Esther.

Esther.

 

The sheets stuck to her thighs, they were twisted around her ankles as if her bed had turned into a jungle while she slept. Although she was in bed for nearly ten hours, she didn’t sleep well. Tick. Tick. Tick. Her mind clicked every moment like one of those angry old cash registers that sputtered and spit out white receipts except this was her mind and as she lay in bed the evening before she stared straight above her, drawing invisible lines in the ceiling cracks, connecting them to make a variety of shapes. A wheel barrel. An old man leaning forward. A dog. And finally, the devil. He grinned at her in his blotty stare, he was constructed out of five cuts in the ceiling caused by a water leak nearly five years ago. Once she saw the devil she could not un-see him. “Fuck” she whispered. Eventually she dozed off, but not until after she read half a book, drank water, smoked three cigarettes, masturbated, said a prayer she didn’t believe in, read some more, and counted the cracks. The devil stared the entire time. Grinning as only the devil can even if he is hidden in the plaster. She kicked at the bottom of the bed, wrestling with the sheets, they held her ankles as she did “they are trying to keep me in bed” she thought, she could smell the sweat that had soaked her bed while she slumbered. “What is wrong with me?”

The windows were open, all of them in the entire apartment, the two in her bedroom, the one in the kitchen and the three in the living room. All with the hope that this welcoming by the open glass portals would invite a breeze to come in, make itself at home. The slow-poke wind just sauntered by, giving a middle finger to the apartment as she melted inside. Unraveling herself from her bed, she walked to the bureau, her bare feet made a soft sucking noise as they peeled off the hardwood floor. Lifting a lighter to her first cigarette of the day, she stood a few feet back from the window and tried in vain to catch a breeze. Outside, the heat was coming off the black roof across the street in shimmering waves, two birds flew and landed on the electrical wire that stretched in front the building. The longest couch in the word, all made for these fluttering animals. She gazed in the mirror that was attached to the dresser, it was old with a blackness that had set in on the corners as if it were being eaten slowly by mold. She caught herself, turning her head sideways she looked at her breasts in the reflection, turning slightly she studied her hips. Her thighs were dotted with small greenish and purple bruises, “where did I get those” she thought as smoke climbed towards the heavens. A brunette smokestack with bangs. Moving to the center of the room, the cigarette hung like a thin white twig from her lips as she gazed at her body, the mirror only went so far and even by scooting back she was cut off at the knees. Her hair was mussed and she raised her arms above her head, her breasts pulling wide against her chest and ran her long fingers through her hair, tussling it about until if fell in the same manner that it did just before she tried to fix it. “Stupid hair” she thought and walked over to the small table next to her bed. Snuffing out the cigarette, she grabbed a purple rayon robe and slid it over her shoulders and pulled tightly on the string.

The smell of jasmine danced out of the kitchen and as she carefully carried her tea into the living split living/dining room she sang, “see the way he walks down the street, watch the way he shuffles his feet…” her mood was lifting, a small plate of English tea biscuits balanced on the small porcelain cup. Setting the jasmine tea down on the table, she pulled the chair up, it felt as if it was going to collapse under the weight of its own memory and as she scooted the chair in towards the table it made a small groan. “Jesus fucking Christ, already” it wheezed in its own chair way. She flipped through the pages of her book, the crisp white pages felt reassuring at the tips of her fingers,  the transformative powers of the words passed through the stiff texture of the pages. Books comforted her, more that almost anything else, and they didn’t disappoint or betray a person, they didn’t sling insults or raise their voices, they were always home on time, and could create a smile with just a few basic lines of print.

As the smoke circled above her cup, bending her neck back, she thought of a darkness that settled in her gut, deep into the bottom of her being. “Sometimes, I knock against the river but the river just rushes past” she thought as a small bit of sadness escaped from that bottom, it slipped out like a blink in a darkened movie theater. Her heart caught in her chest, the air in the room stopped, for one moment of a moment of a moment, the world stopped. She touched her throat, sliding her hand down her chest and held her thigh. It was gone, the smell of the tea and the faint smell of cigarettes filled her nostrils. She smiled, even this surprised her. Gently touching the table top, it’s wooden surface a highway of small chips and bumps from being moved from one house to another depending on whatever relationship had ended, switch or just for the sake of change. Her grandmother had given her the table when she obtained her first apartment, a tiny efficiency that smelled of cat piss, must and old man. She had scrubbed it out with Clorox, Pine-Sol, and optimistic determination that sprung from setting off alone on an adventure. She hauled the table up the stairs by herself in that first apartment, making sure to not ask for help as her mark would be made on her own, she didn’t want to owe anybody. Anything. To her, owing meant being owned.

“Let me get my truck and help you” her ex-boyfriend offered, “uh, no thank you. I got it” thinking to herself, “he’s just gonna try to fuck me for old-time’s sake.” “Dear, you are going to need help with that table and mattress, or whatever the heck that thing is you are going to sleep on. I don’t know why you just don’t get a real apartment with a bedroom and a bed. You can have the one from your bedroom, your father can take it apart” her mother said one evening while sipping a margarita, Frank Sinatra enunciating in the background. “It’s called a futon, and I don’t want a real apartment, I’m happy with the efficiency, it’s close to campus, I don’t want too much stuff in my life and this will help prevent that” a silent thought sat in her mind, “this is the reason I don’t want your help, always critical.”  Her mother sniffed, “if you only had a larger apartment you would be safer.” “Mother, that makes no sense” shaking her head. “Yes it does, what if some man enters your apartment and tries to rape you? If you had another room to go to you could lock the door. I love this song, do you know it?” Eyes rolling, “yes, of course I know New York New York”.

