When the social worker called Gary, she said, “Everyone I’ve talked to wants nothing to do with him.”
When I used some of my experiences with this brother in my fiction, I thought of it, in a way, as payback. Writing as redemption: the writer gets to shape the story, to remake events. There’s a power in that, a sense that you can undo, or at least mitigate, whatever wrongs you’ve endured. The other party is powerless to stop you. You’re telling it, and you can say whatever you want to, need to. But my brother has had his own payback. Call it God’s will. Or karma. Or the life he’s made or been subject to because of bad brain chemistry and codependent parenting. That black tornado inside him flattening his chances for love, for health, crushing his talent for music and sports.
When his condo burned, so did the tennis trophies he’d accumulated over years of tournament play, gold-plated men melting into their pedestals.
Payback isn’t, as it turns out, what I’m after. My writing is about my own life, a part of which includes a brother who loomed large in my childhood, whose swath of destruction cut through our entire family, changing whatever, whoever, we might have been. I don’t mourn that imaginary family, the one in which I’m not hiding in the closet or sneaking out to the car with my other brothers to leave behind the one who will ruin the outing. The one in which my parents lose the constant worry and my mother isn’t being belittled or attacked. There’s no point mourning what never existed. Whatever we’re given, we use, or else it destroys us.
My brother terrified me then, and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I ran away to my best friend’s house once, in junior high, but I came back after several days because her parents wouldn’t let me stay. When I returned, I tried to confront my mother about what was happening. But confrontations were not anyone’s forte, except for my oldest brother and father, and those always involved fists. My mother’s advice was this: “Stay out of his way. We can’t control him.” She was washing the dishes, washing her hands of me. I felt like I was headed for Golgotha.
Then I left home for good at seventeen, and eventually made a creative life for myself.
“I think it would mean a lot to him.” Maybe it would. But I’m not going to call my brother. I care what happens to him, and I’m sorry his life has been one long predicament. But I’m free of him now. As a child, I thought I would feel forever the way he made me feel: ugly, worthless, afraid. I didn’t know that bad experiences could be outgrown, that you could learn from them the harsh lessons life sometimes imposes, and move on.
Although, maybe I caught a glimpse, one night in high school when he was fighting with our father. It was the usual: “Fuck you, you punk”; “Fuck you too, old man,” the two of them lunging at each other, our mother in the middle trying to stop them, the kitchen door left hanging from one hinge. I ran outside into the rain and hid behind the crab apple tree in our front yard, waiting for it to be over. I could still hear them yelling inside, and as usual I worried for my mother, caught between them. It was hot out, despite the downpour. I stood under the canopy of branches, the buds in full pink flower, the branches webbed with sticky white caterpillar cocoons. I thought I might go ahead and sleep there, if the grass beneath the tree stayed dry. My parents would eventually go upstairs to sleep, I knew, but it was harder to predict what my brother would do; he’d pulled me out of bed before, enraged that he couldn’t find his tennis shoes, and slammed me against the wall a few times. So I thought it best to stay put for a while.
A few minutes later the front door burst open and my brother ran out. He stopped and stood in the driveway for a minute. Then he doubled over and fell to his knees, moaning, clutching his stomach. It was the onset of the ulcerative colitis that would compromise his health the rest of his life, that would lead to operations, heavy cortisone, a colostomy bag. His muscular, stocky body would grow thin and wasted, his face would get puffy from the cortisone, he would lose everything dear to him. Of course no one knew that then. What I knew that night was that my big bad brother was on his knees in the rain, moaning like a wounded animal, and all I felt for him was pity.
Best Words, Best Order
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, you see a strange word across a crowded room. It looks different from all the other words; it beckons and glows; it exerts such a powerful magnetism that you are drawn like a murmurous fly to Keats’s “coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine” in the ode where he feels so happy listening to a nightingale that he thinks about getting drunk, killing himself, and other poetic pursuits.
Those first encounters with language, for a writer, are as powerful as confronting Michelangelo’s Pietà might be for a budding young artist who previously knew only the lineaments of the molded plastic baby Jesus and kneeling cows in the Christmas crèche dug out yearly from a cardboard box in the basement in Trenton, New Jersey.
