have been at one time. Sister A. spoke candidly about the rigors of the order and how she had witnessed several strong believers, whom a layperson may have deemed saintly, rationalizing minuscule, natural wavering as an excuse to return to the secular world. But Father O. was interested only in purveying a broad message, one with no intellectual subtleties or complexities to confuse the kids and with clearly defined moral boundaries, and he also was concerned with keeping the church coffers firmly in the black. The Mac, as Immaculate Conception was nicknamed, held a bazaar in the church parking lot for two weeks every summer, and along with about a dozen games of chance, the event also included two craps tables, an over-under wheel, and, in the cafeteria, about two dozen black-jack tables. Evidently, the boy’s mother thought, the message of Luke 19:45-48, in which Jesus set his wrath upon the money-changers, did not apply to the parish to which her family had belonged seemingly forever and to which she had belonged for more than 25 years, dating back to her first Holy Communion, and in whose classrooms 25 years ago the intellectual subtleties and complexities of the dynamic Catholic faith were parsed and permanently illuminated. Why were her children’s generation treated like adults in almost every other facet of life but faith? Their world was almost wholly foreign to her, except for the regular occasions when her sons strut onto their grass or artificial turf stages and, to rapid applause, ran, tossed, and tackled better than everyone else, broadcasting in the loud, brutal, and, to her, nonsensical language of sport that primal quality of which she was infinitely fond: excellence, a higher state of being erected upon the universal notions of talent, patience, duty, perseverance, and practice. But after games, when the boys appeared to her in their silly street clothes, speaking in their silly catch-phrases through the base, noisy holes in their pockmarked faces, and rubbing their sore, muscular but hairless, and fictile limbs, and bore no resemblance to the majestic, uniformed giants on the field, she was returned to confusion, unsure what to say or think or how to feel. Each son had been the ringleader of a troupe of thieves bound in speed, dazzle, and legerdemain, and, their weekly performances transacted, dispensed to anonymity by the mark’s haplessness, a haplessness not entirely without its charms, though. Its intoxicating residues carried the boy’s mother down from bleachers suspended high in the air by rigid algorithms of angled steel braces –– the ground below patrolled by stoic security guards and empty, swirling soda cups, bags of chips, and paper plates, and visible as distant, exotic terrain through the splines behind spectators’ knees –– and propelled her gaily through the chattering, shuffling exodus and to the makeshift waiting area outside the locker rooms, where she and other players’ parents and friends waited excitedly, no matter the game’s outcome, for their children, her memory tipsy on visions of her sons’ swiftly navigating shockingly animated matrices of large, angry bodies and emerging into open space unscathed. Her confusion returned upon the opening of the doors and sight of her boys, especially the youngest, who in the wintry months was rarely separated from a certain denim jacket, its lapels covered in miniature pins, each circle, none any bigger than a quarter, ablaze with the text logo of one of his favorite rock bands. Rush? UFO? Iron Maiden?! Who are these characters? she wondered. She could not have imagined, as a child or even an adolescent, confronting a phrase such as “Judas Priest” without being shocked by fear, and a kind of shame, into convalescing for a few weeks afterward. The boy, her son, not only waived his right to be offended but endorsed the offending words. He brandished them on his favorite garment. He decorated his room with them. He went out of his way to understand them.

The boy’s was the inexorable culmination of three previous, more and more bewildering childhoods, as if L.’s, V.’s, and A.’s had conspired to birth it. By the time the other children had grown, somewhat imperceptibly, into almost-adults, with career ambitions and material desires and grossly uninformed but readily flung opinions, the magnitude of the boy’s present and onrushing future had begun to press heavily down upon her. Relegated to compendiums of yellowed snapshots were simpler displeasures, of L.’s irascibility that led invariably to chipped teeth, missed curfews, and missing cookies, and the uncontrollable, seemingly unprovoked tantrums that contradicted V.’s meek temperament and calm resolve, and A.’s fists, dreaded by his peers and plainly motivated by his potentially demoralizing lisp. The other kids had a warmth, a closeness about them. But the boy emitted a coldness, though his expressions of warmth were manifold and unique. None of the other kids worked with their father, putting up drywall or making wine. None of the other kids even considered for a second, as far as she knew, making their own money –– the boy had a paper route. None of the other kids drew pictures for her. None of the others pestered her for stories about her vacationing with friends in New York City and about visiting Birdland and The Village Vanguard and about her seeing shows by Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Stan Getz, and about hanging out with the Freshmen and the Four Lads when they came to town to do a show. Maybe, she thought, just maybe her distance from her youngest was her fault, the consequence of fatigue or forgetfulness or both.