As she traced the scars along the tabletop, moving her fingertips in and around the indentations, left by the haphazard movements of previous owners, a cigarette burn here, a knife scrap here and a banging fist there, equaled an untold biography of the table. Her mother blended into the migration of her index finger as it glided through the wood, she recalled her mother’s tears behind closed doors, when the muffled moans fell deep into pillows stacked high on her mother’s bed. Remembered how her mother would not exit the room until all the red had left her face, all that emotion had been stuffed away to be replaced by fresh make-up, hair-doo set right and a smile stuck on her face. There were summers when her mother wore white pleated tennis shorts, that failed to cover up the highway of deep bruises that made a map of violence on the back of her thighs. When her mother had too many drinks as her head bobbed back and forth, to suddenly freeze while a moment of truth tumbled out of her mouth, “don’t.ever.get.married. men are scum.” These droppings would erupt suddenly, without provocation then abruptly leave is if they were constructed of water tumbling over itself, a sudden wave that split into the ocean, foaming then disappearing as the water was sucked back into the sea. Regrouping, her mother would swallow deeply, then move on into an easier subject, “well, I can’t believe that Fitzgerald’s would pull Katherine out of St. Mary’s and put her into the public school, I suppose if they want her to turn into a junkie then that’s that way to go. Which reminds me, you need to delete her from your phone book, at least until she gets her act together.” Esther would sit dumbfounded underneath the weight of disbelief, there would be no retort, no discussion of what was really unspoken or the irritation that came with such a swath of judgement from her mother. She raised the tea cup to her mouth, tasting the sweetness of the tea as she tempered the anger in her chest.

She scooted the chair back, put the cup in the sink, walked to the bed room and put on a pair of yellow shorts and a white t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Coney Island, NY” with a faded ferris wheel in the background. Slipping on brown sandals, the thin white leather straps grabbing fast against her toes, she went back to the kitchen and washed the cup. Drying her hands against her shorts, wiping them along her legs she left the house and went into the sunshine. Hands reaching deep into her pockets, searching for an answer to the restlessness that the morning brought into her fingers, the fabric stretched as she expanded her palm. An unlit cigarette hung between her polished red lips, suddenly she felt alive as the shine from the sun dropped science as quietly as a lamb’s yawn. In the bag that hung on her shoulder was a faux leather notebook that contained scraps and bits of her mind, she recorded like she were an archeologist of her own mind. Tick by tick, tock by tock she logged them down like clockwork every day but never revisited because once they were recorded that was it, you can’t recreate a moment she thought even though she would read words like a locust devouring fields in biblical manner. Pausing by a parking meter, she dug through the pale lemon colored bag, an afterthought of 1960’s fashion, with bold gold hoop rings at each of the straps and fat gold zippers on both sides and in the middle, she pulled out the small royal-blue plastic lighter and lit the cigarette. A couple strolled by with a small baby carriage, the husband turning back towards her with a frown, she shook her head and raised her eyebrows at him, “it’s a free fucking country” her eyes silently spoke. She absorbed the smoke, filling her lungs with nicotine she allowed all of it into her body and closed her eyes. Small islands of contentment, were what kept her sane.

The street was busy, a Saturday brought people out, with the sun sucking people out of their apartments  had liked it had never glowed in the sky before. There was no plan to where she was going but her feet followed route that may well have been grooved from all the times she had walked it. Three blocks north, two blocks west and another four blocks north and she had arrived at a large thrift store. She had a way of shutting out the world, a vision that walled off any distractions that not only kept her insulated but also safe. The sweet smell of pine was in the air as she walked into the store, it was always clean, a shiny homage to the discarded past of the items that filled the racks and white metal shelves. The old woman who worked the check-out line nodded at her, she seemed to wear curlers in her hair nearly every day with her sliver horned-rimmed bifocals balancing on the edge of her nose, held firmly but the silver chain that was lassoed around her ears. Esther waved to her, a small grin splashed across the old woman’s face, she had worked here for years and a gesture of kindness still made the old lady feel a warmth she couldn’t hide. A billion smiles over a billion gestures. Fetching her phone from the yellowed bag around her shoulder she slipped some headphones on, cued up one of her favorite records, “Dusty in Memphis” and proceeded to investigate the racks and racks of clothing. An unending supply of fabric that drew a line from every fashion event over the past forty years, deep blue polyester tops with ruffled collars, wide bottomed pants that hugged the hips as if they were a baby on a breast, and faded stone-washed jeans clogged against one another, resembling a Tokyo sidewalk during rush hour. Everything was blotted out as Ms. Springfield cooed about all the love she had to give, hitting like a soft needle in Esther’s heart as the sound bounced around her ears,  “I’ll never forgive you for what you done, I’ll never turn my back on you for anyone” brought a tablespoon of water to her eyes, she rocked slowly as she eyed skirt after skirt.

Behind her the sound of a young mother with what seemed like a herd of young children, she could hear the woman speaking in Spanish, a flow of words the sounded like a sharp song. Turning, she saw a diminutive woman, holding a baby in one arm, cradling the child in the crux of her elbow, at her feet were two twin children-no more than four, climbing over one another and behind her holdfast to the bottom of her skirt was a child who looked to be five or six. Esther smiled that the young boy, holding his mother’s skirt, causing the boy to smile back. A wide toothy grin that spread across his face as if it were a curtain being pulled open. The mother looked at Esther then down at her child, she smiled at him and then at Esther, a slight nod thanking her for calming the child. Esther looked over the pile of clothes she had pulled aside, a bundle of different colors, and she realized that she didn’t need any of these but her mind was calm, if not for the first time in nearly a week. Her hands felt the different types of fabric, polyester blends, cotton and denim a veritable time capsule of the past forty years nestled on top of her shopping cart. She had painted her fingernails and toenails last night, deep into the night when the restlessness brought her to the foot of her bed, and empty wine bottle next to her bedside lamp, the flicker of the outside lights making small fireworks against her window. She had painted her toes first, creamy white like the inside of a Cadbury Egg and for her fingers she choose periwinkle blue and choose a broach and earrings to match. If she could not make order in her head she could at least make order with her body, her outfit. A way to tell the world, “I got my shit together motherfuckers.”

