Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (5 page)

She opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys.

Then she opened the door. It was a dear and trusted friend. She nodded at the door and went into the house and walked down a long hall into a room that was filled with bees.

There were bees everywhere in the room. Bees on the chairs. Bees on the photograph of her dead parents. Bees on the curtains. Bees on an ancient radio that once listened to the 1930s. Bees on her comb and brush.

The bees came to her and gathered about her lovingly while she unwrapped the liver and placed it upon a cloudy silver platter that soon changed into a sunny day.

I have a bank account because I grew tired of burying my money in the back yard and something else happened. I was burying some money a few years ago when I came across a human skeleton.

The skeleton had the remains of a shovel in one hand and a half-dissolved coffee can in the other hand. The coffee can was filled with a kind of rustdust material that I think was once money, so now I have a bank account.

But most of the time that doesn't work out very well either. When I wait in line there are almost always people in front of me who have complicated banking problems. I have to stand there and endure the financial cartoon crucifixions of America.

It goes something like this: There are three people in front of me. I have a little check to cash. My banking will only take a minute. The check is already endorsed. I have it in my hand, pointed in the direction of the teller.

The person just being waited an now is a woman fifty years
old. She is wearing a long black coat, though it is a hot day. She appears to be very comfortable in the coat and there is a strange smell coming from her. I think about it for a few seconds and realize that this is the first sign of a complicated banking problem.

Then she reaches into the folds of her coat and removes the shadow of a refrigerator filled with sour milk and year-old carrots. She wants to put the shadow in her savings account. She's already made out the slip.

I look up at the ceiling of the bank and pretend that it is the Sistine Chapel.

The old woman puts up quite a struggle before she's taken away. There's a lot of blood on the floor. She bit an ear off one of the guards.

I guess you have to admire her spunk.

The check in my hand is for ten dollars.

The next two people in line are actually one person. They are a pair of Siamese twins, but they each have their own bank books.

One of them is putting eighty-two dollars in his savings account and the other one is closing his savings account. The teller counts out 3,574 dollars for him and he puts it away in the pocket on his side of the pants.

All of this takes time. I look up at the ceiling of the bank again but I cannot pretend that it is the Sistine Chapel any more. My check is sweaty as if it had been written in 1929.

The last person between me and the teller is totally anonymous looking. He is so anonymous that he's barely there.

He puts 237 checks down on the counter that he wants to deposit in his checking account. They are for a total of 489,000 dollars. He also has 611 checks that he wants to deposit in his savings account. They are for a total of 1,754,961 dollars.

His checks completely cover the counter like a success snow storm. The teller starts on his banking as if she were a long distance runner while I stand there thinking that the skeleton in the back yard had made the right decision after all.

I
T'S
a high building in Singapore that holds the only beauty for this San Francisco day where I am walking down the street, feeling terrible and watching my mind function with the efficiency of a liquid pencil.

A young mother passes by talking to her little girl who is really too small to be able to talk, but she's talking anyway and very excitedly to her mother about something. I can't quite make out what she is saying because she's so little.

I mean, this is a tiny kid.

Then her mother answers her to explode my day with a goofy illumination. "It was a high building in Singapore," she says to the little girl who enthusiastically replies like a bright sound-colored penny, "Yes, it was a high building in Singapore!"

P
EOPLE
cannot figure out why he is with her. They don't understand. He's so good-looking and she's so plain. "What does he see in her?" they ask themselves and each other. They know it's not her cooking because she's not a good cook. About the only thing that she can cook is a halfway decent meat loaf. She makes it every Tuesday night and he has a meat loaf sandwich in his lunch on Wednesday. Years pass. They stay together while their friends break up.

The beginning answer, as in so many of these things, lies in the bed where they make love. She becomes the theater where he shows films of his sexual dreams. Her body is like soft rows of living theater seats leading to a vagina that is the warm screen of his imagination where he makes love to all the women that he sees and wants like passing quicksilver movies, but she doesn't know a tiling about it.

All she knows is that she loves him very much and he always pleases her and makes her feel good. She gets excited around four o'clock in the afternoon because she knows that he will be home from work at five.

He has made love to hundreds of different women inside of her. She makes all his dreams come true as she lies there like a simple contented theater in his touching, thinking only of him.

"What does he see in her?" people go on asking themselves and each other. They should know better. The final answer is very simple. It's all in his head.

"
IT'S
very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

I'd rather dwell in some dark holler
where the sun refuses to shine,
where the wild birds of heaven
can't hear me when I whine.

—Folk Song

 

T
HAT'S
right. The children had been complaining for weeks about the television set. The picture was going out and that death John Donne spoke so fondly about was advancing rapidly down over the edge of whatever was playing that night, and there were also static lines that danced now and then like drunken cemeteries on that picture.

Mr. Henly was a simple American man, but his children were reaching the end of their rope. He worked in an insurance office keeping the dead separated from the living. They were in filing cabinets. Everybody at the office said that he had a great future.

One day he came home from work and his children were
waiting for him. They laid it right on the line: either he bought a new television set or they would become juvenile delinquents.

They showed him a photograph of five juvenile delinquents raping an old woman. One of the juvenile delinquents was hitting her on the head with a bicycle chain.

