The Poem is the Antidote to your Parents

Fill up on bread.
Start running.
Don't look either way.
Don't wear a sweater.
Forget your lunchbox.
Don't learn a trade to fall back on.
Take that tone with me.
Make me repeat myself.
Make me come back there.
Make me turn this car around.
Mess up your room.
Let yourself fall apart.
Go, go, go, go, go.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Don't even bother to look.  Just leap.

You are the scab I pick over and over,
The whip I use to beat myself.
Your spectre hangs on the back of the bathroom door.
 I stare at it day after day as I sit on the toilet and tell it,
"Things would have been different if I had known.
I still love you.  I'm sorry."

I want to write graffiti in your memory,
Buy an ad in the classifieds to tell you.
Anything to absolve myself of the inky guilt
Of still giving a shit.

Writing Workshop: Week Three

Week Three (15 August 2012): We had to write a scene that takes place in a restaurant.  Here's mine:
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It was the place we went 46 years ago when she found out she was pregnant with Seamus.

She ordered the roasted chicken with new potatoes that night and the chef came out and shook my hand.

We went there when he graduated from college, too. He poured us each a glass of wine, stood, and thanked us. The whole dining room applauded when he was finished his speech. The two of us were ebullient then, full of love and pride.

When we found out Linda's sister Carol had been diagnosed with breast cancer we took her out to Javier's, too. The night before she started chemotherapy. The four of us, me, Linda, Carol, and Carol's husband Marty.

In the low-light, after a few glasses of wine it was easy to look into each other's eyes. It was easier to say, “Everything will be okay,” and believe it. Linda just had a salad that night. Carol had the prime rib cooked rare. She was eating like it was the last day of her life.

Six years later, we went back to Javier's for a luncheon after Carol's funeral. That time Linda didn't eat anything. She stood near the entrance greeting people as they came in. At one point I looked over and it seemed one of the waiters was holding her up. She had her head on his shoulder. I could see the tension in his body, he was trying to inch away. She had forgotten he had another job to do. I went over to her then and took his place.

Last night we visited Linda's doctor again for the 25^th time in the last 12 months. He asked to speak to me privately and finally said what I had been waiting to hear. “Take her home,” he said, “keep giving her her medication, but I need to tell you this: She is in decline. It won't get any better than this. I need to be honest with you now, David, because I think you deserve honesty. You need to be prepared for what's ahead of you.”

I met Linda in the waiting room and she smiled her vacant smile. “Everything, okay, darling?” she asked me. She rarely called me David now because my name usually slipped her mind.

“Yes,” I told her, “how would you like to go to Javier's for dinner now?”

She just beamed. It was one of the only places she still remembered.

We got to the restaurant and they sat us at our usual table. It was a Thursday night, so there was live music. A singer and a guitarist. When I got Linda into her chair I walked over to the singer and slipped her a twenty.

“Do you know 'Someone to Watch Over Me'?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Play it for us,” I told her, “It was our wedding song. It's our anniversary tonight. I gave you twenty bucks so you'd play it four times. Five bucks a play is fair, right?”

The singer smiled. “You got it, sir,” she said, “Congratulations.”

It wasn't our anniversary, of course. But I was still celebrating. I would be celebrating every day that I still had her.

Linda ordered the lamb chop. It seemed the food made her lucid. She grinned and grinned throughout the whole meal.

I noticed that she had some gravy on her chin and then I heard the first few chords of our song.

I got up from my seat and crossed over to Linda's side of the table. Holding her face in one hand I wiped her chin with my napkin and kissed her.

She looked at me, there in the low-light, after a couple of glasses of wine, it was easy. She looked at me and she understood.

I saw tears in her eyes and she whispered, “Thank you, David, thank you, I love you.”

They played the song three more times and each time I got up and crossed over to Linda.

Each time I took her face in my hands and each time she recognized me.

Each time we kissed it was the first time and the last time.

Our tears fell clear through dessert, but we laughed at them and at each other.

On my second to last cup of coffee I caught the singer looking at us. She was crying too.

Here was the answer to all the times in the past year I had asked myself where she had gone. She was still here, in our favorite spot, at our usual table, after a couple of glasses of wine, listening to our song. She was with me still. Each time I got up and crossed over to her, she came back to me fully. She knew who I was, who I had been. She saw it all, and it was enough.

Our life together had been a series of perfect moments. Without the various contexts of our experiences, it could be like a montage in a film. Linda in her favorite blue dress. Linda fixing my tie. The two of us sharing the drive up to Maine in the summers. Me young and slim in my swim trunks. Linda ordering an appetizer, having another glass of wine, thanking the waiter as he fills her water glass. Me getting out my seat several times during dinner to kiss my lovely wife. We had lived so beautifully, had been so generous with one another. It would go on. It would keep going on until the end.

Writing Workshop: Week Two

Week One (1 August 2012): Our prompt this week was to write a story based on a photograph.  Old photos and postcards were distributed randomly to all the participants.  Here's what I got:

It's a picture of singer Lovelace Watkins and Ed Sullivan.  Watkins performed on the Ed Sullivan show several times throughout the 60's and 70's.  He was called the "Black Sinatra."  Big, smooth voice.  Amazing.