She looked for a room to try the clothes on, there were lines in front of all of them, middle aged women with ankles bloated from carrying children, laundry and groceries up varying flights of stairs over the past twenty years, teenage girls blowing bright pink bubblegum in between words that tumbled out of their jaws like rain from a gutter, and a few other women, shifting on anxious legs, scanning phones or talking to a few people around them.  A family of immigrant children huddled around their mother, she shooed them along like ducklings and they soon stood in a line behind her. All these spoke about the weather, about what they ate that morning about dead-end jobs. Taking her place in the queue she stared ahead, counting her breaths she wanted to read and pulled a small slim paperback from her purse. Soon enough a room opened, and she entered the tiny changing room, her bright white toenails making a contrast to the grimy linoleum floor in the changing room, she tried hard not to set her bare feet on the filthy floor. She decided on two blouses, a skirt and a white three-quarter jacket whose inside was a faint black and white checkered pattern.  In the end, with her items tucked into the small burlap bag made from a reconstructed bag of coffee beans, she felt a fraction bit better, the needle had moved from empty to full in terms of her emotion. So much had happened she thought as she stepped of the curb to cross the street, the green light singling her to cross, it went like this all the time, her body following direction while her mind spoke of something else, a chatter that dipped, waned but never quite disappeared. He had called roughly a month ago, telling her that he would call her the next time he was in town, promising to meet her for tea or a drink, “anything, you want to do. I’ll be there for five days.” He had arrived and left, never called although she knew he was in town by his posts on social media, there he was in a crowded bar surrounded by people that looked familiar if just by their outfits, and the drinks they held in their hands. Props for the twenty-something crowd, another one of him on a ferry, the city in the background as if he were posing in a post card. She had reached out, sent messages, left a few voicemails and in the end waited while anticipation ate her whole from the inside.  She knew she felt those voicemails more than he did, even if they sat silent in some electronic vacuum.The weeks since then had stretched out a like an elastic band stretched too far, until brittle it lost its flexibility and broke, and each day had limped to a tired close while she battled the night with books, wine and music. She searched for him in the white spaces between the words she read, the dancing sentences calming her but he still went missing, a void in the middle of her life.

The sidewalk had emptied in just the hour she had been shopping, it almost felt like a scene from a movie for her, perhaps at the ending credits, for the next two blocks she passed nobody just shops and restaurants all of which had people sitting by the windows, sipping specially made-drinks, just for them and inside she saw their laughter, the chatter they made, the clinking of the silverware all went unheard as she walked in her quick pace. Her headphones were on, as a deep voice man warbled a cover of Pavement’s “Here” which made her feel even more isolated. She stepped sideways and missed a splatter of red and brown vomit that had exploded on to the concrete the night before, a monument to somebody taking fun over the line, filling their gullet with enough vodka and pale ales to cause his body to push it out the most efficient way it knew how. After spilling the previous seven hours onto the street his friends pulled him up by his armpits, pushed him into a cab and let the night see him home. Turning the corner, the music had switched now, it was a single trumpet and a dead man singing about regret and all the thoughts that swarm around such thinking. This afternoon, realizing she was unmoored—the ache in her chest was physical, and stretched up into her shoulders, down her arms and settled into her elbows. It affected everything yet there was nothing wrong with her, she knew this, she was careful about what she put in her body, choosing her food carefully, no meet, no dairy and her vices were cigarettes, a few glasses of wine and a joint in the evening.  A chasm had opened inside her, with every step she took, she suddenly stopped. Across the street a woman was screaming, long arching shrieks, her face so filled with anguish it appeared to be melting from the inside out, her voice cutting over the music. There, in front of a small shop under the yellow awning, dark mold creeping up its side, with the words BEER, CIGARETTES, FOOD written across the sides, was a man who lay with his hand over his face, a pool of blood circling his head, it was growing slowly like dark red liquid pillow around his head. There was no noise, no movement from him, only the seeping of himself onto the sidewalk, above him the panicked woman, arms extended, bent with hands held upwards as if she could summon the power of the sky into her palms. Her face a picture of torment, everything was still for a moment, she clicked the music off and the only thing she heard were the wails, and birds singing in the background. Seconds slipped by, as it time were an escalator, she stepped off the curb towards the woman wanting to touch her, to provide some comfort and suddenly two people ran out of the store and a young woman ran down the stoop next to the store, they were all yelling and coming to their aid. She stepped backwards, turned and kept walking. The music started again.

Songs provided emotional galoshes, as she waded into her inner swamp, a brown and gray muck that never seemed to go away, at times she felt safe—with the protection of song, of marijuana and the countless books of poetry she held like crucifixes while at other times, she looked for invisible vines to pull her out of an internal bog but oftentimes these were not vines at all, they were serpents. The inside of her legs felt weak, her feet moved forward while her throat went dry, a dizziness flickered on and off like a fly against a window—her pace quickened while she searched for a place to sit, anywhere would do as long as she could let her mind grow quiet. She could not hear the clicking of her shoes against the sidewalk but the sounds from the sole of her shoes presented a certain confidence that she had no idea she had, the clack of the heels were an announcement that Ester could not hear as the sounds from the phone flooded her ears. Her short dash to a bench a heroic act for those who were lucky enough to see it. Settling into the hard seat, it’s wrought iron construction was fastened to the concrete, nothing would make it move. She sat down carefully, glancing at her phone for a moment she tucked it into her lap. Staring up at the pigeons that fluttered around her, their wings making the sounds of a shuffling deck of cards, and she reached into her purse and pulled out some plastic packets of saltine crackers and tossed them in front of her. Smiling as the birds swooped in and gobbled them up with pointed beaks, crowding out the others who wrestled for the food, in a moment she turned inward. Her hands were shaking, the wrapper from the crackers slipped from her fingers, floated into the air as a rare gust of wind swooped in. The world was narrowing as she tried to remain calm. Sweat made small rivers down her back.

