PEOPS project by Fly
November 28, 2009
Bryan Kienlen - 04/06/2K9 - Lower East Side NYC
I met Bryan in the early 90's when he was squatting in the Lower East Side at Serenity & i got to see the Bouncing Souls play at ABC No Rio which was nuts!! - the Souls are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year by releasing new music on their own label and touring the world. Check out www.BouncingSouls.com for more on that.
Channie Greenberg
January 4, 2010
KJ Hannah Greenberg and her hibernaculum of imaginary
hedgehogs roam the verbal hinterlands.Hannah, a poetry nominee for the
2009 Pushcart Prize, eschews marshmallow fluff, laundry, and irregular
type fonts. She houses her verbal flair at places like The American
Journal of Semiotics and like Australia’s Language and Culture
Magazine.
The hedgies, though, love gelatinous monsters and insist on mucking with speculative fiction. Using Hannah's name, they help out the editors of Bewildering Stories and write lit. crits. for Tangent Literary Review. They've published lots of fantastic tales and have even won a contest at Strange, Weird and Wonderful.
Together, those wee bush rats and their gal pal, Hannah, penned Oblivious to the Obvious; Wishfully Mindful Parenting, French Creek Press, Spring 2010. As a collective, they write lots of books.
Two Pieces Below:
Reflections on Prejudices Lived before the Age of Convergent Media
Like Baum and Chou, Fred shared our Maple Street house. That was all he shared. Fred sat alone in the university’s largest library, flicking page after page of philosophy texts, trying to master the secrets of Whitehead, of Bacon, and of Dewey. Otherwise, Fred brooded in his attic room while he memorized the significant bits of late night movies. Fred wanted to be a cinema critic. DVD, CDs, videos and much more of the technology most of us currently take for granted were yet to be invented. Fred dreamed large.
I bought him a kitten. Cleo was of the fuzzy sort; she was all black and yellow stripes, pink-brown nose and noxious meow. Shortly after Fred agreed to care for Cleo, he adopted another needy creature, a woman only five years beyond his own age. Suddenly, Fred laughed more, stayed up even later watching last generation’s films, and began to take an interest in topics beyond rhetorical theory. By the end of the term, he gave up his studies in discourse and chose, instead, to concentrate on the newly emerging field of mass media.
Meanwhile, the rest of the house’s residents frolicked in snow drifts. Iowa’s two seasons, summer and winter, allowed men like Baum, from India, and Chou, from North Korea, to watch solidified moisture pile to door height. Those youths found fresh courage in dismissing, as unimportant, the ambient temperatures. There was little else the members of our house’s international cartel could shelve.
Sure, those young graduate students sounded bold given their ongoing patter about naked women, about local beer, and about loud music, but the 1970’s was not a time when individuals dependent upon student visas were treated well. I could allow the lull and occasional sagacity of my typewriter to overcome my concerns about publishers’ lack of celebration of my articulated quirkiness, but my housemates found little solace in footnotes when they received calls or letters concerning their governments’ imprisonment of relatives or when the radio or TV declared that grossly fatal, seasonal storms were taking place in their homelands.
Consider that “loosing my innocence,” meant to me and to my kindred naive classmates, realizing that certain professors slept with students, comprehending that friends paid rent by selling drugs, and embracing the idea that a common pal, who had refused to wear a helmet, would forever exist in a vegetative state because his pedal bike and a sober driver collided. “Loosing their innocence,” though, meant to my housemates, realizing that they could not go home again, comprehending that their loved ones had informed on them for the price of potatoes or rice, and embracing the idea that their survival depended on their hasty renewal of visas.
Thus, employment became a consolation not just for us idealistic youth, but also for the prematurely sagacious foreigners among us. Deprived of the social impact of today’s convergent media, we long ago youngsters still understood that exchange students were exotic and, for their part, they understood, that their portion, in our lives, was privileged. Specifically, as difficult as it was for us post-Sexual Revolution, not-quite-Yuppy citizens to find jobs, it was that much more impossible for our alien peers.
When my classes ended, for instance, I returned to my family’s home in Pittsburgh. Slowly, my graduate school friendships atrophied. In less than nine months, I stopped received mail bearing postmarks west of Cleveland. Although I had matured during The Era of Free Love, free thought remained less valuable, to our culture, than did superficial, easily marketed ideological forgery. Corporate America would hire and pay well for kids with fancy degrees. They wanted no part, however, of those with actual liberal education-based perspectives.
As a result, somewhere between the bus terminal in the Windy City and my home in the Steel City, I lost the Grain Belt. When, at last, I resorted to an academic conference to slug around my ideas about the relative merits of the work of Plato and Aristotle, my colleagues were more interested in rubricing me as a doofus who was blissfully ignorant of fashion norms than as a staid scholar. Disillusionment is available in a variety of colors and fabrics.
Elsewhere, my former, foreign housemates, too, recalibrated. One retrained as a technical writer who relegated his important decades to abiding by the whims of engineers half of his age and twice his salary. The other became a corporate lackey for a pompous piece of humanity who fancied himself open-minded, but who spent his waking hours debasing anyone with the slightest tint of skin. When that boss got caught with his hand in a subordinate’s panties and when he dribbled rum on an important bureaucrat’s suit, it was my former buddy, not the idiot for whom he worked, who arranged for both of those out of court settlements.
Much later, after I had met and married the father of my children and had resigned myself to dull moments of housewifery, those two friends again came together to form an organization. They sold widgets from which they made a grand profit. Simply, they applied their rhetorical skills to convincing middle class Americans that such devices were necessary for social survival. I found out about their success by accident; I noticed a small posting, featured Baum and Chou’s picture, in the national newspaper, which one of my children was tearing up for a paper mache project.
Pretty girls dressed in little more than smiles flanked the men. Federal officials nodded in the background. Beyond the mass marketed do-dads, my former housemates had devised something that successfully competed, in cost, with federally funded toilet seats.
Afterwards, I trolled alumni bulletins for news of my former housemates. A decade and three ex-wives later, Baum was dead of a heart attack. Chou had slid under the public radar. Fred, though, had surfaced at a meeting of academics interested in the impact of media on society. He suggested to me, over warm cola served up for lots of money in a hotel lounge, that Chou had returned to his homeland to fund insurgents. Fred had not become a movie critic, but a teacher of film courses at a community college. His older sex partner had abandoned him for an undergraduate two years after I left the university. His cat was run over by a tractor being driven to a 4H Fair.
As for me, when the Internet became central to communications and when my babies grew into adolescents, I retired my newspaper column in favor of a blog. I taught more and more of my load online, as was encouraged by my department chair. I suggested to readers and students, alike, that the boarders of nations are as superficial as are the boarders of true compassion.
The Soldier's Solution
Society is a fabric woven from the usual stuff and is sometimes accented with sparkly bits indigenous to a particular segment of the universal population. In other words, it is simultaneously true that people tend to behave the same no matter where you drop them and that human behavior is influenced by environment. Take the case of the IDF soldiers who were snacking at a local mall.
I merited witnessing those soldiers’ goings on because I was dutifully “resting” between an acupuncture appointment and a date with an elliptical training machine. My care providers have been insisting that I pause between interventions. I translated that prescription as necessitating my eating a salad whose leaves someone else had checked for bugs and whose peppers someone else had diced.
Given my middle-aged mindfulness, I scanned the food court for an almost clean spot. In the back of the hall, I saw one empty of people and not populated by much debris. Better yet, that seat was adjacent to a table filled with soldiers.
Granted, the members of the military might be all that stand between my family’s safety and a bad outcome, yet, save for,has v’shalom, a crisis, I can not help but experience members of the armed forces as someone else’s adorable, albeit responsible, children. The fellows who were occupying the table next to mine, for example, looked to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty, an age for which I have an affinity. As a professor, I interact with that age group. As a mom of older teens, I constantly have that stage of life floating around my salon or sticking its head in my refrigerator. Hence, for me, electing to sit near those dear boys meant getting a good vibe to go with my salad.
Initially, those young gentlemen were all macho business. I sucked in my cheeks so they didn’t see me smiling. Visible fondness would have been off-putting. Instead, I listened attentively and stole as many glances in their direction as seemed reasonable for a person in my demographic position. Fortunately, the boys didn’t notice.
Rather, they barked in Hebrew, in Russian and in English into their cell phones, growled, in a friendly manner, at each other, and did whatever else it took to set their world right. Shortly after they established their temporal-spatial parameters, two of their trio left the table. I assumed they were going to order food and were leaving the last one behind as a lookout. I was wrong.
I paid more attention to my greens. Too quickly, I got to the bottom of my bowl. Fortunately, the youngsters returned before I ate my last sliver of tomato. They did not come back with trays of hot food, however. Rather, they brought with them a filled paper bag!
I let my eyes once more wander to their side of the divide. Experience dictates that boys that age will eat almost anything. I wondered what was so precious that they brought it in from outside of the food area. My curiosity was soon sated.
From within the depths of their sack, one of the soldiers removed three little, plastic spoons and a large carton of ice cream. In short notice, the three boys were cooing like small brothers who had found their mom’s cookie stash. All touch posturing had melted faster than the sweet treat before them.
When I finished my blessings and got up to leave, I looked again at those valiants. Once more, I smiled. Those guardians of our nation were still speaking to each other in soft voices and were still enjoying their “illicit” snack.
At the Buffalo Paddock
February 1, 2010
Advice From My Muse
March 19, 2010
Learning to Walk Backwards
April 9, 2011
By: Robert Lesher
Robert lives, with his wife Jana, in Fullerton, California, in the house that he was raised in. He was a journalism major throughout high school and university. He has had poetry published in The Cathartic, Voices International and Electrum magazines. For the past forty-plus years he has been a professional musician, within the blues idiom, living in Southern California and on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. In 2009, he was inducted into the Victoria Music Hall of Fame, in British Columbia, Canada, along with the rest of the band he was in, circa 1970-74. He has been with the same band, Tupelo Blue since 1995 and wrote lyrics and melody lines for 14 of 15 tunes on their self-titled CD, released in 2000 to excellent reviews in LA Jazz, and Blues Revue Magazine.
“I feel my music and writing complement and inspire each other to various creative levels”
My Grandfather is immortal to my mother; an early-century man, a barrel-chested railroad engineer who drove huge post-war Buicks. Anytime my Mom speaks of him, in any context, she is really celebrating him.
“Dad…..Dad.” She calls for him as I lead her down the hallway, towards the kitchen for her breakfast. “Daddy.” He is still her divine protection. Although he has been dead for forty-some years he has stayed on as her only real memory, the only strength she consistently retains.
I’m learning the art of walking backwards, facing my Mom as I steer her through the house. She leans back, bending her knees. It is a resisting crouch so I practically have to pull her. I am the tractor. My mother is the trailer with two flat tires.
She frets about taking steps. Her right knee is bone to bone and it hurts. I know that. The complaint is valid, but anything else could be just as much some shadowy illusion or some un-choreographed play for simple attention. It has no reference or logic. It’s part of the illness and nothing beyond that.
This thing meanders in and out. Also, because it appears to be so non-physical, I’ve heard some refer to my mother’s dementia as being a soft disease. There is no call for dripping tubes, shots of morphine or big, halogen-lit surgeries. It doesn’t eat livers, colons and vocal chords. There seems to be no unremitting pain that will eventually gag life away. Instead, it freezes dignity by collapsing the process of thought. It forsakes the heart and the conscious blessing of a kiss. It turns people into furniture, but never really takes on the responsibility for killing them.
She pushes the cookie away. She doesn’t know what it is. I pick it up, force it gently against her lips and she whimpers, almost fearfully.
My mother’s eyes went translucent the day after my stepfather died, but I am certain the disease had manifested into her, parked itself in the rear of her mind sometime before that. He was her reason, as to why she made precise dinners and would still wash the hallway baseboards on her hands and knees. As long as he lived the skips in her memory seemed to be no more than another distraction of getting old.
It was academic. His death tipped her back, into the blips and prisms behind her eyelids. The thing was there to take his place. She had let on, many times, and over the years, that her admitted weakness was prolonged loneliness. The disease had waited for that moment to intrude forever and fill the blanks in her meaning. Now it had the room to itself, to rise-up and creep around in her. It became established and unimpeded.
But we still had time. Though she could not remember who the president was or exactly how old she’d become, it was in the eight months right after my stepfather’s passing that Mom could still focus, long enough to talk about the grass in the front yard, or take a ride in my car one rainy afternoon.
We drove, in the most roundabout way, over the foothills to the next small town and had cheeseburgers for lunch. She had no idea where she was but she knew this was a pleasant moment, a special and last stop for both of us.
Last Thursday I put on a Sinatra LP. It was the September album when Frank was looking back into his life. My mother’s aura flared lightly as she relaxed away from the dementia. The music still worked, found its way in, and her eyes hummed to the scatter of leaves falling around Sinatra’s voice.
Sunday afternoons were Glenn Miller records and some Wild Bill Davidson. After my stepfather fixed a third martini for everyone, Pete Fountain would play his soft Dixieland across the living room. It rolled up, blending with the orange-yellow sunlight that was now low enough to glow hazy and fan-like through the screen door.
There was talk and chuckles. It was a good time for Mom. Kids went to high school each work day and mothers would drift in and out if each others’ houses to visit and gossip about the Christian Science family who lived down the street.
My step dad was her promise to herself, a safe man who would stay at home and eat every meal she cooked, a guy who wore knitted shirts and groaned when the Dodgers fell
off a two-game win streak. His easy presence was what she had been taught, all of her life, a husband would be. Her passion for a normal marriage was completed by him.
I hold the tip of the spoon against her pursed lips. She looks at my face.
“Help me, Mom. You have to eat.”
Slowly, her lips part and she emits an “aaaaaah” as I tip the spoon in and upward so the syrupy peaches can slide down her throat.
Two years ago she was still edgy enough to want things her way. Even though the dementia had dissected much of her logic at this point, it was not yet the madness and frustration that it promised to be.
She had come to view the sidewalk out front as some straight line back to Marion, Ohio. For her it was a kind of OZ, a place where the pieces still fit together. It was where she was born and raised through high school, where she held a job at Kresge’s and met my real father, who was up from Springfield to find a job after graduation.
By the time I realized that Mom was gone, she was at least six houses up the street shuffling along in her blue sweat suit. “Mom’s out!” I called-out to my wife as I clamored down the porch steps and sprinted across the lawn. I caught-up and stepped in front of her to block her from going any farther.
“Oh,” she said. “Why, where have you been, honey?” Her eyes were twinkling and she grinned. “Is Dad on the train waiting for me?”
“Where are you going, Mom?’
“Well now, I’m going home.” She nodded at me. “My mom and dad are waiting for me. They’ll be worried.”
“They know you are with me, Mom. They know you are safe.”
She was hesitating. Her rhythms began to collide and sputter.
“Mom, they know you’re with me.”
“OK”, she said. She was taking deeper breaths. “OK.” With that, the pep began to drain out of her. “Then, well, I guess so.”
She’d now forgotten why she was even there. All that she knew, from this point on, was that her knee was beginning to hurt and that she was very tired. Her breathing came out in hisses and little whispers. I took her hand. It felt infinite and light, as if I held a small paper bag.
I wake-up earlier and earlier to have more time to myself, just to read the paper at 5 am. To know, at that time, she will not stir until around eight is soothing for me. My anxiousness will pull-back for an hour or so. The strain at the base of my neck recedes as I rest my elbows on the kitchen table and listen to the coffee drip and crackle.
I’ve come to fantasize, and perhaps even believe, that my mother’s ongoing madness is a terminal beast that walks on the ceilings and cartwheels through the walls of this house. There is no respite, no privacy from it. It is a constant buzz of flies in the hearts of the living. Because it cannot be cured, eliminated or even tempered, it has caused me the most vivid of frustrations, to sometimes make me think of my mother in a context that will bother me, in varying degrees, for the rest of my life.
As I prepare her lunch, I anticipate having to fight her, nag and bitch for her to eat it. I know the possibility is constant that she will take four bites and then push the plate halfway across the table. Her expression will go blank, almost static, as it passes through me into another dimension. I slide the plate back in front of her. She fiddles with the spoon for a few seconds and, once again, shoves the plate back across the table.
I immediately realize what is going on here. My chest contracts and my shoulders tighten like thread rod. Within that moment it is past counting to ten in order to re-group, walking outside to take a deep breath. I feel seriously compromised and impotent. The stress spreads out, like bruises within my eyes and every pore and finally pummels in a baritone fire-rage out of my mouth, ka-booming and splattering against the walls.
“Mom, I’m sorry that I yelled. You know I’m your son and that I love you.”
I kneel in front of her, where I’ve just sat her down in the living room. Her tiny legs are covered by a blanket that is pink with cartoonish kitty prints on it. She is smiling, the
same way she did when she would greet me at the front door five or so years ago, when her mind remained switched-on to some degree and I was still working. It was that
positive smile that guided me in, that became etched in me, that said all was OK and I was home. I was her son. It was the clearest of facts and meant nothing could come between us.
Some mornings I am fraught with a dry fear. It settles into the bottom of my stomach like a compressed pile of cardboard. My mother now wets herself because she sleeps so soundly. She is completely disconnected from her urine and defecations. The illness has released her from that concern, as if she moves in a dream above it.
If it is just urination, my senses sigh and calm down a little. It is washable and easy as compared to defecation which is not so transparent. That will stay with me through the rest of the morning, the memory of easing off her diaper, carefully, so a clump won’t fall onto the bathroom floor, the wiping of her poor old behind, red and folded inward.
She is getting smaller. I’m barely five-six but she is so hunched forward that I loom over her. As to weight loss, her doctor doesn’t seem surprised. “Let her eat cookies and full-grade milk”, he says. “Give her ice cream”. He wants me to feed her calories, but I see it as an attempt to keep me busy, to level my fret, my growing awareness that my mother is falling away.
“You are invisible to your mom.” A friend says this, during a phone conversation, as I explain to him that I’d like just ten minutes of coherency from her. Then we could talk and I could be forgiven all of the lies I ever told her, the hurt and worries I brought to her. I wanted my mother to kiss my wounds of guilt one more time and grant me that breath of peace. “She’s past that. Her mind doesn’t even understand itself.”
I’ve never talked to my mom enough. I know some of her history, her most coveted moments, being on her Aunt’s and Uncle’s farm outside the railroad town she lived in. There’s a photograph of her, hand-tinted in watercolor tones. Her dog is sitting beside her. I suppose she is only three or four. She looks like Shirley Temple. But, this is something I’ve always known. It is more of an innocent memory, the kind of perfection all boys will assign to their mothers.
My regret, one of my midnight sorrows when I think of her, is that I never will know her secrets, the things she kept to herself, as to why her hugs were sometimes light and held-back, as to why, most always, she could offer only a nervous chitter of a laugh when I told her that I loved her.
Even now, that chitter, that alarmed look will appear in her dementia-strewn eyes if I say that to her. It is a feeling, some memory so strong that it becomes one of the few things the illness cannot subdue at all. For that reason it represents that something is still there, a faint hope, even amid my regret that I never, not in the slightest, questioned why love has so confronted my mother.
After I get her dressed for the day, I face her towards the bathroom mirror and, with a wetted brush, groom her white hair. She is motionless and resigned as I sweep it back. Her eyes are entirely fixated to her image in the mirror. They are rimmed with a tear-like redness.
Now, more than ever, she is tired. I’ve begun to realize my mother complains and whimpers when she is forced to walk because she thinks she should not be walking at all.
I walk backwards, maneuvering her down the hallway as she grips into my forearms. Her fingernails are long and uneven. They leave marks on my skin. She is bent forward, so much now that she appears only three feet tall. She emits “uuuuh’s” and desperate little whines between her labored breaths. Her discomfort is not just bones grinding together but the fact her connection to this life is no longer making any sense.
