Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  “Muchas gracias, professor.” (Thanks a lot, professor.)

  “Es mi función en la vida.” (It’s my function in life.)

  Another guy, Don Reynolds, comes in with his wife, Grace. Getting radiation for a tumor at the back of his jaw. Tumor already removed, but coming back. Recurrence.

  He must be about forty. Wife very sexy—wrinkled blonde, but slim, energetic—python-woman, lots of snake-energy in her. They live out in the country northeast of Lansing, the hill and forest country. He works with wood, landscaping.

  “So how ya doing, Foxy?” he asks.

  “OK. How about you?”

  “OK . . . I’m starting to get to be a philosopher like you, lie in bed at night thinking about death, possible afterlives, or no afterlife at all, all that space out there—”

  “He’s driving me crazy.”

  “Todos somos crazy,” (We’re all crazy,) says Alfonso with a very exuberant, youngish laugh, as the intercom beeps on and they call “Alfonso to radiation room, please.”

  “My turn.”

  He gets up amazingly easy and waves us goodbye.

  “He’s doing great,” says Grace, “Just last week he couldn’t walk at all.”

  “It’s all just temporary,” says Darlene with a tear in her eye, “It’s a shame . . . he’s such a great guy.”

  Which was the way I began to feel, too. A great guy, a thousand stories about Mexico and Yucatan and the lumber trade; every day getting a little younger looking, more vivacious. Was it true that all this was temporary and he was on the gangplank walking out into the Sea of Death? I hoped not.

  Or Jim Stanton, this retired MSU professor who was still (emeritus) working in the education department, a small, little white-haired guy full of stories about students.

  “You miss them, all this brightness, like blooming tulips, magnolia trees, and then you turn around and they’re gone: unfortunately most of the time forever. Sometimes a Christmas card for a couple years and then they’re gone. I’d like to start all over again, go back to twenty-five and have a second chance.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “No one, I guess.”

  Every day, day after day, for two months, the same gang, the same women in the radiation room where you stretch out on this table and they pull this huge monstrous machine in over you. Crazy, though, the way they’d put pictures of gardens, rivers, and ducks on the wall, on translucent plastic with lights behind them. So instead of staring at a blank ceiling you stared at lit-up tulips and trees, rivers, ducks.

  “From Sweden,” Maryanne explained to me one day, this slim, intense blonde ex-ray technician.

  “Ayuda un poco para olvidar lo que esta realmente pasando,” (It helps a little to forget what is really going on,) explained Carmencita, a Chicana born in Michigan who spoke an A-1 Spanish right out of Castillo.

  Feet rubber-banded together, head on a pillow, and then the radiation began. Four shots: top, bottom, then from each side.

  Thinking about the terrible effects on the bowels and bladder.

  Always running to the toilet when the spasms began but sometimes not making it, ending up with shitty shorts. Embarrassing.

  There was a retiree party over at the fancy-wancy Kellogg Center that I had originally intended to go to, but I cancelled at the last minute.

  Judy, over in my old department, ATL, understood:

  “Hughee, don’t worry about it; my husband had prostate cancer. I’ve been through it.”

  A friend for thirty years.

  Valerie over at ATL the same.

  “You’ll be OK. Just get through the tunnel. It’s not the first one you’ve been in . . . how about that polio when you were a kid?!”

  “True enough.”

  Another friend for thirty years.

  It was weird being retired, weird being seventy.

  E-mail helped a lot. A letter every day during the week from poet A.D. Winans in San Francisco. Stacks of letters. And he always wrote his letters between the paragraphs of the last letter I’d sent him. So I’d print them all up. A nice collection of correspondence.

  Tough guy poet, a “Bukowskian.” Not a mythology-centered nerd like me, bouncing between the Etruscans, the Sumerians, the Hindus and Judeo-Christianity. Street poetry, the-way-the-world-is poetry.

  We’d always been close since the old COSMEP days in San Francisco, but now recently we’d become like brothers.

  “You’re my best pal,” he wrote one day.

  “The same for me,” I’d written back.

  An e-mail letter a day from Lynne Savitt in NY, too.

  The sexiest woman ever. Ever!