For me, discovering the spelling of bologna was one such revelatory moment. I was familiar with the thing itself, but not until I saw the word written on a blackboard one Friday in the fourth grade did I appreciate its power. I was instantly hurled into tumultuous confusion about the true nature of reality. How could this ordinary cold cut, pinkish and slippery, trapped between slices of Wonder Bread, slathered with mayonnaise, wrapped in wax paper, and lifted from my Barbie lunchbox each day at school beside the swing set, have such an odd, exotic spelling? Why was there such an enormous distance between the word as it sounded and the way it was actually written? Clearly there were deeper truths than I realized lurking beneath not only language, but existence itself. The routine, mundane occurrences of my nine-year-old world—these were mere appearances, mere shadows on the wall of my bedroom. My human perception was clearly limited. The substance of life might be scarier and wilder than I had imagined. I went around all week with bologna in my head and with a new sense of anticipation and dread for the next Friday’s spelling and vocabulary list.
But the word that truly rocked my world—a word that made bologna seem like mere Spam—was one that I encountered in a poem the following year. The verse, a simple a-a-b-a quatrain, was written in black Magic Marker on a yellow cement wall in the courtyard of my elementary school. The young bard had written,
Her beauty lies
Between her thighs
And that’s what makes
My libido rise.
I had no idea what libido meant, but I more or less understood the writer’s intent. Libido! Maybe it was significant that, like bologna, it was a three-syllable word, with that stress, that lift, in the middle. An amphibrach, like inferno, or Dorito. A Latin word. Foreign, exotic, and in the end—as I discovered, once I got to a dictionary—dirty. It meant sex, desire, excitation. Now the poem itself took hold of me, an intoxicating mix of filth and erudition. It had all the qualities of a great work of literature: paradox, Eros, and the fitting of form to content. The first three lines followed a strict pattern of iambic dimeter. And then the departure, the final line opening into the power of metric substitution, the triple foot of an anapest pouring forth and overflowing its iambic container. The poem met Coleridge’s definition of “the best words in the best order.” It impressed itself indelibly into memory; once read, it could not be forgotten. I was haunted by the poem, and wondered who the author was. A boy, I was sure—possibly an older man, a sixth-grader. He had stood at that wall; he no doubt stood now somewhere nearby—the tetherball court, or the jungle gym. I burned to find him, a bad boy who understood the subtleties of metrics and knew big words. Who had a libido.
I didn’t ever find him. Not in the fifth grade, or in the sixth, when a boy and I crawled into an empty refrigerator box at the back of the classroom—our science project was to construct a spaceship—and made out instead of drawing the control panel. All we had done in there was glue up a picture of some galaxy and stick our tongues in each other’s mouths and try not to make any sound that would get us hauled out to drill fractions. He was a good kisser, but when we broke up h
e wrote a note to a friend that read, “Kim is a pigheaded slob.” His language was crude and unrefined, as well as imprecise. The note lacked rhythm, had no surprising metaphor, and its idea was insufficiently developed; it dealt in clichéd generalities (pigheadedness, slobdom) and might have referred to any number of girls named Kim rather than the unique, special eleven-year-old who had allowed his cretinous tongue to slither over her own.
He was the kind of boy I would fall for again and again in the coming years, adorable and unsuitable, ordinary as the dirt in that church in New Mexico that is supposed to heal broken legs and hearts but is really dug up from the hill behind the church and not miraculous at all, which anyone will freely tell you, but people still make pilgrimages and leave their crutches and dog tags hanging there. The guys I fell for rode motorcycles and flew small airplanes and played in bands, and wondered why writers—the writers they knew personally, i.e., me—had to go into things so much. For a while, we would be completely happy together. Then we would grow bored with each other, a circumstance they didn’t seem to mind as much as I did. To a man, they married soon after we broke up, except for the one who might be homeless by now.