Eyes were focused on the asphalt in front of her, the sounds of birds, traffic and conversation sunk into the background as if they were swallowed by the concrete, reaching into her purse she fumbled for her cigarettes, holding the blue crumpled cardboard box, knocking the top of it against her wrist she stopped. Held her hand as she noticed it shaking, she held it as if she were muffling the sounds of a baby, so alarmed at the shakiness in her fingers. Closing her eyes, she was able to pull a cigarette from the packet, and slide it into her mouth, lighting it with eyes still closed she leaned back. Her chest heaved while she held the cigarette as if it were a buoy and she was being attacked by white capped waves, her other arm draped across her chest, holding herself so she wouldn’t explode. “What the holy fuck?” she thought, as she continued working on the cigarette, she felt the sweat rolling down her back, writing wet lines into her skin, her legs felt limp. Remembering a moment that would roll around every once in a while, an unwanted guest that dropped in at the slightest opportunity, she could see the light between the bottom of the door, half an inch from her cold fear to the terror on the other side. The television was chattering a noisy clatter, the sound of canned laughter from somewhere else, finding a blunted path to her ears, she pulled the covers up. She made herself small, she was smaller than a memory, a tiny speck in a field of white cotton sheets and camouflaged vinyl sleeping bag, it felt sticky against her but she was small she was certain nobody could find her as the sheets protected her. The television blathered on in the other room, her back hurt, as did her elbows and her shins, she was bruised she knew this—she always bruised easily even when she played volleyball in gym class, her legs would resemble the burnished colors of a Gerhard Richter painting, she could only guess what she looked like now. She feared the light from the other room, it meant he was home, if she listened carefully she could hear the floorboards creak under his feet, sounds muted by the green carpet that smelled of cat piss, she didn’t know what was worst the smells of the carpet or the musty vinegar odor the whisked off of his body when he climbed on top of her. Swallowing, she felt the dryness in her throat, she felt tiny but the sound of her swallow felt like an earth mover, “Shhh,” she reminded herself. “mam’e are you o.k. Hey, are you ok?” Somebody was in front of her, opening her eyes she saw an old man with a dark blue beret and what appeared to be the largest eye-glasses she had ever seen, he looked like an owl. “Are you ok?” he kept asking. “Honey, she’s probably just resting” and old woman in a canary yellow peacoat was saying to the man, the old woman’s wrinkly hand on her husband’s shoulder, “oh my God, look at her nails!” she felt herself thinking. Indeed, the woman’s nails were at least an inch long and painted a raspberry red. “Yes, I’m fine thank you. I just felt a bit faint…maybe I ate something that didn’t agree with me” her voiced trailed off, she shook her head to wipe any former thoughts clean, smiled at old-nail-lady, “thank you-you are very kind. We need that in the world.”

This is from a collection of short stories, this is fiction but I have filled in the lines for someone(s) I have known.

 

 

Stories.

“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy!”, Bruno crawls over my lap, his knees poking into my skin, “where has that baby fat gone?” I wonder as a grimace appears across my face. My memory comes in spurts and when it does, it is shaded as if it were hiding behind a soft white, almost transparent curtain. At night. This child has heard all the stories I can remember from my childhood, for the most part these number less than the number of digits on my hands. But the boy never tires of them, in his mind they are always fresh, always new but if I tell the story wrong he commands and corrects my telling, reminding me that I left a part out.

My brother lives across the country, practically in an entirely different country in fact, he lives in Texas and when we talk it is through the hic-cups of our days, mostly when I am driving in my car and he has a moment to spare. I see the other main partner of my childhood, my older sister Erica, more frequently as she just lives down the winding road of Interstate 71 in Southwestern Ohio, near my mother and my nieces. The stories have been bandied about, and if they were a piece of metal they would be burnished smooth by now, as they have traded hands, ears and tongues over the year only the rooms in which they have been told have changed. For the life of me I wish I could remember more, but a childhood spent moving from town to town and school to school (I attended seven by the sixth grade) did not exactly re-enforce memories. I struggled with making friends until the fourth grade, as my brother left my mother’s house in the third grade to end up at living with our father, Zoltan was my constant playmate so emptiness filled me much of my second and third grade years.

Long Island was uh, long, when we entered New York City for the first time, driving straight through from the soon-to-be burned out streets and houses of Youngstown, I was awoken by my mother and siblings, “wake up we are in New York!”, I crawled from the floor of the back seat, no doubt my face filled with the red lines from the plastic floor coverings. I rubbed my eyes and stared straight up out of the window, the highway twisted around high-rises that stood like sci-fi trees, with thousands of lights bursting into the sky I thought of all the people who lived in them. New York City was another world compared to Youngstown, where mornings smelled of rotten eggs from the burning and melding of steel just miles from our blue-collar house.

We lived on the far east end of Long Island, in a small town near East Hampton called Springs. It is best known for being the town where Jackson Pollock lived and William DeKooning lived a few houses down from us, but by that time in the mid-seventies, his mind must have been eaten up by dementia, although my mother remembers him talking to her about us, her children.

