1985

I was born in 1979.  Though I was hardly reared on television, Sesame Street had a tremendous impact upon my sensibilities.  I longed for the urban landscape from a young age; I liked the idea of proximity, apartment living, a deli on the corner.  My early years were, in fact, rather suburban.  We lived with my grandparents on Clearview Road.  There were houses with yards lining both sides of the street.  It wasn't the cul de sac'ed utopia that one imagines, it was still wild around the edges.  


Our house was at the end of the row, and abutted wooded acreage that I thought of as a Sendackian landscape, with wild osage orange trees and weeds as tall as me.  This lot, where I imagined the wild things to be, was a never ending source of fear, apprehension and illicit excitement.  I loved exploring it but never alone; though, in truth, the older neighborhood boys who I would tag along with should have been more feared than the limpid creek and mud, the trees and brush.  


My spacial sensitivity probably had something to do with what I picked up on in those woods.  I, at a tender age, sensed that this parcel of land was a place that people came to escape into, to hide themselves or their activities.  I found relics of this, and these artifacts seemed at once wrong and enthralling.  A woman's bra, that I wouldn't dare touch with my hands but would place on the surface of the water with a stick, and swirl around in the water, watching the lace float.  I found the bra, and when I was done playing with it, I hid it by flinging it as far into the trees as I could with my stick.  I didn't want the boys to find it.  It was private, belonging first to the woman who lost it and then to me.  When I was done playing, it was mine to discard this time.


As were the packs of cigarettes that I would find, or, my big one-time score- a cassette tape of Rush.  This was Rush circa their synth period, it's 1985, not the prog rock Rush.  I knew, from experience, that if you found something really good, it was best to keep it to yourself.  I didn't like to share my bounty so I slipped the tape into my pocket and made an excuse to run home.  I had a cassette deck.  It had come as a gift for Christmas one year, including several books and corresponding tapes, a sort of reading practice.  I quickly figured out how to manipulate the sounds on the tapes by pressing two buttons at once or by crimping the tape.  This is how my mother happened to come upon her six year old listening to Rush, backwards.  Least of all did I want to share my treasure with her, she had the power of seizure.  I begged her to let me keep it and eventually she relented.    


Danger was something that I was fortunate enough to be able to court on my own at a young age.  Of course, this didn't always work out well for me...I can tell you some other time about playing hide and go seek in an abandoned factory, and all of the stitches that I didn't get.  But knowing that something was dangerous, poisonous, or somehow sinister was a gateway for my curiosity, imagination and courage.  


The largest osage tree grew right next to the fence in my back yard, so large and heavy with fruit that the branches would bow low, over the fence and into my grasp.  This is how I leaned a few things; osage oranges are not in fact, real oranges hiding inside of ugly green skins.  The trees have long, spiky thorns that are coated in a powder that makes them sting extra bad if you get one under your skin.  The white juice that looks like milk does not taste like milk and if you ingest it, adults will give you ipecac syrup and tell you to go outside and throw up in the lawn until you can't throw up anymore.  But long after I leaned these things, the osage oranges still had allure to me.  Just as picking the thorns off of my grandmother's rose bushes did, or attempting to run my small fingers in between row of thorns on my mother's cactus plants.  I would bleed and learn the lesson, but in time, find myself tempting fate once again.      

the hearty hybrid

Oh to be purebred and fine, lineless and shiny
Perfectly rounded and unmoved by mundanity
Untroubled and controlled, within bounds.
To only grow weary at the novelty of it all, 
I wouldn't know.
I wait quietly for my season.
I grow ridges and grooves
And I fold thyself into myself
As I wait patiently for tomorrow.

The Northeast Corridor

There are a whole bunch of talkers on this train, it’s only been an hour, only nine am and yet everyone’s got so much to say.  

To be fair, I have things to say too, but I only want to talk to you.  I have no interest in the woman behind me who works in hospital admin, in the billing department.  I am mildly interested in the two gentlemen behind me who are talking like they are on Law and Order- “We’ve got a huge problem in Afghanastan- the poppy farmers and all the ancillary issues…this place was hopping after WWII, baby.  Remmington Arms, the whole nine…they’ll cut your nuts off…altoids, that’s my plan to cut back on smoking.” 

I keep thinking about this perfect moment, this moment that we had on Friday night, that sums up our whole connection.  There’s you, and there’s me and I am in you and we’re talking and I’m in you and we’re having a heart to heart and we’re not talking about sex, we’re talking about life and us and it’s everything.  With you, everything is related and I love that.  You connect me to you and the world is there too and you’re not scared of a life like that.

I’m passing through Bridgeport, CT.  This place looks like a pit.  We just passed some dinosaur graffiti.  Here’s a marina with a bunch of yachts, here’s a brown field full of detritus and my favorite, old mattresses.  Matresses used to be made out of crazy fabrics, they each had their own flair.  Psychedelic mattresses in blue and orange florals from the seventies, blue ticking stripes from the fifties, baby blue brocades circa 1984.  Who slept on those mattresses, and why are they abandoned on the side of the train tracks now?  What is the story? 

Next to me sits a short, polite and slightly interested in me man.  He’s got a jewy look, he’s clean cut and smilely and clearly wants to talk to me.  I am sure that he is circumcised.  His father runs a large practice of cardiologists.  He’s a doctor too.  I’m too tall for him.  And probably too nasty.  Today, if you could see me, I look like a respectable young woman.  A woman, several rows back, has been laughing like a hyenia for basically the whole time.  In about an hour, I am sure that I will start having empassioned fantasies about physically harming her.  My fantasies will all center around a pivotal and dramatic line, when I ask her, “Who’s laughing now, bitch?”  It’s New Haven. 

For Rosa

No glass broke.  

No blood spots, no spectacle. 

