when the kids would do the cruel things
kids can sometimes do, I would think of Jackie Robinson and I
would try to be heroic like him,
and sometimes it worked. Even when they called me a jerk
and a race traitor and all the rest,
because when we played stickball and each took on the persona
of our favorite players, I would
pick him, and the other white guys would berate me and try to
get me to react the way I usually did,
with my fists or my murder mouth or something that could be
turned to their amusement as long as
I was out of control. But when I took on his name for the game,
I took on his dignity too, and it
got me through their petty prejudices and opened up a whole new
world. Sometimes it even worked with
the girls. Until they too began to feel compelled to make
fun of one of their race who was inspired
by a man whose face was handsome and intense, but happened
to be denser in its reflection of the sun
then one of us. Jackie Robinson was the guide to the
outside world for me, his example let me see
that what I was taught was not necessarily true, and what I
always suspected I knew might be. He gave
me a way to go beyond that world and to go deeper into me—
and when I came back, what I had learned
helped me to see that even the people I had left behind knew
these things too. When my cop brother
and my cop brother-in-law and my cop uncle and cousin and
boarder in my mother’s house denounced
the riots in the ’60s always in racist tones, I’d confront
them about the black friends they often
had in their homes and they would say, that’s different,
that’s L.J. he’s my friend, he’s not one
of them. Or when I’d point out how they often dressed and
spoke and drove the same cars and hung
out in the same bars and all the rest, they’d get hurt like
I had turned into some kind of foreigner,
one of those old time Americans who didn’t understand and
tried to grandstand with their liberal ideas
when they lived in wealthy enclaves and never had to deal
with the reality of our streets. They’d tell
me they didn’t think they’d ever meet one of their own kind
as blind to what was real as me and then
they’d try and make me see that they didn’t have anything
against the Jews and Blacks and Italians
and homos and even the rich, because they all had friends or
even in-laws that fit those labels,
they’d try to tell me it’s about being true to who you really are
no matter how far your people have come
or haven’t come, and then they’d tell some story about how
it used to be and then they’d ask me
how come I never wrote those Damon Runyon stories about them
or more importantly about my father—
they figured I didn’t bother because I got too far away
from what I’d been—when I moved
away from the old neighborhood after my father said I was
no good for wanting to marry a
black girl and having too many black friends—and then,
when I finally came back again,
so many years after I left him—this time we didn’t
fight—because I asked him about
Boots and Mary, whatever happened to Louis the Lip or
Two Ton Tony—he talked all night
& it finally felt alright with him—he talked about how
his mother had been a “live out maid”
when he was a kid—we never talked about politics or the
division that had driven us all into
fear and insecurity—I listened, he talked, and after I
left he called me up & asked if I had
enough to get my kids Xmas presents this year—I said I
did—I never took a dime from him
before, why should I start now—one of my sisters called
and told me because it was the only way
he could say I love you—so I called him back & said hey,
I could use two hundred & he said
it’s yours—& I took the kids to see him with the
gifts his money made possible—
he was watching sports on the TV—and all of a sudden he
brought up Jackie Robinson—
how he always admired that man’s dignity & a few days later
he called up the only brother he
had left and told him to take him to the hospital—
the doctor called my sister &
told her there’s nothing we can find, we’ll keep him
overnight and send him home—
& of course he died & this time when they tried to bring him
back he refused—hey, I don’t know
why he wanted to die—that was a lot of years ago—all I
know is when I saw Field of Dreams
I started to cry—I didn’t even know why—my father and
I never even tried to play any game—
but hey you know I’m not ashamed to carry his name—I hope
he feels the same.
HOLIDAY HELL
I always worked on Christmas. Well
not always, since I was about 13.
My father had this home maintenance
business, which meant we cleaned up
after rich people and fixed things in
their homes. There was always a lot
to do around Christmas, including
selling trees out in front of the
little hole-in-the-wall store front.