For some reason, my memories of Springs (which are very few) are idyllic although we barely spent more than a burp there. My step-father, at the time, David had gotten a job working as a scientist near Montauk which lies at the tip of the Island complete with a massive and brilliant lighthouse. His office, or laboratory (?!) was just down the road from the lighthouse, and I have vivid memories of walking the beach at Montauk as what appeared to be billions of mussel shells stretched over the sand in crunchy bunches that cracked and split under my shoes. The dense odor of salt and fish is still in my nose nearly forty years later. We lived in a small house that abutted a small thatch of woods to the rear of the house, with a quick shuttle through the woods, nary a spit from our back door we would be at a small harbor. We spent hours in those woods and on our small wooded street, where I taught myself to ride a bicycle, got bit by a dog and had a disastrous  first attempt at a sleep over.

There was a community picnic one evening, just off the beach, volleyball was set up and the older children had taken a group of us fishing. The sky was a whirl of clouds, twisting over the ocean, mimicking the breaking waves, filled with grays, whites and iridescence blues that appeared to be a cauldron that could come and swallow the ocean if the universe would only let it. I held an older boys hand, the rain would come, I was certain of that but for now, we were going fishing and my parents lay just beyond the lump of trees that provided a shimmering barrier between the beach and the grilling of chicken, hamburger, hotdogs and corn. In hindsight, this must have been the weekend of the fourth of July. There were piers constructed of hunks of blue and black rock that strode bravely into the sea, where one could fish and stare into the vastness of water while contemplating the smallness of oneself. These were slippery rocks and were instructed not to go to the end of the piers where the water was more dangerous and violent. Only the big kids could go there. A young fattish boy, with a yellow ball-cap helped me bait my hook, I had some experience fishing with my father and told him I could cast the line myself, which I dutifully did. Sitting quietly by myself as the bustle of ten and twelve years old, raged on further down the pier, no doubt engaged in primitive games of masculinity for girls who giggled at their antics, no doubt because they had no other idea of how to react. The fishing rod, pulled gently–a small tug and knowing instinctively to tug a little back and suddenly like shot from a gun, whatever was on the other end of the line swallowed hard and sensing immediately that the food it had just eaten was not a normal dinner as the hook dug deep in its throat, frantically tearing away from the thin line that twisted in its mouth, “good God! What the fuck is this?!” it may have thought, if it was possible for a sea creature to hold such a thought. It fled, and in doing so, my little-boy hands, soft from innocence and barely large enough to hold onto the fishing pole, wrapped themselves around the base of the pole, frantically trying to reel the fish in.

It was a struggle and I was shy, my brother was towards the forbidden end of the pier, no doubt throwing small chunks of rocks into the sea with the other boys, some shouted out behind my slight shoulders, “that kid’s got something!” By now my fishing pole was bending into an almost half moon and the sweat and excitement was now pouring from my brow. “I’m sweating!” I thought, “I never sweat.” Suddenly the fat boy with ball cap, cupped his hands over mine, “let me help you,” he whispered behind me, “wow, you got something big here.” A small group of children hovered around us, trying not to slip on the wet rocks, “be careful” somebody hushed to another. The line was taunt, and for every spin of the reel, the fish would take another foot of wire deeper into the sea. The struggle of the fish was apparent in the effort we were putting into bringing it ashore, with our feet and ankles wading into the sea. Careful not to slip. At one point, it became obvious that we were winning, as the pole almost dragged us into the water, and with a couple of yanks and pulls we managed to shore a long, slick black eel, its body twisting out of the water and the sharp teeth clutching tight against the fishing line. “what is that thing!” yelled yellow cap. “It’s an eel, they are delicious!” I spoke for the first time, “my dad eats smoked eel.” Someone behind me shouted, “that little kid caught an eel!” The realization that I had done something exhilarated me, “hold on!” I screamed and went yelling towards the picnic. Leaving the group of children with the frightened animal, whose entire world had just been transformed into nightmare absurdity, I ran across the sand, “I caught an eel! I caught an eel!” If I had died then, I knew in my heart that I had accomplished something extraordinary. My gravestone, tall and proud, scripted with the words: “He caught an eel.” My mother hearing my shrieks had thought my brother had fallen into the sea, “where is he? is he ok?” She must have thought I was screaming, “Z fell into the sea!” instead of “I caught an eel!” or something like that. Quickly settling things, my parents and others ran towards the pier, and upon arriving on the wet rocks, the wind picking up with thick pellets of rain striking our faces we were informed that the eel had slipped through the rocks and was back out at sea. “did you get the hook out?” I asked, not wanting it too suffer. “Yeah, I was taking it out when it squirmed away” yellow shirt replied, “you are a good fisherman kid,” and he rubbed my head. Zoltan told everybody what happened, how I was fishing by myself and off on my own, and then how I caught the fish, “it smelled real bad!” A part of me was disappointed that the eel had gotten away but I was also relieved.

Bruno loves to hear this story, as I sit on his bed, behind me a large framed Spider-Man puzzle given to him by a close friend and on the other wall a huge Avengers poster (the comic book, not the band), his room littered with Lego’s, Charlie Brown books and on top of his book shelf and Dinosaur Jr. poster. Some nights, as the wear and tear of trying to patch together people’s tattered emotional lives takes its toll on me, I climb in next to him and I tell him a continuous unending story of a father and son, alone of a dingy hiding the plans they had stolen from a mad scientist titled “How to Take Over the World.” His world is simple, easy and I can tell him stupid shit and he’s cool with it, as I tell him the story of the father and the little boy, how they avoid getting caught, I fall asleep. “Daddy, wake up, you’re falling asleep.” Of course I am I think.