Other than some of its furnishings –– furniture and carpeting, knickknacks and wallpapering, and the people –– the house had not changed for as long as the boy’s mother could remember. There were a few years right after L. and V. were born when the boy’s family lived in a quaint house in a poor industrial suburb by his father’s parents and extended family. But for most of her life, the boy’s mother was here, treading the same worn linoleum floor panels whose uniform and intricately floral patterns of gold and white conveyed the color of urine unless you were crawling across them and cared to notice, flipping the same worn light switches to the same worn light fixtures, climbing the same worn, clumsy, dog-legged, green wooden stairs out back to reach the same worn second-floor entrance, whose stingy, green porch –– its footprint about the size of a compact car –– sloped viciously, trying its damnedest to spill its occupants over the same worn green railing there and onto the narrow yard’s same worn red-brick latticework below, where weeds sprouted up in clumps in the same old places, by the mouth of the gutter, by the wooden fence between the Brackens on the south side and the chain-link fence between the Savinis on the east, and at the lip of the dark, grimy cubby hole that formed naturally beneath the back stairs’ raised elbow, where a spade, a snow shovel, a pick, and some gardening tools were kept, out in the open and without fear of theft, even though one of the implements, especially Daddy’s handheld spade, was precious, specifically for being the conduit between the boy and the delectable peppers grown by his father, there in the brick yard’s makeshift garden, really just about five wheelbarrows’ worth of topsoil lovingly compacted, cordoned off by bricks upended and jabbed into the ground, and backed by a red-brick wall attached to a huge garage next door and that stretched as long as the entire western run of the yard, from back gate to front, and as high as the second-floor porch, whose view opened up to the flat, empty, tarred roof of the garage, home to a bottled-water company, and the roofs and porches of the shitty houses and apartments nearby, stuffed with groaning, tired, bitching bodies and seemingly perpetually rimmed with dusk and stilled, with the measured stream of cars crossing beneath the street-light at the intersection of Taylor and Liberty all day every day perpetually swallowed by muggy gray shadow, and even the people shuffling in and out of Mellon Bank, Pizza Italia, and the Plaza Theater, and Bloomfield Drug and St. Joe’s, or simply loitering, arrested light and motion like piles of dry shit, all within feet of the tall house near the corner with the white aluminum siding and faded green awnings beneath which the boy’s mother and her siblings jovially watched rain and snow fall or played jacks or collected the mail, only several feet from the potentially fatal traffic and almost always beneath stony adults, who watched over the asphalt where the children chased one another and laughed and squealed, recklessly and naturally, as if they, the soft-bellied and -limbed noisemakers, were already intimate with the noxious weights of their futures, when the world would be greased by the blood of their suffocating commitments and loyalties signed by hands in an attitude of waving in –– for good –– authority and shooing out everything else; jovially watching rain or snow fall or playing jacks or collecting the mail but only to return inside to the same worn floors, the same worn white appliances, the same worn porcelain commodes, the same worn white sinks, and the same worn bathtubs, as part of the same worn life that never ended.

The boy’s life accommodated a similar though heedlessly vernal awareness, kilned by pure facts. That there were houses nicer than his family’s was a fact –– some of them were even on Taylor. That time would not be time were it not a thing fit to be wasted or exploited was a fact. That he wrestled with geometry and video games was a fact. That having a mini-bike would be awesome was a fact. That superheroes existed was a fact. That goodness sometimes went un-rewarded was a fact. That there was no one as exceptional as he was a fact. That the world was cruel despite goodness was a fact. The house’s essence as his family’s house, known and unremarkable, seemed to him as often comforting as constricting: a cramped basement caked with grime that stained his eyes and redolent in grease, two floors of full living quarters, and an attic whose three inhabitants slept, woke, dressed, undressed, dusted, and swept, and jammed to music on the stereo, and dreamed, leafed through comic books and professional wrestling magazines, and read joke books aloud to one another, and painted and sketched fantastical creatures and panoramic, otherworldly mises en scene on paper, and played board games and card games, and whose lone inhabitant on one particular August day strapped on a backpack filled with priceless stolen comic books, stepped out of the window and onto the glistening, black shingled roof, and, to a soundtrack of shuffles, scrapings, and pinchings, shimmied down the concrete gutter encasement –– his fingers and forearms and his knees and feet crackling electrically, his breathing fitful and sharp –– landed on Taylor Street, and flew away.