Within my thoughts about this illness, I have come up with perceptions and ideas that draw nothing from science or medical journals.
One of these involves the spirit detaching from the physical and going wherever a spirit is set to go. In my mother’s case, it has left but is still tied to an earthly umbilical cord, floating and bobbling in some abortive release. It has left but still must wait for the body to give in.
Every so often, somebody will ask, in a hushed and peripheral voice, if I feel trapped in this situation. I know they will not care for my answer, nor will I, because on the surface it indicates I’ve given into this crap that is my mother’s disease. Even the thought of my reply makes me view myself as a type of sociopath, a completely separate figure who stands away, the flat length of a football field, from all who know me.
I don’t really want the world to know this answer, not even my brother or any close friends. Only my wife can understand me enough to know my response is not so literal or binding. The safest time to say it is late evening, when we finally go to bed. My mother has been sleeping since seven. All of my friends are, most probably, settled in their homes and not concerned about anything I have to say. My brother in Oklahoma is surely asleep.
“Yeah,” I say to my wife. “I feel trapped.” I roll over and she, as she always does, places her hand to my back between my shoulder blades. As I breathe-out I feel some relief, at least for one more day, from the nauseous, little judgments I put on myself for ever thinking this way.
“No, Jesus, in your mouth!” I let out a yell and snatch her hand down as my mother attempts to brush her hair with a loaded toothbrush.
People will sometimes just complain and then hope someone else’s story will be heavier than theirs. It’s so they can sigh a little, feel human and believe, for that moment they might still remain close enough to a real life. That’s all I seem to hear in these groups that meet in semicircles of metal folding chairs in scuffed-up florescent rooms donated by a hospital. Their every manner, every sentence, comes with a long measure of pallid resignation and bland hopelessness.
I went to the meetings two times before I began to itch. People spoke with tears. They leaned forward with the weight of their parent’s illness, the remorse of losing their daily lives to it.
One woman had realized she was spending more time with the shell of her mother than her teenaged children. They resented her tired silences by smoking weed in their bedrooms. They painted their fingernails black and threatened her with thoughts of them getting gothic tattoos and marble implants under their skin as soon as they turned eighteen. She was impelled to surrender the responsibility of her mother in favor of them. She had no other choice and the extra burden of that guilt seemed to pull her off edge of her seat.
Her whine comes up to me. It is like a dry, irritated hum; a mouse squeak. As I wash the sleep from her eyes, dabbing them with a damp washcloth, she closes them and twists her face away. I clean her up each morning before dressing her.
Still, I cannot completely bath the front of my mother’s body. Her breasts, which now hang flat and empty, frighten me. I will scrub her neck and back, even her butt crack and cheeks. But when I apply the washcloth between her legs, just a few inches above her knees, she instinctively clamps them together. I am immediately terrified in the most nightmarish of ways.
I can deal with her poop, be it in her morning diaper or goo on the bathroom floor. I can shove her toothpaste spit down the drain or trim her gnarled toenails without a flinch as she screeches down at me in some delusional horror, but I will not wash her front.
My paranoia is that I’m scheduled for this monster. Not only do I sometimes think about it, I feel others thinking about it even more. I sense right into my wife’s hesitation when I admit to not remembering where I set my glasses. Sometimes she watches me with this subtle speculation that now that the illness has practically finished consuming my mother, perhaps it is beginning to nibble at me.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, I watch her as she takes her pills. Although it runs head-on into my impatience and better judgment, I still try to let her do this as long as I am watching.
My arms are folded across my chest to contain the anxiety that starts to murmur within. Knowing that she probably won’t, I still hope, just hope she will complete the cycle before she attempts to chew the gelatin capsules that are her stool softeners or poke her blue cholesterol pill into the very glass of water she should be drinking to wash it down. It floats long enough for me to say, “Damnit, Mom” and pick it out before it begins dissolving.
I feel deeply offended by my mom, that she does this sort of thing. It is just the common logic of swallowing a pill that I cannot let go on behalf of her. It is the kind of thing that will make me slam doors and yell curses into a bedroom closet so the neighbors won’t hear it.
Pill to mouth. Drink the water. Pill to mouth. Drink the water. It becomes another facet of the daily drill, a motion once taken for granted that is now an event never to be left unattended.
I’ve cried twice in the way that I imagine I will when my mother is completely gone, when her body finally deflates and gives itself back. Yesterday she kept falling asleep as the Travel Channel droned in a kind of parallel with the afternoon heat. I watched her nod down to her left side. The minutes became straight lines, a near silent whirring of seconds, one after another, never going from one to two, just one, one, one, one, one, as if the word depicting the number itself would eventually lose its context within the repetition and become a misnomer without any purpose or meaning.
In this pale world between that one and two I see Mom wander towards mirages of her mother and father. The cat enters the room and looks at her with narrowed eyes in a way that he might view a ghost or some disoriented spirit.
“Oh lord. I need my toes.” She is having a fretful, whinny morning. Her voice quivers with every word as if her eyes are crying through it. I lead her into the bathroom to get her onto the toilet. The right side of her nightie is dark with pee. “Oh my lord,” she moans. Her feet move with little scuffs against the rug. “I need my toes. Where are my toes?”
If there is light beyond death, then perhaps dementia is one form of darkness that directly precedes it. It is without any specific trait, with the exception that it seems to be tailored per victim.
Its only consistency is that it will emerge out from beneath the bed and re-inhabit her each morning as soon as I wake up. I know it will be there and my nose is immediately, an eighth of an inch from the wall. The curve of weirdness sets upon me, bringing grimaces of anticipation and a dread that spin like slow rotor-blades above my every movement.
“Who’s Lloyd, or should I say, who was Lloyd?” My wife is talking to me. She has just walked back into the kitchen after putting Mom to bed. A skillet full of hamburger meat is crackling on the stove and I’m staring into the fridge looking for the one beer I’ve saved from the weekend.
“Lloyd? What, who do you mean, Lloyd?”
“Lloyd. Your mother said he was in the bathroom when I sat her on the pot and then he was coming to bed with her when I was starting to cover her.”
“I don’t know, dear. Maybe it was a boyfriend in high school.” I laugh a little. “ Really, I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t anyone.” I pull the milk out and there’s my beer. She walks to the stove and shuffles the meat back and forth with a big wooden spoon.
I can tell she is pondering this Lloyd thing. The full silence that was once my mother’s knowledge fills in between us as I turn my head and watch her shake the spoon into the pan. “It was somebody,” she says.
As her sleep goes farther and farther in, I think of the dementia as pulling back from her to a point where she is finally left alone to feel some of the lines connect once again. The dreams she has will be of sun-white days, of her parents in midlife when they used to ride the Santa Fe out to visit us in California.
When my mom is sleeping, her face relaxes. Her knees are drawn into an almost fetal fold-up. Even though this is supposed to be a classic position attributed to the disease, it never bothers me. My mother, as long as I can remember, has always slept like this.
“I didn’t do it.” Her answer is bratty and final. She has poured her milk-soggy wheat flakes onto her napkin. Once more I am paralyzed and a routine morning becomes surreal. Already, drops of milk drip-smack to the linoleum floor and a million steam whistles go off behind my eyes and up my ear canals.
She reaches down into the sink and pulls the stopper out. I grab her hand away form it. “Mom, let’s sit down so I can put on your pants.” Now I’m unhooking a steelworker’s clench that she has on the bathroom counter so that I can slowly back her up and sit her on the toilet seat. Her breath is grey and stale. It floats around to me and puffs up to the back of my mouth as I speak. A gag begins to curdle in my throat.
“Oh, my pants?” Again she reaches down and pulls the stopper out. Again, I’m pulling her hand away from it. She starts to claw upward at the mirror as I try to ease her back. Her voice shakes and rises to high pitch. “Now, don’t hurt me!”
I tug her away from the counter. “You’re going to hurt me! Oooooooh, my god! You’re going to hurt me!” In a half-second it has escalated into a fury that seems to blow the walls apart and the roof away.
“Mom, please! I’m helping you sit down! Please, Mom!”
I can only guess that she thinks she is falling into some eternal deepness as I lead her backwards and down onto the toilet seat. It is barely a drop of one foot from her hunched
position but she still pushes back up and emits a quivering vibrato scream. I purse my lips. I bite the inside of my mouth. She yells and heaves, “Oh God! Oh, my dear lord!”
“Mom, look up. Look up at the mirror.” I wet the brush and run it through her white hair. It parts naturally and she looks at herself. She gazes at the image in front of her as the synapses behind her eyes try to re-group.
“Who do you see, Mom? Who’s in front of you?”
“Me,” she says. She pauses. “Well, heh-heh, that’s me. Sometimes it’s me.” I listen to the ceiling fan rattle above us. Her eyes begin to squint deeper at the mirror. She touches her face and then after more pause, she says, “Hello, me.”
A while back I helped my wife clear out a closet in the back room of the house. It held the last of Mom’s clothing, the stuff that would never fit her again: dresses and knit tops that had no more use for her shrinking frame. I quietly handed each piece to my wife for her to place them in a plastic trash bag. Some would go to the Salvation Army. The rest would be just thrown away.
I tried to see my mother in some of these dresses with their tablecloth patterns and the little vinyl belts that were cracked with age. I attempted to draw out the memories of summer vacation days when she wore them and fixed me and my brother peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or maybe tomato soup for lunch.
There is always a quiet doubt that I should take these sort of steps, to accept this one more realization as my mother sits in another part of the house, not knowing the circles are completed and that the rest of her time moves in and out of the dry attachments of old dreams.
My wife knows my silence and she merges with it. She comments in reverent little tones as to a particular cut or design and runs her index finger along a seam of a dress as if she is touching poetry.
She lifts the red pill to her mouth. From the sides of her eyes she watches me lean over her. I am holding a small glass of milk for her to wash it down with. The cat walks through the kitchen to his water dish beside the stove. It distracts her immediately. She sets the pill back onto the table.
“Take your pill, Mom,” I say as calmly as I can for the seventh time.
“Don’t you go outside, honey,” she says to the cat. He pays no attention as he begins nursing the floor in front of the dish. “Don’t you do that, heh-heh. Be a good baby.”
“Mom, here’s your pill. Take it, Mom.” I point to it, push it to the table’s edge with my finger. She looks down at it and shoves it back, pinching it between her finger and thumb. “Come on, Mom. Take it.”
“It’s a rose,” she says, now looking at me directly. Her smile is almost impish. It is mother to son and begins to pull me backwards into a gentle tease that tickles across the top of my head. “It’s a little,” she says, “a little red one. See?”
As I listen to my wife’s breathing lapse into a pattern of sleep, I shift the pillow behind me and reach over to turn the light off. We have kissed each other as we always do.
Night has pulled us away from daytime, the Dali-like presence of my mother, the clutter and shivering confusions that it confronts us with. The darkness is like a wide and straight river with tiny porch lights on each side. My legs go soft as I start to sink in and move with it. I take longer breaths and draw myself into a wistful hum, the sanctuary of those hours that come just before and after midnight.
The street out front is settled and cool. Three long blocks to the southwest is the mainline. I become sleepy listening to the heavy freight trains that run up and down it all night long. I envision the way my mother might have thought of her father, leaning from the high cab of the big engine as he guided it along the tracks, rolling across a quiet Ohio countryside.
She has gone to sleep long before us. Her room is at the other end of the hallway. In my thoughts, I will see the memories she has hidden in her heart come free of the illness, to pour out and gather around her restful face. As if the lines of my mother’s life pass through me, I listen to the trains, the way they glide, low against the tracks in a tight, smooth clatter that seems to stay behind long after they disappear into the night.
The hedgies, though, love gelatinous monsters and insist on mucking with speculative fiction. Using Hannah's name, they help out the editors of Bewildering Stories and write lit. crits. for Tangent Literary Review. They've published lots of fantastic tales and have even won a contest at Strange, Weird and Wonderful.
Together, those wee bush rats and their gal pal, Hannah, penned Oblivious to the Obvious; Wishfully Mindful Parenting, French Creek Press, Spring 2010. As a collective, they write lots of books.
Two Pieces Below:
Reflections on Prejudices Lived before the Age of Convergent Media
Like Baum and Chou, Fred shared our Maple Street house. That was all he shared. Fred sat alone in the university’s largest library, flicking page after page of philosophy texts, trying to master the secrets of Whitehead, of Bacon, and of Dewey. Otherwise, Fred brooded in his attic room while he memorized the significant bits of late night movies. Fred wanted to be a cinema critic. DVD, CDs, videos and much more of the technology most of us currently take for granted were yet to be invented. Fred dreamed large.
I bought him a kitten. Cleo was of the fuzzy sort; she was all black and yellow stripes, pink-brown nose and noxious meow. Shortly after Fred agreed to care for Cleo, he adopted another needy creature, a woman only five years beyond his own age. Suddenly, Fred laughed more, stayed up even later watching last generation’s films, and began to take an interest in topics beyond rhetorical theory. By the end of the term, he gave up his studies in discourse and chose, instead, to concentrate on the newly emerging field of mass media.
Meanwhile, the rest of the house’s residents frolicked in snow drifts. Iowa’s two seasons, summer and winter, allowed men like Baum, from India, and Chou, from North Korea, to watch solidified moisture pile to door height. Those youths found fresh courage in dismissing, as unimportant, the ambient temperatures. There was little else the members of our house’s international cartel could shelve.
Sure, those young graduate students sounded bold given their ongoing patter about naked women, about local beer, and about loud music, but the 1970’s was not a time when individuals dependent upon student visas were treated well. I could allow the lull and occasional sagacity of my typewriter to overcome my concerns about publishers’ lack of celebration of my articulated quirkiness, but my housemates found little solace in footnotes when they received calls or letters concerning their governments’ imprisonment of relatives or when the radio or TV declared that grossly fatal, seasonal storms were taking place in their homelands.
Consider that “loosing my innocence,” meant to me and to my kindred naive classmates, realizing that certain professors slept with students, comprehending that friends paid rent by selling drugs, and embracing the idea that a common pal, who had refused to wear a helmet, would forever exist in a vegetative state because his pedal bike and a sober driver collided. “Loosing their innocence,” though, meant to my housemates, realizing that they could not go home again, comprehending that their loved ones had informed on them for the price of potatoes or rice, and embracing the idea that their survival depended on their hasty renewal of visas.
Thus, employment became a consolation not just for us idealistic youth, but also for the prematurely sagacious foreigners among us. Deprived of the social impact of today’s convergent media, we long ago youngsters still understood that exchange students were exotic and, for their part, they understood, that their portion, in our lives, was privileged. Specifically, as difficult as it was for us post-Sexual Revolution, not-quite-Yuppy citizens to find jobs, it was that much more impossible for our alien peers.
When my classes ended, for instance, I returned to my family’s home in Pittsburgh. Slowly, my graduate school friendships atrophied. In less than nine months, I stopped received mail bearing postmarks west of Cleveland. Although I had matured during The Era of Free Love, free thought remained less valuable, to our culture, than did superficial, easily marketed ideological forgery. Corporate America would hire and pay well for kids with fancy degrees. They wanted no part, however, of those with actual liberal education-based perspectives.
As a result, somewhere between the bus terminal in the Windy City and my home in the Steel City, I lost the Grain Belt. When, at last, I resorted to an academic conference to slug around my ideas about the relative merits of the work of Plato and Aristotle, my colleagues were more interested in rubricing me as a doofus who was blissfully ignorant of fashion norms than as a staid scholar. Disillusionment is available in a variety of colors and fabrics.
Elsewhere, my former, foreign housemates, too, recalibrated. One retrained as a technical writer who relegated his important decades to abiding by the whims of engineers half of his age and twice his salary. The other became a corporate lackey for a pompous piece of humanity who fancied himself open-minded, but who spent his waking hours debasing anyone with the slightest tint of skin. When that boss got caught with his hand in a subordinate’s panties and when he dribbled rum on an important bureaucrat’s suit, it was my former buddy, not the idiot for whom he worked, who arranged for both of those out of court settlements.
Much later, after I had met and married the father of my children and had resigned myself to dull moments of housewifery, those two friends again came together to form an organization. They sold widgets from which they made a grand profit. Simply, they applied their rhetorical skills to convincing middle class Americans that such devices were necessary for social survival. I found out about their success by accident; I noticed a small posting, featured Baum and Chou’s picture, in the national newspaper, which one of my children was tearing up for a paper mache project.
Pretty girls dressed in little more than smiles flanked the men. Federal officials nodded in the background. Beyond the mass marketed do-dads, my former housemates had devised something that successfully competed, in cost, with federally funded toilet seats.
Afterwards, I trolled alumni bulletins for news of my former housemates. A decade and three ex-wives later, Baum was dead of a heart attack. Chou had slid under the public radar. Fred, though, had surfaced at a meeting of academics interested in the impact of media on society. He suggested to me, over warm cola served up for lots of money in a hotel lounge, that Chou had returned to his homeland to fund insurgents. Fred had not become a movie critic, but a teacher of film courses at a community college. His older sex partner had abandoned him for an undergraduate two years after I left the university. His cat was run over by a tractor being driven to a 4H Fair.
As for me, when the Internet became central to communications and when my babies grew into adolescents, I retired my newspaper column in favor of a blog. I taught more and more of my load online, as was encouraged by my department chair. I suggested to readers and students, alike, that the boarders of nations are as superficial as are the boarders of true compassion.
The Soldier's Solution
Society is a fabric woven from the usual stuff and is sometimes accented with sparkly bits indigenous to a particular segment of the universal population. In other words, it is simultaneously true that people tend to behave the same no matter where you drop them and that human behavior is influenced by environment. Take the case of the IDF soldiers who were snacking at a local mall.
I merited witnessing those soldiers’ goings on because I was dutifully “resting” between an acupuncture appointment and a date with an elliptical training machine. My care providers have been insisting that I pause between interventions. I translated that prescription as necessitating my eating a salad whose leaves someone else had checked for bugs and whose peppers someone else had diced.
Given my middle-aged mindfulness, I scanned the food court for an almost clean spot. In the back of the hall, I saw one empty of people and not populated by much debris. Better yet, that seat was adjacent to a table filled with soldiers.
Granted, the members of the military might be all that stand between my family’s safety and a bad outcome, yet, save for,has v’shalom, a crisis, I can not help but experience members of the armed forces as someone else’s adorable, albeit responsible, children. The fellows who were occupying the table next to mine, for example, looked to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty, an age for which I have an affinity. As a professor, I interact with that age group. As a mom of older teens, I constantly have that stage of life floating around my salon or sticking its head in my refrigerator. Hence, for me, electing to sit near those dear boys meant getting a good vibe to go with my salad.
Initially, those young gentlemen were all macho business. I sucked in my cheeks so they didn’t see me smiling. Visible fondness would have been off-putting. Instead, I listened attentively and stole as many glances in their direction as seemed reasonable for a person in my demographic position. Fortunately, the boys didn’t notice.
Rather, they barked in Hebrew, in Russian and in English into their cell phones, growled, in a friendly manner, at each other, and did whatever else it took to set their world right. Shortly after they established their temporal-spatial parameters, two of their trio left the table. I assumed they were going to order food and were leaving the last one behind as a lookout. I was wrong.
I paid more attention to my greens. Too quickly, I got to the bottom of my bowl. Fortunately, the youngsters returned before I ate my last sliver of tomato. They did not come back with trays of hot food, however. Rather, they brought with them a filled paper bag!
I let my eyes once more wander to their side of the divide. Experience dictates that boys that age will eat almost anything. I wondered what was so precious that they brought it in from outside of the food area. My curiosity was soon sated.
From within the depths of their sack, one of the soldiers removed three little, plastic spoons and a large carton of ice cream. In short notice, the three boys were cooing like small brothers who had found their mom’s cookie stash. All touch posturing had melted faster than the sweet treat before them.
