Women and Men (144 page)

Now give her credit, though she can’t slip past the metal-detector threshold an old license plate of hers specially requested by the brother sentenced among other things to drive no more, she when she sees him unlike their father (who is also, granted, embarrassed, which is maybe good for my father to feel, you know) sees
two
things—not one, like the old man in his bleached T-shirt and his mouth. But she can’t see her two at once, and I can only forgive her; and the two are: me her brother the foregone once-loved relation; and second (but not in order) her man in black she sees—in my eyes sees him reflected, Jim, behind her on his suburban local moving past power poles like picket fences flickering disapproval but much worse than disapproval at her through me, my eyes—or try this for size, he’s standing just behind her mad brother (me) just before Brother seats himself on his side of the Visitors Room table, and seeing through me as thank my stars she alone has always done with the light of love, she instead, like the Visitors Room is a museum, finds her husband there, he in real black not my correctional green, in a silver-buttoned uniform coat over my prison-issue green short sleeves, and in his silver-number-plated conductor’s hat above my long-lobed brainy ears and short, fair hair, and his clean lip under my utility infielder’s mustache, but is he in black or in blue? it’s been so long I wouldn’t know, and you got to ask yourself as you said, Jim, speaking of trusting your memory, Did I
ever
know this thing I claim to have forgotten, rest my soul?

Ruth Heard thought like that. And that’s how I almost got thrown out of Junior High: attacked the principal and other teachers for pushing her out, this beautiful subversive person. This is about i960 and she took us on unauthorized trips and we would disappear for the afternoon, and a skinny Irish kid who was funny so we all thought we liked him didn’t like her assignments and got his folks after her and she had no teaching certificate and told his parents she was glad to teach only when she was worked up and wanted to make trouble for herself; and in the different ways parents have, no one fought her dismissal and the principal fought me by letting me graduate. First things first, my mother would say, the sweat on her brow; and make dinner that my father would look at the meatloaf and ask very quietly, Where’s the ketchup, and she said, Already in—yet he brought home an electric frying pan for her once not threateningly and you could tell if you looked close he was pleased with himself.

My mother did not imagine she would go to a driving school on the sly and get her license at age fifty-one, but she did. Meanwhile made what trips she could to see me by bus, but has never to this day told me the explosion when the old man found out she had gone out and got her license.

First things second. It’s not a pat on the back I want now much less that brown-and-gray-striped shirt—did you get that in your brother’s store? It was hot in our workshop room that first night. Thank you for filling out the correspondence form. I took your word Friday that you do not know the activities of the South American economist (while we do not discuss him or the American photo-journalist who has pursued that distinguished gentleman’s life for profit that has led him from Florida to this very institution. Which the Foleynomic Plan was to cover, too).

You were part of the life of that good and heroic gentleman South American with an Irish or was it Scottish name but with the foreign
and
the English accent: hence our constant messenger tooling up through hills which was only one thing I meant when, before I said, "So much for economics," I found an opening in the void.

It was a face I could have pushed in, or inward. You know the type, Jim. One with oddly the same eyes as my girl, sharp behind the mist—a little not there. Reflecting not you exactly. Just secrets seducing you to know them when shit who cares.

But those eyes not my girl’s drew you in by likeness and then you were betrayed and where her eyes were all readiness which you expect of a good person, a fine girl, these similar orbs of her father the super were motion I swear like he’s not all here, and he did marry a Puerto Rican even if she died. Which left him free to go to Israel, which Miriam said her mother never would.

He never missed a thing; looked after the building like it’s owned by someone he looked up to. And he would forsake his bed in the middle of the night to monitor his garbage cans.