Fiction reading

28 February, 2011

Location and Time: TBA

Info

• Allows direct filling of air sample bags
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Aimee Bender discusses her new book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
Interviewed by Heidi Julavits.

Symphony Space
Mon, Jun 14 at 7:30 pm
2537 Broadway at 95th Street
New York, NY 10025-6990

You may have been wondering: How does a gifted artist with a gentle nature turn to building bombs and dreaming of the wholesale destruction of his homeland?

One afternoon, my brother came home and announced his engagement to our neighbor’s daughter. Needless to say, Mother was beside herself, shouting with joy and relief and exultation, burning through all that is fashionably said on such occasions before moving on to exclamations whose vintage has not been heard since the earth cracked open and gave birth to the mountain ranges. I had to listen to all of it as I lay on the floor of the front room.

“Where’s my little brother?”

“Oh, who knows,” I heard my mother answer, when, in fact, I had lain on the floor in the sun of the front room all day, and she knew perfectly well where I was. I stayed there.

Though I could sense the black shadow of the great bird of heartbreak gliding across open country toward me, I was still pretending that my brother’s change of fortune was a game he and I were playing, and the next day, I followed him to the park, gleefully planning to tackle him against the bachelors’ hill—when I saw him run into the arms of his fiancée and spin her in a circle. I was stunned. He took her hand, and they started down the main path, airing out their good fortune, nodding slyly at other happy couples. I followed. I am not a stealthy man to begin with, and I was making no special effort to move like a cat, and yet they seemed not to see me. Perhaps they were blinded by joy—my brother! my sister!—unable to recognize the deformed animal stumbling through the garbage-laced gloom as one of their own kind.

My brother was as good as gone, lost to some stranger, to a life of soft summer blankets, to weekend picnics, to roasted chickens, rounds of cheese, mild green pears, tins of roasted nuts, salads, dried fruit, pastries, cakes, cookies. Is that what my brother really wanted? To be ordinary, to spend his days going soft, entombed in comfortable rooms, listening deadfaced to the endless narrations of the large and small creatures around him? To be a family man?

I had snuck a bottle from my mother’s house. I pulled it from my inside pocket and took a long, discreet drink, which immediately brightened my view of things and, not for the first time, saved my mother’s youngest son’s brain from obliterating despair. It wasn’t long before the sun sank into the river and people packed up their things and left in droves, and I had drunk most of the bottle and the park lights were giving off their cold, dazzling drunken penumbras, and I was alone, in every sense of the word. I wanted to climb onto the Independence Day stage, strictly forbidden—

But if it’s what you really want?

I hesitated, fond as I was of the Old Counselor. He lived in my brain, but then so did Mother—her dreams, her dread, her sense of shame, they all tripped over each other in the effort to make me afraid of everything I wanted to try in life. All of her thoughts somehow living in my head. I drank until they drowned, and I climbed onto the stage.

I watched two men struggling to carry a third man deeper into the darkness of the park, and I laughed freely at the comedy that derives, inevitably, from men trying to capture and carry unwilling objects. I looked overhead and could see the ghostly tendrils of hangman’s rope swaying among the high branches. I studied the old proscenium: the fog-streaked trees, the slate-blue river, the ships huffing blandly across the black harbor. The ships that had carried the men and women who killed every bird, leaf, frog, bear and snake they found here by naming it. The smile (it was a stupid grin) faded from my jolly sweat-slicked face, and I sank into an oil-black melancholy that I must have loved . . . since I sought it out so often. “And, lo, the ships begot the people,” I declaimed, “and then more ships begot more people.”

I hurled my empty bottle from the stage and heard it shatter against the hard brown fact of trees in the dark, and I saw the shadow of the park bum crouch and run. Always listening. I sighed, took comfort in the comfort that was there for the taking: I was a better man than some men, than at least one man. (Things could always be worse.) But an artist’s job doesn’t stop there, and just as I often tried to think of my oblivious, materialistic, self-absorbed fellow citizens as my brothers and sisters and to love them, I tried now to love and to find room in my heart for this alien being, and I reached an open hand toward the full darkness of the park, and I said, “My brother . . . remember me!” Then I thought of the cold indifference of my real brother. If only I could obliterate once and for all the part of me that needed other people, I might become (through pain) an actor so great that I could lord over some part of the real world, even after death.