When I finished my blessings and got up to leave, I looked again at those valiants. Once more, I smiled. Those guardians of our nation were still speaking to each other in soft voices and were still enjoying their “illicit” snack.
At the Buffalo Paddock
February 1, 2010
By: Richard J. Martin
Schooled by the Archdiocese of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, Richard J. Martin’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. His first book, Hos, Hooker, Call Girls and Rent Boys, was released in August 2009 by Soft Skull Press and favorably reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in September. He works a grant writer for non-profit human service agencies and as a musician for San Francisco–based Myriad Talent Company and currently divides his time between San Francisco and Lakeport, California. Additionally, "At The Buffalo Paddock" is one of Splash of Red's official 2010 Pushcart Prize nominees.
We married late and weren’t able to have children. Leah, my wife, had just had her second miscarriage. She looked so crazed and desperate when she flushed the unformed fetus down the toilet that I called Catholic Charities and asked about the adoption program. At the orientation meeting, the people were all as frantic as my wife. A nun was in charge. She told us it would cost $18,000 for the whole thing. We stayed until the end of the meeting but we didn’t go back.
After that, we tried it all: Holistic remedies, in vitro-fertilization and then there was the private adoption attorney. It’s illegal to buy a human being. But where there’s a will.... This lawyer placed newspapers ads in areas where there were lots of poor people.
PREGNANT? NEED HELP?
Loving Home$ for Babie$
Call 506-841-3950 - Confidential.
These people from Alamogordo, New Mexico answered our ad. They had two kids and another on the way and they were living in their car. They said they were willing to give up their baby to the right people. We ended up getting a hotel room in Alamogordo, and when the mother was ready to deliver, we drove them to the hospital in the middle of the night. The baby was born healthy but they didn’t want to give it to us. They never intended to.
In the end, it was Reality House. We had both been out of the program for several years, but when our former case manager, Donna Yarick, died of pancreatic cancer, we went to her Celebration of Life and saw Lupe. Donna and her lesbian partner adopted this kid out of foster care when he was six. When the couple broke up, Lupe stayed with Donna. He grew up in Reality House, that den of thieves, pampered like a little Pharaoh by all the addict mothers who had lost their own children.
When she was alive and working at Reality House, Donna’s shift began at 7am and she showed up every day with Lupe in tow. Someone had to drive him to school across town and Donna chose me for the job. Lupe and I had this gag we used to pull. See, when I took him to school each morning I had to take a “buddy.” My buddy was another Reality House resident who had to come along for the ride, the theory being that we would keep each other out of trouble. I usually chose an attractive ex-prostitute as my buddy. On our way from the Western Addition to Holy Name School in the Sunset, we would drive through Golden Gate Park. We stopped at the buffalo paddock. Each day at the time we went by—about 8:15am—the sprinklers would be on, watering the grass. I would say something like, “Did you know there were buffalo in Golden Gate Park?” Then Lupe would chime in, “Let’s stop! I want to see the buffaloes.” We would pull up next to the sprinklers and I would roll down the automatic window on the passenger side of the Reality House van. If we timed it just right, the sprinkler would splash through the window and get the buddy all wet.
One time, this beautiful Nuyorican babe, Catalina, had all this wax-like gel holding her hair into a perfect geometric pattern and she got soaked. Her hair fell down like a deflating balloon and I thought she was going to take a swing at me, but Lupe was laughing so hard she couldn’t help but start laughing herself. I miss those sparks….
Then I saw Lupe at Donna’s Celebration of Life. He was 16 now, and big – half-Samoan and half-Mexican from his birth parents. The first thing he said after the obligatory Reality House hug was, “You remember the buffaloes?” We laughed and I put my hand on his shoulder.
It turns out that he had been living at a boot camp in Utah. Donna, before she died, had adopted two other kids. Little ones. Lupe became jealous. In the final straw incident, he set fire to their Section 8 housing unit. Now, Donna was gone and Lupe didn’t want to go back to Utah so he had called his social worker to get a placement in the City. He told me, “I’m gonna be staying with Debbie Caruso,” but I doubted it. Debbie was Director of Clinical Services at Reality House and had her own teenage daughter living with her.
A couple of days later we got the call. Debbie knew what had happened to us in New Mexico. Could we take Lupe? He was staying in a group home. There was a $700-a-month foster care stipend. After all, we didn’t have any kids, and….
We went down to sign the papers. They designated us as “extended family” which meant there was no background check. Lupe moved into our house. He had the keys to Donna’s car—his only inheritance—and he had a small urn that contained her ashes. We put the urn in the trunk of the car and I parked it in the garage.
The Unified School District had designated Lupe as “gifted and talented,” so we enrolled him in the college preparatory public school. They wanted him in class at eight am but he stayed up all night watching TV or sitting in his mother’s car in the basement, pretending to drive. Every morning there was drama.
We both worked, so no one was around when he came home. I set up an account for him at the corner store and gave him some walking-around money. Soon there were empty junk food wrappers all over his room.
We did the best we could. Leah went to PTA meetings and volunteered for a school fundraiser. Lupe helped her light the Hanukah candles and stood there while she said the prayers. For Christmas, we had a real tree with presents; he got all this hip-hop gear and two-hundred-dollar running shoes. We ate in good restaurants—Chenery Park was Lupe’s favorite. He would finish a huge plate of food in about five minutes, and then order two desserts.
We were trying to buy a home and we took him out to look at real estate with us. One time in Oakland, we looked at a house that had a small tool shed in the backyard. We were standing there with Sarah, our elegant young realtor. I pointed to the little tool shed and said to Lupe, “You can stay there.” He said, “OK, Dad,” without even cracking a smile, but he had that same mischievous gleam in his eye that he used to have when we were driving to the buffalo paddock with a new victim. Later, I tried to tell Sarah that we were kidding but I’m not sure she believed me.
Lupe was denied contact with his birth parents, but when he asked to see his father, I couldn’t tell him no. I knew the father from jail. He was an old-school Samoan gangster from Hunter’s Point. They called him “Island Boy.” I drove Lupe to Crocker-Amazon Park and we parked. For a second we both thought the father wouldn’t show. I was trying to think of something meaningful to say when an old Ford pulled up. All four doors opened up and an enormous Samoan got out of each one. Lupe leaped out of my car and they all ran towards each other. I drove away. Later, he showed me some of the pictures they took that day and I told him he looked like his father. He stared at the photo for a long time after that.
Everyone wanted him to “live up to his potential.” He played off this, just as I had when I was his age. All I wanted him to do was graduate the tenth grade. One day the school principal called me at work. Lupe had been in a fight. The Gang Task Force was there. At the meeting with the principal, I fell on my sword, told them my wife and I worked—that Lupe wasn’t getting the support he needed at home. When I told them Lupe wasn’t going to have any trouble with anybody from Chinatown anymore, very quiet and confident, they seemed satisfied. They would let him finish the semester but he was suspended for three days. We went straight from the meeting to General Hospital. When Lupe got out of the emergency room, high on Vicodin with a new cast on his right hand, scared about what was going to happen when he went back to school; I told him he didn’t have the right stuff for street fighting and that he should lay low for a while.
In March, the landlord told us he was selling the house and that we would have to be gone in a month. I told Lupe I didn’t know where we were going but he was welcome to come with us. He had only two more months to graduate the tenth grade. He said he wanted to go with his aunt—his birth mother’s sister who lived by Rolph Park and this needed to be approved by CPS. Leah called the aunt, who somewhat reluctantly agreed. Then we called the social worker to tell her. No one answered, so we left messages.
The car and the urn that contained Donna’s remains were still in the garage. Lupe had planned to drive it once he got his license, but he never got his license and nobody was making payments on the car. I had known for months that the repo man was looking for it.
The night before we had to move out, Lupe got busted shoplifting at Tower Records in Stonestown. The police called and I said I would be there in fifteen minutes. I pulled up and there was Lupe in the back of the squad car. Handcuffed. The police were looking at me a little funny and it occurred to me that Lupe must have told them I was his father. I explained that he was in foster care and that I was his legal guardian.
I have to admit; I felt proud saying it.
Then I ran the same drill as in the principal’s office: mincing apologies, stern glances at Lupe and promises that this would never happen again. They undid the cuffs and Lupe walked back to my car with me.
The next day we had to move. Our stuff was all in boxes, ready to go, but the car and the urn were still in the basement. I knew how he dreamed about this car. I told him to come downstairs with me and he looked a little scared. We went down and I took the urn from the trunk. I set it down carefully on the basement floor and said,
“Donna was a friend of mine….”
I wanted him to challenge me but he was silent. I told him we would have to ditch the car. He said nothing. I asked him if he wanted to drive and he perked up a little. I pulled the car out of the garage and drove a half-block down to Bosworth, then handed him the keys. I told him that we were going to Lake Merced where there was a big parking lot and leaving the car there. Lupe said, “Why don’t we leave it at the buffalo paddock.”
I had to fight hard to keep a poker face.
When I asked him if he was taking Sunset Boulevard he said, “I guess so” in a way that told me he had never driven a car before. I showed him the gas and the brake and I prayed. Leah was following us in the other car. We eased out into traffic and I told him that this car might be on the hot list and that he had better drive slow, but not too slow. He tried to look at me like I was crazy but I pointed to the road and he gripped the wheel and leaned forward. We made it to Golden Gate Park and took a right towards the buffalo paddock.
The sprinklers were off but the bison were all there; one huge one up near the fence and the rest sitting in the fog across the field. I congratulated Lupe on his driving and slapped him on the back. Then I started to wipe the car down for prints.
Lupe was watching the buffalo. After I finished in the car I walked up to the fence near him. An old bison with matted fur and decaying skin was eating grass right up near the other side of the chain-link fence.
Suddenly the beast made this great groaning sound and charged the fence. Lupe leaped up the embankment. This buffalo kept snorting and pushing at the fence while Lupe stood at the top of this little hill shaking his head.
From a cell phone, I called CPS and asked to talk to a supervisor. I railed about how this kid’s social worker couldn’t even return a phone call. We had left messages for two weeks. There was no place left to go and Lupe would be staying with us at the Gaylord Hotel on Jones Street if anybody was interested.
The CPS supervisor said Lupe’s social worker had died suddenly and no one had checked her messages yet. She was sorry. We were not to tell him – she would handle it. He could spend the afternoon at the office on 3rd Street until his aunt got home from work, at which time a proper transition could be made.
And that’s where I left him, my son, watching TV in the waiting room of the San Francisco Department of Human Services’ Child Protective Services Unit on 3rd Street with his mother’s ashes on his knee.
Schooled by the Archdiocese of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, Richard J. Martin’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. His first book, Hos, Hooker, Call Girls and Rent Boys, was released in August 2009 by Soft Skull Press and favorably reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in September. He works a grant writer for non-profit human service agencies and as a musician for San Francisco–based Myriad Talent Company and currently divides his time between San Francisco and Lakeport, California. Additionally, "At The Buffalo Paddock" is one of Splash of Red's official 2010 Pushcart Prize nominees.
We married late and weren’t able to have children. Leah, my wife, had just had her second miscarriage. She looked so crazed and desperate when she flushed the unformed fetus down the toilet that I called Catholic Charities and asked about the adoption program. At the orientation meeting, the people were all as frantic as my wife. A nun was in charge. She told us it would cost $18,000 for the whole thing. We stayed until the end of the meeting but we didn’t go back.
After that, we tried it all: Holistic remedies, in vitro-fertilization and then there was the private adoption attorney. It’s illegal to buy a human being. But where there’s a will.... This lawyer placed newspapers ads in areas where there were lots of poor people.
PREGNANT? NEED HELP?
Loving Home$ for Babie$
Call 506-841-3950 - Confidential.
These people from Alamogordo, New Mexico answered our ad. They had two kids and another on the way and they were living in their car. They said they were willing to give up their baby to the right people. We ended up getting a hotel room in Alamogordo, and when the mother was ready to deliver, we drove them to the hospital in the middle of the night. The baby was born healthy but they didn’t want to give it to us. They never intended to.
In the end, it was Reality House. We had both been out of the program for several years, but when our former case manager, Donna Yarick, died of pancreatic cancer, we went to her Celebration of Life and saw Lupe. Donna and her lesbian partner adopted this kid out of foster care when he was six. When the couple broke up, Lupe stayed with Donna. He grew up in Reality House, that den of thieves, pampered like a little Pharaoh by all the addict mothers who had lost their own children.
When she was alive and working at Reality House, Donna’s shift began at 7am and she showed up every day with Lupe in tow. Someone had to drive him to school across town and Donna chose me for the job. Lupe and I had this gag we used to pull. See, when I took him to school each morning I had to take a “buddy.” My buddy was another Reality House resident who had to come along for the ride, the theory being that we would keep each other out of trouble. I usually chose an attractive ex-prostitute as my buddy. On our way from the Western Addition to Holy Name School in the Sunset, we would drive through Golden Gate Park. We stopped at the buffalo paddock. Each day at the time we went by—about 8:15am—the sprinklers would be on, watering the grass. I would say something like, “Did you know there were buffalo in Golden Gate Park?” Then Lupe would chime in, “Let’s stop! I want to see the buffaloes.” We would pull up next to the sprinklers and I would roll down the automatic window on the passenger side of the Reality House van. If we timed it just right, the sprinkler would splash through the window and get the buddy all wet.
One time, this beautiful Nuyorican babe, Catalina, had all this wax-like gel holding her hair into a perfect geometric pattern and she got soaked. Her hair fell down like a deflating balloon and I thought she was going to take a swing at me, but Lupe was laughing so hard she couldn’t help but start laughing herself. I miss those sparks….
Then I saw Lupe at Donna’s Celebration of Life. He was 16 now, and big – half-Samoan and half-Mexican from his birth parents. The first thing he said after the obligatory Reality House hug was, “You remember the buffaloes?” We laughed and I put my hand on his shoulder.
It turns out that he had been living at a boot camp in Utah. Donna, before she died, had adopted two other kids. Little ones. Lupe became jealous. In the final straw incident, he set fire to their Section 8 housing unit. Now, Donna was gone and Lupe didn’t want to go back to Utah so he had called his social worker to get a placement in the City. He told me, “I’m gonna be staying with Debbie Caruso,” but I doubted it. Debbie was Director of Clinical Services at Reality House and had her own teenage daughter living with her.
A couple of days later we got the call. Debbie knew what had happened to us in New Mexico. Could we take Lupe? He was staying in a group home. There was a $700-a-month foster care stipend. After all, we didn’t have any kids, and….
We went down to sign the papers. They designated us as “extended family” which meant there was no background check. Lupe moved into our house. He had the keys to Donna’s car—his only inheritance—and he had a small urn that contained her ashes. We put the urn in the trunk of the car and I parked it in the garage.
The Unified School District had designated Lupe as “gifted and talented,” so we enrolled him in the college preparatory public school. They wanted him in class at eight am but he stayed up all night watching TV or sitting in his mother’s car in the basement, pretending to drive. Every morning there was drama.
We both worked, so no one was around when he came home. I set up an account for him at the corner store and gave him some walking-around money. Soon there were empty junk food wrappers all over his room.
We did the best we could. Leah went to PTA meetings and volunteered for a school fundraiser. Lupe helped her light the Hanukah candles and stood there while she said the prayers. For Christmas, we had a real tree with presents; he got all this hip-hop gear and two-hundred-dollar running shoes. We ate in good restaurants—Chenery Park was Lupe’s favorite. He would finish a huge plate of food in about five minutes, and then order two desserts.
We were trying to buy a home and we took him out to look at real estate with us. One time in Oakland, we looked at a house that had a small tool shed in the backyard. We were standing there with Sarah, our elegant young realtor. I pointed to the little tool shed and said to Lupe, “You can stay there.” He said, “OK, Dad,” without even cracking a smile, but he had that same mischievous gleam in his eye that he used to have when we were driving to the buffalo paddock with a new victim. Later, I tried to tell Sarah that we were kidding but I’m not sure she believed me.
Lupe was denied contact with his birth parents, but when he asked to see his father, I couldn’t tell him no. I knew the father from jail. He was an old-school Samoan gangster from Hunter’s Point. They called him “Island Boy.” I drove Lupe to Crocker-Amazon Park and we parked. For a second we both thought the father wouldn’t show. I was trying to think of something meaningful to say when an old Ford pulled up. All four doors opened up and an enormous Samoan got out of each one. Lupe leaped out of my car and they all ran towards each other. I drove away. Later, he showed me some of the pictures they took that day and I told him he looked like his father. He stared at the photo for a long time after that.
Everyone wanted him to “live up to his potential.” He played off this, just as I had when I was his age. All I wanted him to do was graduate the tenth grade. One day the school principal called me at work. Lupe had been in a fight. The Gang Task Force was there. At the meeting with the principal, I fell on my sword, told them my wife and I worked—that Lupe wasn’t getting the support he needed at home. When I told them Lupe wasn’t going to have any trouble with anybody from Chinatown anymore, very quiet and confident, they seemed satisfied. They would let him finish the semester but he was suspended for three days. We went straight from the meeting to General Hospital. When Lupe got out of the emergency room, high on Vicodin with a new cast on his right hand, scared about what was going to happen when he went back to school; I told him he didn’t have the right stuff for street fighting and that he should lay low for a while.
In March, the landlord told us he was selling the house and that we would have to be gone in a month. I told Lupe I didn’t know where we were going but he was welcome to come with us. He had only two more months to graduate the tenth grade. He said he wanted to go with his aunt—his birth mother’s sister who lived by Rolph Park and this needed to be approved by CPS. Leah called the aunt, who somewhat reluctantly agreed. Then we called the social worker to tell her. No one answered, so we left messages.
The car and the urn that contained Donna’s remains were still in the garage. Lupe had planned to drive it once he got his license, but he never got his license and nobody was making payments on the car. I had known for months that the repo man was looking for it.
The night before we had to move out, Lupe got busted shoplifting at Tower Records in Stonestown. The police called and I said I would be there in fifteen minutes. I pulled up and there was Lupe in the back of the squad car. Handcuffed. The police were looking at me a little funny and it occurred to me that Lupe must have told them I was his father. I explained that he was in foster care and that I was his legal guardian.
I have to admit; I felt proud saying it.
Then I ran the same drill as in the principal’s office: mincing apologies, stern glances at Lupe and promises that this would never happen again. They undid the cuffs and Lupe walked back to my car with me.
The next day we had to move. Our stuff was all in boxes, ready to go, but the car and the urn were still in the basement. I knew how he dreamed about this car. I told him to come downstairs with me and he looked a little scared. We went down and I took the urn from the trunk. I set it down carefully on the basement floor and said,
“Donna was a friend of mine….”
I wanted him to challenge me but he was silent. I told him we would have to ditch the car. He said nothing. I asked him if he wanted to drive and he perked up a little. I pulled the car out of the garage and drove a half-block down to Bosworth, then handed him the keys. I told him that we were going to Lake Merced where there was a big parking lot and leaving the car there. Lupe said, “Why don’t we leave it at the buffalo paddock.”
I had to fight hard to keep a poker face.
When I asked him if he was taking Sunset Boulevard he said, “I guess so” in a way that told me he had never driven a car before. I showed him the gas and the brake and I prayed. Leah was following us in the other car. We eased out into traffic and I told him that this car might be on the hot list and that he had better drive slow, but not too slow. He tried to look at me like I was crazy but I pointed to the road and he gripped the wheel and leaned forward. We made it to Golden Gate Park and took a right towards the buffalo paddock.
The sprinklers were off but the bison were all there; one huge one up near the fence and the rest sitting in the fog across the field. I congratulated Lupe on his driving and slapped him on the back. Then I started to wipe the car down for prints.