  I don’t know how she did it, but she said she “played with herself” most of the day every day, even at work.

  Beautiful woman. She’d send me pictures from time to time of her children, grandchildren, herself and her husband (whom she’d married after he’d gotten out of prison after a twenty year sentence for murder).

  Great poet, too.

  Letters from my pal Noel Peattie in California, my cousin Judy in Chicago, Richard Kostelanetz in New York, my son, Hugh, from Taiwan-Cambodia-Vietnam. The e-mail brought it all alive, made me suddenly part of a world-wide network.

  Seeing my daughter, Cecilia, every day after lunch with Bernadette helped a lot. Chris had classes on Tuesday and Thursday so he’d have lunch with us, too, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and we started going to the central market in Lansing where these Laotians had a stand, food somewhere between Chinese and Cambodian. Or we’d go over to East Lansing to Yat Wah, this Chinese place in the Frandor Shopping Center. Or to the Olympic Broil downtown, the blue-collar place where all the truck drivers and machinists and plumbers came. Me and my fish sandwiches, Chris and his super-burgers, Bernadete with her careful, perfect little chicken wraps.

  Sometimes Cecilia would let me drive her home. Usually on perfect, warm, sunny days. On rainy, cloudy, icy days, no.

  Maybe it’s a pattern she wasn’t aware of.

  Her reason for not going with me some days was that she said she was afraid I’d take her to either the mental health hospital over at Saint Lawrence, or to the police station.

  I’d thrown a smoke-bomb in her direction a year before on the fourth of July and ever since then she had been afraid of me. But you never know. Some days she’ll go with me, no problem, let me drive her back to East Lansing, to Lucia’s place, and then when I get there, she’ll start in “I want to spend more time with you, let’s go to the Meridian Mall or Frandor, I need to do some shopping at Kroger’s, or else lets go to Beaner’s for coffee . . .”

  All or nothing at all.

  For two months, after being with Cecilia, I’d go to radiation therapy, the Radiation Club, but now that I’m through with that I spend more time with Christopher.

  He’s always full of manias.

  Instead of having his head full of assignments /test preparations for Lansing Community College, he’ll come up with things like having to get rid of his VCR and replace it with a DVD player, get rid of all his video-tapes, all his nice wood video-tape storage cases, turning his world into something exclusively DVD. DVD and nothing else.

  So down to Big Buy second hand store and they’d buy his VCR player and most of his tapes, and he’d stick the VCR cases down in the basement.

  Or he’d go through his closets and get out all his old clothes and try to sell them at a secondhand store, which usually wouldn’t take them: too old and worn out.

  Or else we’d go out to the Meridian Mall or Lansing Mall, always the same places: Suncoast, other video stores, Best Buy. A maniac for horror films, the sicker the better. A connoisseur of horror films, all possible versions of The Night of the Living Dead—all DVD now, of course.

  Or he’d suddenly need new shirts, new pants, new boots, new grease (oops, pardon, “pomade”) for his hair.

  Two showers a day, hair always super-trim, a haircut every two weeks at the minimum.

  Then back to his pla
ce downtown.

  Which he also wanted fixed up, new carpets, new tile in the bathroom, walls painted . . .

  Always trying to create the perfect world.

  Most of his old pals from high school gone now, only Weeza, this black Zambian left; Weeza and Weeza’s fifteen year old blonde bombshell girlfriend and Andrea, this overweight Polish orphan who Chris always likes to torture:

  “Jesus, why don’t you lose weight, get a new brain, get reborn already, start out all over again, you certainly fucked it up the first time . . .”

  Lonely up in his third floor apartment alone most of the time, on the phone with Andrea. Katie gone—this enormous blonde with purple birthmarks all over her face. Annie gone—Ms. “I’m Always Sick,” sickly, always hanging on Chris, sex, sex, sex and sickliness.

  He’d go through women like a hot knife through butter.

  Ending up very much alone.

  So in mid-afternoon I drive him back to the downtown house and go over to the new house on Wildwood in East Lansing alone.

  The Alden Dow house with its enormous two-stories windows on the back of the house looking out on this vast untouched backyard.

  Make dinner.