Once, the garbage started rising. So he needed a fifth can, and he got it out of the owner, but then found that under the beef gristle and chicken joints, the toothless cobs, lolling eggshells, glistening slicks of tuna cans and here’s a gefilte fish jar and spent tapeworms of spaghetti and tomato sauce and grounds and cucumber curls everything breaded in cat litter, light bulbs like new and angles of toast, was stacks of his old newsmagazines and papers he almost didn’t know he had because he reads them only years late for perspective, but now he wanted them and freaked out that the ones not already mashed by the sanitation-truck paddle-chopper were stinking wet, and what he could sometimes be saying in shock to his cronies who’d stop by the cans to smoke a cigarette, "I don’t get into shouting matches," and Miriam was up in the apartment right there when he came so close to smashing her little Aunt Iris who’d thrown the magazines out you might have thought those old pages and supplements were life savings—papers prematurely leaking cancer cures and showing old infants half-cooked half-eaten in the furnace of your local place of worship. He paid for them with his labor, and he had spent his time preparing to read them, it carried him through the very twilight hours of "local dusk" at which you said the Russians are fond of recovering payload weapons test-fired by retro from orbit in case there should be a future to ply with, which will mean more of the old educated guesses as to actual cash flow in global arms trade because credit arrangements not to mention the grant basis make, as you admitted, major weapons transactions as hard to put money value on as the give-and-take of modern wedlock (laugh). Twin mysteries. But why did you then say we shouldn’t take you seriously? I, at least, saw the connection. And I know the papers make up whatever they find they are missing so the future can be told; but if statistics like last year’s jump in military spending in a certain South American nation will likely be followed in ‘77 by a corresponding drop because the lid is on there now—and even
because
statistics don’t find it easy to lie, so action after action must be made up—did you sleep in berths in the old Pullman trains?—the father of a kid I know worked there until one day they put him behind a bar selling pressed units of turkey-gobbler in bread wrap—actions as live as that dioxin spread over four misty years of Asian woods and farms maintained its integrity so well that it proved itself as a future area-denial weapon—which you know already, Jim, so well that my being in your head is the important thing, not the information I rehearse there—as interesting, all this, as people, Jim, and as, sometimes, the boredom they make you live with—more events to read about, to carry Miriam’s father, his gray-white wiry hair standing up on end, through local dusk from work to supper even in my thinking and I feel yours concurring, beyond the sanitation tumbril chopper-scrambler (his head borne under it, and disappearing, or segregated and rejected for transplant tumbling back into the street where it is exasperated) while Miriam’s Aunt Iris watches with her soulmate Eddie the printer with friendly ink-eyes and an anvil forehead still unmarried driving a late-model compact.

And Miriam’s father keeps himself going with other consumables besides these magazines and papers which he kept because he wanted the chance to devour them all over again someday, while leaning against his building talking to friends who had retired and didn’t work part-time but are included, free, in his leisure watch over a six-story tenement not far from the East River Drive, from the subway, from my own former home, and from a drop Miriam and I some days detoured to so as to go not right home from school to her house which was a way I couldn’t begin to measure near-sighted though I don’t forget a bit of it, down to the point of a pizza wedge Miriam once fed me across the booth table to shut me up when all I was going to say was, Let’s get outa this dump, let’s go to Jersey, the beach, maybe further out, no one’s there this time of year—whatever time of year it was.

And I am not forgotten by her father, which is the story of my one-time life before I learned to think. But a man who his beloved daughter Miriam said spoke often of settling in Tel Aviv with a friend he had once sat on an East River pier bench with and disputed for hours. But if I am in your mind now and by design, you are in mine and no getting around it and you see I do not hide my light under a bushel.

You said, as if in question, There are no animals here. Got a guilty laugh, running up out of the convicted gut on a string that was then leashed in. I see you moving and me here. Ever-moving. But sometimes moving in one place without ever leaving, yet knowing you could leave. You asked who visits. Well, I have always been pretty selective. My mother borrows Eddie’s car— you don’t know Eddie—and always leaves a little present in it—a bear to hang on the sun visor; a pack of mints. My mother comes. The Visitors Room—what more than an expansion of the seminar horseshoe table where we rap with Death Row chaplain ‘bout everything except that inevitable penalty itself, and the Muslims come and listen and burst out now and then I mean really very intelligently. The meeting’s called "cadre," it’s called "therapy," it’s a rap supposedly though padre does all the talking, urges us not to jerk off—but the cadre’s a way not to get locked up after supper which is earlier than the army but later than the hospital. Not this dentist-equipped hospital, which I don’t go near.