Lupe was watching the buffalo. After I finished in the car I walked up to the fence near him. An old bison with matted fur and decaying skin was eating grass right up near the other side of the chain-link fence.
Suddenly the beast made this great groaning sound and charged the fence. Lupe leaped up the embankment. This buffalo kept snorting and pushing at the fence while Lupe stood at the top of this little hill shaking his head.
From a cell phone, I called CPS and asked to talk to a supervisor. I railed about how this kid’s social worker couldn’t even return a phone call. We had left messages for two weeks. There was no place left to go and Lupe would be staying with us at the Gaylord Hotel on Jones Street if anybody was interested.
The CPS supervisor said Lupe’s social worker had died suddenly and no one had checked her messages yet. She was sorry. We were not to tell him – she would handle it. He could spend the afternoon at the office on 3rd Street until his aunt got home from work, at which time a proper transition could be made.
And that’s where I left him, my son, watching TV in the waiting room of the San Francisco Department of Human Services’ Child Protective Services Unit on 3rd Street with his mother’s ashes on his knee.
Advice From My Muse
March 19, 2010
By: Kathy Curto
Kathy Curto lives in Cold Spring, New York with her husband, their four children and one big dog. Her work has been featured on NPR, MOM WOW, in live performances of The Art Garden and Letters to Our Ancestors, and in Lumina, The Beacon Dispatch and The Journal News. Kathy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter School of Social Work and in 2006 she was awarded the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship of Sarah Lawrence College. She is a member of the Millrock Writers in New Paltz, New York and an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College.
When you try too hard it shows. If you don’t believe me dig up those old photos from 1973 of your mother and father posing in front of the entrance to the dining room at Mount Airy Lodge. Or the one of you at the Lisa Gianetti’s Sweet Sixteen Party.
Light a candle after mass and pray for peace.
Cook a big, cheap, heavy meal that takes a long time to eat and wear your mother’s apron while doing it. Don’t forget the meal will taste different now than when she cooked it. You set this table. But wipe your soiled hands across the front of the apron in the most respectful fashion and straighten the bow in the back anyway. Touch up your lipstick.
If the act churns out the stickiest of memories, unleashes dreams you never knew you had, causes your heart to race, and your body to fall limp upon the revolutionary discovery of a deeper valley inside of your soul that you never knew you had pull yourself together and keep writing. Or go make love.
Give the lady digging through the garbage at Grand Central the Styrofoam container you carried all the way from that swanky place on Mercer. Don’t analyze why you feel shitty. Just feel shitty.
Keep drinking coffee. Don’t get fancy with cinnamon hazelnut or flavors that have accent marks in the title. Just regular coffee will do. Drink it frequently and in a variety of places. Diners with paper placemats and bowls of pastel butter mints next to the cashier work best but small round kitchen tables, the passenger seat of your brother’s car and The Vince Lombardi Rest Area off the NJ Turnpike just before the GW Bridge are good spots, too. Take notes. Fantasize about the people around you the stories they are telling over their cups of coffee. Watch the way they finger their cup handles, make shredded paper piles of napkins and sugar packets, and fiddle with the steering wheel. Coffee breeds story. Remember you have one.
Eat a box of Cracker Jacks and suck on the black Necco Wafers until your tongue burns.
Vote.
Keep dreaming about what it would be like to eat Chinese food in bed on a rainy Sunday afternoon with your lover. Sinatra or Muddy Waters or Santana playing in the background, soft white flannel sheets with sky blue piping and seven or eight more pillows on the bed than any normal person needs. Keep dreaming the dream but don’t let it get in the way of everyday love.
Stay the course and be reminded of how critical good stamina is.
Pay close attention to how people behave at cocktail parties. It could very well hold the key to most of life’s mysteries.
When you feel yourself heading into the darkness-the wrath of worry and fear, a really, really bad decision, a disingenuous life-start carrying a flashlight everywhere you go. If that doesn’t work wake up early enough to watch the sunrise. And really watch it rise-don’t just say you did.
Wear red shoes until the bitter end.
Kathy Curto lives in Cold Spring, New York with her husband, their four children and one big dog. Her work has been featured on NPR, MOM WOW, in live performances of The Art Garden and Letters to Our Ancestors, and in Lumina, The Beacon Dispatch and The Journal News. Kathy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter School of Social Work and in 2006 she was awarded the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship of Sarah Lawrence College. She is a member of the Millrock Writers in New Paltz, New York and an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College.
When you try too hard it shows. If you don’t believe me dig up those old photos from 1973 of your mother and father posing in front of the entrance to the dining room at Mount Airy Lodge. Or the one of you at the Lisa Gianetti’s Sweet Sixteen Party.
Light a candle after mass and pray for peace.
Cook a big, cheap, heavy meal that takes a long time to eat and wear your mother’s apron while doing it. Don’t forget the meal will taste different now than when she cooked it. You set this table. But wipe your soiled hands across the front of the apron in the most respectful fashion and straighten the bow in the back anyway. Touch up your lipstick.
If the act churns out the stickiest of memories, unleashes dreams you never knew you had, causes your heart to race, and your body to fall limp upon the revolutionary discovery of a deeper valley inside of your soul that you never knew you had pull yourself together and keep writing. Or go make love.
Give the lady digging through the garbage at Grand Central the Styrofoam container you carried all the way from that swanky place on Mercer. Don’t analyze why you feel shitty. Just feel shitty.
Keep drinking coffee. Don’t get fancy with cinnamon hazelnut or flavors that have accent marks in the title. Just regular coffee will do. Drink it frequently and in a variety of places. Diners with paper placemats and bowls of pastel butter mints next to the cashier work best but small round kitchen tables, the passenger seat of your brother’s car and The Vince Lombardi Rest Area off the NJ Turnpike just before the GW Bridge are good spots, too. Take notes. Fantasize about the people around you the stories they are telling over their cups of coffee. Watch the way they finger their cup handles, make shredded paper piles of napkins and sugar packets, and fiddle with the steering wheel. Coffee breeds story. Remember you have one.
Eat a box of Cracker Jacks and suck on the black Necco Wafers until your tongue burns.
Vote.
Keep dreaming about what it would be like to eat Chinese food in bed on a rainy Sunday afternoon with your lover. Sinatra or Muddy Waters or Santana playing in the background, soft white flannel sheets with sky blue piping and seven or eight more pillows on the bed than any normal person needs. Keep dreaming the dream but don’t let it get in the way of everyday love.
Stay the course and be reminded of how critical good stamina is.
Pay close attention to how people behave at cocktail parties. It could very well hold the key to most of life’s mysteries.
When you feel yourself heading into the darkness-the wrath of worry and fear, a really, really bad decision, a disingenuous life-start carrying a flashlight everywhere you go. If that doesn’t work wake up early enough to watch the sunrise. And really watch it rise-don’t just say you did.
Wear red shoes until the bitter end.
Learning to Walk Backwards
April 9, 2011
By: Robert Lesher
Robert lives, with his wife Jana, in Fullerton, California, in the house that he was raised in. He was a journalism major throughout high school and university. He has had poetry published in The Cathartic, Voices International and Electrum magazines. For the past forty-plus years he has been a professional musician, within the blues idiom, living in Southern California and on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. In 2009, he was inducted into the Victoria Music Hall of Fame, in British Columbia, Canada, along with the rest of the band he was in, circa 1970-74. He has been with the same band, Tupelo Blue since 1995 and wrote lyrics and melody lines for 14 of 15 tunes on their self-titled CD, released in 2000 to excellent reviews in LA Jazz, and Blues Revue Magazine.
“I feel my music and writing complement and inspire each other to various creative levels”
My Grandfather is immortal to my mother; an early-century man, a barrel-chested railroad engineer who drove huge post-war Buicks. Anytime my Mom speaks of him, in any context, she is really celebrating him.
“Dad…..Dad.” She calls for him as I lead her down the hallway, towards the kitchen for her breakfast. “Daddy.” He is still her divine protection. Although he has been dead for forty-some years he has stayed on as her only real memory, the only strength she consistently retains.
I’m learning the art of walking backwards, facing my Mom as I steer her through the house. She leans back, bending her knees. It is a resisting crouch so I practically have to pull her. I am the tractor. My mother is the trailer with two flat tires.
She frets about taking steps. Her right knee is bone to bone and it hurts. I know that. The complaint is valid, but anything else could be just as much some shadowy illusion or some un-choreographed play for simple attention. It has no reference or logic. It’s part of the illness and nothing beyond that.
This thing meanders in and out. Also, because it appears to be so non-physical, I’ve heard some refer to my mother’s dementia as being a soft disease. There is no call for dripping tubes, shots of morphine or big, halogen-lit surgeries. It doesn’t eat livers, colons and vocal chords. There seems to be no unremitting pain that will eventually gag life away. Instead, it freezes dignity by collapsing the process of thought. It forsakes the heart and the conscious blessing of a kiss. It turns people into furniture, but never really takes on the responsibility for killing them.
She pushes the cookie away. She doesn’t know what it is. I pick it up, force it gently against her lips and she whimpers, almost fearfully.
My mother’s eyes went translucent the day after my stepfather died, but I am certain the disease had manifested into her, parked itself in the rear of her mind sometime before that. He was her reason, as to why she made precise dinners and would still wash the hallway baseboards on her hands and knees. As long as he lived the skips in her memory seemed to be no more than another distraction of getting old.
It was academic. His death tipped her back, into the blips and prisms behind her eyelids. The thing was there to take his place. She had let on, many times, and over the years, that her admitted weakness was prolonged loneliness. The disease had waited for that moment to intrude forever and fill the blanks in her meaning. Now it had the room to itself, to rise-up and creep around in her. It became established and unimpeded.
But we still had time. Though she could not remember who the president was or exactly how old she’d become, it was in the eight months right after my stepfather’s passing that Mom could still focus, long enough to talk about the grass in the front yard, or take a ride in my car one rainy afternoon.
We drove, in the most roundabout way, over the foothills to the next small town and had cheeseburgers for lunch. She had no idea where she was but she knew this was a pleasant moment, a special and last stop for both of us.
Last Thursday I put on a Sinatra LP. It was the September album when Frank was looking back into his life. My mother’s aura flared lightly as she relaxed away from the dementia. The music still worked, found its way in, and her eyes hummed to the scatter of leaves falling around Sinatra’s voice.
Sunday afternoons were Glenn Miller records and some Wild Bill Davidson. After my stepfather fixed a third martini for everyone, Pete Fountain would play his soft Dixieland across the living room. It rolled up, blending with the orange-yellow sunlight that was now low enough to glow hazy and fan-like through the screen door.
There was talk and chuckles. It was a good time for Mom. Kids went to high school each work day and mothers would drift in and out if each others’ houses to visit and gossip about the Christian Science family who lived down the street.
My step dad was her promise to herself, a safe man who would stay at home and eat every meal she cooked, a guy who wore knitted shirts and groaned when the Dodgers fell
off a two-game win streak. His easy presence was what she had been taught, all of her life, a husband would be. Her passion for a normal marriage was completed by him.
I hold the tip of the spoon against her pursed lips. She looks at my face.
“Help me, Mom. You have to eat.”
Slowly, her lips part and she emits an “aaaaaah” as I tip the spoon in and upward so the syrupy peaches can slide down her throat.
Two years ago she was still edgy enough to want things her way. Even though the dementia had dissected much of her logic at this point, it was not yet the madness and frustration that it promised to be.
She had come to view the sidewalk out front as some straight line back to Marion, Ohio. For her it was a kind of OZ, a place where the pieces still fit together. It was where she was born and raised through high school, where she held a job at Kresge’s and met my real father, who was up from Springfield to find a job after graduation.
By the time I realized that Mom was gone, she was at least six houses up the street shuffling along in her blue sweat suit. “Mom’s out!” I called-out to my wife as I clamored down the porch steps and sprinted across the lawn. I caught-up and stepped in front of her to block her from going any farther.
“Oh,” she said. “Why, where have you been, honey?” Her eyes were twinkling and she grinned. “Is Dad on the train waiting for me?”
“Where are you going, Mom?’
“Well now, I’m going home.” She nodded at me. “My mom and dad are waiting for me. They’ll be worried.”
“They know you are with me, Mom. They know you are safe.”
She was hesitating. Her rhythms began to collide and sputter.
“Mom, they know you’re with me.”
“OK”, she said. She was taking deeper breaths. “OK.” With that, the pep began to drain out of her. “Then, well, I guess so.”
She’d now forgotten why she was even there. All that she knew, from this point on, was that her knee was beginning to hurt and that she was very tired. Her breathing came out in hisses and little whispers. I took her hand. It felt infinite and light, as if I held a small paper bag.
I wake-up earlier and earlier to have more time to myself, just to read the paper at 5 am. To know, at that time, she will not stir until around eight is soothing for me. My anxiousness will pull-back for an hour or so. The strain at the base of my neck recedes as I rest my elbows on the kitchen table and listen to the coffee drip and crackle.
I’ve come to fantasize, and perhaps even believe, that my mother’s ongoing madness is a terminal beast that walks on the ceilings and cartwheels through the walls of this house. There is no respite, no privacy from it. It is a constant buzz of flies in the hearts of the living. Because it cannot be cured, eliminated or even tempered, it has caused me the most vivid of frustrations, to sometimes make me think of my mother in a context that will bother me, in varying degrees, for the rest of my life.
As I prepare her lunch, I anticipate having to fight her, nag and bitch for her to eat it. I know the possibility is constant that she will take four bites and then push the plate halfway across the table. Her expression will go blank, almost static, as it passes through me into another dimension. I slide the plate back in front of her. She fiddles with the spoon for a few seconds and, once again, shoves the plate back across the table.
I immediately realize what is going on here. My chest contracts and my shoulders tighten like thread rod. Within that moment it is past counting to ten in order to re-group, walking outside to take a deep breath. I feel seriously compromised and impotent. The stress spreads out, like bruises within my eyes and every pore and finally pummels in a baritone fire-rage out of my mouth, ka-booming and splattering against the walls.
“Mom, I’m sorry that I yelled. You know I’m your son and that I love you.”
I kneel in front of her, where I’ve just sat her down in the living room. Her tiny legs are covered by a blanket that is pink with cartoonish kitty prints on it. She is smiling, the
same way she did when she would greet me at the front door five or so years ago, when her mind remained switched-on to some degree and I was still working. It was that
positive smile that guided me in, that became etched in me, that said all was OK and I was home. I was her son. It was the clearest of facts and meant nothing could come between us.
Some mornings I am fraught with a dry fear. It settles into the bottom of my stomach like a compressed pile of cardboard. My mother now wets herself because she sleeps so soundly. She is completely disconnected from her urine and defecations. The illness has released her from that concern, as if she moves in a dream above it.
If it is just urination, my senses sigh and calm down a little. It is washable and easy as compared to defecation which is not so transparent. That will stay with me through the rest of the morning, the memory of easing off her diaper, carefully, so a clump won’t fall onto the bathroom floor, the wiping of her poor old behind, red and folded inward.
She is getting smaller. I’m barely five-six but she is so hunched forward that I loom over her. As to weight loss, her doctor doesn’t seem surprised. “Let her eat cookies and full-grade milk”, he says. “Give her ice cream”. He wants me to feed her calories, but I see it as an attempt to keep me busy, to level my fret, my growing awareness that my mother is falling away.
“You are invisible to your mom.” A friend says this, during a phone conversation, as I explain to him that I’d like just ten minutes of coherency from her. Then we could talk and I could be forgiven all of the lies I ever told her, the hurt and worries I brought to her. I wanted my mother to kiss my wounds of guilt one more time and grant me that breath of peace. “She’s past that. Her mind doesn’t even understand itself.”
I’ve never talked to my mom enough. I know some of her history, her most coveted moments, being on her Aunt’s and Uncle’s farm outside the railroad town she lived in. There’s a photograph of her, hand-tinted in watercolor tones. Her dog is sitting beside her. I suppose she is only three or four. She looks like Shirley Temple. But, this is something I’ve always known. It is more of an innocent memory, the kind of perfection all boys will assign to their mothers.
My regret, one of my midnight sorrows when I think of her, is that I never will know her secrets, the things she kept to herself, as to why her hugs were sometimes light and held-back, as to why, most always, she could offer only a nervous chitter of a laugh when I told her that I loved her.
Even now, that chitter, that alarmed look will appear in her dementia-strewn eyes if I say that to her. It is a feeling, some memory so strong that it becomes one of the few things the illness cannot subdue at all. For that reason it represents that something is still there, a faint hope, even amid my regret that I never, not in the slightest, questioned why love has so confronted my mother.
After I get her dressed for the day, I face her towards the bathroom mirror and, with a wetted brush, groom her white hair. She is motionless and resigned as I sweep it back. Her eyes are entirely fixated to her image in the mirror. They are rimmed with a tear-like redness.
Now, more than ever, she is tired. I’ve begun to realize my mother complains and whimpers when she is forced to walk because she thinks she should not be walking at all.
I walk backwards, maneuvering her down the hallway as she grips into my forearms. Her fingernails are long and uneven. They leave marks on my skin. She is bent forward, so much now that she appears only three feet tall. She emits “uuuuh’s” and desperate little whines between her labored breaths. Her discomfort is not just bones grinding together but the fact her connection to this life is no longer making any sense.
Within my thoughts about this illness, I have come up with perceptions and ideas that draw nothing from science or medical journals.
One of these involves the spirit detaching from the physical and going wherever a spirit is set to go. In my mother’s case, it has left but is still tied to an earthly umbilical cord, floating and bobbling in some abortive release. It has left but still must wait for the body to give in.
Every so often, somebody will ask, in a hushed and peripheral voice, if I feel trapped in this situation. I know they will not care for my answer, nor will I, because on the surface it indicates I’ve given into this crap that is my mother’s disease. Even the thought of my reply makes me view myself as a type of sociopath, a completely separate figure who stands away, the flat length of a football field, from all who know me.
I don’t really want the world to know this answer, not even my brother or any close friends. Only my wife can understand me enough to know my response is not so literal or binding. The safest time to say it is late evening, when we finally go to bed. My mother has been sleeping since seven. All of my friends are, most probably, settled in their homes and not concerned about anything I have to say. My brother in Oklahoma is surely asleep.
“Yeah,” I say to my wife. “I feel trapped.” I roll over and she, as she always does, places her hand to my back between my shoulder blades. As I breathe-out I feel some relief, at least for one more day, from the nauseous, little judgments I put on myself for ever thinking this way.
“No, Jesus, in your mouth!” I let out a yell and snatch her hand down as my mother attempts to brush her hair with a loaded toothbrush.
People will sometimes just complain and then hope someone else’s story will be heavier than theirs. It’s so they can sigh a little, feel human and believe, for that moment they might still remain close enough to a real life. That’s all I seem to hear in these groups that meet in semicircles of metal folding chairs in scuffed-up florescent rooms donated by a hospital. Their every manner, every sentence, comes with a long measure of pallid resignation and bland hopelessness.
I went to the meetings two times before I began to itch. People spoke with tears. They leaned forward with the weight of their parent’s illness, the remorse of losing their daily lives to it.
One woman had realized she was spending more time with the shell of her mother than her teenaged children. They resented her tired silences by smoking weed in their bedrooms. They painted their fingernails black and threatened her with thoughts of them getting gothic tattoos and marble implants under their skin as soon as they turned eighteen. She was impelled to surrender the responsibility of her mother in favor of them. She had no other choice and the extra burden of that guilt seemed to pull her off edge of her seat.
Her whine comes up to me. It is like a dry, irritated hum; a mouse squeak. As I wash the sleep from her eyes, dabbing them with a damp washcloth, she closes them and twists her face away. I clean her up each morning before dressing her.
