Close to the Knives (29 page)

I sat on a bench in the park in Merida wondering how much heterosexuals really love each other. Everyone I know has come from a childhood where they suffered some element of abuse at the hands of their parents. They watched the marriages of their parents turn into ugly battlegrounds whose parameters were defined by the four sides of a house.

In the streets of Merida there are hundreds of poverty-stricken kids selling handfuls of wild roses to the tourists for the equivalent of mere nickels and dimes. At dusk, someone saw these kids sitting on the benches in the park eating the petals of the flowers they hadn't managed to sell. The murderous jerk they call the pope is on his way to town in the next ten days for a tour. Another press agent for god who will in all likelihood tour the garbage dumps on the outskirts of the city, where groups of seven-year-old kids and their families comb the hills of putrid garbage looking for a handful of rotted food to fill their stomachs. Buzzards lift and descend on the stinking landscapes, in competition with hundreds of stray dogs for a mouthful of food. I went walking there with Tom once and the flies that poured through the air around us had us running in fear of what the marriage of insect and fucked-up immune systems might produce in us. A woman in the dumps, seven months pregnant and with four kids by her side, was asked on tv if she ever thought of using birth control, and she replied, “I heard that birth control causes cancer.” There is no doubt that the church has spread that information among these people. Back in the states, the archdiocese, with the blessings of the vatican, says that condoms and clean needles are lies in the face of the AIDS epidemic. The lovely mexican queens who sit in the shadows of this park at dusk can't afford to buy rubbers when they sleep with the north american and european queers and straights who come here for vacations. It is left in the hands of visitors to provide protection. With the advent of acrylics, the rope this city was once famous for is no longer needed, and the economic problems extend even into the tourism industry. I went to a local zoo and most of the animals were laying in dazed pools of urine and diarrhea in the cages. Those animals that had died were taxidermied and placed back in the original jail-like homes. Thinking about all this and the constant sighting of Dakota in the labyrinthine streets makes me feel like tipping over sideways off the bench I am sitting on, or else buying a gun.

I felt something in my mouth—like a sensation you get when you're in a car or on a bicycle or just walking down a nighttime country road under the breezy trees and something flies into your mouth, like an airborne insect caught in the flow of currents. I pulled it out and laid it down on the white porcelain edge of a sink. I also may have found the thing floating in a puddle of water, not in my mouth: the two possibilities of discovery converge or at least intersect. It looked like a tangled body of a thin long mosquito or spider from a distance, but looking closer I saw it was a young mermaid, tiny and perfectly formed, no longer than three quarter inches long, and she was unconscious in the tiny pool of water that surrounded her on the porcelain surface. I thought if I picked her up and dried her off with a piece of tissue, or else put her on a dry surface, she might expel the water in her mouth and survive. I found a pair of cuticle scissors. I planned to use the thin closed blades to lift her up by the waist because my fingers were too large and clumsy to pick her up without squashing her. I made a delicate attempt to slide the scissors beneath her body in the tiny pool of water, and she separated at the waist. Her upper body was a quarter inch away from the rest of her body. I felt a subtle shiver of horror and kind of wiped away at her with my fingers—trying to send her lifeless body into the emptiness of the room. I felt embarrassed and self-conscious. I woke up glad to be dreaming again after months of emptiness

Tom found a poster on a distant corner, advertising bullfights. I felt sluggish in the intensified light and heat of the day and didn't really feel like going to a bullfight. I couldn't shake the transparent sense of death inside of every minute and every image and every movement of my body among the sheets of the hotel room, in the slow turning blades of the ceiling fan, or in the curves of stone and concrete making up the streets and buildings. At the last minute I shook the exhaustion and went with him, hoping the sight of blood would shake me up and wake me up to all that which had no words.

It's a hot day to kill a bull. The bullring is in a part of the city that looks like an incidental suburb made up of dying buildings reflecting the bright hot light of an unbearable noon. We're seated in the coliseum-style bleachers made of rough concrete with small numbers traced into dollops of cement that delineate each seat. There are crowded groupings of spectators, bunched into certain sections of the stadium, under portable umbrellas, behind dark sunglasses; all wearing hats or fishing caps. People are still arriving and the stadium is only half filled. Six large megaphone-style loudspeakers begin to blare a scratchy music; bad speaker connections, harshly amplified static, buries the notes, and there are occasional lapses in electrical current so the recording slows down. When the stadium attendants seat someone in front of us, we can't move our feet. When they seat someone behind us, we can't lean back without bumping into them. Claustrophobia gives me sensations like the flu.

The earliest photograph I own of my mother is one of her at age fourteen or fifteen, just before she got married. She is standing on a rocky outcrop of hillside, possibly above the city of Melbourne, Australia. She is wearing a white blouse and skirt, with her arms behind her head holding her hair against the insistent wind. At the bottom of the photograph she had inscribed the word:
Self
. At that time of her life she may have been the only person around who cared enough to ask for a portrait to be taken of herself. I barely remember what she described of her parents but it sounded as if she was unloved.

My earliest memory of my father is the glazed drunkenness of his eyes. He stole chickens for his mother during the depression so they could eat. My father was a sailor who could only describe his foreign travels in racist stories after hours of nursing a whiskey bottle. He had a tough liver that lasted fifty-four years without giving out. He loved to beat his wives and his children, in fact he made a science of it in the cinderblock basement where he kept his guns and tools, his attempts at taxidermy and making pickles. The pickles always rotted because his job kept him away for weeks and months at a time.