  A can of peas or beans, maybe some tuna, mixed with some sharp cheddar cheese, some pasta, all soaked in olive oil, Italian bread, microwaved, dusted with garlic powder, some red pop with a little Chianti or Vermouth in it, every day another invention . . .

  Sometimes taking Bernadete over to the bistro in the Marriot Hotel in downtown Lansing, sometimes Chris coming with us out to the Meridian Mall, the Panda Express, sometimes over to the fancy, hidden-away lounge at the University Club, sometimes sandwiches from Arby’s—especially when they had that two for $4.00 chicken special. Which Bernadete wouldn’t eat. High cholesterol and general pickiness. So she’d have her Market Fresh sandwich and I’d have my chicken sandwich.

  She’s built a deck just outside the windows in the backyard. Deck and chairs.

  I bought a plain pine $13.00 carpenter’s table and found some huge tiles in the basement of the new house, covered the table with the tiles, put on wood borders to hold them in place, stained it dark oak, and that became our table.

  We’ve been buying all kinds of trees, mostly fir trees, arbor vitae, all kinds of flowering trees too, Dogwood and Cherry, Crabapple, and planting the whole place with bulbs.

  One of my ex-students, Tom Repasky, is redoing the bathroom in the basement and my son Chris (now 21) wants to move in. But I get a little nervous about him sleeping in the basement next to the furnace. I am going to have a room built on the first floor next to the basement and turn the one basement window that exists into a stairway so he can sleep someplace without gas and mould, dampness; he is an asthmatic, too, something I have to always think about.

  I don’t want to sell my old Victorian house downtown though.

  That’s where I write now, on my iMac, WKAR radio on in the background, playing Cantelube’s Songs from the Auvergne.

  This little corner in the kitchen next to the phone. A perfect spot for me, the walls around me covered with art I’ve picked up over the years. Sometimes literally “picked up.” Like there’s a colored drawing of a guy with his mouth open, the sun rising up over his tongue. A variation of the drawing that appeared as a cover of Pulpsmith years ago. My drawing I found in the garbage, a discarded version. Artist: Jim Kay.

  To my left on the wall is a poster published by Black Sparrow with a selection from Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye printed on it. Signed by Bukowski. A couple of his little drawings and then “There’s no real way. All we can do is a little.” Charles Bukowski.

  A painting (watercolor) of the night sky by Harry Smith.

  A plate with big red lips moulded on it. By my daughter Alexandra from one of her classes at the Art Institute in Kansas City. A print by Edgardo Antonio Vigo, my old pal (now dead) from Argentina. Right in front of me a big concrete-poem-drawing by Toby Lurie, the San Francisco poet-artist, the one with splashes and spills of yellow, red, green blue, and impossible-to-read words scrawled in different colors, a postcard from Lurie next to it, a picture of him, seventyish, all white-bearded and white-haired, pink T-shirt, white pants, standing in front of this huge mural of his.

  I love the old house downtown filled with pre-Columbian pots and dragons from Southeast Asia, paintings, letters from great poets, old posters like the one that reads THE BEATNICKS: WHO, WHAT, WHY, Feb.16, Veterans Memorial Bldg., Los Angeles. February 16th 1961, somewhere around there. A lecture I gave in L.A. with one of my students, Brian Avery, the actor, and his girlfriend, actress, Penelope Chandler, reading selections from the Beats.

  I could do a whole book just about the art on the walls and in cases in this house.

  And I love the “feeling” of the old, 100+ year old house, all the old oak mouldings and floors, staircases, cozy, safe, secure . . .

  So I think we’ll keep both houses, go back and forth between the two of them, East Lansing, Lansing; the Alden Dow designer house with all its dramatic space, the old Victorian house with all its coziness and comfort.

  You see how my days stack up: morning on the computer writing and submitting, answering e-mail letters, then lunch with my wife, three days a week with Chris along, too, then the afternoons with Cecilia and Chris, dinner and evenings with Bernadete, a couple of plays a week, a little film-watching every night before she goes to bed, concerts at MSU, then a night of my having to get

  up every hour to take a leak, but I somehow have been sleeping pretty well . . .