When death slipped in, it came so quiet, like the sound of holding a breath.  It danced in, on its tiptoes, with a tight smile on its face.  It came the way that it wanted; unfairly, stealthily, with nimble fingers and a purpose.  There was no hesitation and when it left, it turned on its heel and went abruptly, with the sound of stage lights turning off.

All evidence erased itself in the tide.  No one saw the big moment because it was so small, and in that fact is the unfairness of everything.  Perhaps it had made the tiniest sound, like a beatle shell being crushed.  That noise never made it out of his body, and certainly not over the crash of the waves.  Mike was the only one who heard, in the way that you can only hear those kinds of body sounds within yourself.  His four little beatles, crushed right behind his ears, made the smallest and largest sound of his life.  And no one was there to see.  

He rode in on a different wave than he had wanted to.  

Triage began immediately, and swiftly.  

All procedures and protocols were observed.  Minutes mattered to those folks, as did following the rules.  The rules that exist, partially because they are the right way, the best way, the safest thing, those rules make it possible for the rule followers to deal with the mundane realities of death.  

But those minutes were the lost minutes, in someone else’s reality.  They meant something only to those who were there.  For her, who was not, imagine the cruelty.  

There was life, loud and frentic, enjoyable and hard; there was a slow and fast moment in the water, a soundless execution; then reaction.  For some, sinking hearts; for others, adrenaline. Many many many footprints were left in the sand.  The best was done, and then time moved on.  People returned to their blankets, sandcastles, umbrellas, the surf.  The water lapped at the shore.  Time marched on and took an inch or two of sand back with it, every ten minutes.

So when she returned from her walk, very little evidence remained.  She had missed the worst show of her life.  

She brushed the sand from her shins, sat down in the faded striped beach chair that had made it through a fair number of seasons.  She found the sensible bottle of spf 50, which was about two years old and did not provide this level of sun protection any more.  She slathered her skin with it and opened the paperback book to page 73 of the 286.  She read two sentences and looked out at the ocean.  She studied the figures in the water, bobbing and practicing the zen art of waiting on the Jersey Shore.  She zeroed in on a familiar silouette, and satisfied, focused her eyes again on page 73. 

She would soon put down that book forever, never to pick it up again.  In the next year, she would squint her eyes, as if looking into a bright light, blinding her, if she saw that book atop a table at Barnes & Noble or Borders or in the book and magazine section of Costco.  It will be displayed in an imposing tower formation, and it will take all that she's got at times to resist crumbling to the ground and crawling under that pile of books.

  

She will never touch this book again, and she will religiously avoid crossing paths it when possible.  She will learn.

But before all of this, she will enjoy another page or two of this light reading, in the sun, fine grains of sand sticking to the pages.  When the chapter is finished, she will stretch her legs in the sand, scan the horizon with intention and purpose.  A faint feeling will begin to creep in; first in her head, only vague and undefined.  It is like a fine fog that comes in as she eyes the landscape.  Reason will reign for a minute, but it will lose the coin toss and that fog will become heavier, and sink, and sit in her stomach.  She doesn’t know it yet, but that fog that got inside of her, it is there to stay, it will follow her for days, months and then years.  It will make purpose and joy so hard to find.  It will take a little joy away from all things, even when they are enjoyable once again.  Flavors will never quite be the same; they will all be familiar but they will be sentimental and seem like they tasted better yesterday.  

She stands, and walks down the shore about 50’.  She puts her hands on her hips, stands in the water, first to her ankles and then to her knees.  Suddenly she will find herself wading out into the water, deeper and deeper, she is wearing shorts and a tee shirt and she will walk out to the surfers.  She will ask them to tell her what she already knows.  They see her approaching, no wetsuit, in the October water.  In an instant and without words, they know so much more about her than she knows of her self in that moment.  She will begin yelling to them and the wind carries her voice in the opposite direction, making it impossible to make out what she is saying.  But she will hear them.  She will hear them say “Talk to those officers.” She will follow his outstretched arm, his finger, with her eyes and see the two figures in navy blue, badges glinting in the sun.  

She will run out of the water and they will know exactly who she is.  The widow.  The widow who thought she was a married woman, at the beach for one of the last warm days of the season with her surfing husband; the widow who does not know that she is a widow yet, but she feels it.  

She won’t remember speaking. She isn’t sure if she couldn't speak or if she didn't want to or perhaps she did speak but her words were all silent?  She’ll never know, though she will think of it often, while lying awake in their bed.  While thinking of how terrible awakness is, while shutting her eyes and almost feeling just his thumb on her cheek, like how he used to occasionally wake her up.  It was her very favorite way to be woken, and she realized that she would never have another awakening like that.  Before it became a sad fact, it was simply shocking.  

Shock is a tight emotion, a state of being bound so tightly that safety is implicit.  But the shock shatters and it is a far fall from the grace of shock to reality.  She enjoyed the shock as much as she could enjoy anything those days.  

7am

I awoke to my game face, smeared all over my pillow.  I stared as the mess of it provoked me to be ashamed.  But I wasn't.  I looked at the man in my bed, the one that I tried to get rid of so desperately the night before.  I'm used to sleeping alone.  Sleeping next to someone is a very intimate act, vulnerable and prone.  His lifeless limbs were draped so comfortably over my pillows and I still wished he would disappear. 


I had called him by the wrong name the night before, while we were fucking.  I was about to come, totally enjoying myself and thinking of the one who really excited me.  Then I heard the name slip past my lips. The brink of orgasm gave way to panic.  So quickly that it almost felt involuntary, I began to fake a boisterous orgasm, in the hope that the throes of my pleasure would distract and affirm that in that moment, he was the only man that existed for me.  This was lame, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it sealed the deal for him.  We would never work.