Not to mention that everything here is colored in varying shades of purgatorial gray: the slate of the ceiling tiles, the wet-concrete hue of the columns, the floor tiles mottled like dusty gravel. The light pale and diffuse, a fluorescent mist. As in Dante's Purgatorio, no one casts a shadow. Time passes on, and we perceive it not. The escalators move us from one mountainous terrace to another. What negligence, what standing still is this. And instead of Dante's angels, with their flaming swords deprived of points, we are guarded by TSA screeners like my new friend advising me to repent from the death-lust of Lucky Strikes, marking my forehead with that bleating electronic wand of his as Alighieri's brow was carved at the gates. Confess thy sins, tiger: May pity and justice disburden you soon, that ye may have power to move the wing. Empty your pockets, please. Empty too thy addled mind.
***
Ray Queneau—formerly a minor god of mine, so far as translating goes; this, of course, back when I actually had gods (now I only have you)—once said that true stories are about food and made-up stories are about love. This line flitted into my mind a few minutes ago as I was chewing a "famous"
"Baja" Chipotle Chicken Burrito from the Burrito Beach outlet. (I accompanied my six-pound burrito—a steaming hippo turd disguised as cuisine—with an "Arizona Green Tea," in order, I guess, to completely short-circuit my gastrointestinal receptors. Were I, say, a drunk New Orleans attorney, I might leap across the counter to throttle the server for this cement mixer of a dinner, though the homemade gang tattoos sprucing the server's knuckles might give me pause, plus it's not like I didn't have an array of other food-court options. Butter Crust Chicagoland Pizza & McFuggets! Fu Manchu Wok Craaaaziness. Aromatherapy smoothies. But the Burrito Beach had the shortest line, hence my hippo turd. When I dumped my uneaten leftovers in the trash, the whole can trembled.)
Anyway, Queneau, me chewing: I was idly skimming this dread letter of mine when my eyes happened to stop on the three blank lines that I left between the tale of Bennie and Stella's first encounter and that of my run-in with the sweet old munchkinette outside advocating slot-machine therapy. Three blank lines: a page break, a smoke break, a visual exhalation after that remembrance of Magazine Street. Don't riffle backwards—I can tell you precisely what I wrote: "I stood there for a long while, my heart a sparkler spraying light across the sidewalk." A nice metaphor, isn't it? If maybe a little dainty & saccharine. Naturally I stole it. Sort of stole it, anyway, from a dead Varsovian poet named Blazej Krawczyk whose posthumous collected poems I translated years ago. The verse, so far as I can recall it, went something like this:
On an empty street, past midnight, you lit my heart's fuse.
I watched, amazed, as my chest
heaved white sparks upon the stones.
I laughed because I had never seen it do that.
But when I looked up you were running. You
glanced only once over your shoulder as you fled.
You could not have heard me say your name. Katarzyna.
No. All you could have heard was the blast.
For blocks, every windowpane quivered. Dogs
barked, lights appeared as question marks. But
there was nothing to see. You were gone
and so was I.
How brutal! And of course how common. This Katarzyna performing the romantic equivalent of the old Halloween "ring and run" trick. You can almost hear the clicks of her heels on the rainslicked cobblestones while the poet stands frozen with his poor torso about to explode, the expression on his face collapsing, melting, as the fuse dwindles inward. (Though I doubt Krawczyk would have written those lines had he lived long enough to see suicide bombers dominating the newscrawls ... the modern evocations—wrecked and repressed Arab youths transforming themselves into hand grenades, into fatal pop-up political ads—are just too godawful ugly. Dear American Airlines, you've got far more pressing personal grievances against the jihadists than I do, but still, notwithstanding what they did to my adopted city, and the hot bejesus they scared out of my mother, the fuckers also soiled a great metaphor. If there is any vengeful comfort available to us, though, consider this: A savvy German scholar calling himself Christoph Luxenberg—a shielding pseudonym—recently concluded that the passages in the Koran promising a bevy of dark-eyed virgins to dead Muslim males is a mistranslation. Read in the original Syriac, the Koran instead promises rare and presumably delicious white raisins, which, while mildly tempting in the way of dried fruit, hardly approach the moist allure of seventy-two spread-eagled sweeties beckoning with a curled finger in the way of pulp-fiction vixens. Would the jihadists who flew your planes into the twin towers & the Pentagon have licked their lips before impact in the expectation of raisins? Let us not forget that suicide is a profoundly self-interested act. Luxenberg's revelation has lately stiffened my resolve when my translating seems worthless, a chore of lingual accountancy. The right word matters, it says to me. The wrong ones infect, spread disease. Words are everything.)
One thing, however, that I've never been entirely clear about: Did Katarzyna perish in the blast? It's not altogether evident, is it? Wy byliscie nieobecni, was what Krawczyk wrote: literally, You were absent. Krawczyk was three years dead by the time I got to the poem, so I never had the chance to ask. I suppose the answer hinges on whatever emotional luggage you're packing when you encounter the poem. Is the end of love an implosion or an explosion? Was that hussy Katarzyna flattened by shrapnel (metaphorically, of course), hurled face-first to the street, or did the poet's remains float down upon her like flakes of soot, like benign embers hissing in the rivulets of rainwater between the cobblestones?
But then it appears I'm skidding off the runway again. Where was I? Oh yes: the young Me as fizzy sparkler, freckling Magazine Street with my Stellated ecstasy. And then those three blank lines, containing multitudes. That tender, gauzy fade-out. What I'm wondering is why I stopped the story where I did, with that sweet pilfered metaphor that's been jangling about in my pockets for years. (Beyond the obvious reason, I mean: I needed a cigarette.) Unlike Krawczyk's betrayed poet, I didn't go boom that morning. I went back home and mixed a stout nightcap and smoked two or three Luckies before masturbating myself to sleep. Six or seven hours later I helped Charles clean his apartment, bagging beer cans and emptying ashtrays and fielding shit from him for "disappearing all night with that flatchested chick." ("Flatchested?" I said. "You sure? I didn't notice."
"You didn't notice," he said, with a roll of the eyes. Well, I didn't notice.) Then we went to the Exchange where I got luminously hammered and considered calling Stella—I still had her number in the back pocket of my jeans—but didn't, mostly owing to the presence there of an art student named Valerie who, when she drank gin, tended to get nearsightedly horny, and who happened that night to be drinking gin. Normally I hated talking to her—she was from upstate New York and thought she was doing aesthetic missionary work down South, irrigating the Sahara of the Bozarts—but the saucy things she said under the influence of gin were terribly hard to ignore, e.g. "Gosh, I'm feeling so edible right now." Gulp. So why not finish my story there? Me, the walking, talking sparkler—drunk with new love, but drunker with vodka and erotic bons mots? Or for that matter, why not wrap it up a few dark hours later when I stumbled home from Valerie's barefooted because I'd been too drunk to find my shoes? (The next night, when I did finally call Stella, and we talked for three hours, it emerged that I'd been shoe shopping that afternoon. The joke, for weeks after, was that I'd bought new shoes to impress her. Her joke, not mine.)
But then Krawczyk wasn't writing about the beginning of love, let's remember, Bennie. He was writing about the end.
After my and Stella's final argument, kindled by my conjuring of Speck's far-off wedding, naturally I retreated to the Exchange. The typical male drinks heavily in such situations, so I suppose I was typical though toward the far end of the bell curve. To put it mildly I drank my fool head off. I toppled off my barstool and vomited in the bathroom trough an
d spent much of the evening collapsed against the shoulder of B. B. Mike who goodnaturedly obliged me though not without calling me a drooling homo. Some Uptown cuties slumming it for a bachelorette party sneaked a plastic tiara onto my head—without ever speaking to me, I mean; that's what kind of spectacle I was—which I didn't even know was there until long after I'd left the bar. That must've been four or five hours after my entrance; all I know is that I departed, on foot (Felix the Fat confiscated my keys), and in a light rain, well before last call.
The key was gone. We kept the spare housekey hidden beneath a struggling potted cotton plant in the hallway; the key was for me because I was always forgetting my own keys, or, on rarer occasions like this one, having them taken away from me. I rapped on the door for several minutes—a frantic rat-a-tat—at first as quietly as I could (for Speck's sake), and then with mounting urgency and volume. When that didn't work I pounded the door with the side of my fist. Inside me was a shotgun-patterned anger that even today I can't precisely explain: I was angry at Stella for no longer being in love with me and angry at myself for deserving that unlove. I was boiling in guilt for the ... for the shambles I was, and with rage for the shambles I thought she'd made of me. I hated her for wanting to leave me even though a part of me wanted to watch her go. I hated her because I loved my daughter and my Stellas could not be wrenched apart. I hated her because the sight of myself reflected in her eyes made me recoil. I hated her because all I'd wanted in life was to fuck and drink and make poems and die young and in the saddle singing yahoo. I hated her because I could abide neither her presence nor her absence. And I hated myself because I was a shitheel father who didn't even get the joy of parenthood until six or seven months in when Speck was old enough to react to me, to reflect me—which meant Stella was right, that down deep I considered myself the sun, the center of all orbits, my mother's child after all. And I hated myself too because when I drank I became someone else and I loved that someone else while I was him and despised him when I wasn't. And finally I hated everyone/everything because ultimately there was no escape, I was trapped within myself and my life, there was no ending or outcome that wasn't going to hurt me or them or us all. Yet at the same time I didn't or couldn't believe all that. There were words that could fix this, there had to be. We could bandage or bury this night & all the others like it with the right words, by saying them, believing them, crawling inside them together, inhabiting their worn confines, lighting a candle, and growing old within them. And while I punched that door harder and harder—I remember this—I thought of walking my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day. My mind fastened upon that frilly, cast-off vision that had so weirdly, inexplicably led me here, that daydream—no, that sweetened-condensed nightmare—that I'd never actually had before stating it aloud (why would I have? What man dreams of giving away what he loves to someone else, slicing off and serving a piece of his heart? That's almost like aspiring to be Abraham on Mount Moriah, rearing back with the knife over beloved Isaac. If anything I dreamt of my daughter traveling the world solo, absorbing its Technicolor marvels, writing me lavishly detailed letters from Borneo and Budapest, footloose and earth-soaked and wholly unbothered by the anklebites of marriage, the drowsy bleakness of domesticity)—there in that hallway I fixed upon that sweet, poisonous anti-dream that, in its revealing, had ignited all this, had triggered this end, and as I pounded and kicked the door I said to it: I'm not a liar Stella I'm not.
Nothing. I dropped to my knees and punched the door more weakly then put my ear to it to see if I could maybe hear her breathing on the opposite side. That's when I realized I was wearing the plastic tiara. Discovering that reignited my rage and I went outside and around the corner of the house to a spot beneath our bedroom window. A narrow, grassy channel separated our house from the neighboring one—too wide to pass an egg from window to window but slim enough to confidently toss one across. There was no light in our bedroom window above me but of course she was in there, I knew it. Where else could she be? By now the rain had strengthened and I was soaked through. Enraged and intoxicated, and above all else wounded, I stood below our window and with all that was in me I bellowed out her name.
Almost instantly, however, I went silent—struck mute by the interior echo. "Oh shit," I finally said aloud. Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna—maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.
***
Whew. Me again. As to the three blank lines immediately preceding this: Dear American Airlines, you don't want to know what they contain. Suffice it to say that I no longer possess that six-pound "famous" chipotle chicken burrito, physiologically speaking, and the evidence suggests that I may have been stricken with an O'Hare strain of E. coli that may soon annihilate me in a way the vodka never could. I know why the trash can trembles.