I turned back to the proscenium. I rocked back on my heels, I shoved my hands deep into my pockets, I leaned forward, and I charged the scenery with all my strength, slamming my head clean through. I henched that ornamentation like a pro, busted it wide open, and my head, even in the swell of alcohol, burned with pain. I reeled backward, stunned, and put my hands instinctively to my head. I felt that it was slicked with blood, and to my surprise, vomit shot from my throat, and I fell facedown on the stage. I had struck the proscenium at the worst possible angle. In the excitement of what I had done (an extraordinary self-infliction), I saw very clearly just how far I had drifted from other people: no one would find me high up on the forbidden stage, and I would surely die, and die alone, a little tragedy that would be forever alloyed to my mother’s joy over her other son, illuminating her pride with the shining gilt work of her grief.

The picture of the world was flickering in and out, and I crawled to the front of the stage, my hands wet and red, and I was full of foreign feeling—it was terror, terror at the edge of my life. I wanted to be a different man, or at least remembered as a different man, and I cried out from the stage, from the full depth of my being:

’Tis true I hath head-punched the proscenium!

Forgive me, I was drunken when I hath done it.

I came to the next day still prone on the boards, rough against my cheek, and my first thought, despite the severity of my condition, was of the beauty of the smell of the wood. My body had only pain in it (it seemed to be made of pain), and yet I was newly attached to it: I was clinging to this world again, a weak and fearful little man in a blood-flecked pale suit. I heard the taut ropes and metal grommets ticking against the flagpoles as the wind picked up in gusts that smelled like the river, and I could hear the broad-winged seabirds calling out to one another.

Later, I woke again to the smell of the Brothers of Mercy, their talcumy sweat, and I retched, convulsing and coughing up rotten air. I could hear my brother’s voice—No, no, no!—and I managed to open my eyes, and I could see the silhouettes of four or five Brothers standing around me, and I moved my hand, which seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, to cover what I imagined to be a frightening wound. My eyes rolled stubbornly back into my head, into the blackness of my brain, and I strained to see, and I could see that one of the Brothers was holding a gray workman’s smock—No, no, no!—and my eyes rolled back again, and I thought: for once, I’ve got to think clearly about what’s happening to me. I heard my brother arguing, and then I lost him again beneath the piles of black powder accumulating in my head. Distantly, I could hear the shouts of children filling up the park, and I could hear the fountain filling, eternally.

I woke in a small, dim room, on a bed of old coats. It took me a moment to perceive the other shape. My brother was sitting nearby in a wooden chair, his beautiful pale suit replaced by the gray workman’s smock. There was an empty bottle on the table beside him. Until that moment, I had lived a blameless, worthless life. Now I had made something happen—something terrible, of course.

“They took Mother to the Sheds this morning,” my brother said at last. I covered my face with the coarse sleeve of my gray smock, in order to conceal from my brother any happiness that might appear, involuntarily, on my face. My brother and I were together again. Our mother was gone; my acting career was over; my brother’s life was ruined, the love of his life probably weeping in the sun-streamed kitchen of her parents’ house . . . who cares. Our little room, our heart of hearts.

Last night I dreamed that the Brothers of Mercy had me pinned to the ground. They were hunched over me, their heads silhouetted by the setting sun. They were swabbing my face with a strong-smelling cloth that made me want to fight, and I struggled and fought with all my strength, which seemed to amount to nothing. They cut away my pale suit, and then they brought over the park bum and forced him to lick my naked body. I was disgusted—by the smell of him, by the feel of his coarse, wet tongue on my skin, by his muffled voice crying out in protest and revulsion as the Brothers of Mercy pushed his head down again and again. It was almost more than I could bear, but the dream took mercy on me and dropped me in the bow of an old whaler, painted blue and black and white, sailing upriver toward the Mountain Lakes, where our parents had taken us as boys, where the hearth was always hot and the world silent and white, the sleeping bees and foxes waiting in the dark for the golden fuzz and mint green of spring. When I was a boy and I used my brain for other things! Some men were carving up a whale on the shore: clouds of fat fell open in the sun. Some men are innocent, I thought, and others are not, but all seemed well with the world again. The clear, cold water split around the bow. Then I heard a soft thumping, the thunk . . . thunk that always invaded my dreams, and I looked over my shoulder and saw that my brother was in the boat with me. He was slumped beside the fishing lantern; the lantern cast a thin gold light over the water as it swung back and forth, cutting into my brother’s head.