 

and a few of Bruno’s favorites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqZPGT0TsZ8

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Cars, New York and Alcohol 1991-2003

Cars, New York and Alcohol 1991-2003

The great American fascination of the automobile fell upon deaf ears to most of us, unless it was tied up in a song (ala, “Born to Run”), books (“On the Road”) or film (as a metaphor for escape), the insular world that we inhabited was confined to walking distances or to the touring van. In rural Ohio, a car is a necessity, a way to get from here to there, which covered miles not city blocks. Springfield Northeastern High School was nearly eight miles from my house, a fifteen minute car ride or a nauseating school bus ride over rolling hills, sudden stops and a rollicking-rolling trip spent upon spent shocks that lasted nearly an hour from school to home. It is impossible to ride a bicycle on these rural roads where the average speed of cars rocketing over the sudden mounds of earth and slopping quick valleys, that if timed with the right amount of acceleration could lift a small car over the peak of the hill. The roads, even the state routes are all two lanes and for even the most accomplished cyclist this method of transportation would be inviting trouble.

In high school we drove when we could, and upon reaching the age of sixteen procuring a car was the highest sense of order no matter how poor the family was. For a car provided an escape, from the boredom of the humid summer days that cracked upon the sweaty backs of angst-ridden teenage boys, from the isolation of playing Atari video games while Pink Floyd sang about adolescent rebellion masking as claustrophobic stardom and as the pangs of burgeoning sexuality cause near madness. Our family was poor, we lived off of Bob’s sole paycheck which hovered just over $12,000 for a family of four. Zoltan was given a car by a friend and I relied on the broken-up and often broken-down Corolla that Bob drove. Eventually, Zoltan gave me his pale gray Mustang that had never driven correctly since he tried to plow through a creek only to have the car get stuck in the mud and slowly fill up with rising creek water. Smoke billowing out above the cool water that rose above the bumper, I crawled in and yanked out the Radio Shack tape player–the player someone forming a perfect union with the engine for as one pressed the gas pedal the whining of the engine would play through the speakers. “Bela, get the hell out of there! The car might blow up!” yelled Z from the bank of Mud Creek. “It can’t blow up, it’s buried in water!” I screamed under my breath as I wrestled with the wires, my knees getting soaked in the brown water. Eventually we got a kind farmer to pull the car out with a tractor and after a few days of airing out, it ran again but never quite like the $400 car it was. More like a $350 car.

In Columbus not everyone had a car, Jerry Wick never had a license as far as I knew although I had offered to let him use any of the litany of the small compact cars I had over the years. He walked everywhere and eventually got a bicycle and this was this mount that he riding on when he was tragically killed. Sadly, Jerry a punk till the end didn’t think he needed a light, reflectors or a helmet (although a helmet would not have prevented his neck from being snapped like a twig when he was hit that night twelve years ago.) Road trips were common, mostly to Cleveland to see bands, either at the old Euclid Tavern, the Grog Shop or sometimes Public Hall. Other times to Cincinnati to Sudsy Malone’s a Laundromat bar that hosted bands as well or to Bogart’s, Cincinnati’s answer to the Newport but more of a shoebox than the ornate Newport with its high oval ceiling and elaborate wooden balcony. Most of my trips were to Athens, where the hour and fifteen minute drive, fueled by a six pack and a handful of cigarettes would fix my racing mind.

Other times, I would drive to New York, my first drive in the 1967 Dodge Valiant, which I bought for $500 from Matt Newman a guitarist for High Sheriff Ricky Barnes who was the first in Columbus to start playing old country standards among a handful of, at times brilliant originals. Soon, the Gibson Brothers, Hank McCoy and others followed suit. Matt was moving to California to seek more lucrative professional possibilities than playing for a handful of regulars at Staches, while wearing thrift-store western attire. I got his light blue Valiant, a standard “3 on the tree” that had a warming system that just worked on the passenger side and left a small pools of ice on the floor when parked overnight during the winter. My first drive to New York was to see Sharon, who lived with Herbert Hunke. Herbert lived in the same apartment he had lived in since the mid-seventies, and he was still on daily methadone and would rise early, write and walk the five blocks or so to the methadone clinic. Sharon said he would venture out with a young Puerto-Rican man who she wasn’t sure was Herbert’s boyfriend or not. I made that first trip with Jack Taylor (Richie Violet) who was going to see his friends in New York. He was pals with Judah Bauer from The Blues Explosion, the men in Railroad Jerk and Charlie from Surgery and the band Unsane. He was close to Sharon and would razz her in front of me about her relationship with me, partly due to his own crush on Sharon and partly because he did not feel I had enough rock “acumen” to go out with such a beautiful woman. Perhaps I didn’t but I was head-over-heels for Sharon who was not only stunning beautiful but also carved out a life in NYC.

The drive was good for both Richie and me, he was trying to stay clean, and while we did not discuss his heroin habit we bonded over “Exile on Main Street”, The Blues Explosion and our love of Great Plains and country music. He was funny and poked fun at me for my unabashed love of alcohol which he derided as “unnecessary, you don’t need that to laugh do you?” he would ask me. As we pulled into view of the Manhattan skyline, the tape deck blasting the Silos my heart beat faster, “Good Lord” I thought, it’s the biggest fucking thing I’ve seen. As a child I lived on Long Island, in Springs NY, just an echo from East Hampton and my memories of the city were vague as if looking through a pool of water. We went through the Holland Tunnel, and came out upon a sea of graffiti and garbage piled high, I was lost in a storm of streets as I tried to navigate traffic and Richie pointed where to turn. Soon we were driving towards Alphabet City where Sharon and Herbert lived.