  Waiting for death, mainly, thinking about my dead father and mother and all (all!) my aunts and uncles. No one left. One cousin dead. Lots of friends. And the rest of Our Gang, the madman poets and artists I’ve lived with all my life, all getting old, slowly contracting, on the death-track, too: slow but certain.

  Every Friday night we go to the Shaarey Zedeg synagogue in East Lansing. Always the back row on the right. Subconsciously, I think, expecting some madman to come in some night with a bomb and blow up as much of the congregation as he can.

  So many friends over there now.

  Like Curt Gorwitz and his wife Cathy.

  Tough little Curt, actually was a child in a concentration camp, somehow got up and got to the U.S.

  Sometimes we speak German together.

  “Wie gehts, mein Freund?” (How’s it going, my friend?)

  “Alt, krank un müde, aber was can I tun?” (Old, sink and tired, but what can I do?)

  Then there’s Larry Vert and his beautiful wife, her a convert, head of the Sisterhood, one of the “committees” inside the synagogue structure, the one that handles all the women’s things.

  Larry is retired like me and all winter long he spends his weeks up in Cadillac in the UP—the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—ice-fishing, no less. Actually has a little hut out in the middle of a frozen lake, fishes through a hole in the ice, and does pretty well, from what he says.

  Mr. Smiles, and his wife, too, Mrs. Smiles. He never converted but seldom misses services, which seem to be one of the big pluses in his week.

  We always sit together during the oneg after services, although sometimes the services themselves can be a real “up,” too, especially when my old pal, Joan Gochberg, is on the piano and Pamela Schiffer, a cantor from the Detroit area, is doing the singing.

  Joan is the wife of a fellow professor at MSU. English department. Don Gochberg, the Shakespeare scholar. And she’s a magnificent pianist: masterful technique and oodles of heart.

  Pamela seems ageless, this tall, beautiful woman who reminds me of Gladys Swarthout from my old days in opera.

  Then there’s John Eulenberg, the computer genius, who, for some reason, knows all sorts of black African languages and who, along with Joan, does a lot of composing for the services. He’s usually up in the first row with his wife, Marsha, who says she has mental problems, but you’d never guess it talking to her. Everyone should have mental problems like her; it would be a lot
better world.

  Sometimes they join me and Bernadete at the oneg after services, and I feel especially close to Marsha as she tells me about her volunteering over at the American Red Cross off Lake Lansing Road.

  John is the guy who invented a computer-way of having people who can’t talk talk, so the non-talkers suddenly get eloquent and can even do their Bar Mitzvahs.

  He’s getting a little massive these days, is pure intensity, but at the same time has a smile like the summer sky at sunset. Marsha is slim, make-upless, as “basic” as you can get, but radiates a sense of beauty and love about her.

  For a while student rabbi, Oren Hayon, was up on the bima/altar, usually when Joan and Pamela weren’t around. Young guy with a beard and lots of hair, plays guitar, is full of pizzazz, kind of a revivalist hippy. But he has finished his “internship” now, and is back in the theological seminary again, finishing up his studies.

  Sometimes retired Rabbi Morton Hoffman does the services, especially when there’s going to be a Bar Mitzvah the next day. Seventy-four, prostate and heart problems, but he keeps going. Married to Aviva (“Spring” in Hebrew), originally from Israel, Morton getting very political in the light of the current problems in Israel, which he very much understands and identifies with.

  What I like about the services is the message that comes through that ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE UNIVERSE, GOD IS UP THERE IN CHARGE OF THINGS, CONTROLLING THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE SEASONS.

  Not that that’s what I believe, but it is what I want to believe.

  So I usually emerge from the sanctuary feeling like the world is back on track again, go into the social hall, and there the Gang is: Kurt and Larry and the Eulenbergs, Joan Gotchberg, Mrs. Radway, eighty-five, living in a retirement home out on Park Lake Road, who seems to have an especial attachment to me, always treats me like I was her husband or grandson or best long lost friend. Sometimes Billie Berman singles us out and sits down next to me—a widow, her husband dead for about a year now, herself having gone through radiation therapy for breast cancer (after surgery)—just finished her conversion to Judaism, which surprised me when she told me; I thought she was always Jewish.