I woke up, sighed with relief when I saw that we were still safely in our little room by the train station. There was my brother, passed out on his bed of coats. I liked to watch over him, just as our mother watched over us when we were boys, leaning over our soft round heads in the dark, dreaming about what we might become. Poor Mother. All of our relationships deform us (i.e., make us “human”), but how do these loving creatures (our mothers) survive the person-imploding disappointments of their sons?

By the time I turned sixteen, I knew who and what I was (an artist). I told my mother that I planned not to marry, but rather to live and die in the theater. After the briefest hesitation, she gave me a wry smile. She was masking internal panic with an amused look—oldest tactic in the book. Then she began to recite the Old Prisoner’s Tale, the grisly tale of “impossible choices” that she had told us almost every night when we were boys. “Do you know the story about the old prisoner?” she said. I had no choice but to listen, and I sat at the kitchen table with her and buried my face in my hands and mumbled, “Yes, but it feels good to remember.”

That night, I watched my brother helping my mother in the kitchen. They were mocking me, asking if the Great Artist would prefer carrots or squash for dinner. I decided that these cheap amusements were a kind of foreign import loaded onto local heads (my mother’s, my brother’s) and that they would fall away in time. They didn’t.

Then they had left me no choice but to fail into my art. I calculated the exact grade of failure necessary, so that I could slide, failing, into what I really wanted: the life of an artist. But the life of an artist is an impecunious one, and I was forced to dine often at my mother’s house, collapsing my sense of outrage into a dense, hot, bright star that I hid in my heart while I filled my belly and fantasized about the day when I would come home a star of the theater, beloved by the people, worshipped by my mother. It was the kind of game I’d always loved to play: the entertainment of false alternatives.

Now I was a grown man, of course, making my own decisions. If my life was once a project for which another (namely, my mother) had the highest hopes, then I was choosing now to build a pyre under it, to use as firewood the life my mother had made and cared for. I’d been sneaking gunpowder from the workshed behind the police station for weeks, hiding it in the upturned cuff of my work pants, which could be easily explained away—I was a clumsy workman, presumably weak with hunger and disease, shakily sorting the gunpowder. My brother came home from his shift at the gum factory and set down three murky bottles of bad spirits, which the factory workers brewed illegally in the storerooms.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What are you doing?” I said. “That stuff will kill you.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“I don’t go near gum liquor,” I said, touching the scar on my forehead delicately.

“Is that gunpowder?”

“Why, yes it is, Brother. I’ve been bringing a little home every day,” I said, and poured the gunpowder through a makeshift paper funnel into one of our empty tea envelopes. I filed the envelope in the wooden tea box. “See? I’ve thought of everything.”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

“I’m making a bomb,” I whispered, and I was deeply gratified by the look of surprise and fear on my brother’s face.

“You’re trying to make a bomb?”

“No, Brother. I am making one.”

“And what are you going to do with this bomb?”

“I’m going to destroy the city and everyone in it.”

“On Independence Day?”

“That’s right. On Independence Day.”

“How much gunpowder is there?”

“Almost a whole tea box.”

My brother picked up one of the tea envelopes I had filled with gunpowder. “There’s enough in this box to blow your head off, or mine, maybe crack the Reynolds Branch. That’s it. Then the play will go on . . .” While some part of me conceded that he was probably right—he had always been the more practical brother—I pretended not to understand.

Just last week, I was dropping a pinch of gunpowder into my upturned cuff when a Brother of Mercy burst into the room. I let out a small scream. He was out of breath, full of predatory intensity. He took a long, hard look at me and said, “Did you see him?”

I hesitated, wanting to understand the rules of our game better before I jumped in.

“Did you see something?” he said.

“I’m sorry, see?”

“See the prisoner—he got away from us and ran.”