The loudspeakers of the stadium are blaring dramatic trumpet sounds. The instruments make up the sounds of an old brass band with an occasional flute buried beneath the waves of rolling music. The actual ring of the stadium is made of raked dirt and is quite small. The dirt is sunbleached and dry and surrounded by a wooden fence, chest high and painted the color of brick. There are small propped-up walls inside the edge of the ring, in various locations, for the banderilleros to scamper behind when the bull rampages. Embedded in the concrete foundation of the interior arena are small rooms with doorless entrances, marked
POLICIA
or
SERVICIO MEDICO.
On the dirt floor of the bull ring, about ten feet in from the fencing, someone has made an inscribed ring drawn in lime and inside that, yet another, smaller, ring.

My parents separated around the time I turned two years old. My father kidnapped my brother, sister, and me and put us up with relatives on a chicken farm outside of Detroit until he remarried with a woman from Scotland and brought her to America. He brought us back to New Jersey to live with her in a house on the outskirts of a farming town slowly being torn up for suburbs and tract housing. I remember big wet leaves in the morning trees and birds pulling worms out of the ground. I remember the first time in my life seeing a cop car scream by with red lights turning. I followed the sound of it for a number of blocks, to the front lawn of a house. The street was empty. I remember a man in a white t-shirt standing next to a woman in the front yard. I remember he had a gun to her head. I remember getting yanked away from the street by a stranger.

At the opposite end, of the arena from where I am seated, under a cigarette advertisement painted on a wooden archway, is a half-sized double doorway. Over the top of the doors is a tunnel burrowed through the width of the stadium. I can see a gathering of men in shadows, and further back, in a strip of blazing sunlight, a couple of tan-uniformed policemen and a big white ambulance with revolving red lights.

Five rows behind us a brass band is assembled. There is a single drum. At the farthest point of the upper seats across the arena, near one of the sets of loudspeakers, the tips of a couple of healthy palm trees can be seen over the top of the wall. One bird floats in the circular sunlit hell of the cloudless blue sky.

With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word: freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what is ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.

The assembled brass bands starts up. It plays loudly for about five minutes before being subdued by the intense heat. A group of men in white cloth shirts and red berets appears in the sundrenched part of the tunnel. The matador appears and moves about the cops and the white-clothed men. He glitters in a silver, black, and gold uniform. The solitary drum starts up an irregular beat and thumps like a breathing pattern in the uneasy temperature. The stadium has slowly and quietly filled up.

My father moved all of us to another town, where another kid and I had a gag routine that kept us amused on boring afternoons. We would lie down on the long sloping highway outside our doors to make the enormous trucks that came barreling over the hill hit their brakes. At the last second, before the squealing trucks would hit us, we'd jump up and run into the woods.

The only act of kindness I can remember from my father was one day when he took me into the playroom to beat me as he regularly did and, just before starting, he asked me what he should do. I replied, “Don't beat me.” I remember he looked at me with a very tired and sad face, thought about it for a moment, and said, “Okay.”

I remember zombie films in the local firehouse. I also remember the first times I witnessed death. One of them was in a pirate movie at the firehouse. I felt dizzy when a pirate plunged his sabre through the body of another pirate. I became the blade for a split second and couldn't picture where it went, what the interior of the other man's body looked like. I only felt helplessness because I knew it wasn't humanly possible for the other guy to survive. The second death I witnessed was when I was walking alone through a distant field and saw a brown dog tearing the brains out of the head of a rabbit. I yelled at the dog, but it paid no attention to me.

After being silent for a while, the band returns to song with an air of exuberance. The music sounds like roman songs mixed with Sergio Leone soundtracks. After a series of rounds it begins to sound like fusions of cabaret music and, further, like soft dreamy coastal bar music. A man in blue pants and striped shirt walks into the ring and checks out the small propped-up partitions. He pulls out and unfurls a small rectangle of red cloth. Draping it over the wood fence, he sticks his arm between its two layers and makes threading motions with a thin rod to give it support at the top. There are also mustard yellow and shocking pink banners, as well.

I thought of when Keith was lying in a coma in the hospital. Before he became ill he'd had a venomous relationship with his ex-lover, and some of the family gathered around his bedside continued that relationship for him at his wish. The lawyer representing Keith and his ex-lover had been battling over their loft for more than a year. Since Keith had become ill, and even then as he lay in a coma, his ex-lover hadn't seen or talked to him; the family would probably have been upset if he showed up. At least that is what I imagined when I tried to put myself in the lover's place and think his thoughts. Not long before Keith died for the third and final time, a phone call came into the room. One of his sisters answered it and it was the ex-lover. She explained the situation to him and said he could speak to Keith—if he had any last things to say, Keith could probably still hear them. She placed the phone on the pillow next to Keith's ear and left the room. I can only remember the waxen color of Keith's flesh and the slitted eyelids and the fluctuating movements of his eyes beneath them, and the dull hiss and thump of the respirator.

The guys in white uniforms and red berets have moved out of the sunlit part of the arena's exterior grounds into the shadowed area of the tunnel. In the sunlit area I see the fragmented movements of the picador riding back and forth on a horse that is draped with a deep blue stuffed blanket that protects it from the bull's horns.

The guys in red berets are now at the entrance gate to the dirt arena. A second picador appears at the gate. The crowd whistles and breaks into waves of applause. The band strikes up again. The red gates to the arena are pulled open. There is a drum roll. A procession of eight matadors enters the ring accompanied by picadors and banderilleros on horseback. The horses are blindfolded, with huge pieces of red cloth tied over masses of newspapers pressing against the horses' eyes. The padded coats the horses wear are deep blue, studded with red dots in a grid pattern. The drum roll repeats as the matadors doff their black hats to the crowded arena.