Still, I cannot completely bath the front of my mother’s body. Her breasts, which now hang flat and empty, frighten me. I will scrub her neck and back, even her butt crack and cheeks. But when I apply the washcloth between her legs, just a few inches above her knees, she instinctively clamps them together. I am immediately terrified in the most nightmarish of ways.
I can deal with her poop, be it in her morning diaper or goo on the bathroom floor. I can shove her toothpaste spit down the drain or trim her gnarled toenails without a flinch as she screeches down at me in some delusional horror, but I will not wash her front.
My paranoia is that I’m scheduled for this monster. Not only do I sometimes think about it, I feel others thinking about it even more. I sense right into my wife’s hesitation when I admit to not remembering where I set my glasses. Sometimes she watches me with this subtle speculation that now that the illness has practically finished consuming my mother, perhaps it is beginning to nibble at me.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, I watch her as she takes her pills. Although it runs head-on into my impatience and better judgment, I still try to let her do this as long as I am watching.
My arms are folded across my chest to contain the anxiety that starts to murmur within. Knowing that she probably won’t, I still hope, just hope she will complete the cycle before she attempts to chew the gelatin capsules that are her stool softeners or poke her blue cholesterol pill into the very glass of water she should be drinking to wash it down. It floats long enough for me to say, “Damnit, Mom” and pick it out before it begins dissolving.
I feel deeply offended by my mom, that she does this sort of thing. It is just the common logic of swallowing a pill that I cannot let go on behalf of her. It is the kind of thing that will make me slam doors and yell curses into a bedroom closet so the neighbors won’t hear it.
Pill to mouth. Drink the water. Pill to mouth. Drink the water. It becomes another facet of the daily drill, a motion once taken for granted that is now an event never to be left unattended.
I’ve cried twice in the way that I imagine I will when my mother is completely gone, when her body finally deflates and gives itself back. Yesterday she kept falling asleep as the Travel Channel droned in a kind of parallel with the afternoon heat. I watched her nod down to her left side. The minutes became straight lines, a near silent whirring of seconds, one after another, never going from one to two, just one, one, one, one, one, as if the word depicting the number itself would eventually lose its context within the repetition and become a misnomer without any purpose or meaning.
In this pale world between that one and two I see Mom wander towards mirages of her mother and father. The cat enters the room and looks at her with narrowed eyes in a way that he might view a ghost or some disoriented spirit.
“Oh lord. I need my toes.” She is having a fretful, whinny morning. Her voice quivers with every word as if her eyes are crying through it. I lead her into the bathroom to get her onto the toilet. The right side of her nightie is dark with pee. “Oh my lord,” she moans. Her feet move with little scuffs against the rug. “I need my toes. Where are my toes?”
If there is light beyond death, then perhaps dementia is one form of darkness that directly precedes it. It is without any specific trait, with the exception that it seems to be tailored per victim.
Its only consistency is that it will emerge out from beneath the bed and re-inhabit her each morning as soon as I wake up. I know it will be there and my nose is immediately, an eighth of an inch from the wall. The curve of weirdness sets upon me, bringing grimaces of anticipation and a dread that spin like slow rotor-blades above my every movement.
“Who’s Lloyd, or should I say, who was Lloyd?” My wife is talking to me. She has just walked back into the kitchen after putting Mom to bed. A skillet full of hamburger meat is crackling on the stove and I’m staring into the fridge looking for the one beer I’ve saved from the weekend.
“Lloyd? What, who do you mean, Lloyd?”
“Lloyd. Your mother said he was in the bathroom when I sat her on the pot and then he was coming to bed with her when I was starting to cover her.”
“I don’t know, dear. Maybe it was a boyfriend in high school.” I laugh a little. “ Really, I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t anyone.” I pull the milk out and there’s my beer. She walks to the stove and shuffles the meat back and forth with a big wooden spoon.
I can tell she is pondering this Lloyd thing. The full silence that was once my mother’s knowledge fills in between us as I turn my head and watch her shake the spoon into the pan. “It was somebody,” she says.
As her sleep goes farther and farther in, I think of the dementia as pulling back from her to a point where she is finally left alone to feel some of the lines connect once again. The dreams she has will be of sun-white days, of her parents in midlife when they used to ride the Santa Fe out to visit us in California.
When my mom is sleeping, her face relaxes. Her knees are drawn into an almost fetal fold-up. Even though this is supposed to be a classic position attributed to the disease, it never bothers me. My mother, as long as I can remember, has always slept like this.
“I didn’t do it.” Her answer is bratty and final. She has poured her milk-soggy wheat flakes onto her napkin. Once more I am paralyzed and a routine morning becomes surreal. Already, drops of milk drip-smack to the linoleum floor and a million steam whistles go off behind my eyes and up my ear canals.
She reaches down into the sink and pulls the stopper out. I grab her hand away form it. “Mom, let’s sit down so I can put on your pants.” Now I’m unhooking a steelworker’s clench that she has on the bathroom counter so that I can slowly back her up and sit her on the toilet seat. Her breath is grey and stale. It floats around to me and puffs up to the back of my mouth as I speak. A gag begins to curdle in my throat.
“Oh, my pants?” Again she reaches down and pulls the stopper out. Again, I’m pulling her hand away from it. She starts to claw upward at the mirror as I try to ease her back. Her voice shakes and rises to high pitch. “Now, don’t hurt me!”
I tug her away from the counter. “You’re going to hurt me! Oooooooh, my god! You’re going to hurt me!” In a half-second it has escalated into a fury that seems to blow the walls apart and the roof away.
“Mom, please! I’m helping you sit down! Please, Mom!”
I can only guess that she thinks she is falling into some eternal deepness as I lead her backwards and down onto the toilet seat. It is barely a drop of one foot from her hunched
position but she still pushes back up and emits a quivering vibrato scream. I purse my lips. I bite the inside of my mouth. She yells and heaves, “Oh God! Oh, my dear lord!”
“Mom, look up. Look up at the mirror.” I wet the brush and run it through her white hair. It parts naturally and she looks at herself. She gazes at the image in front of her as the synapses behind her eyes try to re-group.
“Who do you see, Mom? Who’s in front of you?”
“Me,” she says. She pauses. “Well, heh-heh, that’s me. Sometimes it’s me.” I listen to the ceiling fan rattle above us. Her eyes begin to squint deeper at the mirror. She touches her face and then after more pause, she says, “Hello, me.”
A while back I helped my wife clear out a closet in the back room of the house. It held the last of Mom’s clothing, the stuff that would never fit her again: dresses and knit tops that had no more use for her shrinking frame. I quietly handed each piece to my wife for her to place them in a plastic trash bag. Some would go to the Salvation Army. The rest would be just thrown away.
I tried to see my mother in some of these dresses with their tablecloth patterns and the little vinyl belts that were cracked with age. I attempted to draw out the memories of summer vacation days when she wore them and fixed me and my brother peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or maybe tomato soup for lunch.
There is always a quiet doubt that I should take these sort of steps, to accept this one more realization as my mother sits in another part of the house, not knowing the circles are completed and that the rest of her time moves in and out of the dry attachments of old dreams.
My wife knows my silence and she merges with it. She comments in reverent little tones as to a particular cut or design and runs her index finger along a seam of a dress as if she is touching poetry.
She lifts the red pill to her mouth. From the sides of her eyes she watches me lean over her. I am holding a small glass of milk for her to wash it down with. The cat walks through the kitchen to his water dish beside the stove. It distracts her immediately. She sets the pill back onto the table.
“Take your pill, Mom,” I say as calmly as I can for the seventh time.
“Don’t you go outside, honey,” she says to the cat. He pays no attention as he begins nursing the floor in front of the dish. “Don’t you do that, heh-heh. Be a good baby.”
“Mom, here’s your pill. Take it, Mom.” I point to it, push it to the table’s edge with my finger. She looks down at it and shoves it back, pinching it between her finger and thumb. “Come on, Mom. Take it.”
“It’s a rose,” she says, now looking at me directly. Her smile is almost impish. It is mother to son and begins to pull me backwards into a gentle tease that tickles across the top of my head. “It’s a little,” she says, “a little red one. See?”
As I listen to my wife’s breathing lapse into a pattern of sleep, I shift the pillow behind me and reach over to turn the light off. We have kissed each other as we always do.
Night has pulled us away from daytime, the Dali-like presence of my mother, the clutter and shivering confusions that it confronts us with. The darkness is like a wide and straight river with tiny porch lights on each side. My legs go soft as I start to sink in and move with it. I take longer breaths and draw myself into a wistful hum, the sanctuary of those hours that come just before and after midnight.
The street out front is settled and cool. Three long blocks to the southwest is the mainline. I become sleepy listening to the heavy freight trains that run up and down it all night long. I envision the way my mother might have thought of her father, leaning from the high cab of the big engine as he guided it along the tracks, rolling across a quiet Ohio countryside.
She has gone to sleep long before us. Her room is at the other end of the hallway. In my thoughts, I will see the memories she has hidden in her heart come free of the illness, to pour out and gather around her restful face. As if the lines of my mother’s life pass through me, I listen to the trains, the way they glide, low against the tracks in a tight, smooth clatter that seems to stay behind long after they disappear into the night.
Buses
May 6, 2011
By: Lois Greene Stone
Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies. Collections of her personal items/photos/memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.
Isn't public transportation just a means of getting from point-A to point-B without a car? What’s that got to do with lasting impressions? In April 2011, I read, in my morning newspaper, that there actually is a museum for old buses, quickly went online and typed in those words. A site had sterile information, photos, plus images in time-line organized display cases. Point A to .... the passenger was missing...
I once felt that riding a certain bus in New York City was exhilarating, and I created reasons to travel from Flushing, Long Island to Manhattan. Public transportation now? Well, let me first give you 'then':
Air brakes were quiet compared to my breathing; I'd run a quarter-mile to reach a Queens County stop before the bus did. The driver took no notice, swung a large handle and moved doors. I groped in my tiny leather pouch, bought at an Army-Navy store, for my nickel.
My buffalo coin sounded as if it were being destroyed when churning began and money dropped lower into the counting cylinder. I sat on the right side so I could watch awaiting passengers on Bus Stop marked street corners.
I noticed the shoe store on Northern Boulevard where, whenever I walked by it, I went inside and placed my feet beneath a machine that x-rayed them so I could actually see if Stride-Rite shoes did indeed fit. I smiled when I passed the flower shop where I often used 50¢ of allowance to buy my mother fragrant gardenias.
I pressed my nose against glass, exhaled. Had a cloud formed from hot breath? After passing the RKO Keith’s grand movie theatre where a real-person organist played between films, left turn, and there was the terminal where, as my dad used to say, the 'busses sleep'.
With a paper transfer, I looked for a connection to Jackson Heights, moving way off target destination. Nope. My mother couldn't understand why I took a round-about route to the city; she said it was like going to China to get to New Jersey. So the Long Island Railroad was direct, only 22 minutes; even the subway from Flushing Main Street was quick. She regularly said the same thing as I pretended a bored expression, rolled my eyes, placed weight on the outside of one turned ankle, muttered "more advice" and did as I pleased, anyway. She was old...38...wanted things easy and quick.
I seemed to always giggle with anticipation before my ride from Jackson Heights to Manhattan on a double-decker. An open-top one was ready to pull out. I climbed its stairs, and my silky blonde hair strands were caught by blowing wind atop the big double-decker vehicle. I loved summer.
Now, decades later in my adult hometown, Rochester, New York, nearly 400 miles from childhood, I stare at a sleek and modern "stretch" bus as its accordion middle wraps around a corner. Park and Ride signs dot some designated outside lots. I've toyed with the notion but it seems absurd: I'm already in my warm car and anyplace in this community is only twenty minutes away. If I have to drive to park, then bus, I may as well drive to park downtown and be there ten minutes sooner. "She's old...wants things easy and quick." Why do my own words come back to tease me?
When I became a parent, I realized what my own mother and father had allowed. I knew how self-sufficient and capable I'd felt, as a girl, going out alone. Did my mother worry when, at age nine, I took the train to the city for ballet lessons? Certainly. How about when my figure blossomed into young womanhood and workmen whistled as I passed? Most definitely. Why, when I was in high school, was it 'cool' to go to Connecticut to see a movie, or go to Philadelphia to a baseball game? How must she have felt: scared.
But I, as my mother, kept fears to myself and released my children to explore possibilities, accept responsibility for their own welfare, learn how to transport themselves yet be alert, build memories of self-discovery. In my suburban town located in the snowbelt, there are no sidewalks; the nearest bus is a full mile away. My daughter walked in the road’s shoulder, toting ice skates on her shoulder, to get to a bus to take her to a rink. I realized the return was difficult.
I've never ridden public transportation here. From my car’s windshield, I peer at potential passengers standing within plastic enclosures as I drive a main thoroughfare. But.. what if an old, noisy, open-topped double-decker straight out of my New York childhood came clanking by? I grin at the thought, and giggle.
Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies. Collections of her personal items/photos/memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.
Isn't public transportation just a means of getting from point-A to point-B without a car? What’s that got to do with lasting impressions? In April 2011, I read, in my morning newspaper, that there actually is a museum for old buses, quickly went online and typed in those words. A site had sterile information, photos, plus images in time-line organized display cases. Point A to .... the passenger was missing...
I once felt that riding a certain bus in New York City was exhilarating, and I created reasons to travel from Flushing, Long Island to Manhattan. Public transportation now? Well, let me first give you 'then':
Air brakes were quiet compared to my breathing; I'd run a quarter-mile to reach a Queens County stop before the bus did. The driver took no notice, swung a large handle and moved doors. I groped in my tiny leather pouch, bought at an Army-Navy store, for my nickel.
My buffalo coin sounded as if it were being destroyed when churning began and money dropped lower into the counting cylinder. I sat on the right side so I could watch awaiting passengers on Bus Stop marked street corners.
I noticed the shoe store on Northern Boulevard where, whenever I walked by it, I went inside and placed my feet beneath a machine that x-rayed them so I could actually see if Stride-Rite shoes did indeed fit. I smiled when I passed the flower shop where I often used 50¢ of allowance to buy my mother fragrant gardenias.
I pressed my nose against glass, exhaled. Had a cloud formed from hot breath? After passing the RKO Keith’s grand movie theatre where a real-person organist played between films, left turn, and there was the terminal where, as my dad used to say, the 'busses sleep'.
With a paper transfer, I looked for a connection to Jackson Heights, moving way off target destination. Nope. My mother couldn't understand why I took a round-about route to the city; she said it was like going to China to get to New Jersey. So the Long Island Railroad was direct, only 22 minutes; even the subway from Flushing Main Street was quick. She regularly said the same thing as I pretended a bored expression, rolled my eyes, placed weight on the outside of one turned ankle, muttered "more advice" and did as I pleased, anyway. She was old...38...wanted things easy and quick.
I seemed to always giggle with anticipation before my ride from Jackson Heights to Manhattan on a double-decker. An open-top one was ready to pull out. I climbed its stairs, and my silky blonde hair strands were caught by blowing wind atop the big double-decker vehicle. I loved summer.
Now, decades later in my adult hometown, Rochester, New York, nearly 400 miles from childhood, I stare at a sleek and modern "stretch" bus as its accordion middle wraps around a corner. Park and Ride signs dot some designated outside lots. I've toyed with the notion but it seems absurd: I'm already in my warm car and anyplace in this community is only twenty minutes away. If I have to drive to park, then bus, I may as well drive to park downtown and be there ten minutes sooner. "She's old...wants things easy and quick." Why do my own words come back to tease me?
When I became a parent, I realized what my own mother and father had allowed. I knew how self-sufficient and capable I'd felt, as a girl, going out alone. Did my mother worry when, at age nine, I took the train to the city for ballet lessons? Certainly. How about when my figure blossomed into young womanhood and workmen whistled as I passed? Most definitely. Why, when I was in high school, was it 'cool' to go to Connecticut to see a movie, or go to Philadelphia to a baseball game? How must she have felt: scared.
But I, as my mother, kept fears to myself and released my children to explore possibilities, accept responsibility for their own welfare, learn how to transport themselves yet be alert, build memories of self-discovery. In my suburban town located in the snowbelt, there are no sidewalks; the nearest bus is a full mile away. My daughter walked in the road’s shoulder, toting ice skates on her shoulder, to get to a bus to take her to a rink. I realized the return was difficult.
I've never ridden public transportation here. From my car’s windshield, I peer at potential passengers standing within plastic enclosures as I drive a main thoroughfare. But.. what if an old, noisy, open-topped double-decker straight out of my New York childhood came clanking by? I grin at the thought, and giggle.
The Prison
February 20, 2012
By: Henry F. Tonn
Henry F. Tonn is a semi-retired psychologist whose fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in such print publications as the Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Connecticut Review, and online journals such as Front Porch Journal, Summerset Review, and Eclectica. “The Prison” is an excerpt from his book-length memoir, I Never Met a Paranoid Schizophrenic I Didn’t Like. He is presently editing a war veterans anthology and can be found at henrytonn.com.
October, 1967. There is a shortage of psychologists in the state of North Carolina, creating excellent employment opportunities for anyone with bare minimum qualifications. As a fledgling psychologist searching for new experiences, I decide to apply for positions in the southeastern part of the state. Within two weeks, the head of the mental health department at Central Prison, a maximum security unit in Raleigh, contacts me. “We’d love to talk to you, Henry,” he says. “Why don’t you drive over and see the facility?”
Central Prison houses the most dangerous inmates in the state, and is reputed to be both depressing and ugly. I have already spent a year working part time in Cherry Hospital, a state institution for the mentally ill, and found it as depressing and ugly as I wanted to see. On the other hand, I like Raleigh as a city and feel I should at least check the job out.
The interview goes something like this:
ME: “Stan, I have to admit, this place is somewhat depressing. You drive over the hill to the entrance and you’re confronted with all those guards on the walls with guns. Then you go through all these locked doors in order to get to your office. And there’s this constant screaming and hollering. Pretty grim!”
HIM: (nodding sympathetically) “Yeah. And it gets worse. The criminals here will kill you in a second if they can, or rape you at the very least. It’s not a pleasant place.”
ME: “And there’s no sunlight in here. There are no pictures on the walls. It’s gloomy!”
HIM: (nodding further) “I couldn’t agree more. We need an interior decorator. But we can’t afford one. Remember, we’re financed by the state. There’s no money. Besides, the prisoners would just ruin everything anyway because they riot a lot.”
ME: “And why do you have such a big turnover among the staff? You haven’t been able to keep a full-time psychiatrist here for more than six months.”
HIM: “That’s nothing. We can’t keep psychologists, either. That’s why I’m offering you the job. I can’t get anybody else.”
ME: “This is not reassuring.”
HIM: “At least I’m being honest with you. You have to give me credit for that.”
ME: “I do. Thank you for being honest. But it looks like a terrible job, quite frankly.”
HIM: “It is a terrible job! Who in their right mind wants to be locked up all day with a bunch of murderers, rapists, child molesters, psychopaths, drug addicts, alcoholics, schizophrenics, perverts, and freaks? And I’m just talking about the staff, not the prisoners! But, seriously, Henry, remember, you’re a psychologist. You’re just beginning your career. You need experience. And where else can you find a better assortment of the people you ought to be studying than right here? We’re not asking you to stay forever. Just long enough to be raped and murdered a few times.”
I find his argument irresistible. I accept the job.
And he’s right, of course. It’s everything he says and worse. This is the psychiatric treatment facility for all the prisoners in the state of North Carolina. If a prisoner has problems, he’s shipped to Raleigh and evaluated by us. We diagnose the problem, put him on the proper medication if indicated, and then send him back to his unit with a report to the doctors and guards at the facility. If the prisoner is so mentally ill that we can’t treat him at our facility, we send him to nearby Dorthea Dix Hospital, a mental institution built in the 1880’s, with a locked ward for prisoners.
