Archive for November, 2008

I die with melting ruth. That’s what Queen Dido says after hearing Troy’s sad story. I’ve got a bag of props. Gore-spattered swords, Louis Quatorze wigs, juggling balls and the like.

Like a hyperactive birthday boy whose frazzled pale mother breaks his hockey stick over her knee on the subway platform.

Like being misdirected to cross the river on a side ramp and ending up at the wrong school altogether.

Like valuing ideology over creativity.

The original hit was a musical but we were doing an adaptation without singing or dancing, retitled High School Straight Play. My role was the Simpleton, and though I’d never rehearsed or even been on the set I wasn’t worried about what to do in my Breughel-meets-Bugs-Bunny tunic and tights.

Like watching TV alone in a room while your family watches through a doorway in the next.

Like the hard-bodied young woman doing her homework who had been my mother a moment before.

When you see his old Volvo wagon skid sideways in the parking lot,
The U-Haul trailer smash into the boulder in front of the bank,
And trigger a pink granite avalanche,
You can only marvel at how fast Eugene grabs the rubble
And is on his way again.

When you see the climb to the top of that rock
As probably not such a hot idea,
And put-upon clerks in their cubicles
Peer out at you, suspicious,
You wonder how the hell to get back down.

Close your eyes and feel
For the footholds with your feet.
You’ll nearly float to the ground.
As for the directions to Eugene’s
In a Los Feliz of your mind,
You’re on your own. Get in line.

In the years following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln gifted adepts known as mediums offered the bereft and grieving the opportunity to communicate with the late president via seances. In one particularly inept instance of the operation my partner and I were concealed in a small compartment beneath the floor of a special chamber designed to facilitate contact with the dead. Jimmy provided the voice of Venus, sort of a receptionist to the spirit realm, and I impersonated the late president by reciting what I could remember of the Gettysburg Address.

Back at mom and dad’s my young son was taking a bath. The water was full of soggy disintegrating toilet paper and huge crawling beetles. Yikes! I didn’t want him to freak out, so I didn’t point out the bugs, but he didn’t seem to mind. I poured water from a bucket into the toilet tank. It had a lot of dirt and green paint in it. Yuck. In Boy Scouts they taught us that, in the event of an emergency, the water in your home toilet tank would be potable. Cold and tasty, too! But not this stuff.

I was doing research in a college library with my editor, Juno, a stout woman of a certain age, as they used to say. Many of my supervisors over the years have been women. I’m a man who is comfortable with that. As we moved through the open stacks, an old friend and mentor from high school, the drama coach we called Mrs. Z, happened to pass by. It was strange because I knew that she had died many years before. She recognized me, smiled, and went her way. I turned to Juno and calmly said, That woman in the pink sleeveless sweater was a ghost. Somehow I decided I not to be alarmed by the apparition. Juno, whose unflappability in the face of trying workplace circumstances was well known to me, cheerfully wondered what might have brought my old teacher back from the dead. But when Mrs. Z wordlessly walked by us again her smile had become threatening. I began to feel afraid of what she was up to.

Venus had a great indoor pool–diving platform, underwater lights, the works–and I went right in, fully clothed in a dress suit, something I only wore for weddings and job interviews. I swam right to the bottom and surprised myself by being able to stay under, breathing easily, where the watery light played on the white tiles. This is pretty cool, I was thinking, when I noticed that I had accidentally knocked a tray with the remains of my dinner into the pool when I jumped in. Risotto drifted around and I tried to collect it, but the crumbs kept squirting away from my fingers.

That if a piece of sheet music, a Chopin etude, say, with a pale yellow cover, was placed at the right spot on a piano bench it could be a portal to the future. I could touch it and go to a moment three days ahead. Venus let me in on it, but didn’t say how I could get back.

I gave the goddess her real name. Why be cute? Hear that bell? It’s the knife sharpening truck, either the green one or the red one. Word is the red guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, but they’ll both screw up your blades, so what’s the difference?

I ended up on the bus, passing the door of the Broadway Mall, multi-globed in various brightnesses with a layer of black dust on the tops of the bottommost tier. If I could concentrate and crack the mystery of the fixture I might just understand the meaning of life. I also felt this way about a cactus in a pot on the windowsill of a restaurant on Hennepin Avenue once.