The apartment was between Avenues C & D on 8th, just below the sidewalk, and the apartment was filled with books, magazines and old furniture. Sharon blushed when she saw me, we kissed and she introduced me to Herbert who saw small and hunched over. He shook my hand, his grip was strong and his hands seemed to be constructed of leather, rough and covered with the experience of hustling and scrapping. He had bright blue eyes and a shock of gray hair the sprouted from the top of his head. He did not appear to be a man in his eighties. “Bela! Glad to meet you, Sharon has told me all about you. Bela, like Bartok? Right? She tells me you love to read, I’ll be curious to find out what you like to read. Did you know that I’m a writer?”  I had known who Herbert was, not only from what Sharon had told me but I had read some of the Beats, although I was not the outrageous fan of so many in the underground. In fact, I was never a big fan of William Burroughs whom I regarded as somewhat anti-women but I enjoyed the beat poetry and the movement itself.  Hunke’s own influence on the Beat movement was massive, from the coining of the term Beat to being a major influence on both Burroughs and Ginsberg, He was portrayed in both Junkie by Burroughs and also in Kerouac’s “On the Road” and when he asked me what I read and what I wrote about he appeared pleased.

I felt at home in New York, although this partly came from ingesting the music from New York since the age of fifteen, I had devoured the Ramones, Lou Reed, Garland Jefferies and Springsteen as a teenager. The grim of the lower east side was burned into my consciousness and as I walked the streets, the busyness of the sidewalks were already tattooed to my synapses. I had picked up Garland Jeffrey’s “American Boy and Girl” at Woolworths for a $1, his entire solo catalog, like that of his sometime collaborator, Lou Reed was easily had for a buck a record. Although Garland had never had the amount of press or even credit he deserved he made a couple of seminal NYC albums that rank near the top of all music NY. Perhaps he is best known as writing “Wild in the Streets” which catapulted The Circle Jerks to their punk-rock fame but from the mid-seventies until the early 1980’s he constructed a trio of albums that hold up quite well.

In a teenager’s mind, New York was built of asphalt and steel, with bustling sidewalks that mimicked the opening scene of Cagney & Lacey or of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight huddled next to one another, it was not constructed of clumps of dry cornstalks, gravel roads and flat ranch houses. The music from New York filled my ears, especially Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. I had never heard as anything as grotesquely inviting as “Street Hassle” from the mid-west and it would be a few years before the frantic noise of Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, Cleveland punk bands that would echo the realistic poetry of Lou and other New Yorkers.

On later trips to the city, which came in bunches over the next few years as I visited Sharon whenever I could and would make the nine hour trek to various rock and roll shows at Under ACME, CBGB’s, and the Knitting Factory all of who were open enough to book Columbus bands. The shows themselves are a blur, as are the years and the trips. Through the memory is a faded as the soft light in a 1970’s soap opera, it is burnished at times through the recollections of friends who were there at that time. One such trip when Gaunt played with Prisonshake and a few other Ohio bands at CBGB’s whose restroom was designed after the open sewer systems of Calcutta. I drove on my own and got to the club early, Gaunt was already there, mid-afternoon and as I walked in, sunlight bathing the sidewalk outside the bar was long and smelled like any other bar; with a scent of bleach and stale beer, I ordered a Budweiser and was alarmed at the $7 cost. How in the hell anybody could afford to drink in New York was beside me, Jerry grabbed me in the dressing room, “Dude, don’t drink here” he said as he grabbed my shoulder and steered me out of the bar. We strolled across the street to a small carryout, complete with guy-with-unwashed-clothes-and-defeated-look sprawled out on the sidewalk, brown paper bag clutched firmly in his hand as his head leaned on the brick wall and directly to his left a metal garbage can. One half expected Oscar the Grouch’s head to pop out or a needle laying next to the man, or a needle hanging out of Oscar the Grouch’s neck. Jerry walked right to the good stuff, which was 24 ounce bottles of Crazy Horse a malt liquor that had recently been discontinued in Columbus and next to that rows of green bottled Balintine, another malt liquor that was guaranteed to fuck-you-up. They were about $2.50 each and I bought one of both. “Were the hell do we drink it?” I asked. Jerry scoffed at me, “on the street you dumbshit! They don’t fuckin’ care, it’s fuckin’ New York!” After this lesson these malt liquors and well hidden bottles of Jim Beam were my preferred choices.

New York made me feel big, as if the soles of my feet made an indentation into the sidewalks, my mother had briefly flirted with New York in her late teens. Living in the Bowery District before heading back to Columbus, for reasons she never explained. There was an energy that fed into the boyhood dreams of a Midwest outcast, of the idea that I could shake the inner turmoil and isolation I felt in high school, by smelling the smells, tasting the food, blending into the scenery of the city–as if feeling small in the smaller town of Catawba propelled the perception of being gigantically alive in the city. I had become friends and acquaintances in the city through the record shop, indie-rock was a very small world and it was common to have coffee, lunch or drinks with many of the folks who the store did business with. The community I felt a part of was much more comforting in New York than whatever I felt in Catawba.

Even still the feelings of unease hung onto the tails of my shirt and enveloped me no matter where I was, whether in the living room of my father and his wife as they foisted homemade Hungarian cookies into me, lecturing me on the dangers of homosexuality, God’s retribution and my indeterminist failures, or the talking to Sharon while we laid in her bed, waiting for her to end the magic I felt between us. Later, the unease would be swallowed by gallons of alcohol, as brown and green bottles were turned upside down, the unease would melt into a carefree carelessness that could quickly break down the walls of trepidation between me and another. I pined for attention, yet like a bug trying to land on a light bulb, I would scamper away when the emotions were too much. In my mind, I had already been defeated.