Then there was the other kind—the kind I did not have to warn not to say “fuck” when we went to lunch at Hamburger Hamlet with my mother. Fuck was not a word this man had befriended. But he knew about the roots of jazz or Hindu philosophy or the French Revolution. He admired my poetry; he loved poetry. He understood how Derrida subverted Plato’s classical concept of mimesis—there was nothing to be imitated. When he said “hymen,” he meant unsettling Heidegger’s concept of synthesis, not to mention Lévi-Strauss’s Hegelian notion of the third element that mediates between the two members of a binary opposition. I hope you’re still with me here. He was brilliant and perfect, except for one little thing: he did not make my libido rise.
All my life, since seeing that perfectly placed word, printed on the wall, I have looked for the one to whom I can say, “Come to me. Call me your little whore and then quote Nietzsche. Tie me up and slap me around and pee on me and then explicate “The Waste Land,” granting its status as a seminal work with vast influence on twentieth-century literature without praising it as the impetus for a bunch of postmodern hooey no one can understand. Tell me we’re staying in tonight, and whip us up some pan-fried bay scallops and saffron pasta with parsley and garlic, and maybe some white corn cakes with caviar. Let the champagne cork blast loose like a rocket ship and shatter the kitchen light and foam run down your arm while the shards fly. I’ll lick the foam while you translate those cuneiform tablets you collected on your last expedition. Dedicate your book and the rest of your carnal life to me, and I’ll do the same.”
Don’t anyone tell me he’s not out there, that the perfect admixture of head and heart is a romantic alchemist’s fantasy, impossible to achieve. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a bunch of bologna. I know he exists. I know.
And listen: if you went to McNab Elementary in Pompano Beach, Florida, and once wrote a poem on a wall, there is someone who wants to meet you.
Don’t Worry
“I GOT YOU a couple of presents,” Margot said as we stood on the sidewalk outside the blues club in San Francisco, amid a swirl of theatergoers and tourists, next to doorways occupied by the destitute homeless. “But I left them in my hotel room. Do you want to come over? Don’t worry, I won’t seduce you.”
When people tell me they won’t seduce me, I believe them. I am credulous. If a man I’d just met were to say to me, “Don’t worry, I won’t come in you,” I would think, How great that he has thought this through. He’s making plans, he’s watching out for the roadblocks far ahead on the highway, whereas I am still considering whether to get in the car with him. It hadn’t occurred to me that Margot, my former student, might seduce me, but here she was, letting me know it was a possibility she had considered. Now she was thoughtfully letting me know what would not happen.
Margot had studied with me for about a week at a writers’ conference. Here’s what I knew about her: She wore a lot of shiny jewelry, had had a piece published in a feminist anthology, and had a novel manuscript that was making the rounds of New York publishers. The day she left home to visit the West Coast, lightning split a tree in her yard. She used the word cleaved. Also, she wanted to create an action doll named Booberella. “Maybe one of those bobble-headed dolls,” she’d said in the club earlier.
“Or maybe the breasts could be on springs instead,” I said.
“Bobble-boobs,” she said. “Good idea.”
“Definitely marketable,” I said.
I was out with Margot on a Saturday night because I didn’t have a date. Single men seemed to have grown scarce since my last breakup. I looked around the club: couples everywhere. We drank Lemon Drops and ripped through a pile of yam fries, and then Margot introduced me to a liqueur called Apfelkorn, which she said could be used to make drinks with interesting names like Appletini, Apple Fucker, and Fuck in the Graveyard. I wondered how one fucked an apple. All I knew was how to make a pipe out of an apple in order to smoke pot. I’d learned that right before going to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference one year and taught it to a number of people there. Fucking in a graveyard was easier to imagine, though I’d never done it. Once, years ago, I had swing-danced on my father’s grave with a man I liked. Maybe, I thought, I should move to New York, where that man is living, and see if he is single now. The last time I’d seen him he’d been with his new wife, but I could tell it wasn’t going to last long.