“The prisoner?” I echoed and scratched my head. Against all common sense, I was enjoying his company (I rarely spoke to anyone other than my brother); besides, we were both “professionals,” after a fashion, and there was no harm in a bit of conversational sport, a mood game to be played out of the sight of the citizenry.

“Well, I did hear something,” I lied, and then the man looked pleased, and I was pleased. “It was a sound like chains in a box,” I said, immediately regretting it.

“What are you talking about?” he said, and then he gave me another long look and seemed to think he understood something about me, something he had missed at first, and he turned without another word and left. I went back to stealing gunpowder, looked forward to the day when I would see his body piled among the others.

Fiction readings by John Haskell, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and Christine Schutt.

6 October, 2010
6pm

The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
212-755-6710

He’s waving his clipboard, saying, “become a donor,” so I look him right in the eye, and I’m like, “no,” but of course he’s sitting down. I always forget how eye contact is like this substitution. I say, “I’m waiting for someone, please don’t sit down.”

He sits down. What tact! He says, “What are you planning on doing with them?”

What am I planning on doing with them?

Like they’re pajama pants? Perhaps another person needs pajama pants? First of all, no one needs my pajama pants. Second, this is not about pajama pants. This is about our collective ability to kindle a small mystical flame. This guy’s like “snuff it out, inspissated sac.”

We’re the same age, probably. He’s handsome without inner vision.

I ask him, “Are you feeling well?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Where do you feel well?”

When a hand fondles a rosary, where is the spiritual revelation? In the beads or in the hands?

How about the scalp? The scalp is comprised of thousands of unsophisticated mouths (drinking all that shampoo and stuff, so be careful). Each of these has within it a steady tenant. If I consented to give away my scalp (I think what happens after the harvest is you get spooned onto a tray that makes ashes) I’d break open my sacred hoop, evict my tenants.

I ask: “You think you’re just a brain? A brain valve?”

Now the man is walking away from me, off to continue fighting for organs, off to ignore the underlying questions.

Your body bears witness.

If you resist my mystical thinking here, you’re managing to enormously increase your respect for me, the very thing you’re professing to deplore, and I swear to God I don’t even care, because a good perfume always travels against the wind.

§

JOHN DINGER ON A DAVENPORT, knees sticking clear out in the room.

His uncle Milgotz was in the chair; Aunt Era was in the other chair. They were happy to have John over even if they didn’t know him that well.

Johnny Carson was on; Michael Landon was on there. They looked great. Landon said something to Johnny and looked at the audience; Johnny looked at the surface of his desk, then at the audience.

Era’s little dog Ryan was standing by the davenport, vibrating; he had on his red nylon harness he wore all the time.

When John Dinger moved, Ryan looked and moved. When Dinger got up and went to the toilet when it was commercials, Ryan started vibrating uncontrollably.

§

PACO’S BIOLOGICAL WAS OVER his woman’s taking his wiener indoors; the collaborators’ skins stuck together and peeled apart on the different pumps.

Subsequent to withdrawal, he walked down Lula Mae Street with a can of beer and a Kent cigarette. He was bare-chested and when he passed under street lamps you could see his stomach for the soft, slickery brown area it was.

He went up Sixth till he come to Lamoille Park. He stood by the monkey bars. He put his hand on a bar and, feeling it wet, slid his hand along it knocking water drops down. He put his beer on the ground by his foot and tried to raise his thigh up to dry the bar on his cutoffs, but it was too tall to him. So, he undid his cutoffs, took them down, and stepped out of them. He wiped the monkey bar with his cutoffs. His wiener kind of joggled around in the darkness a little bit while he did do what I’m telling you about.

He wiped his mouth, stomach, and undercarriage with the cutoffs before putting them back. He got up his can of beer and walked down Ethel toward Bearing’s horse stable on the west of town.

He felt his way from the road through the weeds to Bearing’s woven wire fence and put his forearms on the top of it. He saw two little horses standing together. He didn’t know if they were mares or geldings or what; he didn’t know because he couldn’t see.

Paco’s biological looked beyond the pasture, across the bean field toward Polk Plastics; he could see the little orange lights way, way out there. The big male horse was standing by the fence ten feet from him.

§

LADY BUTTON CHIPPED ICE off her driveway with a snow shovel. She had a half dozen clear dildos strapped on. And a few red ones, too; Christmas was coming.