Some ten or twelve years after that first trip to New York, so long before it had appeared to be only a fleeting appiriation in my mind, for the world had changed so much in a decade. I arrived in New York with my wife, as we drove north to Vermont to see our old friends Dave Sweetapple and Ron Schniderman in Brattleboro. My wife had some business to do in the city with her job, she and I had suffered through a precarious spell in the preceding years and many of the old haunts I had know were now left to the faded pages of punk rock books and time-stained saved flyers of music collectors. CBGB’s, Under ACME and Brownie’s had been shuttered, the move out of  lower Manhattan had already begun, with the bearded and ironic hipsters moving into Brooklyn where rents were still low enough. The dive bar that our friend Paul Lukas had taken us to a few years prior in Red Hook had now become a destination point and anyway, I had decided just a year prior that a bar was a dangerous place to be. We stayed with our friend Matt Majesky, a man of unblemished taste in books and music, who suffered no fools and had a stinging sense of humor. I went into the city and while my wife attended her conference I headed to the lower east side, this time not in search of a bar but instead a twelve-step meeting. There was a clubhouse on 14th near Avenue C that was open 24 hours a day, that week I went to three or four meetings there. Upon entering the first meetings, I grabbed a small cup of coffee, holding the tiny Styrofoam cup in my hand I took a seat in the third row. I glanced around the small room, there were roughly sixteen or seventeen plastic chairs in the room, a few people ducked in and out, one man, with black greasy hair, matted to his forehead, jumped down the three stairs that emptied into the room. Look nervously around, he clasped his hands together, his tattoo’s covering his forearms, a biographical inking for all the world to see, as if his arms were issuing a challenge for anyone who looked in his direction. An image of Lucifer snaking up his arms, with flames, nude women and  a pair of dice camouflaged in the middle of the bursting reds, yellows and blues that careened off of his forearms, there was no room for hair or his pale skin. It was if he had gargled an entire tattoo magazine and they magically appeared on his body. He bounced on the balls of his feet, shook his head and bounded back up the stairs. The air was charged, as if someone had taken the tops of the electrical sockets and the air was being pumped full of invisible sparks. To my rear a man with a dark suit and a briefcase sat back, whistling softly to himself, was he whistling a John Denver song? I looked back, he appeared tired, fatigued, glancing at his watch he too was bobbing his head, nobody was relaxed. In the front of the room, two men whispered to one another, and one pointed to me. Raising my eyebrows I asked if they needed something, “well yes, we do. I think you have the most sobriety in the room and we need someone to qualify for us.” Luckily, after absorbing many Lawrence Block books about an alcoholic private detective named Matthew Scudder, I knew that qualifying on the east coast meant giving a lead in the Ohio. That is, I had to tell my story. I had only nine or ten months sober but I had been instructed by my own AA sponsor that when AA asks something of you, you are compelled to give back. I accepted.

Alcoholics Anonymous was an entity that I had heard about during my twenties, I had even visited one through a family member when I was seventeen, not for my own concern but for support. I had thought nothing of it, it was a place for old people to hide out, I supposed. The charms of the alcohol had provided were too great, too strong and too fun to ever think about, but the charms were constructed of liquid and while the laughter, belonging and sex the bottle brought into my wife also rolled out on my life like piss down my leg and eventually rolled down to the floor. The puddle would take years to grow around me, taking a bit of myself one drop at a time until eventually, there was nothing left except confusion, anger and bewilderment. Attending a meeting in a Lower East Side AA clubhouse was startling, considering where I was just 24 month prior, contemplating suicide and being unable to trust myself in front of a bottle any bottle.

Sauntering up to the plywood podium, that was cracked around the edges, with the plastic wood veneer pulling itself up from particle board, it appeared as if it were hoisted from the gutter as many of the alcoholics who stood before me appeared. Eyes opened wide, with an emotional shakiness brought alive as the hourly obsession of a fix either by needle, pipe or bottle throttled from inside some of them, it was expected that I would bring some salve to their pining obsession. Shaking myself I took a deep breath, this would be the first time I stood in front of a group and tell my story. One man, nodding to himself, stood up and paced the small room, the yellowed walls, tanned by years for cigarette smoke provided a backdrop to his skittish walk, his hands petting his legs, smoothing out crinkles that just weren’t there.

Speaking for 25 minutes, I took questions afterwards, this was a bit different than the meetings I was used to in Gainesville and Columbus. Afterwards, a balding, toothless man from Iran approached me. “Hello Mr. Bela, thank you so much for qualifying, you helped me so much today. I live on the streets here, it is hard to not drink. I am from Iran, and it is so hard to be an alcoholic in Iran as you are not allowed to drink. It was easier here, always drink. Always good times. Always. But I lost everything, my wife, my child even my uncle will not help. I have eleven days today, and thanks to you, I will have 12 tomorrow.” With a flat smile I thanked him, I was never good with compliments. As I stood in front of the clubhouse, the sun splashed against the concrete, and my shadow stretched from the curb into the street. An elderly man approached me, “Hey, that was a nice qualification. My name is Ed” he said as he extended his hand, “would you like a cup of coffee?”  We walked down the street to Avenue C, and entered a polish bakery. Telling me his story, he was a playwright and had gotten sober in the early 1970’s, “I come here nearly every day, especially since my partner passed away a few years ago.” I was encouraged, “I still write, every day a little bit of something, the alcohol was important back then but it staggered me, I lost my job as an editor and my contacts but I found AA or as they say, it found me. And here I am, nearly thirty years later, happy.”

Later that week, I met my friend Lyle, we talked and had a coffee. Lyle had gotten married, and had several small young children. The last time I had seen Lyle was when his band had played an Anyway Fest, and the night they played I had inadvertently walked into his room while in a brownout. The guest room was halfway between our bedroom and the bathroom and it was not uncommon of me to me to fall into the guest bed upon relieving myself as I was too drunk to manage to stumble the ten more paces into our bedroom. I was in a brown-out that night, and ended up spooning Lyle waking up to his shrill, “Duudeee, you are fucking naked!!” and then having him hand me off to my wife, “I believe he is your responsibility” he said as he passed me off in the night. Sitting on a bench in New York, Lyle said, “Bela, you seem happy now.”