To treat this constant stream of people we have a constant stream of staff members. The one consistent treatment person is Dr. Owen, a seventy-year-old psychiatrist who had been in the system forever. Dr. Owen has a good sense of humor and a healthy skepticism about anything an inmate tells him. He has heard it all. His favorite expression is, “I don’t see anything wrong with him. I think he’s a psychopathic son-of-a-bitch.” He says this without animosity, more like resignation, as though it is a simple fact of life in the prison world. There are three or four other psychiatrists, part time, who circulate through, most of them retired from other jobs, working there to pick up a little change. There is one other psychologist besides myself, and he and I do most of the initial evaluations and any needed counseling. I hardly ever see Stan, the supervising psychologist who recruited me, because of his administrative duties.
Regardless of weather, every morning I walk the four blocks from my apartment to the prison. After ascending a small hill leading to the institution, I am greeted by an awesome sight. Spread below me is something resembling a citadel. Central Prison has stone walls that reach several stories high, topped with barbed wire, and is constantly patrolled by menacing-looking guards with rifles. Although I haven’t done anything wrong, approaching the place makes me feel conspicuous. I’m afraid they’ll shoot me just for being a suspicious-looking character getting close to their gate.
At the first entrance I stand while a guard recognizes me and pushes a button that causes a giant wire gate to creak slowly open. I then proceed to the building entrance, again to be recognized. This also happens to be the waiting area for incoming prisoners, and sometimes making my way to the next locked door is like running a gauntlet. If a new inmate decided to kill me on the spot, there is precious little the guards can do.
Passing through the second locked door, I walk down a long corridor to the cell block where my office is located. A friendly face generally greets me here because most of the people passing through- including inmates- are known to the guards. My office is small, cramped, and without distinction. It does, however, have a window overlooking the yard so during my idle moments I can watch the inmates milling about. Occasionally, I actually walk out on the yard to take in a little sunshine, but the guards frowned upon it. Too dangerous, they say.
I quickly realize I have stepped into a mess. All common elements of humanity have been stripped away in this environment. The inmates, for the most part, are cold-hearted and manipulative. The staff members, particularly the psychiatrists, are arrogant and condescending. Arriving on the scene with only two years of experience, I’ve been hoping to learn much from these people, some who have been in the system as long as twenty-five years. But it’s not working out that way.
An example: One day I’m presenting to the staff a patient I’ve been treating for several months with behavioral problems. One of the psychiatrists, after asking the patient a number of insolent questions, opines, “This is obviously a retarded depression. He needs to be hospitalized.”
I’m aghast. The inmate is doing well in therapy. I’m accomplishing something useful in this difficult environment. I don’t want him going to the hospital where they will fill him with drugs and make him angrier than ever. He is not particularly depressed, and in this situation I feel obliged to offer a differing opinion.
“With all due respect, I don’t think he’s depressed. He just tends to be moody. I’d like to keep him here and continue treating him. He’s making progress.”
“This is a retarded depression,” the psychiatrist replies with thunderous finality. He’s a bald-headed man who speaks with a gravelly Hungarian accent. “I’ve seen hundreds of them in the prison system. He needs to be hospitalized.” He looks around at his colleagues who all nod sagely in agreement. “If you gave him an MMPI you would find the depression scale sharply elevated.”
The MMPI stands for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, then and now considered the top personality test in America. I respond, “Well, I gave him an MMPI two months ago and it wasn’t elevated then. I don’t think it is now. I’ll tell you what, I’ll administer another. If the depression scale is as high as you say, we’ll send him to the hospital. If it’s low, we keep him here and I’ll continue treating him.”
He sort of rolls his eyes in exasperation. “Suit yourself. He’s your patient.”
I give him the MMPI and, as expected, his depression scale is quite normal. I ask him the next day, “What was wrong with you in that psychiatric staffing? You acted like you were out of it.”
He’s a tall, thin, proud African American who usually wears a sullen scowl. “They’re a bunch of phonies,” he replies. “They treat us like dogs. I just answered their questions the best I could. I don’t give a damn about them.”
“They thought you were depressed and ought to go to the hospital.”
He snorts. “That’s the least of my worries.”
After that I rely on my own judgment.
One of the most interesting people I evaluate early on is a prisoner who has just gotten a multiple-year sentence for selling drugs. He has been sent in from his unit because of his strange behavior and his lack of cooperation with the authorities. He won’t work and refuses to eat cooked prison food, insisting that he wants his food to be raw. He’s a rather attractive African American male with a narrow face and thin frame, in his late forties, who interacts in a calm but aloof manner. I ask him why he refuses to eat the prison food.
“It’s all part of the great plan,” he says.
“The great plan?” I ask.
He regards me condescendingly. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” I encourage.
He heaves a deep sigh and says, “Sure. I have nothing else to do at the moment. I’m not leaving prison till I’m ready to leave. I’ll tell you all about it.”
He then relates his concern for the plight of the African American population in America and has decided to intervene and institute some major changes. Over the next hour he outlines a complicated economic plan which involves building factories and hiring African American workers to produce a product that would be sold to the white population. The profits, then, would be plowed back into the system until sufficient income is generated to put more African Americans to work, and so forth, until there is prosperity for all. He is going to oversee this great system and make sure it proceeds efficiently, with an eye on fairness to all.
“What about corruption?” I ask. “Whenever you have a complicated organization like this, you have to guard against corruption.”
“No problem,” he replies. “I’ll be at the helm.”
“But what happens when you die?” I ask. “The whole system you’ve built up could collapse.”
“I’ve thought of that, too,” he replies. “I’m not going to die.”
“How is that?”
“I’m not going to die. I’m going to be immortal.”
“Well, that certainly will do the trick,” I agree. “Could you tell me how exactly you’re going to pull this off? Just for the record, of course.”
“Of course,” he says. “Well, actually, it’s very simple. I’m in the process of making those preparations as we speak. You have to start with a basic understanding of life: when we’re alive we have to breathe air, eat food, and drink water. In other words, we’re dependent on air, food, and water. So when we reach the point where we’re no longer dependent on these things, we can live forever. Simple. Consequently, I’m gradually weaning myself from air, food, and water. I breathe less, eat less, and drink less. In fact, that’s why I don’t eat cooked food. I eat raw food, natural food, to purify my body. I get closer to nature. I drink pure water- spring water, preferably- although I can’t get it here in prison. Gradually I eat less and less raw food, drink less and less pure water, and breathe less and less air. Eventually I won’t need them at all. Then I’ll be immortal!”
He sits back satisfied with himself.
I pause for a moment before saying, “I hate to tell you this, but I don‘t think this idea is going to work.”
“Of course you don‘t, Doc. All you people say the same thing. But has anybody ever tried it? It makes sense to me. And that’s what I’m doing. When I’m finished, this prison won’t hold me.” For the first and only time, I see a flicker of contempt pass across his face.
He is a pleasant enough fellow, and we converse a little while longer, and in the end agreed to disagree- not that there is any point in our debating his view of things, anyway. I eventually present his case to the psychiatric board which is neither amused nor impressed. They send him to the hospital and I never see him again. I assume he either became immortal or stayed in prison for a long time.
The longer I remain at the prison and the better I get to know certain inmates, the more I learn about the inner workings of the institution. I learn that the major topics of conversation are mojos, paroles, and assholes. Mojos are wallets. In these days Central Prison has an active leather industry where the inmates make beautiful wallets and sell them for profit. Since it’s the only source of income for many of them, a lot of energy goes into this endeavor. Paroles, of course, mean freedom, mom, apple pie, and the opportunity to create more crimes. The fixation on assholes is obvious. There are no women in the prison and they have to make do with what is available. One prisoner puts it to me succinctly: “We can get anything in this prison that you can get out there, Doc. Except women. And we’ve got something better.”
I don’t pursue the issue.
Not all inmates are devoid of emotion, although the understanding of such concepts as anxiety and depression are foreign to most of them. Once an inmate actually makes an appointment with me to question exactly what this thing called anxiety is. He has been reading a book about the subject and simply cannot understand what they are talking about. I patiently explain that it’s a feeling of nervousness inside and can make you shaky, like when your hands tremble.
“Ah!” he exclaims, suddenly brightening. “Like when the cops are shooting at you and you’ve got to keep you hand steady to shoot back straight and knock a few of ‘em off.”
Um, not exactly, Scarface. But, whatever . . .
I watch the psychiatric staff interviewing a rather notorious inmate who has slashed himself with a razor seventy-three times. When asked why he’s done this to himself, he stares at us with utter disgust.
“Slashing myself is the only way I can get out of that damn cell,” he says. “How would you like to stare at nothing but bars all day?”
Well, he has a point. But this man had murdered two people in cold blood on the outside and is a constant menace on the inside. What sort of accommodations does he expect?
All of the inmates, of course, are not like this. Some are fine human beings who have simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. Drugs or alcohol are usually involved. I treat one inmate who has received twenty-five years for manslaughter. He and his fiancée were having an argument one evening while drinking wine and preparing a turkey, and in a sudden fit of anger he slashed at her with the carving knife. He severed an artery and she died before his eyes. Four years into his sentence he is still inconsolable.
The inmates I find most interesting are the ones who work in the processing department where they administer tests, type reports, and so forth. These inmates usually have some education and some literary skills and tend to read books during their off hours rather than hang around biding their time. They are generally analytical, thoughtful, and opinionated. Each had squandered his potential at an early age by doing something stupid while inebriated- like murder or rape. “In one minute my entire life changed,” they often say, shaking their heads.
The senior of the group is sixty-five and has been in prison forty of those years for one murder and numerous escapes. He’s near the end of his sentence and the fire of his youth is now burned out. He is quiet, resigned, and passive. “I’d just like to walk down a shady lane without worrying about the police chasing me,” he confides in me.
I spend hours chatting with these people and the biggest problem for both of us is not getting too close. They seem to genuinely miss me when I eventually leave.
The end comes quickly. In the summer of 1968 Central Prison has a prison riot. Inmates take over the yard and refuse to return to their cells. They build bonfires, make weapons, and produce a list of demands. The warden refuses to negotiate and soon has the walls filled with the National Guard. The entire prison goes into lockdown and no one is allowed to leave. I’m scared to death, as are my colleagues, and no doubt we would have remained in the prison indefinitely had it not been for seventy-year-old Dr. Owen, who informs the warden that his health will not permit remaining on the premises. When they let him through the gate we all quickly follow.
During the night, the Guard opens fire, killing eight inmates and wounding around seventy-five. I return to work the next afternoon to find the prison hospital filled with the wounded. They all whine about how unfairly they’ve been treated. “Psychopathic sons-a-bitches,” Dr. Owen mutters as he pokes his head in from room to room. “They never learn.”
I discover later that many inmates were caught in a loyalty trap. If they did not join the rioters, they were considered traitors. But joining could have led to their demise. So they were forced into a very difficult decision.
Prison life changed dramatically after this. Security is at a higher level, prisoners remain in their cells, and thus there is not much for the psychologists to do. I find myself becoming restless. For months I’ve been contemplating returning to graduate school. I have a master’s degree, but my ultimate goal is to earn a doctorate. Eventually, I want to teach psychology in a university and have a private practice on the side. Already I’ve explored the possibilities of several graduate schools, but getting into one has proven difficult.
Suddenly a rumor comes that North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, is developing a doctoral clinical psychology program. It is still in its infancy, but the plan is to have it going at full throttle in one to two years. Perfect for me. The university is two miles from my apartment. I have a chat with the head of the department and he invites me to apply. Two months later I am accepted.
Elation.
I visit Stan, the chief psychologist, and officially tender my resignation. Stan has short gray hair and a flushed face from years of overindulging in alcohol. Due to kidney problems, he is now permanently on the wagon.
“So soon?” he queries, scrunching his face up in disappointment.
“I’ve been here ten months.”
“Has it been that long?” he says. “Time passes fast when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? Well, I guess you’ve been here long enough. If they couldn’t kill you in a prison riot, they’re probably not going to get you.” He throws his head back and laughs at his own humor.
“And for this I am deeply grateful.”
“Now you can get a cushy job, like teaching in a university or something. Have nice, curvaceous, nubile coeds wandering through your office all day looking at you with their big eyes.”
“Sounds great after having psychopathic killers relating their sordid deeds to me every day.”
“Yeah. This life isn’t for everybody.”
“I like your idea of the nubile coeds, though.”
“Well, best of luck with your career, Henry. I’m too old to leave the prison system now. It’s part of my life.”
“Best of luck with your career, too, Stan. Maybe some day you’ll make warden.”
“God, I hope not. That’s a job nobody should have. ”
Several years later the chief psychologist becomes warden of the prison.
Painting the Goats
January 22, 2014
J.S. Dziedziak is a creative nonfiction writer who
specializes in travel and memoir writing. He’s the author of France and
the World Out There, the bilingual (French and English)
autobiographical account of a year studying and rambling about Europe.
He currently lives in Reunion Island, France where he teaches English.
“The eyes have one language everywhere.”
-George Herbert
In the corner, the tile stove chewed through a bundle of poplar and several bricks of coal. Night fell cold and starless. On the verge of sleep, I lay cocooned in blankets and quilts, listening to an owl hooting from somewhere in the barn rafters. Wind drafts shushed its low questioning and then shook the eaves outside my window. But after each gust passed, the owl, in its soft, throaty voice, called out in response to the night fallen silent as stone.
The next morning, I woke to dim sunlight. The room was cold; my fire long since burned out. It even smelled cold, metallic somehow, like the copper scent of snowfall. Above the bed was a window—a huge stretch of glass puzzled into asymmetric panes. Some opened horizontally, some vertically and others not at all, their latches having been corroded shut. Each pane of glass framed a different portrait of the courtyard below: the rust-red tractor parked outside the woodshed, three Bernese mountain dogs standing at the gate, puddles dimpled with rain.
Opening the soot door at the base of the stove, I scraped the grey ash into a tin pail. The pail, already half-full from previous fires, smoked faintly as I layered on another night’s cinders. Above the cast-iron door, the stove’s beige ceramic wore its use like the dark spots under sleepless eyes. The tiles felt cool and I shuddered with my palm resting flat against their grooved surface.
Down in the courtyard, something slammed. Pulling on a thermal shirt, I looked through one of the window’s larger tableaux. A door had been thrown open on the westward-facing barn. Krzysztof appeared in the doorway, a huge bundle of straw slung over his shoulder. Chickens, ducks and turkeys followed in Krzysztof’s footsteps, pecking at the bits of straw that fell from his bundle. He crossed and re-crossed the courtyard until the cows, goats and horse were fed. It was like watching a clock’s pendulum swing back and forth, carrying the bits and pieces that pass the day.
I thought about the day I met Krzysztof. Wind and rain lashed the bus on its route from Wroclaw to Jelenia Gora. Securing the bus ticket at the Wroclaw station had been quite the affair: The bus driver launched into a Polish monologue as I stood at the front of his coach, mouth agape and offering him what I hoped was an appropriate amount of Zloty. The Polish language sounded like brick, thick and guttural, something sturdy used for construction. It could stand in stalwart masonry or spread out in garbled rubble. And yet, with softer inflection—like what I heard issue from the line of travelers behind me—it sounded like leather soles on a gravel road.
When the driver had built a thick wall of confusion between us, I climbed up on my side and called down.
-I just need one ticket to Jelenia Gora, please.
The driver laid a fresh row of pavers.
-Uh, je voudrais un aller-simple à Jelenia Gora, s’il vous plaît, I tried, thinking French might break through the language barrier.
Nothing. My words splattered against the driver like rain on the bus’s windshield. He sighed, switched on the wipers and gave me a ticket. It was paralyzing; never had my languages failed me like this. Certainly I had struggled to make simple purchases in France and even in parts of Ireland and Louisiana where English brogues and drawls itself into a foreign dialect, but at least in these scenarios I had a fighting chance. Indeed, I owned a pair of both English and French boxing gloves; I knew how to take punches and return them, I knew when to jab, when to hook and how to get myself off the ropes. In Polish, though, I couldn’t even form a fist.
Two hours into increasingly mountainous terrain, we stopped in what I hoped was Jelenia Gora. Outside, the rain had turned to mist. A service garage had been converted into a café. Smoke rose from its chimney; however, no one appeared to be inside. A man in a torn parka smoked under an awning and muttered to himself. I hoped he wasn’t Krzysztof. The bus station itself was a narrow, wooden structure that, in another lifetime, may have been a shotgun house in Chattanooga. Its red paint peeled and curled like rose petals in a heat wave. Above the front door, small black letters spelled out Jelenia Gora.
Krzysztof was supposed to pick me up from this bus station. I crossed the parking lot, peering into the rain-speckled windows of several cars. All empty—no one around except the muttering man. I wondered what the hell I was doing in Poland.
Inside the station, two old men sat hunched on wooden benches, their arms folded across round stomachs. Neither one moved as the door shut behind me. Shaking the rain from my hair, I moved forward with hesitant steps. No one else was in the small station. The men eyed me without moving. They appeared to be sculpted, carved out of some coarse stone that hardened the topography of lines and creases on their faces. In English, I asked if they were or knew of Krzysztof. Nothing but silent, stony eyes.
Desperate now, I threw open the station doors, tore down its front steps and hurried across the lot to where the muttering man stood. At least he would talk to me, I thought. I thought wrong. As I approached, the chatty smoker abruptly fell silent, shook his head at the question still forming at my lips and walked away. I was at a loss. Did I try talking to the old stones again? Was there a hotel nearby? I leaned against the café-garage, muttering in confusion.
Then, a red car caked in mud at the bumpers and around the wheel wells pulled into the parking lot. It stopped in front of me. The engine continued running as the door opened. If this wasn’t Krzysztof, I decided, I would hijack the mud-covered car and drive back to France. A thin bearded man, with long black hair and a hooked nose stepped out of the car. He addressed me:
-Joseph?
*
Lacing my boots, I heard a stampede of paws and eager barks tear through the front door: Śniadanie, breakfast.
-Kaffee, Joseph? The way she said it, I knew it was spelled with a “k.”
-Yes, please. Thank you Marie, I replied more with my eyes and a nod than with words.
I sat at the dining room table stirring my coffee. Marie made it with the grounds directly in the cup. I had learned that stirring up the grounds and then waiting for them to settle assured that they would be packed down tightly in the mug, like the gritty bottom of a peat bog. I looked around the dining room: wood sat next to a now fireless stove, tomato seedlings grew in glass jars of dirt on the window sills; batteries, tax papers, murder-mystery novels and drying cheese wheels claimed the desktops and corner tables.
Marie came and went from the kitchen to the table until a spread of bread, smoked meat, cheeses, butter, goat cream and chives formed. Finally, she sat down at the table and sliced the bread. I watched her work, the knife and loaf extensions of her small strong hands. Mid-slice, she looked up at me.
-Eat, Joseph.
I smiled and ate. Marie dug the laptop out from a pile of maps on the corner table. She sat back down and started typing. I spread blackberry jam on a slice of bread and watched her lips move silently as she wrote. When she had finished typing, she turned the laptop around and set it in front of me. On the screen Google Translate had converted Marie’s Polish sentence into rough English: “You are comfortable there with us?” Marie mimed for me to type a response and translate it back to Polish. I said that I was very comfortable, was really enjoying my time on their farm and thanked her for being so hospitable. I turned the laptop back to Marie.
-O matka! she laughed, stupid translator.
We amused ourselves with god-awful translations until Krzysztof and their daughter Anya came in from the courtyard. Krzysztof, who spoke the best English, asked what was funny.
The language changed tone once our plates were cleared. Krzysztof turned to look at me. He had a way of holding my gaze before speaking, as if he had to mine his words from some deep shaft in my eyes.
-Jo-seph? Starting the sentence with my name, prolonging the syllables and raising his voice meant that Krzysztof had a job for me.