So here's the story I wrote:
___________________________________________________________________________________________

Mother's kiss was an exaggerated pantomime of a kiss. It was more for the benefit of admiring strangers than it was for me. She liked the way the puckering hollowed out her profile and showed off her cheekbones. The dry peck on my forehead was just a byproduct of her vanity.

“Louise, you spoil that boy,” said Mr. Gladstone from next door, his eyes growing wide. He had a highball in one hand and a Benson and Hedges in the other. The Gladstones and the Pritchards, my mother and father's friends from church, came one Sunday a month to drink cocktails, gossip, play pinochle, and ogle one another's spouses. The two other couples left their children at home with babysitters. My mother did not encourage their attendance.

Although my quiet, serious nature belied my six years of age, usually mother hustled me up to bed by 7. This particular night, though, she'd started drinking early and her benevolent streak had prevailed. “You are a good boy, Philip,” she told me, “You may stay up tonight and watch Ed Sullivan as long as you behave yourself, and then take yourself up to bed.”

“Behave yourself.” The words jumped out of the sentence at me. I knew what she meant. My parents had a low tolerance for “any variety of shenanigans,” as they said.

My mother's house was immaculate. It was by and for fastidious adults. She was fond of mirrors and chrome. Our sofa and carpet were white. I was six-years-old in 1968. Our sofa and carpets were white. She kept her gardening and art books on a shelf my father had built arranged in order of height. There was an orchid placed in the center of our coffee table. It begged me to touch it, but of course I never did.

My architect father spent hours in the basement at his drafting table listening to The Romantic Strings of Mantovani. You could see it the blue prints that resulted from those sessions, low, sweeping structures. The floor plans were gracious, dramatic, like a section of violins.

Whenever I made a mess, had a rare moment of sass, refused to finish my supper, my mother would become fed up immediately and send me down the basement stairs to have my punishment meted out by my father. He would put me over his knee and spank me half-heartedly to the Romantic Strings of the Montovani Orchestra with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. His hand came down again again to the rhythm of Village Swallows or Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago. Afterwards I would stand up and he'd stare at me awkwardly like he didn't know whether to sock me in the eye or shake my hand.

“That's it, son,” he'd say, “please, do try to look after yourself better.”

I could hear the muted rise and fall of the adults' voices coming from the dining room now. My mother was laughing her controlled laugh at regular intervals. I sat in the middle of the white sofa and stared at the television set. I heard Ed Sullivan say, “Lovelace Watkins.”

A tall black man stood in the middle of the screen. The band started and then his voice came out, low, full, and luxurious. The sound flowed out of the television and wrapped itself around me like the beckoning smoke hand that comes from the caulron of carrot stew and tickles Bugs Bunny's nose. I covered the lower part of his face with my chubby hand and focused on his eyes. They seemed to be full of water, in earnest, but sad, almost apologetic. I opened my mouth to let his voice in deeper. I became aware that I was rocking. I realized when they dropped that my shoulders had been up around my ears for a long time. The man's voice was in my fingers now, the man's voice was in the center of my chest. The man's voice was in my pants now, bathing me with its warmth.

I was hearing my mother scream then from far away and the sound of a glass hitting the floor. My father jerked me up off the couch, ending my reverie.

“Philip! What's gotten into you? How could you?” she bellowed.

The couch was drenched in urine.

The audience was clapping for Lovelace Watkins, my mother was crying. The neighbors were seeing themselves out in low tones of hushed outrage. Father put me in my room and closed the door.

As I lay in bed my memory of the man's voice cradled me. It nearly drowned out the sound of my mother's furious scrubbing. That night I pretended my pillow was Lovelace Watkins.

Writing Workshop: Week One

I started attending a writing workshop in the city.  Each week we work from a different prompt to compose some kind of piece of writing.  I thought I'd share them here so you, whoever you are, can see how they're coming along or not coming along. 

Week One (25 July 2012):  Our prompt this week was to write a piece with a specific song in mind.  Here is the story I wrote (and a link to the song I used):
_____________________________________________________________________________

Everytime We Say Goodbye, Julie London

The first eight notes of the first phrase are all the same. My father said it was like the slow, even glugs of liquor coming out of a bottle. But then, to alcoholics, everything is analogous to alcohol. Music especially.

The first two lines were the ones on which he'd always get stuck. They'd come seeping out of his mouth regularly, on the exhale and again on the inhale. At a certain state in his drunkenness, he'd repeat them in a low, breathy murmur, like a mantra.

It was a sad, lonely sound, like an old boat makes rocking back and forth on the dark water. He phrased it that way when he sang it, with an ominous rhythm. Imagine a lunatic sitting with his knees up to his chest, pitching his torso forward and back, forward and back:

Everytime you say goodbye

I die a little

Every time you say goodbye

I wonder why a little

He came home from work each day already enveloped in the smell. Before I even knew what it was I knew what it was. It was the smell of 6 o'clock. It meant my father would soon enter the state with which I was so familiar. His state of crooning and howling. Howling either with laughter or with tears.