§

GLORIA-HALF-OF-SOMETHING MURDERED Mandu Fam Lam Bartlum on a day in 2002. She ran him down behind the Park Tavern at Mineral, tore his head open to one side, pulled out his eyeballs, and cored out his rectum. She walked it over and placed his rectum in the parking lot. You couldn’t tell what it was; it wasn’t in the right context, and it was all kind of stretched out.

It was Queen Mother Brard with her male helper in front of the post office; they were standing holding their mail and communicating with each other; you could see them. Mandu Fam Lam went by on his nice dirt bike. He looked, and now Brard and them were looking up the street the other way.

Mandu Fam Lam Bartlum came to Uncle Forrey’s visitation. He was standing near the casket looking at Forrey. Mandu Fam Lam had on a beautiful blue sweater; there was fine embroidery all on it. He looked very beautiful to the family; they could never be through looking at him.

§

ON ONE NIGHT IT WAS BAD WILLIE SLEMMONS in aisle six of the Star Market looking at frozen meals.

“Like an old fool angel he looks,” thought Hwang the night manager, looking at Bad Willie Slemmons. Hwang was literally standing holding a mop in his hands.

Bad Willie Slemmons was a crippled individual: Had he two little decrepit arms, no elbows or hands, and only one gnarl finger growing straight out of his right wrist. His dukeless arm—that was his left—appeared to be a vast, uncut wiener on the droop.

Despite his disability problems with his arms, he was pretty good with a knife, he said. At regular hand to him was his eighteen-inch Jim Bowie that a Danville cutler customized with a leather strap and fingerhole in the handle. When Bad Willie took and belted the weapon to his wrist, he had to make sure to pull the strap with his molar teeth on the right side of his head-mouth. His other teeth he had (few) were liable to come out; the looseness was caused by negligence and by chemical habits. He said he would belt that thing to his arm and chase after somebody if they got smart with him.

He would have liked to really doll that knife up in a man’s gore but, of course, civilization says you can’t do that, even if you don’t murder your opponent. Bad Willie Slemmons understood that. So, to keep out of trouble he worked around civilization’s rules in two ways:

1) He threatened people with the knife, without touching his victim with the blade

2) He introduced the knife into the sex act

Let it be said that Bad Willie Slemmons did not substitute knife for his regular wiener or cut down a sex collaborator during a coitus; all he did was point it at his collaborator and yell at his collaborator while he got pumped. That’s not to say yelling isn’t hurtful to a collaborator; but my deal is, if you have to use a blade in your sex act, you should get permission from your collaborator before you do so, or at the very least, warn your collaborator. But, as you know, I am not Bad Willie Slemmons and neither are you.

Hwang looked, as he drew up to Bad Willie, at the young man’s severely deformed person, which I have already described to you.

“It’s—right now—it’s between meatloaf and chicken breast right now,” Bad Willie said; spit flew off his mouth onto the glass door of the freezer. “Which ones you be eating?”

Hwang thought Bad Willie had the most high, beautiful voice. Hwang looked at the freezer and said he likes Healthy Choice brand meals. “The entrées taste wonderful.”

Bad Willie leered at Hwang: “You be working out?”

Hwang was looking at Bad Willie’s arms. Hwang invited Bad Willie to take his time in selecting a frozen meal. “They have many flavors to choose.” Hey that was Hwang—customer care was first to him. He goes, “I am simply going to finish mopping,” but he stayed put, looking at Bad Willie’s wrists.

Bad Willie squared up to his man. He looked upon Hwang’s business district for longer than you would expect. He was looking right there. He pushed back his glasses with his finger. His brain was communicating with his body capsule. His autonomic nervous system performed its office: corpus cavernosum—look out!

A thoroughgoing report on what you would have seen on a journey into Bad Willie’s front left trouser pocket at that moment would have had to include the word movement.

Bad Willie’s mouth filled with spit. His head moved forward nine centimeters; his arms moved.

Hwang wondered on the side: “In the grand scheme of things, what does it mean to want to hold this young man down and study his arms and his finger? To want to try gripping his arms tightly and loosely to see what the difference is? I will make notes about him in my private journal. Maybe I could take a shot at a poem.”

Bad Willie went with a Healthy Choice brand meal, like Hwang said to. But since the registers had been counted, Bad Willie couldn’t pay—not even with his personal debit card. Hwang told him, “It’s completely OK with me to take the item. You can come again tomorrow and pay. Maybe at this same time. What do you think? It’s OK with me. I will be here regardless. I am closing again regardless.” Bad Willie was standing there just taking it all in.