-Maybe now you will go help Marie with goats?
-Sure, how can I help?
-We, uhh, do something with goats…them need medicine. You, uhh, must put on goat’s head with soap for teeth.
-Toothpaste?
-Tak.
-We’re going to brush the goats’ teeth?
-No, no! We must…ahh, you will see.
Krzysztof led me to the goat pen as Marie fetched the toothpaste from the bathroom. I wondered what sort of circus act we were about to perform with thirty-odd goats and a tube of Crest. Marie arrived, gave me the toothpaste and snagged a white goat by the horns. Then, she led the goat to where I stood perplexed, backed up against a concrete feeding trough, wondering what would come next. Marie put the goat’s horns in my hands. The white nanny-goat ground a mouthful of hay between her molars. She looked up at me with swollen rectangular irises.
Then, Marie pulled an eye-dropper topped bottle from her coat pocket and winked. She traced the goat’s spine with the eye-dropper, leaving a thin trail of clear gelatinous liquid. Next, she took the toothpaste from my hand, squeezed a dollop between the goat’s horns and rubbed a quarter-sized blue dot into its coarse hair. Marie then motioned for me to let go of the goat and the animal trotted off with a minty new hair-do. It was then that I understood the process and its purpose: we were marking the goats as they were vaccinated to avoid giving any one goat two doses of meds. Soon, I was rounding up the goats like a bona fide cowboy, or goat-boy, ushering the baying nannies to where Marie stood, eye-dropper drawn and toothpaste at the ready. Painting and medicating the last of the goats, I laughed remembering the farm’s name: Zielona Kora, Green Goats. Perhaps a name change was in order.
Hands smelling of fresh mint and livestock, I left Marie and went to find Krzysztof and my next job. I found him in the tool barn spot-welding a colossal hot water tank. Sparks danced across the stone floor as I approached. Finishing a weld, Krzysztof cut the flame and lifted his protective mask. Looking at me, he excavated his words slowly.
-It is very complicated job, Joseph.
-Can I help? I asked, knowing I probably couldn’t unless the tank needed a toothpaste mural drawn on it.
-Maybe you help to pick up and put in house?
-Yes, that sounds great.
-But later. Neighbors will come to help, ah, in afternoon.
-Ok, I can chop wood until then.
Krzysztof then disappeared behind his welder’s mask and a spray of sparks. Chopping wood had become my specialty on the farm. I found the maul and ten-pound hammer hanging on the woodshed wall. I got to work. Righting a poplar log on the chopping block, I read its grain, deciphered the language of its timber. As with any language, there was a grammar to follow: You start with the hazel cloud at the log’s center and if you find a definitive slit in it, like the black slash through a cat’s eye, you can stop reading and drive your maul straight into that slit. The log will split cleanly, like crisp apples under a sharp knife. End of story.
However, not all logs speak with such clean phraseology. No, some chunks of wood are written in garbled code, no rhyme scheme or reason; their vague metaphors clutter into grainy knots that end in question marks. You had to read and reread this wood, ponder it like something E.E. Cummings wrote, knowing that there was no one way that it would split. These logs troubled me in my first few days of lumberjacking.
I remembered one episode in particular. I rolled this log onto the chopping block and drove the maul down into it with all my force. The knotted log responded with an unimpressed thud, the maul sinking no more than half an inch into the wood. But this was just the beginning of my folly. Brandishing the hammer, I assaulted the maul head repeatedly, sending its blade a few pitiful millimeters into the stubborn poplar. Each blow echoed a shrill ping of metal on metal. Seeing the futility of my strongman strategy, I tried to pry the maul out of the log. No luck. My frenzied hammering had lodged it securely against the wood’s grain. As hot sweat ran down my temples, I picked up the hammer and started to deploy a second more desperate assault. Finally, mid-swing, the ten-pound hammer gave up; its head became dislodged and crashed into a sheet of scrap metal leaning against the woodshed wall. The collision sent a metallic peal across the courtyard.
Before long, though, I started to understand the patterns in the logs. I dropped the maul through their grain and sent lightning strikes across the exposed growth rings, relishing in the crack of thunder that ensued. A handsome stack of split poplar soon formed against the woodshed wall as the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky.
When the afternoon seemed to be at its warmest, Marie called from the front door: Obiad, lunch. I put down my tools and crossed the courtyard. In the house something groaned, cracked and crashed; it sounded like a wall had caved in. Stepping past Marie and through the threshold, I saw that a plywood wall had indeed fallen, been cut into a big jagged puzzle piece and sent tumbling down the staircase. Krzysztof stood with a jig saw and a grin at the top of the steps.
-Water heater will be too big. I must cut wall to make bigger room.
Traipsing over the fallen wall, the three of us went into the dining room and sat down at the table. Five plates had been set with generous servings of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Thick white gravy covered everything. Suddenly I was back at my sister’s house in South Carolina, mashing down on a Bojangles’ summer special and listening to Johnny Cash. In the middle of the table, a huge earthenware bowl of kapuszka insisted that we were still in Poland.
I heard the front door open and shut. The dogs, lying below the table, tensed their muscles and inhaled quickly, preparing to bark. A tall man came into the room. His name was Paul, or at least I called him Paul, everyone else knew him as Pawel. He was one of Krzysztof’s friends who was redoing the cement walls of the new goat pen. Paul’s coarse hair was drawn into a loose black braid; his tanned-leather face grew grey stubble over a sharp jaw. Dry cement was spattered all over his skin and clothes.
Paul sat down across from me at the table.
-Cześć, he said, leaning forward to shake my hand.
-Hello Paul.
I put my hand in his enormous paw and shook it. Funny enough, on Paul’s right hand, just below the knuckles of his middle and ring fingers, was a black tattooed paw print. Thick veins ran up Paul’s forearms, connecting the paw to other tattoos that poked out from under his rolled sleeves. Yet Paul spooned sugar into his tea with as much delicacy and precision as Krzysztof. Finished, he set the spoon lightly on the table as if it were a hummingbird with a broken wing.
I lost myself in the Bojangle’s-Polish fare until I noticed that the whole table had grown silent, their gazes converged toward me. Krzysztof spoke, saying Paul wanted to know why I had a Polish last name, Dziedziak, but couldn’t speak a word of Polish. Fair enough, I thought. The obvious answer: My family had been in the States long enough that their Polish was slowly strained out of each passing generation. Yet, that didn’t seem like a reason; it felt like an excuse.
-Dziedziak, he pronounced in a slow, deep tone. The raspy whispers he inflected on those two familiar syllables transformed them into something foreign. For the first time, my name didn’t refer to who I was. No, in Paul’s mouth, it stood for what I wasn’t, everything I didn’t know about myself. It made my spine tingle.
Next, Anya wanted to know what exactly I was doing in Europe. Again with Krzysztof as my translator, I explained my study abroad program, that I had lived in Nice during autumn and was now staying in Paris until summer. I started listing the countries I had traveled to during my year abroad. Krzysztof told me that the four of them had never left Poland. I stopped talking. Sipping my tea, I thought of my friends sitting in the program’s student center on rue de Fleurus, exchanging travel stories like battle scars, as if posing for a picture with Big Ben or smoking a joint in Amsterdam made us cultured.
-I want to be a writer, I then blurted out, surprised by my honesty. I love to travel, I continued, but I hate being a tourist. I can’t stand guided tours; museums make my feet and head hurt and every time I see one of those huge Greyhound-style tour buses, I want to slash each and every one of its tires. That’s why I came to Poland to work on this farm, that’s why I’m studying in France. I want to live culture, not look at it dried and dead in a display case. I want dirt under my fingertips, wind against my face…
I could tell I had lost my audience; even the dogs had stopped moving and stared at me quietly.
-What do you write, Joseph? Krzysztof broke the silence.
Timidly, I tried explaining my writing style, the general themes of my poetry and my ideas for a memoir. I realized that what I was saying didn’t make a lot of sense and if it didn’t make sense to me, it sure as hell didn’t make sense to my non-Anglophone audience. I don’t really like to discuss my work, perhaps because I’m not very good at it. Instead, I prefer to just put my nose to the grindstone and write. Falling silent, I looked up and saw four pairs of furrowed brows.
Later, as I walked into the bedroom, I thought about why I was in Poland. I looked out the window. Krzysztof was walking toward the neighbor’s farm; he moved with an unhurried gait, head bent toward the earth. The cows had been let out into the courtyard to harass the chickens and amuse the dogs. Paul lounged on my morning’s yield of split poplar in the cool of the woodshed smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
“What do you write, Joseph?” Krzysztof asked again in my head.
I open my leather-bound journal. In my small slanted handwriting I read everything from observations in the Paris metro to hand-drawn maps of downtown Copenhagen; poems in various states of deconstruction, phone numbers and addresses and unfinished thoughts.
I write because, otherwise, some things would never be said; because some things won’t make sense unless they’re spelled out on a page. It’s like trying to explain what the taste of a cherry looks like. How can you account for something that is, at the same time, beyond your abilities of perception and unbearably palpable. There’s just no medium for it. Or is there?
I struck a match and lit the newspaper, staring as the flames grew. Outside, it had gotten dark. I thought of finishing some of my poems. I pictured the old apartment in Nice and how its dining room somehow reminded me of the one here in Bystrzyca. Yet again, these two rooms looked nothing alike.
*
The car’s high beams shook through the trees as we rattled down the cobble driveway. Around several bends and up and over hills that tickled my stomach, we arrived fifteen minutes later at Paul’s house. Smoke rose from the stone chimney. Several windows burned orange against the dark wood siding. The house and its barn stood alone in a clearing, halfway up a small hillside.
Krzysztof parked the car next to a tall pine. I opened the back door and was shocked to hear the barking of presumably every dog in Poland. Paul and his wife Agatka greeted us at the front door. Cradled in Agatka’s arms, a Siberian husky pup yelped. Its coat was cream and chestnut. Krzysztof put his hand on my shoulder.
-You want to see dogs? Them got many dogs here.
After showing us the dozens of huskies in the barn, Paul cut off the overhead light. Leaving the barn, Agatka let out one cage of dogs to roam a fenced-off pasture next to the house. The barking faded as we stepped inside the house. In the sitting room, a fire burned in the large stone hearth. Thick blankets and fur throws covered the couch and rocking chairs. In the corner, lying on a bed of sheets and cardboard, a husky nursed six three-week old puppies.
-You want dog? It’s free! Agatka laughed. She pointed to the pups and flashed a wild grin.
Before I could answer, she turned and led us to another room at the end of a narrow hallway. Ducking my head through the low doorframe, I stepped into a different world. Chinese lanterns in every color zigzagged across the walls. In the middle of the room stood a guy more or less my age dressed in sweat pants, a baggy t-shirt and a backwards cap. His name was Dominik. He played an enormous pair of djembes that had been made in Africa. Next to the drums, Paul picked up his electric bass and plugged it into an amp. Above the two musicians, a wolf’s head had been carved into the wooden wall. It stared down at us from a lacquered pair of mahogany eyes.
I sat down on the couch, eyes wide. Agatka laid a twelve-string acoustic guitar in my lap. When Krzysztof picked me up the first day in Jelenia Gora, I had mentioned that I played guitar. Dominik spoke up, his English was thickly accented but by far the best I had heard in Poland.
-Play us some good American song! We will play with you!
He dug in his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. Lighting it, he inhaled deeply, passed it to Paul and rolled thunder out of the larger drum.
-You want some gandza? Weed? Dominik asked through a cloud of smoke.
I began to strum chords randomly, thinking of “some good American song” to play. I thought of my dad. It was from his family that I got my Polish name. It was also from my father and his family that I had learned an almost sacred appreciation for the Rolling Stones. And although Mick Jagger and his crew weren’t Polish (or even American for that matter), it somehow seemed right to play a Stones song. It was my Polish heritage. I started playing.
Paul quickly picked up the bass line and Dominik laid down a smooth deep beat on his gigantic drums. When I broke into the first verse, Paul cocked his head and stared at me. A smile formed on his face.
-“Wild Horses” he whispered.
We played through the song as the room clouded with smoke. Krzysztof, Anya, Marie and Agatka sat on the floor, backs against the wall. They kept time with their heads, humming softly where they could pick out the melody.
-Childhood living is easy to do…
I breathed deeply between lines.
-You know I can’t let you slide through my hands…
My eyes were watering. The wolf carving gazed at me from the wall. Paul’s house was a den; his life was a wolf’s life. I closed my eyes, a salty tear slid to my lips.
-Wild horses couldn’t drag me away…
I opened my eyes and looked around the room. No longer aware of the instrument in my hands, I looked at Krzysztof, Marie and Anya sitting on the floor. I thought about how suddenly our lives had been thrown together. How could I be in this room, getting high off of some Polish drummer’s gandza, singing and playing guitar in a Polish mason’s hippie hideout? How could I love, yes love, these people I barely knew and couldn’t even converse with? How? I tried to remember what I had thought this trip would be like.
-I know I’ve dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken, tears must be cried
So let’s do some living after we’ve died.
An hour or so later, we headed home. Saying goodbye at the front door, Paul shook my hand with more vigor than ever. Again Agatka suggested that I leave with a puppy. Waving, we got into the car and drove off into the darkness. As we left a chorus of huskies howled in farewell.
Back at the farm, the three Bernese mountain dogs sniffed us excitedly. Marie brought out four beers from the kitchen. We cracked the cans open and sipped at them lazily. Krzysztof was sitting across from me. He stared hard, holding my gaze longer than usual. Marie said something soft in Polish. Krzysztof translated:
-Marie want to see your hands. Your hands don’t…ah…hurt from chopping?
-No, I said, they don’t hurt. I don’t even have blisters.
Turning to Marie, I placed my hands palm-up on the table. She took my right hand in both of hers and examined it. I thought she was going to read the lines in my palm, tell me my future. In all honesty, I wish she had. Instead, she spoke to Krzysztof.
-Marie say you have farmer’s hands, there was pride in his smile. You want to be farmer one day? he laughed.
I laughed too and thought about his question. Maybe? I kept my left hand palm-up on the table, still hoping Marie might see some sign of fate in it.
-Jo-seph? Krzysztof said, with the same inflection he used to start discussing a job with me. It was going on midnight; there was no work to be done.
-Krzys-ztof? I matched his tone.
-Marie and me and Anya want thank you for working hard. You chop a lot of wood and work hard on our farm. You know, Jo-seph, I getting old and there is a lot of work on farm, you chopping so much wood help us a lot…when we make fire in winter, we will say “yeah Joseph!” He smiled, his eyes reddened. He said nothing for a minute. Jo-seph, you know, I never have any son…
His voice trailed off but I knew what he meant. Nothing could have been more of a compliment and nothing I said could have expressed that. There just wasn’t a medium for it. So I smiled. I smiled the way you do when you’re between laughing and crying, eyes watering all the same. We stayed at the table until the fire burned itself to ashes and then went to bed.
The next morning I decided to hike through the fields and up the hilltop at the farm’s limit. Leaving the courtyard, I walked along the tractor road, passing rusted farm equipment, the names and functions of which I would never know. I passed my first pile of chopped wood; passed the well that leaked a small stream from its cracking foundation, and went through the wooden gate that opened onto the potato fields and beyond the scraggly woods that held onto the edge of a small cliff, I came to the hilltop.
There at the hill’s crest stood a sweet cherry tree; its branches were beginning to bloom in tufts of white petals. I sat down in the shade, leaning against its trunk. Petals fell like broad flat snowflakes; they landed in my hair but didn’t melt. From the cherry tree you could see far: you could make out how the farm sat in a shallow valley which the road cut through like a black snake.
Very soon I would leave Poland and it would take some time, I imagined, to find my way back. I held my hands up and saw, underneath my fingernails, Polish dirt clouding the cuticles. Turning my hands over, I noticed that two weeks of farm work had added several small cuts and two rows of calluses to the lines of my palm.
It’s not the future, then, that can be read in your palms, I thought, it’s the past. One cut in particular had passed through a birthmark on my left palm, forming a red and brown cross. I hoped that it would leave a scar.
Then, closing my eyes, I listened to the breeze rustling through the young leaves overhead. My hands felt along the tree’s roots, stopping where they continued into the ground. I wondered if I would be able to read the language of this sweet cherry’s wood, what its grain would say, but I knew to do so I’d have to cut the tree down.
I opened my eyes. The petals falling were so white.
“The eyes have one language everywhere.”
-George Herbert
In the corner, the tile stove chewed through a bundle of poplar and several bricks of coal. Night fell cold and starless. On the verge of sleep, I lay cocooned in blankets and quilts, listening to an owl hooting from somewhere in the barn rafters. Wind drafts shushed its low questioning and then shook the eaves outside my window. But after each gust passed, the owl, in its soft, throaty voice, called out in response to the night fallen silent as stone.
The next morning, I woke to dim sunlight. The room was cold; my fire long since burned out. It even smelled cold, metallic somehow, like the copper scent of snowfall. Above the bed was a window—a huge stretch of glass puzzled into asymmetric panes. Some opened horizontally, some vertically and others not at all, their latches having been corroded shut. Each pane of glass framed a different portrait of the courtyard below: the rust-red tractor parked outside the woodshed, three Bernese mountain dogs standing at the gate, puddles dimpled with rain.
Opening the soot door at the base of the stove, I scraped the grey ash into a tin pail. The pail, already half-full from previous fires, smoked faintly as I layered on another night’s cinders. Above the cast-iron door, the stove’s beige ceramic wore its use like the dark spots under sleepless eyes. The tiles felt cool and I shuddered with my palm resting flat against their grooved surface.
Down in the courtyard, something slammed. Pulling on a thermal shirt, I looked through one of the window’s larger tableaux. A door had been thrown open on the westward-facing barn. Krzysztof appeared in the doorway, a huge bundle of straw slung over his shoulder. Chickens, ducks and turkeys followed in Krzysztof’s footsteps, pecking at the bits of straw that fell from his bundle. He crossed and re-crossed the courtyard until the cows, goats and horse were fed. It was like watching a clock’s pendulum swing back and forth, carrying the bits and pieces that pass the day.
I thought about the day I met Krzysztof. Wind and rain lashed the bus on its route from Wroclaw to Jelenia Gora. Securing the bus ticket at the Wroclaw station had been quite the affair: The bus driver launched into a Polish monologue as I stood at the front of his coach, mouth agape and offering him what I hoped was an appropriate amount of Zloty. The Polish language sounded like brick, thick and guttural, something sturdy used for construction. It could stand in stalwart masonry or spread out in garbled rubble. And yet, with softer inflection—like what I heard issue from the line of travelers behind me—it sounded like leather soles on a gravel road.
When the driver had built a thick wall of confusion between us, I climbed up on my side and called down.
-I just need one ticket to Jelenia Gora, please.
The driver laid a fresh row of pavers.
-Uh, je voudrais un aller-simple à Jelenia Gora, s’il vous plaît, I tried, thinking French might break through the language barrier.
Nothing. My words splattered against the driver like rain on the bus’s windshield. He sighed, switched on the wipers and gave me a ticket. It was paralyzing; never had my languages failed me like this. Certainly I had struggled to make simple purchases in France and even in parts of Ireland and Louisiana where English brogues and drawls itself into a foreign dialect, but at least in these scenarios I had a fighting chance. Indeed, I owned a pair of both English and French boxing gloves; I knew how to take punches and return them, I knew when to jab, when to hook and how to get myself off the ropes. In Polish, though, I couldn’t even form a fist.
Two hours into increasingly mountainous terrain, we stopped in what I hoped was Jelenia Gora. Outside, the rain had turned to mist. A service garage had been converted into a café. Smoke rose from its chimney; however, no one appeared to be inside. A man in a torn parka smoked under an awning and muttered to himself. I hoped he wasn’t Krzysztof. The bus station itself was a narrow, wooden structure that, in another lifetime, may have been a shotgun house in Chattanooga. Its red paint peeled and curled like rose petals in a heat wave. Above the front door, small black letters spelled out Jelenia Gora.