Later, when it occurred to me to try and classify the smell, I called it akin to rotting cherries. Still, it was so inextricably linked to my memory of him that it was more evocative than a photograph.

My aunt Helen sat with me for two hours each afternoon from the time I came in from school until the time my father arrived home from his job at the insurance office.

Breezing through the door he'd greet her the same way each time, a peck on the cheek and a thank you.

Often he granted her extravagant compliments. Ones that seemed especially ludicrous when bestowed upon a thick-waisted and pious dowager.

“Dear Aunt Helen, you are ravishing today,” he'd bellow. Or, “Helen! Thou art worthy of thy name!”

He could turn a phrase, like Cole Porter himself, my father. He was endlessly charming and endlessly disappointing.

Dismissing Aunt Helen, my father sent her off into the regular world. Then there we were.

We lived in a kind of limbo. In the normal world, but apart from it. We regarded our diseased existence the way all functional alcoholics do, with understatement in our eyes, resignation in our shoulders.

We died every time, but just a little.

We wondered why every time, but just a little.

I call us both alcoholics, my father and I, because my life was tempered by, dependent on, concurrent with the ebb and flow of booze too. The level of alcohol in my father's blood stream determined my degree of terror for the day, how much I ate, how long I slept. It wasn't a simple proportionality either. Drunker didn't necessarily mean quieter, it might mean clumsier, weepier. More sober might mean more rational, but not always.

Still, his unpredictablity was predictable to me. My anxiety linked itself to his undulating consciousness. My vigilance balanced his carelessness. The nights he stayed awake pacing, drying himself out, were the nights I slept like iron.

Nights he passed out early I paced wide-eyed as the wee hours laid an eerie enchantment over the house. I would wander from room to room, confronted by the subtle tension objects have as they wait to be illuminated. The coffee pot, a jar of peanut butter on the counter. Things seemed to smile at me sympathetically. Soon it will be morning, they seemed to say, and we can all pretend like this never happened.

They helped us, of course, my father's sisters, his mother.

At night, though, it was me helping him up the stairs, or onto the couch when he couldn't make it up the stairs. I was the one braving the concerned, penetrating glances of shopkeepers and teachers, frying him eggs at eleven o'clock at night, dropping a tab of alka seltzer into a glass of ginger ale the next morning.

He was never cruel to me really, except that he trained me for a life enabling alcoholics.

My father preferred Julie London's rendition of the song. That low, breathy voice and the brush on the drum. ”It's a drunk's dream,” he'd say, “easy on the head.”

Why the God's above me

Who must be in the know

Think so little of me

They allow you to go

It never occurred to me to miss my mother. Once I heard my father's sisters snarling in the kitchen, “Wasn't the maternal type, that one. Saw it from the start. Once she got that kid out of her, she couldn't get away fast enough. They're better off anyhow, I reckon. She was dangerous crazy.”

Dangerous crazy, she said it just like that. The phrase came snaking out of my of Aunt Helen's mouth with a weird mix of revulsion and envy.

At least she only left me one time, I thought to myself. Right then and a million times after. At least she only left me once.

My father turned his famous charm on me when his chemistry was right.

“My darling girl,” he'd say, “what did I do to deserve you?”

He sweet-talked me with a hesitant look in his eyes, like he scarcely believed himself. It was a consolation prize, and he knew it. He abandoned me at every turn, but at least he told me I was pretty now and then.

There's no love song finer

But how strange the change

From major to minor

Every time we say goodbye

He drank himself to death, of course. I was 19. We were both so used to his being sick he never even went to the hospital. He just passed out one night and didn't wake up the next morning. When I came in and realized he was dead, I rolled my eyes.

I cried without the contorted faces one makes out of shock and grief. I sang his favorite song and my tears came down in a straight, even stream. That's what happened. The world changed with the key. From major to minor. We had been saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, for so long. I repeated the refrain one more time and made the arrangements for him to be taken away.

Happy First Birthday, June

I sewed a tag onto a fence to commemorate my niece June's birthday.  Here is what it's meant to say:

June, we are allowed to do beautiful things for no reason or for any reason.
Beauty and art are not frivolous and silly, they are necessary, and we are responsible for creating beauty and art anywhere we can.  Any time we can.  With whatever we have.
Have the courage to be subversive, have the conviction to act upon your environment in whatever way you think will improve it.
Even if something is technically illegal, that doesn't necessarily make it wrong.
June, you are special and great.  A miracle!  Your presence alone has changed the world.  Let's keep changing it together for the better.

Happy Birthday, June.
xoxo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoK5QiN2vxc

3 June 2012

If you want to know my heart
It's on my sleeve
It's sliced up in your sandwiches
It's floating in every bowl of cereal you eat
It stands in a tree and sings you awake in the morning till you throw a pillow at the window

If you want to know my heart
It's on my sleeve
And in my hair
And in my shoes and fingers
And in my chest
Big and sopping like a janitor's mop
Dragging along in the same arc across the floor
Over and over