We had this one special customer who
got this special fifty-foot tree every
year. On Christmas eve, after his kids
went to bed, my brother-in-law the cop,
Joe Glosh (short for Gloshinski) and me
would drive up with the tree and put it
up in the middle of this swirling kind of
Hollywood staircase, wiring it to the
banister here and there until we got it
steady and solid, ready for the silver
dollar tip we always got. My brother-
in-law would always wonder why the best
tree we ever saw always went to a Jew who
didn’t even believe in Christmas, right?
Then he’d drop me back at the store and
go home while I waited there alone just
in case somebody might be waiting til the
last minute to buy a tree. Usually no one
was, and when it turned midnight I could
call the local orphanage and they’d come
by for whatever we had left, which my
old man would let me give them for free and
then I could walk or hitchhike the few miles
home. When we were little my sisters and I
would exchange our gifts before we fell
asleep, because we all lived in the attic
together. The coolest thing was waking in
the morning with this sound, like crunchy
paper, and realizing it was our stockings
at the foot of the beds that our ma had
always somehow got up there without us
catching her, and we’d get to open up all
our stocking stuff before we woke the rest
of the folks, our older brothers and grand-
mother and the border, Jack, and our mom
and dad. Then we’d all open stuff and go
to Mass and come home for the b
ig dinner.
But by the time I got the attic to myself,
cause my brother-in-law and that sister
got a place of their own and my other sister
joined the nunnery for awhile, I got to
working for the parks department too,
because my old man didn’t pay me, figuring
I worked for room and board, so I had these
other jobs, and the parks department had a
busy day on Christmas cause all these kids
would come down to the park to try their
new sleds or skates and I worked either on
the hill or on the pond as a sort of guard
and coach and general alarm man. I used to
love seeing a wreck on the hill so I could
slide down the snow on my engineer boots,
the kind motorcycle dudes wear now, showing
off my teenaged skill and balance for the
teenaged girls who might be watching. I
don’t remember ever falling down, it was
something I was totally confident about. Now
that I think about it, I guess working on
Christmas wasn’t so bad, even though I always
kind of felt sad anyway, especially after I
started dating black girls and knew I couldn’t
take them home or share the holidays much
with them, but there was always something sad
about Christmas anyway, once you were over five
or maybe ten, how could it ever live up to your
expectations again? I also dug being a
working guy though, you know? Even today
when I see young working guys going by in
the backs of pickup trucks I catch their eye
and feel like I know what’s going through
their heads, because of what was going
through mine, which was, any time now I’ll be
out of this, a big star or wheeler dealer or
intellectual or anything that means a kind of
success you couldn’t guess when you look at
me here under these conditions, cause now,
I’m a mystery to you, you don’t know who I
am, you think you can categorize me but you
got no idea who I might be someday, or the
the richness of the life I live inside, and
you’ll never know what it’s like to be as
cool as I sometimes feel when you look at me
and see a guy from some kind of ethnic mystery
you can’t comprehend except in the most simplistic
terms, and who is so free he can work in public
and get dirty and sweat and wear his hair greasy
and his tee shirt rolled and know you would never
mess with him unless you’re a woman and get a whim
to find out what it’s like to give a piece of ass
to someone from the working class—I dug the
kind of coolness of it, of knowing I was a lot more
than these ordinary citizens could comprehend,
that I could be sexy in ways their men were too
restrained to be, that I could be threatening in
ways their men would be too frightened to be, that
I could get down and dirty and not give a fuck
what I looked like in public, even though I knew
I looked cool, that I could be inside a life and
world they could never even guess the intensity and
romanticism and pure exhilaration of because it
didn’t depend on material goods and worldly
success but on loyalty and honesty and standing
up for yourself and all the rest of your kind
when you were put to the test—hell I used to
love looking back into their eyes and thinking
some day they’ll be so surprised to find out
what was going on in my head when I put it in
a book or on film or tell them about it in their
bed—so even though I came home late for the
big dinner and my fingers and toes all froze
cause guys like us could never make a fuss about
the cold by wearing scarves or gloves or any of
that rich kid stuff, and maybe I’d get a little
drunk when nobody was looking and try to get the
phone into the closet or somewhere where I could
be alone for a few minutes to call some girl
they might call colored and wrong, and end up
later that night sleeping on the floor of the
kitchen with the new puppy so he wouldn’t keep
everyone awake with his scared yelps and in the
morning scandalize my grandmother when she found
me in my boxer shorts the puppy asleep on my
chest and she’d rouse me and make me get dressed
but not without telling me I was just like my
father, I didn’t have any ashes, which was her
way of implying I didn’t have any ass to speak
of, and then I’d help her get her stockings over
her crippled legs and have something to eat and
go to work again, maybe this time on the pond,
where I’d get to slide across the ice to rescue
stumbling teenaged girls while “Earth Angel” or
“Blue Christmas” blared over the loudspeakers
and in my heart, knowing for sure I was going
to be a part of some important history, and I
was—and still am.