Krzysztof was supposed to pick me up from this bus station. I crossed the parking lot, peering into the rain-speckled windows of several cars. All empty—no one around except the muttering man. I wondered what the hell I was doing in Poland.
Inside the station, two old men sat hunched on wooden benches, their arms folded across round stomachs. Neither one moved as the door shut behind me. Shaking the rain from my hair, I moved forward with hesitant steps. No one else was in the small station. The men eyed me without moving. They appeared to be sculpted, carved out of some coarse stone that hardened the topography of lines and creases on their faces. In English, I asked if they were or knew of Krzysztof. Nothing but silent, stony eyes.
Desperate now, I threw open the station doors, tore down its front steps and hurried across the lot to where the muttering man stood. At least he would talk to me, I thought. I thought wrong. As I approached, the chatty smoker abruptly fell silent, shook his head at the question still forming at my lips and walked away. I was at a loss. Did I try talking to the old stones again? Was there a hotel nearby? I leaned against the café-garage, muttering in confusion.
Then, a red car caked in mud at the bumpers and around the wheel wells pulled into the parking lot. It stopped in front of me. The engine continued running as the door opened. If this wasn’t Krzysztof, I decided, I would hijack the mud-covered car and drive back to France. A thin bearded man, with long black hair and a hooked nose stepped out of the car. He addressed me:
-Joseph?
*
Lacing my boots, I heard a stampede of paws and eager barks tear through the front door: Śniadanie, breakfast.
-Kaffee, Joseph? The way she said it, I knew it was spelled with a “k.”
-Yes, please. Thank you Marie, I replied more with my eyes and a nod than with words.
I sat at the dining room table stirring my coffee. Marie made it with the grounds directly in the cup. I had learned that stirring up the grounds and then waiting for them to settle assured that they would be packed down tightly in the mug, like the gritty bottom of a peat bog. I looked around the dining room: wood sat next to a now fireless stove, tomato seedlings grew in glass jars of dirt on the window sills; batteries, tax papers, murder-mystery novels and drying cheese wheels claimed the desktops and corner tables.
Marie came and went from the kitchen to the table until a spread of bread, smoked meat, cheeses, butter, goat cream and chives formed. Finally, she sat down at the table and sliced the bread. I watched her work, the knife and loaf extensions of her small strong hands. Mid-slice, she looked up at me.
-Eat, Joseph.
I smiled and ate. Marie dug the laptop out from a pile of maps on the corner table. She sat back down and started typing. I spread blackberry jam on a slice of bread and watched her lips move silently as she wrote. When she had finished typing, she turned the laptop around and set it in front of me. On the screen Google Translate had converted Marie’s Polish sentence into rough English: “You are comfortable there with us?” Marie mimed for me to type a response and translate it back to Polish. I said that I was very comfortable, was really enjoying my time on their farm and thanked her for being so hospitable. I turned the laptop back to Marie.
-O matka! she laughed, stupid translator.
We amused ourselves with god-awful translations until Krzysztof and their daughter Anya came in from the courtyard. Krzysztof, who spoke the best English, asked what was funny.
The language changed tone once our plates were cleared. Krzysztof turned to look at me. He had a way of holding my gaze before speaking, as if he had to mine his words from some deep shaft in my eyes.
-Jo-seph? Starting the sentence with my name, prolonging the syllables and raising his voice meant that Krzysztof had a job for me.
-Maybe now you will go help Marie with goats?
-Sure, how can I help?
-We, uhh, do something with goats…them need medicine. You, uhh, must put on goat’s head with soap for teeth.
-Toothpaste?
-Tak.
-We’re going to brush the goats’ teeth?
-No, no! We must…ahh, you will see.
Krzysztof led me to the goat pen as Marie fetched the toothpaste from the bathroom. I wondered what sort of circus act we were about to perform with thirty-odd goats and a tube of Crest. Marie arrived, gave me the toothpaste and snagged a white goat by the horns. Then, she led the goat to where I stood perplexed, backed up against a concrete feeding trough, wondering what would come next. Marie put the goat’s horns in my hands. The white nanny-goat ground a mouthful of hay between her molars. She looked up at me with swollen rectangular irises.
Then, Marie pulled an eye-dropper topped bottle from her coat pocket and winked. She traced the goat’s spine with the eye-dropper, leaving a thin trail of clear gelatinous liquid. Next, she took the toothpaste from my hand, squeezed a dollop between the goat’s horns and rubbed a quarter-sized blue dot into its coarse hair. Marie then motioned for me to let go of the goat and the animal trotted off with a minty new hair-do. It was then that I understood the process and its purpose: we were marking the goats as they were vaccinated to avoid giving any one goat two doses of meds. Soon, I was rounding up the goats like a bona fide cowboy, or goat-boy, ushering the baying nannies to where Marie stood, eye-dropper drawn and toothpaste at the ready. Painting and medicating the last of the goats, I laughed remembering the farm’s name: Zielona Kora, Green Goats. Perhaps a name change was in order.
Hands smelling of fresh mint and livestock, I left Marie and went to find Krzysztof and my next job. I found him in the tool barn spot-welding a colossal hot water tank. Sparks danced across the stone floor as I approached. Finishing a weld, Krzysztof cut the flame and lifted his protective mask. Looking at me, he excavated his words slowly.
-It is very complicated job, Joseph.
-Can I help? I asked, knowing I probably couldn’t unless the tank needed a toothpaste mural drawn on it.
-Maybe you help to pick up and put in house?
-Yes, that sounds great.
-But later. Neighbors will come to help, ah, in afternoon.
-Ok, I can chop wood until then.
Krzysztof then disappeared behind his welder’s mask and a spray of sparks. Chopping wood had become my specialty on the farm. I found the maul and ten-pound hammer hanging on the woodshed wall. I got to work. Righting a poplar log on the chopping block, I read its grain, deciphered the language of its timber. As with any language, there was a grammar to follow: You start with the hazel cloud at the log’s center and if you find a definitive slit in it, like the black slash through a cat’s eye, you can stop reading and drive your maul straight into that slit. The log will split cleanly, like crisp apples under a sharp knife. End of story.
However, not all logs speak with such clean phraseology. No, some chunks of wood are written in garbled code, no rhyme scheme or reason; their vague metaphors clutter into grainy knots that end in question marks. You had to read and reread this wood, ponder it like something E.E. Cummings wrote, knowing that there was no one way that it would split. These logs troubled me in my first few days of lumberjacking.
I remembered one episode in particular. I rolled this log onto the chopping block and drove the maul down into it with all my force. The knotted log responded with an unimpressed thud, the maul sinking no more than half an inch into the wood. But this was just the beginning of my folly. Brandishing the hammer, I assaulted the maul head repeatedly, sending its blade a few pitiful millimeters into the stubborn poplar. Each blow echoed a shrill ping of metal on metal. Seeing the futility of my strongman strategy, I tried to pry the maul out of the log. No luck. My frenzied hammering had lodged it securely against the wood’s grain. As hot sweat ran down my temples, I picked up the hammer and started to deploy a second more desperate assault. Finally, mid-swing, the ten-pound hammer gave up; its head became dislodged and crashed into a sheet of scrap metal leaning against the woodshed wall. The collision sent a metallic peal across the courtyard.
Before long, though, I started to understand the patterns in the logs. I dropped the maul through their grain and sent lightning strikes across the exposed growth rings, relishing in the crack of thunder that ensued. A handsome stack of split poplar soon formed against the woodshed wall as the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky.
When the afternoon seemed to be at its warmest, Marie called from the front door: Obiad, lunch. I put down my tools and crossed the courtyard. In the house something groaned, cracked and crashed; it sounded like a wall had caved in. Stepping past Marie and through the threshold, I saw that a plywood wall had indeed fallen, been cut into a big jagged puzzle piece and sent tumbling down the staircase. Krzysztof stood with a jig saw and a grin at the top of the steps.
-Water heater will be too big. I must cut wall to make bigger room.
Traipsing over the fallen wall, the three of us went into the dining room and sat down at the table. Five plates had been set with generous servings of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Thick white gravy covered everything. Suddenly I was back at my sister’s house in South Carolina, mashing down on a Bojangles’ summer special and listening to Johnny Cash. In the middle of the table, a huge earthenware bowl of kapuszka insisted that we were still in Poland.
I heard the front door open and shut. The dogs, lying below the table, tensed their muscles and inhaled quickly, preparing to bark. A tall man came into the room. His name was Paul, or at least I called him Paul, everyone else knew him as Pawel. He was one of Krzysztof’s friends who was redoing the cement walls of the new goat pen. Paul’s coarse hair was drawn into a loose black braid; his tanned-leather face grew grey stubble over a sharp jaw. Dry cement was spattered all over his skin and clothes.
Paul sat down across from me at the table.
-Cześć, he said, leaning forward to shake my hand.
-Hello Paul.
I put my hand in his enormous paw and shook it. Funny enough, on Paul’s right hand, just below the knuckles of his middle and ring fingers, was a black tattooed paw print. Thick veins ran up Paul’s forearms, connecting the paw to other tattoos that poked out from under his rolled sleeves. Yet Paul spooned sugar into his tea with as much delicacy and precision as Krzysztof. Finished, he set the spoon lightly on the table as if it were a hummingbird with a broken wing.
I lost myself in the Bojangle’s-Polish fare until I noticed that the whole table had grown silent, their gazes converged toward me. Krzysztof spoke, saying Paul wanted to know why I had a Polish last name, Dziedziak, but couldn’t speak a word of Polish. Fair enough, I thought. The obvious answer: My family had been in the States long enough that their Polish was slowly strained out of each passing generation. Yet, that didn’t seem like a reason; it felt like an excuse.
-Dziedziak, he pronounced in a slow, deep tone. The raspy whispers he inflected on those two familiar syllables transformed them into something foreign. For the first time, my name didn’t refer to who I was. No, in Paul’s mouth, it stood for what I wasn’t, everything I didn’t know about myself. It made my spine tingle.
Next, Anya wanted to know what exactly I was doing in Europe. Again with Krzysztof as my translator, I explained my study abroad program, that I had lived in Nice during autumn and was now staying in Paris until summer. I started listing the countries I had traveled to during my year abroad. Krzysztof told me that the four of them had never left Poland. I stopped talking. Sipping my tea, I thought of my friends sitting in the program’s student center on rue de Fleurus, exchanging travel stories like battle scars, as if posing for a picture with Big Ben or smoking a joint in Amsterdam made us cultured.
-I want to be a writer, I then blurted out, surprised by my honesty. I love to travel, I continued, but I hate being a tourist. I can’t stand guided tours; museums make my feet and head hurt and every time I see one of those huge Greyhound-style tour buses, I want to slash each and every one of its tires. That’s why I came to Poland to work on this farm, that’s why I’m studying in France. I want to live culture, not look at it dried and dead in a display case. I want dirt under my fingertips, wind against my face…
I could tell I had lost my audience; even the dogs had stopped moving and stared at me quietly.
-What do you write, Joseph? Krzysztof broke the silence.
Timidly, I tried explaining my writing style, the general themes of my poetry and my ideas for a memoir. I realized that what I was saying didn’t make a lot of sense and if it didn’t make sense to me, it sure as hell didn’t make sense to my non-Anglophone audience. I don’t really like to discuss my work, perhaps because I’m not very good at it. Instead, I prefer to just put my nose to the grindstone and write. Falling silent, I looked up and saw four pairs of furrowed brows.
Later, as I walked into the bedroom, I thought about why I was in Poland. I looked out the window. Krzysztof was walking toward the neighbor’s farm; he moved with an unhurried gait, head bent toward the earth. The cows had been let out into the courtyard to harass the chickens and amuse the dogs. Paul lounged on my morning’s yield of split poplar in the cool of the woodshed smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
“What do you write, Joseph?” Krzysztof asked again in my head.
I open my leather-bound journal. In my small slanted handwriting I read everything from observations in the Paris metro to hand-drawn maps of downtown Copenhagen; poems in various states of deconstruction, phone numbers and addresses and unfinished thoughts.
I write because, otherwise, some things would never be said; because some things won’t make sense unless they’re spelled out on a page. It’s like trying to explain what the taste of a cherry looks like. How can you account for something that is, at the same time, beyond your abilities of perception and unbearably palpable. There’s just no medium for it. Or is there?
I struck a match and lit the newspaper, staring as the flames grew. Outside, it had gotten dark. I thought of finishing some of my poems. I pictured the old apartment in Nice and how its dining room somehow reminded me of the one here in Bystrzyca. Yet again, these two rooms looked nothing alike.
*
The car’s high beams shook through the trees as we rattled down the cobble driveway. Around several bends and up and over hills that tickled my stomach, we arrived fifteen minutes later at Paul’s house. Smoke rose from the stone chimney. Several windows burned orange against the dark wood siding. The house and its barn stood alone in a clearing, halfway up a small hillside.
Krzysztof parked the car next to a tall pine. I opened the back door and was shocked to hear the barking of presumably every dog in Poland. Paul and his wife Agatka greeted us at the front door. Cradled in Agatka’s arms, a Siberian husky pup yelped. Its coat was cream and chestnut. Krzysztof put his hand on my shoulder.
-You want to see dogs? Them got many dogs here.
After showing us the dozens of huskies in the barn, Paul cut off the overhead light. Leaving the barn, Agatka let out one cage of dogs to roam a fenced-off pasture next to the house. The barking faded as we stepped inside the house. In the sitting room, a fire burned in the large stone hearth. Thick blankets and fur throws covered the couch and rocking chairs. In the corner, lying on a bed of sheets and cardboard, a husky nursed six three-week old puppies.
-You want dog? It’s free! Agatka laughed. She pointed to the pups and flashed a wild grin.
Before I could answer, she turned and led us to another room at the end of a narrow hallway. Ducking my head through the low doorframe, I stepped into a different world. Chinese lanterns in every color zigzagged across the walls. In the middle of the room stood a guy more or less my age dressed in sweat pants, a baggy t-shirt and a backwards cap. His name was Dominik. He played an enormous pair of djembes that had been made in Africa. Next to the drums, Paul picked up his electric bass and plugged it into an amp. Above the two musicians, a wolf’s head had been carved into the wooden wall. It stared down at us from a lacquered pair of mahogany eyes.
I sat down on the couch, eyes wide. Agatka laid a twelve-string acoustic guitar in my lap. When Krzysztof picked me up the first day in Jelenia Gora, I had mentioned that I played guitar. Dominik spoke up, his English was thickly accented but by far the best I had heard in Poland.
-Play us some good American song! We will play with you!
He dug in his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. Lighting it, he inhaled deeply, passed it to Paul and rolled thunder out of the larger drum.
-You want some gandza? Weed? Dominik asked through a cloud of smoke.
I began to strum chords randomly, thinking of “some good American song” to play. I thought of my dad. It was from his family that I got my Polish name. It was also from my father and his family that I had learned an almost sacred appreciation for the Rolling Stones. And although Mick Jagger and his crew weren’t Polish (or even American for that matter), it somehow seemed right to play a Stones song. It was my Polish heritage. I started playing.
Paul quickly picked up the bass line and Dominik laid down a smooth deep beat on his gigantic drums. When I broke into the first verse, Paul cocked his head and stared at me. A smile formed on his face.
-“Wild Horses” he whispered.
We played through the song as the room clouded with smoke. Krzysztof, Anya, Marie and Agatka sat on the floor, backs against the wall. They kept time with their heads, humming softly where they could pick out the melody.
-Childhood living is easy to do…
I breathed deeply between lines.
-You know I can’t let you slide through my hands…
My eyes were watering. The wolf carving gazed at me from the wall. Paul’s house was a den; his life was a wolf’s life. I closed my eyes, a salty tear slid to my lips.
-Wild horses couldn’t drag me away…
I opened my eyes and looked around the room. No longer aware of the instrument in my hands, I looked at Krzysztof, Marie and Anya sitting on the floor. I thought about how suddenly our lives had been thrown together. How could I be in this room, getting high off of some Polish drummer’s gandza, singing and playing guitar in a Polish mason’s hippie hideout? How could I love, yes love, these people I barely knew and couldn’t even converse with? How? I tried to remember what I had thought this trip would be like.
-I know I’ve dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken, tears must be cried
So let’s do some living after we’ve died.
An hour or so later, we headed home. Saying goodbye at the front door, Paul shook my hand with more vigor than ever. Again Agatka suggested that I leave with a puppy. Waving, we got into the car and drove off into the darkness. As we left a chorus of huskies howled in farewell.
Back at the farm, the three Bernese mountain dogs sniffed us excitedly. Marie brought out four beers from the kitchen. We cracked the cans open and sipped at them lazily. Krzysztof was sitting across from me. He stared hard, holding my gaze longer than usual. Marie said something soft in Polish. Krzysztof translated:
-Marie want to see your hands. Your hands don’t…ah…hurt from chopping?
-No, I said, they don’t hurt. I don’t even have blisters.
Turning to Marie, I placed my hands palm-up on the table. She took my right hand in both of hers and examined it. I thought she was going to read the lines in my palm, tell me my future. In all honesty, I wish she had. Instead, she spoke to Krzysztof.
-Marie say you have farmer’s hands, there was pride in his smile. You want to be farmer one day? he laughed.
I laughed too and thought about his question. Maybe? I kept my left hand palm-up on the table, still hoping Marie might see some sign of fate in it.
-Jo-seph? Krzysztof said, with the same inflection he used to start discussing a job with me. It was going on midnight; there was no work to be done.
-Krzys-ztof? I matched his tone.
-Marie and me and Anya want thank you for working hard. You chop a lot of wood and work hard on our farm. You know, Jo-seph, I getting old and there is a lot of work on farm, you chopping so much wood help us a lot…when we make fire in winter, we will say “yeah Joseph!” He smiled, his eyes reddened. He said nothing for a minute. Jo-seph, you know, I never have any son…
His voice trailed off but I knew what he meant. Nothing could have been more of a compliment and nothing I said could have expressed that. There just wasn’t a medium for it. So I smiled. I smiled the way you do when you’re between laughing and crying, eyes watering all the same. We stayed at the table until the fire burned itself to ashes and then went to bed.
The next morning I decided to hike through the fields and up the hilltop at the farm’s limit. Leaving the courtyard, I walked along the tractor road, passing rusted farm equipment, the names and functions of which I would never know. I passed my first pile of chopped wood; passed the well that leaked a small stream from its cracking foundation, and went through the wooden gate that opened onto the potato fields and beyond the scraggly woods that held onto the edge of a small cliff, I came to the hilltop.
There at the hill’s crest stood a sweet cherry tree; its branches were beginning to bloom in tufts of white petals. I sat down in the shade, leaning against its trunk. Petals fell like broad flat snowflakes; they landed in my hair but didn’t melt. From the cherry tree you could see far: you could make out how the farm sat in a shallow valley which the road cut through like a black snake.
Very soon I would leave Poland and it would take some time, I imagined, to find my way back. I held my hands up and saw, underneath my fingernails, Polish dirt clouding the cuticles. Turning my hands over, I noticed that two weeks of farm work had added several small cuts and two rows of calluses to the lines of my palm.
It’s not the future, then, that can be read in your palms, I thought, it’s the past. One cut in particular had passed through a birthmark on my left palm, forming a red and brown cross. I hoped that it would leave a scar.
Then, closing my eyes, I listened to the breeze rustling through the young leaves overhead. My hands felt along the tree’s roots, stopping where they continued into the ground. I wondered if I would be able to read the language of this sweet cherry’s wood, what its grain would say, but I knew to do so I’d have to cut the tree down.
I opened my eyes. The petals falling were so white.
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