Though Miriam sent me once to the dental clinic uptown, and I recall contemplating borrowing a car off the street to save time and now I see that as an early experiment in a public transportation system with open cars anyone may use within a given borough. The car theft I mentioned awhile ago was an old VW that petered out slowly block to block while the cops gave chase until at last vehicle came to a halt, and perpetrator left piece of wood used as pistol on seat, and the cops never identified it as the weapon.

Things go on somewhere here and are heard of. Guys for example might get burned upstairs. I don’t mean they been doing it, but it looks like they are going to activate the refrigerator and other major appliances (smile), stove, blender. But we would never see it. Not even the dimming of the light because they got a separate generator. What do you expect in a maximum multiple dwelling? Let’s say the head pop off and the exhaust smoke just squeeze out from armpit one, armpit two, and the curled hands darken with the body’s irritation at this half-ass cremation, this summary drying out of the teeming colloids. On those midnights when you are waiting for a dream in which there’ll be an unexpected dimming of the seventeen-hundred-toilet candle-power, you think then of an H-bomb settling whole and bright upon this place and reaching down instantly along so many fuse radii the incandescent inmates here are at the center of the flower if not attention; bodies with auras for a moment and auras inside too, where the skeleton flares orange under the analysis of the moment and the brightness that is in truth the ultimate shadow gives you gall remembering what you’re in for to say as you die (instead of "I think we’re in for a shower," because as our Chilean contact said, When people talk about the weather they often mean it). At least Outside the others are getting the same, and you see one of them jacking up a fast car to change a tire which ain’t reboring a cylinder because what’s
he
know?, but doing something anyway, and on the parkway rolling nowhere; another person jumping at the kitchen timer and plunging to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer; another window-shopping, finding a trace of a faraway idea in an article of clothing; another in a backyard digging not realizing a person that knows him well is watching him from the back-porch steps, you could go on, Jim, but when you’ve had this final thought at the moment of the capital H —that your own human kinsmen outside are also being totaled by the bomb —your brain’s too full to let this be the last thought so while you think, ‘ There it was, they’re getting this, too," and ‘That was my last word and thought, that was it," your brain as it shimmies adds a whisper to the shuffle of your coil (smile): Anh-anh; nope; quite the reverse, everything on the Outside, unchanged, unbombed, is O.K. and as it was—like this new generation of clean devices come off the drawing board not just to eliminate undesirable elements but to model a holocaust at minimum expense and with maximum media exposure to show each man in the family of man.

Or so I used to let my mind go—a sloppy body (you said you’d check out colloids, no need to get too technical, Jim)—until my life changed when I woke up to the Colloidal Unconscious. It had always been with us. You touched on it when you first arrived on tape. You are different, Jim, from our old born-again prospectors with the fine-tooled boots pointing out under their cuffs, who pull their big-buckled belt off at the metal-detector checkpoint, yessuh, small change, pen knife, and some credit cards show up too, glad to be asked, suh, well you know they have got it all down to Jesus; or that good bearded father who cornered history by just splitting the Earth between those thirty-two hundred mines full to the brim with miners and on the other hand and always elsewhere the twelve inspectors who by some arithmetic fronting as geometry could ensure each mine one visit every ten years.

Or that bad father—for there’s always a good father and a bad father, Jim, and the bad father didn’t want to get into a shouting match and found the world in a necklace of garbage cans that magnetized his mind, and were his work and perpetuation and care like overflow from father function until his beautiful daughter the one I always love grew older and then those cans got mysteriously linked by a medium-voltage line especially dangerous in a drizzle to jolt and stagger Dobermans, frowning shepherds, bassets minding own business, cold-cock your Afghan, explode your spaniel, straighten out a white chow’s tail, recharge your Saint Bernard, when these had until then lifted, oftentimes propped, a leg to leave a sign of themselves upon galvanized common surface that could now be turned on or off; or another who’s got it all down to one thing, Willie Calhoun Jackson, fellow inmate, soon to get out on work release, soon to be wed, soon to join the army of the employed, who does not say what he does not know and does what he says he will do and is one member of the population here who does not walk the tier or walk the yard but—like him or not—got it down to one thing, and he sees it all as black and white, until you better just not talk to him any more, he is so clear: