Gettin close to him, I said, “We’ll ride away.”
“Where to?”
“Fame and glory.”
“Yeah, like Hollywood, U.S.A.?” he said, his head turning as I moved behind him. “I always wanted to. You know guitar and singin? We’d be a brother act on MTV. Yeah, and legal for once, what a joke.”
“No joke about it, Jimmy Pie,” I said, smoothin him up like Daddy does. “No joke at all.”
“Yeah.”
“How much do you like me, Jimmy Pie?”
“That first night when we . . . oh, yeah, do that to me. That guy with the safe back in Pentecost? When we showered afterward, I was lookin at you and I . . . mmm, mighty fine like that . . . and I thought, What a beautiful personality Otis has.”
“I’m so flattered, Jimmy boy,” I said, headin round to face him and drop to the floor inch by the inch of his skin, with some take your time Daddylike phrases to distract him. Didn’t want him to hear the car pull up. Just don’t slam the damn door, Daddy, s’all I ask.
“Oh, do more of that to me, Otis, my man,” Jimmy was goin. “Yeah, crank that ol boss of ours and tool out among the people jubilatin. Find us two perfect chicks and celebrate a future. Fuck, loot, and MTV, that’s how I see it. Go to town there, Otis.”
“Come down, Jimmy,” I said, pullin on him. “Come near for the best yet.”
“Yes, Otis, I’ll give it to you and you’ll get high like they all. That’s the real thing I was born to be.”
His legs high and my hands goin up and down on his thighs, swallowin him whole till we hear Daddy hummin and I break it up real quick and worried, cryin out, “He witched me, Daddy! He made me!”
Jimmy sees how it is real fast, and he moves to Daddy in self-defense. “Said he’d crank me f’I didn’t let him, Daddy!”
Daddy holds out his arms, his face blank, and Jimmy glides right in there.
“Swore to the Lord he’d strangle me,” Jimmy moans.
“I see it all, my son,” said Daddy, rubbin the back of Jimmy’s neck. “I know how it goes with fairskin boys. The tremble. The starlike quality that redeems a sinful multitude.”
“Yes, Daddy. Yes, Daddy.”
Smoochin Jimmy with a heavy pull and faraway snarlin noises. Hoo, did I get thrilled! Because I knew I’d stole home. I said I knew a few scams myself, didn’t I? And Daddy like to eat Jimmy up with how deep he’s goin on him, that ol Jimmy Pie, who is now done with his Hollywood dreams of MTV and such.
Daddy stands back to admire Jimmy, all shiny with slick, huh, Jimmy? That one last hungry look. Daddy knew Jimmy wouldn’t work right in the general run of things, cause Jimmy believes slick’s to be give away without a thought, while Daddy takes his slick serious.
“Fetch the candle, Otis,” Daddy tells me. “Quickly, now.”
The Big Fry-Up at the Crazy Horse Café
Shaun Levin
Bacon
The butcher around the corner from my old flat in Tel Aviv sold bacon and fresh cured ham. It was one of the only places in the city where you could buy pig meat. I’d just finished college, I was twenty-four, and I was buying bacon for the first time. My friend Anne-Marie was about to become a Jew; it was part of her farewell-to-Christianity breakfast. That morning I told her I’d decided to leave Israel and move to London. Fifteen years after leaving South Africa for Tel Aviv, I was going back to live in English.
Eggs
I hate soft-boiled eggs. The yolk, the softness of it, is like eating a fetus, a chick beginning to take shape. There’s too much life in a runny yolk. I like my eggs hard and rubbery. I like them chewy and bright yellow. So when I go for a late breakfast at the Crazy Horse Café on Arcola Street, I order an omelette.
“Like always?” the boss says, meaning: a bacon omelette.
I need to find welcoming arms wherever I go.
What will I tell my son when he asks how he was made? My turkeybaster boy with his father’s green eyes and the blond hair of his mother. Me cycling for those five wintry months to their flat in Fins-bury Park to jerk off into a yogurt pot, to have my cum slurped up into a syringe and passed on like a baton to Denise, who takes it to their bedroom to squirt into Andy. That, my son, is your creation myth. Three gods it took to create our Francis. God the wanker. God the go-between. And God the girl on her back with her legs in the air.
Beans
My boyfriend, Mark, wonders how appropriate it is for us to be saying the F-word around Frankie.
“I’m not having my son get all giggly around four-letter words,” I say.
“They won’t like that at school,” Mark says.
“Fuck them,” I say.
Mark came into the picture not long after Francis stopped wearing nappies and wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night for feeding. My boyfriend is my rock and my reassurance. My son curses when he bumps his toe on the skirting board or drops his toys. Four-letter words are a way of easing the ache.
Here’s one my grampa taught me: “Baked beans are good for the heart, / The more you eat the more you fart. / Fart, fart is good for the heart, / Keeps the tummy at ease, / Keeps you warm on a wintry night, / And suffocates the fleas.”
Toast
Andy and I met on a residential writing retreat near Hebden Bridge. We used to go jogging together before breakfast, down to the river, over the bridge, then up the hill along the stony path to the fields with the bullocks and the farmhouse, then we’d run back down, to the edge of the town, past the school—where we stopped once to listen to the choir singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—then back through the woods, the ground soft with leaves, the air still cold and damp with dew. Back at the house, we’d shower and meet downstairs in the kitchen, where we’d make ourselves toasted wholemeal bread and eat it with peanut butter and wild blueberry jam. We often talk about that week in Yorkshire; Andy says we fell in love with each other. She says you have to sort of fall in love to do what we’ve done. Three weeks after we got back to London, she suggested the baby thing.
Mark and I are on an all-night flight to San Francisco—our first holiday together—on our way to spend a week in my cousin and his boyfriend’s house while they’re in Tokyo meeting the distributor of the handbags they make. In the morning the steward brings us French toast with tubs of “breakfast syrup,” a kind of honey substitute, and Mark, because it’s morning and he’s just woken up, takes my hand, puts it on his hard-on, and says: “Now what?”
“Let’s see,” I say.
“Not here,” he says.
“It’s still dark,” I say. “Everyone’s half asleep.”
And he pulls it out, his big one-eyed trouser monster, as the sun begins to rise over the California desert, and he plays with it under his tray of breakfast goodies, eyes closed, me gently pinching his nipple, until he comes in his fist.
“Milk for your tea, sir?” I say, and put a finger in his palm, spoon some out, and wipe it onto my eggy French toast.
“Ooh la la,” he says. “Le sperm perdu sur le pain perdu,” and opens his mouth for a bite.
Black Pudding
I want to write a poem and call it: “An Ode to My Lover Eating Black Pudding.”
Marmite
How wonderful to be in England among lovers of Marmite. Marmite is the taste of civilization. The civilized world is salty and smells of yeast extract. Andy says Marmite is a class thing; working-class people hate it. How disappointing for her to have a son growing up in Stoke Newington demanding Marmite sandwiches in his packed lunch.
I teach our son the comfort of Marmite and scrambled eggs on toast.
“What else could we have on toast?” I say.
“Poo,” he says.
“Poo on toast?” I say, the joy of being made to laugh, the pride and relief of creating a child with a sense of humor.
“Daddy,” he says, my laughter a distraction from the task at hand. “Cut my toast for me.”
Tea
My boyfriend and I eat at the Kurdish restaurant
on Stoke Newington Road. (Not on the nights my vegan son is with us. “Daddy,” he says. “Eggs have souls, too.”) The Kurdish restaurant is our treat when I’ve finished a story or Mark’s clinched a deal (like getting a million-pound loan for some company so they can buy gas from the Kuwaitis) or neither of us wants to cook, because we’ve just been flying for hours from San Francisco. Adana kebab, lamb shish, hummus and salads, then small fragile glasses of tea on a saucer with two heart-shaped cubes of sugar.
During the days of my father’s dying in Israel, we drank tea with mint or green tea from the box my mother kept in the cupboard beside my father’s hospital bed.
I met a man once, the man who broke the heart my boyfriend had to fix, who drank only Lapsang souchong and Assam tea. For the weeks after he left—and I’d only just bought the boxes of Twinings for his breakfast—I drank Lapsang and Assam, morning, noon, and night. I was Medusa eating her children so as never to say good-bye to them.
I like my tea strong so that it looks like coffee.
“Just like my dad,” Mark says.
I drink tea the way my boyfriend’s father drinks it.
People say: I won’t leave you for all the tea in China.
Sausages
In South Africa we called sausages boerewors and kebabs sosaties. The bundu was the bush and the veld was the open field across the road from our house on Jenvey Road, Summerstrand. Every Sunday was a braai day, boerewors and sosaties on the barbecue; it was the maid’s day off and, as my mother would say: “There’s no one to wash up after you,” so we took it in turns to set the table and do the dishes. I remember my father coming in from the garden in his Speedo, the heavy Magen David pendant nestled in his chest hair, carrying a silver tray with braaied meat like a Levi making sacrifices in the temple.
We were in San Francisco when Linda McCartney died. I thought: Who’s going to make sausages for my vegan son now that she’s gone?
Jam
A moment of infidelity: Alex is a big blond giant with a thick coat of marmalade-colored fuzz on his chest.
Mushrooms and Tomatoes
My father, when he was dying of cancer—although at that stage he, like us, didn’t know he was dying—went on a strict diet, a regimen he thought would stop the cancer cells from devouring his body. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is too ugly to show its face; the killing happens beneath the skin, in the tunnels of the bone marrow. If he stopped eating spinach, he thought, all the killing would stop.
A week after he’s gone, we’re in the kitchen and my mother’s washing three cos lettuces, drying the leaves and packing them in the crisper.
“We only need a few leaves for the salad,” I say.
“It’s habit,” she says. “For the past year all I’ve been doing is washing these things for your father.”
Six leaves with each meal. Fresh cabbage, too.
“Never eat your mushrooms raw,” my father tells me on the phone.
I, too, believed food would save him. So my sister and I made carrot and beetroot juice, mixed in acidophilus powder, and fed it to him through the tube that hung from the hook on the wall above his bed. We’d brought him back from the hospital for what turned out to be his last three days. Three days, and then his eyes shot open at two o’clock on a Friday morning.
His spirit hovered in the house for another ten hours of grace before the men from Hevra Kaddisha came to wrap his body in a sheet, tie him to a stretcher, and take him eight floors down, stood upright in the lift like a granite Egyptian cat god.
Now, from the seeds of the tomatoes he grew in his roof garden in Israel, we grow cherry tomatoes in our back garden in London. My son calls them Grampa’s Tomatoes and insists we water them whenever he’s here, whether it’s been raining or not. And it’s been raining a lot this summer.
We go mushrooming in Roslyn Glen with Denise and Andy, and Andy’s brother, John. John’s girlfriend tells stories to the kids—ours and theirs—while we drink magic mushroom tea and sing nursery rhymes to a reggae beat in the drawing room of Roslyn Castle.
Bubble and Squeak
I was ten when I started shoplifting. It was summer, November in South Africa, and the week leading up to Guy Fawkes. My cousin (who now lives in San Francisco) and our friend Michael Roberts (who died of AIDS when he was twenty-three) dare me to go into Mr. Theocharus’s grocery shop and steal firecrackers. So I fill the pockets of my jacket and trousers with Chinese crackers and Catherine wheels and walk out the shop. Mr. Theocharus calls me back.
“That’s all I took,” I say, handing over the firecrackers in my jacket pocket.
Back at Michael Roberts’s house—there are always those boys who are referred to by both first and last names—Cecilia, the maid, comes upstairs shouting that Mr. Theocharus is here with the police. I throw the firecrackers out the window into the swimming pool and hide under the bed. Eventually my cousin and Michael Roberts can’t keep themselves from laughing, and Cecilia comes to tickle me under the bed.