Mr. Henly agreed instantly to the children's demands. Anything, just put away that awful photograph. Then his wife came in and said the kindest thing she had said to him since the children were born, "Get a new television set for the kids. What are you: some kind of human monster?"

The next day Mr. Henly found himself standing in front of the Frederick Crow Department Store, and there was a huge sign plastered over the window. The sign said poetically:

TV SALE.

He went inside and immediately found a video pacifier that had a 42-inch screen with built-in umbilical ducts. A clerk came over and sold the set to him by saying, "Hi, there."

"I'll take it," Mr. Henly said.

"Cash or credit?"

"Credit."

"Do you have one of our credit cards?" The clerk looked down at Mr. Henly's feet. "No, you don't have one," he said. "Just give me your name and address and the television set will be home when you get there."

"What about my credit?" Mr. Henly said.

"That won't be any problem,' the clerk said. "Our credit department is waiting for you."

"Oh," Mr. Henly said.

The clerk pointed the way back to the credit department. "They're waiting for you."

The clerk was right, too. There was a beautiful girl sitting at a desk. She was really lovely. She looked like a composite
of all the beautiful girls you see in all the cigarette advertisements and on television.

Wow! Mr. Henly took out his pack and lit up. After all he was no fool.

The girl smiled and said, "May I help you?"

"Yes. I want to buy a television set on credit, and I'd like to open an account at your store. I have a steady job, three children and I'm buying a house and a car. My credit's good," he said. "I'm already 25,000 dollars in debt."

Mr. Henly expected the girl to make a telephone call to check on his credit or do something to see if he had been lying about the 25,000 dollars.

She didn't.

"Don't worry about anything," she said. She certainly did have a nice voice. "The set is yours. Just step in there."

She pointed toward a room that had a pleasant door. Actually the door was quite exciting. It was a heavy wooden door with a fantastic grain running through the wood, a grain like the cracks of an earthquake running across the desert sunrise. The grain was filled with light.

The doorknob was pure silver. It was the door that Mr. Henly had always wanted to open. His hand had dreamt its shape while millions of years had passed in the sea.

Above the door was a sign:

BLACKSMITH.

He opened the door and went inside and there was a man waiting for him. The man said, "Take off your shoes, please."

"I just want to sign the papers," Mr. Henly said. "I've got a steady job. I'll pay on time."

"Don't worry about it," the man said. "Just take off your shoes."

Mr. Henly took off his shoes.

"The socks, too."

He did this and then did not think it strange because after all he didn't have any money to buy the television set with. The floor wasn't cold.

"How tall are you?" the man asked.

"5-11."

The man walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out the drawer that had 5-11 printed on it. The man took out a plastic bag and then closed the drawer. Mr. Henly thought of a good joke to tell the man but then immediately forgot it.

The man opened the bag and took out the shadow of an immense bird. He unfolded the shadow as if it were a pair of pants.

"What's that?"

"It's the shadow of a bird," the man said and walked over to where Mr. Henly was sitting and laid the shadow on the floor beside his feet.

Then he took a strange-looking hammer and pulled the nails out of Mr. Henly's shadow, the nails that fastened it to his body. The man folded up the shadow very carefully. He laid it on a chair beside Mr. Henly.

"What are you doing?" Mr. Henly said. He wasn't afraid. Just a little curious.

"Putting the shadow on," the man said and nailed the bird's shadow onto his feet. At least it didn't hurt.

"There you go," the man said. "You have 24 months to pay for the television set. When you finish paying for the set, we'll switch shadows. It looks pretty good on you."

Mr. Henly stared down at the shadow of a bird coming off his human body. It doesn't look bad, Mr. Henly thought.

When he left the room the beautiful girl behind the desk said, "My, how you've changed."

Mr. Henly liked having her talk to him. During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.

He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and discovered that he had smoked them all up. He felt very embarrassed. The girl stared at him as if he were a small child that had done something wrong.

M
Y
credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I've had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I've been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I've read
The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds
and my favorite
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

I have watched men standing beside hearses in front of mortuaries directing funerals with walky-talkies as if they were officers in a metaphysical war.

Oh, yes: I was once walking with a friend past a skid row hotel in San Francisco and they were carrying a corpse out of the hotel. The corpse was done tastefully in a white sheet with four or five Chinese extras looking on, and there was a very slow-moving ambulance parked out front that was prohibited by law from having a siren or to go any faster than thirty-seven miles an hour and from showing any aggressive action in traffic.

My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, "Being dead is one step up from living in that hotel."

As you can see, I am an expert on death in California. My credentials stand up to the closest inspection. I am qualified to continue with another story told to me by my friend who also works as a gardener for a very wealthy old woman in Marin County. She had a nineteen-year-old dog that she loved deeply and the dog responded to this love by dying very slowly from senility.

Every day my friend went to work the dog would be a little more dead. It was long past the proper time for the dog to die, but the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death.

This happens to a lot of old people in this country. They get so old and live with death so long that they lose the way when it comes time to actually die.

Sometimes they stay lost for years. It is horrible to watch them linger on. Finally the weight of their own blood crushes them.

Anyway, at last the woman could not stand to watch the senile suffering of her dog any longer and called up a veterinarian to come and put the dog to sleep.