20 YEARS AGO TODAY
We were a couple of kids
with a kid—weren’t we Lee—
ever since this topic came up
I’ve been thinking about you—
but not like I usually do,
I’ve been remembering what it was
that kept us together, the glue
that made it look to others
like our marriage worked—
I used to think it was the anger & sex—
I never talked much about love
I guess—and
after all the experience since us
all the lovers and living together
being married and being in a “relationship”
the flirtations and infatuations
the romances and affairs and rolls
in the hay and pokes and fucks and
fantasies, what do I know about it Lee?
I went out with a woman last week,
intelligent, accomplished, attractive,
a great body, like yours only harder,
that’s the way most of them are now,
at least out here, they all work out so much,
but this one does it with ballet,
you’d have dug that too, but she’s
taller than you, she could actually do
it if she wasn’t already successful
at something else not quite so demanding
or deforming—anyway, we had a nice enough
time, but she’s still in love with somebody
else and I guess I am—or was—too—
but that never stopped me with you,
even though you knew—
I remember how understanding you were about that
before we got married, but then after
you said if you ever saw her on the street
you’d cut out her heart and I believed you would
—back then it somehow seemed good
to be with someone that passionate and crazy,
both of us acting so lower class city street tough
as though we weren’t just a couple of kids
afraid the world might really be too rough
for us after all, what did we know heh?
anyways, those were the days Lee—
things hadn’t gone all wrong,
making love every night,
and I don’t think we’d begun to fight yet—
like about John Lennon leaving his wife—
something you were sure I was going to do to you
when I became that successful too, which
everyone seemed to think was inevitable back then—
well, not everything we thought would happen came
true—at least not for me & you—
remember how all those predictions about me
always ended with “if he lives that long”—
everytime I got in my old telephone van and turned
the key, I had to take this deep breath first,
then curse the rightwing assholes who sent me
death threats in the mail, with pictures
of crosshairs aimed at the back of my neck,
or descriptions of my van blowing up or my
house burning down—those guys
probably went on to work for Reagan and
Bush & Quayle, but that’s a whole
other story you don’t want to know about—
what I’m trying to get out now is the fact
that I hardly ever write about you and me Lee
and all those years we spent together—
and of all that time, maybe February 1969 was the
highlight, you were still jealous of everyone
but they didn’t have you on the run and never
would—and I was really being good—you know
I never cheated on you, not once in all those
early years, despite your fears and mine—
even that time that girl said I had with her,
I don’t know what that was about, maybe just
that I was in the papers a lot then and she
somehow wanted to be a part of that—what do
I know Lee, I got girls younger than our
daughter after me now and it’s just because
they want to read their poetry at Helena’s—
I don’t even want to get into that either—
hey, Lee, what I’m remembering is a night so cold we
have to wrap our baby in her little snow suit
to sleep in, cause all we got is this one little
oil stove in the middle of the quonset hut
we were living in, yeah, the kind with the
ruffled corrugated tin in a semi circle—
so what little heat there was hovered
over our heads in the very middle of the house,
the only place I could stand straight up anyway—
I remember the water in the diaper pail had a thin
layer of ice on it in the morning, but that
night, we got naked under tons of covers and
those old quilts you dug so much, reminding you
of your mother’s country roots, we were
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