I still love the thrill of stealing things.
Spotted Dick
In the beginning my boyfriend rolls back his foreskin—a wonder in itself—and I notice little pimply things around the base of his corona.
“Is that a fungus or something,” I say.
“A fungus?” he says. “They’re sensory glands.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “Now you have.”
A Serviette
“Is there anything you miss?” Anne-Marie says.
“I miss the sea,” I say.
We are sitting on her balcony in Tel Aviv overlooking a paved courtyard. I’m on a rare visit here from London. I have lived away from here for seven years; the last time I returned was two years ago when my father died. Anne-Marie is still married to her computer programmer, a nice guy from Jerusalem, and is pregnant with their second child. In the courtyard, an old man is hanging up his laundry on the communal revolving washing line; at his feet, a plastic laundry basket overflows with faded T-shirts and underwear.
“You must miss more than that?” she says.
She’s an Israeli now, and like all Israelis she wants to be reassured that their country is not a mistake; that they won’t have to give it back; that history will not repeat itself.
“I miss the beach,” I say. “And I miss the cottage cheese and chopped-up salad with cucumbers and tomatoes and the thick slices of lechem chai you get at Israeli breakfasts.”
“You know,” she says. “I’ve never really understood why you left.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I say.
“But it wasn’t just the politics,” she says. “I know it was more than that.”
“Everything was getting so messy,” I say.
“It’s always messy,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “But everything felt like it was getting out of hand. Remember that guy who blew himself up on the number 5 bus on Dizengoff Street, just under the bridge, and they had to pick body bits out of the trees. And then Munir telling us that he’d gone to school with the guy. That was more or less when I found out Dan was sleeping with Amir, and his betrayal felt like an act of revenge, like Dan wanted to possess something I’d had, which is basically how he put it to me.”
I spent the first Gulf War in this flat, me and Anne-Marie and Munir, her Palestinian boyfriend. We’d sat on the edge of the bath in our gas masks, the room sealed with plastic sheeting and bleach-soaked towels over the plug holes, and we’d held hands while bombs fell just meters away from here. In the mornings we’d go down to the grocers on Ibn Gvirol Street for food, then stay in all day watching television and teaching each other nursery rhymes in French and English and Arabic.
“How’s Frankie,” she says.
“Did I tell you what he says about eggs?” I say. “And how beautifully he says ‘fuck’?”
I tell my friend Anne-Marie about my five-year-old son. And while I’m telling her I realize that some of us—espe
cially the ones who keep moving from place to place—orchestrate our lives as if they were stage plays, and that the farther we move from home, the greater our freedom to choose the characters in our little dramas. It’s only when we settle down—and I think that’s what’s happening to me—that we stop wanting out or wanting more and our hearts can open up to the beauty of the ordinary.
Thermopylae
James McCourt
29 October, 1956
Magwyck (The Snug)
My dearest Mawrdew Czgowchwz,
In deepest gratitude for (and in consternation and chagrin at the tardy response to) yours of the 29th ultimo.
As Malevich has written, the airplane was not contrived in order to carry business letters from Berlin to Moscow (or the diplomatic pouch either from New York to Dublin) but rather in obedience to the irresistible drive of this yearning for speed to take on external form. In this line, Fama Volat: the Meneghini has sung. More later: it was more than just a night out.
I am off tomorrow to lonely, wintry, appropriate Manitoy to work on the outdoor-summer-night play, The Archons. (Seditiosi voci who do work of summer in winter, especially when work in question is, well, seditious, and features, as did Massine’s ballet of the Seventh Symphony, the Creation of the World, the Destruction of the World, and the Descent from the Cross in between.)
“For a while,” wrote Hart Crane, “I want to keep immune from beckoning and all that draws you into doorways, subways, sympathies, rapports and the City’s complicated devastation.” And Albertus Magnus, no less, directs “those wishing to reminisce, should withdraw from the public light into obscure privacy: in the public light the images of sensible things are scattered and their movement is confused; in obscurity however they are unified.”
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