Archive for October, 2008

At the start of the semester the stadium was a burnt out ruin like a recently destroyed Colosseum. The kids were making a movie melodrama in which the villain, an unspeakable cad, forced himself on a nubile classmate. The two of them struggled on an open flatcar at the back of a moving train, just like in the old days. As they crossed a trestle over a swampy creek, a creature, half girl, half alligator, some cursed female Caliban, rose up and pulled the malefactor beneath the muck, drowning him. Her face was all you could see above the water as she moaned, “Too late, too late. Too young and too late.”

“Let’s go to the trench, where we can talk,” said the assistant principal to the dean of studies after the school play. I tagged along. My first scene with the ingénue had gone well. All I had to do was stare lovingly into her big brown eyes. But even though I frantically studied the courtroom scene, I didn’t know my lines at all. As per usual. We descended into sub-basements and sub-sub-basements, past mildly wondering assistant engineers at old metal desks until we reached a small café offering white wine from boxes, stale cake and cookies. The rest of the student cast was already there.

When a monarch butterfly
Launched itself on the breeze
Above New York Harbor
Heading for Jersey City
I worried its wings wouldn’t make it.
I watched until it disappeared
Like a plane growing smaller in the sky
Except a foot above the water.
What a crazy thing, I thought,
It’s going into the waves for sure.
But then another butterfly flew off
In the same unlikely direction,
And another and another.
They obviously knew something I didn’t.

I missed the morning meeting because the office was being moved. So sue me. I was walking in the woods and when I got there it was like they were hauling out the files in cardboard boxes. Some special event was on. Families were all over the grounds along with campers on field trips from other towns. They had the familiar tenseness of people relaxed and having fun. I looked everywhere, up and down, tramping in bare feet past rows of lodges and cabins. A baby was stuck up in a tree, crying where she climbed. Jesus. It was that kind of day. My mom and dad were visiting but I didn’t want to see them because I was so embarrassed.

Lines of cars drove by the garage workshop where I sat at a machine I didn’t know how to operate. I just turned it on and off. As if through transparent plastic I could see the vessels and veins beneath my skin, and a dark red rock of what I believed to be dried blood in a pit in my chest. At my touch it fell out and bounced on the floor.

To cross the channel to the island
Trucks drive underwater if they’re heavy enough.
You can see them down there with the fish.
You may find that construction projects,
Traffic, weather, or other events
May cause conditions to differ.
Plan your route accordingly.
I rumble a big boat of a Buick
Over forest roots and rocks.
Denise semaphores in a clearing, standing on a stump.
Her face is serious but what is she saying?
In Boy Scouts I studied the alphabet
Of little men with outstretched arms
And never got much beyond S.O.S.
When you are disgusted with your practice
You should recognize this as a warning signal.
While babysitting for Oliver and Sam,
A pair of rambunctious boys,
I was beset by a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox,
A veritable demon of blaring plastic and chrome,
So tricked out with extra dials, switches and meters
I couldn’t find the on/off button
And had to unplug it from a socket on the floor.

Eli Lilly—an incongruously named Indian business magnate, not the big pharma outfit—is chairman and CEO of a multinational corporation and also the leader of a religious cult. He arranges mass marriages between upper caste Hindus and wealthy American yoga devotees. A friend at a weekly news magazine gets me part-time work as a meeting organizer for Lilly’s sales staff. I have to travel to Ohio and make sure enough half & half is ordered for the coffee. When I meet the great Lilly, with his mane of black hair and flowing mustaches, I can tell he’s going force himself on an innocent young female intern. To save her I strangle Lilly with my hands and push his deflated body down a drain in his office floor. So much for that job.

While making love with her husband a wife notices a special roll of double-sided adhesive tape lying beside the bed and complains about his carelessness in leaving it there. “Don’t you know how expensive that stuff is?” she asks. That sets him off—he pushes her away and jumps from the bed, shouting about how much housework he contributes, all the cleaning, organizing and straightening up he doesn’t get credit for. He sputters and stomps out of the bedroom, barely noticing that it is not their own, but the bedroom of his parents in the house he grew up in.

How did I get infected? Was it when I scraped the mildew from the faucet in the communal kitchen? What about that jar of peanut butter with the missing lid? I could see worms bulging along the veins in my arm. I pushed them all the way down to my hand and out the tips of my fingers. The worms were over a foot long and fat, with transparent skin, clear and jelly-like insides and arterial threads running their length. Thoroughly nauseating to see, but what a great relief to get them out of me. Seriously.

My lines were printed in the newspaper
Everyone in the theater had a copy but me
The Grecian soldiers tired with ten years war
Began to cry, let us unto our ships,
Troy is invincible, why stay we here?
But all had to sign up for the draft
Every male aged fifteen to fifty
City parks and squares filled with ranks of new soldiers
Doubtful in their green fatigues
I was relieved to be past the age of conscription
Until I learned the cutoff was fifty-five
I didn’t know what to do
But move my family to California
And register when we arrive