I got a little drunk on the Appletinis. The harmonica player in the band was standing on a table, blowing like mad and delighting the crowd, and I wanted to curl up into a small dark space, maybe under that table, and sleep for a year or two. I thought about the “sleep cure” in Valley of the Dolls, a book I read as a preteen that moved me deeply and educated me in the ways of pathologically damaged women. Maybe there was a doctor who could help me. And if I couldn’t get a sleep cure, maybe I could be admitted to the hospital with a broken wrist or something, develop a mysterious infection, and be put into an induced coma. One day, passing my bed, a handsome new doctor would fall in love with my tube-covered face, lean over, and put his tongue in my mouth, and my new life would begin.
Meanwhile, here was Margot, staggering on the sidewalk from drunkenness, or pain; she had turned her ankle on a broken piece of sidewalk.
“Looks like we’re going to need a cab,” I said, and instantly one magically rolled out of a parking garage and stopped for us.
Margot’s hotel room was small, most of it filled by the bed, so I sat on the bed. She brought out a tube of glitter gel and a puzzle cube with several images of Frida Kahlo on it. Frida stabbed and bleeding, Frida with parrots and monkeys and dogs, the black wings of her eyebrows meeting. Frida and Diego Rivera had a typical marriage for two sensitive artists: passion, pain, professional jealousy, and the indiscriminate bedding of other sensitive artists and intellectuals.
“Thank you,” I said. “These are great presents. And, wow, you have a mini bar.”
Margot was already opening the chardonnay. She brought me a glass and sat on the bed next to me. She trailed her fingers along my arm. “Is this okay?” she said.
I wasn’t feeling anything like erotic attraction, since I was generally pretty sure I was heterosexual, but maybe these things took time; maybe I could make this work. I took a sip of my wine. We were reclining on the bed by now, and I was looking into her cleavage, lightly dusted with glitter, where a pendant of some kind nestled. Possibly it had supernatural powers; I was starting to feel sleepy. Soon I might fall into a light trance and remember my past life as Cleopatra.
“What time is it?” I said. “I don’t want to miss my BART train.” BART stopped running about midnight. I felt like I was in some fractured version of “Cinderella.” “Lesbian Cinderella”? “Cinderlesbian”? Cinderella attends the blues ball with Princess Boo
berella, who trips in her glass slippers and then whisks Cinderella to her hotel room in a coach driven by a Serbian, who denounces the machinations of wicked King Bush and his rat Cabinet as they speed through the neon streets of the kingdom.
“We have this connection,” Princess Booberella said. Or maybe she said, “I feel this connection,” or possibly, “Feeling is connection.” This is the part that gets a little fuzzy in my memory. I remember her taking off my cowboy boots and then touching me a little more, each time with an “Is this okay?” and my mumbled “Um, ah.” I think my breasts were the goal, the hills to be taken. On the plains, the guerrillas crept closer, alert for mines, for snipers. I thought about junior high, making out with boys who slowly, with the wild stealth of adolescence, worked their way from my shoulder down toward the top of my blouse. I still wasn’t feeling anything except a slight tickling sensation that made me want to scratch where she had touched me. But I thought scratching would be impolite, so I tried to develop a meditative frame of mind where nothing bothered me, like the woman who wrote about being perfectly serene while getting bitten by mosquitoes in India.
“Okay,” Margot said, stopping before she had breached my bra. Maybe she was going to call in an air strike.
“Now you do something to me,” she said, and leaned back on the bed.
I felt way too self-conscious to do anything to Margot. Suddenly I wished I were at home, alone, having my usual weekend-long marathon of depression and envy. Friday and Saturday nights, I thought of all the couples going out to dinner and to clubs; Sunday mornings, I thought of them staying late in bed together, frolicking in the sheets, then going for champagne brunch, followed by a hike or bike ride or a stroll through a local farmers’ market, smelling damp bouquets of flowers, squeezing peaches, choosing fresh breads and pastries. I was my own Self-Pity Party in a Box. Maybe I could market it: a solitaire deck featuring photos of happy couples, a bottle of cheap whiskey, a Lucinda Williams CD with those songs about losing her joy and the guy who never made her come. For a little extra I could personalize it with your wedding video and your ex’s voice mail greeting.
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