Next evening same time, Bad Willie showed up and got a bunch more Healthy Choice brand and paid via personal debit card. Hwang had already let Liza the checker go early; she was asking to go early anyway.

After a little standing around, Hwang and Bad Willie went for a bunch of coitus in the back office. It was heavy duty but Bad Willie brandished his knife not. All during, he kept making this weird whiny noise. Meantime, Healthy Choice brand meals in the bag thawing out.

Hwang had trouble gripping the floor with his loafers working on Bad Willie. So he took them and his socks off so he could, you know what I mean, grip a little better on his different pumps, leverage his man better.

One point I do want to say is that when Hwang bent down to set his loafers and socks aside, Bad Willie’s bare moneymaker was right there. Right, right there.

Cramped but organized accommodations. Everybody did OK. Stand-up deeds mostly.

Hwang did his gripping experiment on Bad Willie’s wrists and finger; it was great but, remarkably, Hwang didn’t go on to record his findings in his journal.

What can I say about Ashley Jenkins?  That stink-haired fiddler in the middle of the gloom.  That pining animus.  What can anyone say?  Maybe trust is a good word to start with.  My fairly complicated email history with Ashley has been so pleasant—any twinges of fear I might have felt at the beginning are forgotten to me now.  We’ve gotten to be in a really good place, and I’m quite certain that’s not just because of me.  Ashley’s laid-back but knowledgeable prose has come, over time, to put me quite at ease, which probably explains whatever decency I’ve contributed to our history together.  Certainly nothing has been given to Ms. Jenkins—to this I am willing to attest.  Nor is she in the business of theft.  What she is in possession of is hers, and she worked for it.

The extraordinary depth of trust that characterizes our relationship—personal and professional (personal and professional having become indistinguishable)—has provided us with some advantages, the most pronounced of which, I think, has been the freedom to begin to imagine the intimacy of the meeting that has been proposed.  Ashley has written to me, from very early on in our work together, of her strong but not overpowering sense of that intimacy, and I must confess that I have never felt inclined to doubt her.  This is no small point; it is the intimacy of the proposed meeting that we are talking about here, and the intimacy of the meeting—I’m sure you hardly need to be reminded—is in many ways the meeting itself.  And so then am I learning about the meeting itself from someone who stands for all the world to see in the role of my student?  Once I asked myself this question, I knew that Ashley had become more than a student; I knew that now she was a protégé.  A protégé is a student one can learn from.

I have said that I am convinced that Ashley has a strong sense of the intimacy of our proposed meeting.  I have not said, however, what that sense is.  I’m sure you would like me to speak to this question, given that everything is riding on it.  I would like, for my own sake as well as for the sake of this letter, to be perfectly transparent in my discussion of the question.  Obviously, if her sense of the intimacy of the meeting is extremely positive, this might be said to influence my decision to work with her, and hence to write this letter.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  Her sense of the intimacy of the meeting is not, as it turns out, overwhelmingly positive.  I wouldn’t call it negative… but it’s not overwhelmingly positive either.  Sensual, yes, maybe.  Practical, yes.  Ordinary, yes.  Middle of the road, yes.  Certainly not a pose.  Having been in this business for many years now, I feel certain that I am able to tell the posers from the real thing; it does not even require effort anymore.

While we have not decided yet where exactly we will meet, and have not settled either on an exact date—this is not so much due to any uncertainty or difficulty as it is due to our immunity to the anxious machinations of schedule-makers.  To be convinced of the intimacy of the meeting is to have already assumed that the meeting will take place.  I know that the meeting will take place because I believe in Ashley Jenkins.  And I believe in Ashley Jenkins because, well, to quote Ashley herself, “I feel sometimes like I’m one of those mothertruckers that can see the future and shit.”  I expect you know the mothertruckers she means… because I am one of them.  And you know me.  You have been listening to my voice.

Please do not contact me or speak to anyone of what I have written in this letter.  This letter is for you, and you alone, and I have only sent it because of the strict confidence your ritual bathes itself in.

I love you,

Joe Wenderoth
Professor Of English
UC Davis
Davis, CA 95616
jlwenderoth@ucdavis.edu
530-754-6898