But help me out here. For the past ten minutes or so, among other activities, I've been pondering why airport bathrooms hardly ever feature graffiti. Truckstop bathrooms serve much the same purpose—as pitstops for travelers on the go—yet their walls are almost always festooned with rich commentary. Jesus saves! (The rejoinder: But Satan invests.) Don't look for a joke here, it's in your hand. Please don't toss cigarette butts in the toilet, it makes them hard to light. John 3:16. (Rejoinder: Matthew 3:20—just missed you.) Etc. And my personal favorite, which I saw scrawled on a condom machine in an Allentown, PA, truckstop: Insert baby for refund. In high school, a friend and I actually dialed a "For a Good Time, Call" number spied on the bathroom wall of an Uptown New Orleans po' boy joint. When a female voice answered we threw the receiver back and forth like a fiery ember until her plaintive, patient hellos got the best of me. "Yes," I said, appropriating, for whatever reason, the voice of TV's Maxwell Smart, "I'm calling in reference to a good time." "Oh, God," she said. "My ex-husband Bobby wrote that where he used to work. I thought he'd scratched it out—he said he did." At this point the conversation should have ended with an apology from me and the buzz of a dial tone from her, but without so much as an awkward pause she asked if I'd had the roast beef and gravy (the restaurant's claim to glory) and I said no, I'd had a peacemaker (fried oysters & shrimp), which she said was okay but not nearly as good as the roast beef and gravy so long as you got it "dressed" but not with pickles because pickles were gross. The conversation continued like this, lazily, while my buddy lay on the couch asphyxiating himself with pillows—he was certain I was en route to high-speed carnal glory the moment he heard me venture that "sometimes dressed is good." After a while I abandoned the Maxwell Smart voice, which must have clued her in to my age because swiftly thereafter she begged off the phone. I learned several lessons from that call: (1) that the world was a much more lonesome & wicked place than I'd realized (her ex-husband?); and (2) that my native New Orleans, where dialing a number found on a bathroom wall yielded you a discussion about po' boys, was a truly weird city. (Allow me now to make the sign of the cross to bless its drowned soul. I remember watching the news after Katrina hit and think
ing—outside of the hot grief I felt for all those homegrown refugees and old ladies being plucked from rooftops and, Jesus, that poor kid being stripped of his snowpuff dog—thinking: There it goes, my past. Washing away in the flood, godspeed.)
Really, though: It doesn't make a lick of sense, this lack of wordage in the restroom stalls. Airports are petri dishes for boredom, rage, nicotine withdrawal, and gastrointestinal discomfort—the presumed nuclei of anonymous bathroom verse—and yet the walls here are as blank as a dead man's eyeball. The only marks at all are random scratches that I'm at a loss to explain, unless jetsetting circus tigers use these loos. You would think that some enterprising and disaffected soul would be inspired to write something along, say, these lines: I fucked in Florida, I fucked in Maine. /1 fucked for three days on the coast of Spain. / But I'll never be happy, never be free / until I fuck this airline, like it fucked me. But no, nothing. Not a sign of life in these restrooms save the sounds and smells of businessmen voiding the fruits of their expense accounts. Perhaps it's true what they say. Maybe poetry really is dead.
Mine certainly is. The last poem I published was in 1995; the last poem I wrote, not counting the ditty above, came maybe a year later. It would be false modesty to say no one noticed though just barely. Mostly, it was an amicable split. That great old line of Larkin's—"I haven't given up poetry; poetry has given me up"—doesn't apply here. No, exhausted from decades of quarreling, we each gave up on the other. My mother still hopes for a reunion, goading me with a stick rather than a carrot: NO ONE, said one Post-it, REMEMBERS THE TRANSLATOR. "Oh, Miss Willa," I whined back, "no one remembers the poets anymore either." Officially (by which I mean, when familiar bartenders asked), my reason for quitting was that poetry had finally struck me as a futile weapon against the world. Iambic pentameter is no sword with which to slay evil or even ennui. That sort of thing. And though I sometimes believe that, usually I don't. All I have to do is remember the streaming red blood that poems—other writers' poems—drew from me over the years. The way certain poems guided me through life like blue runway lights. Or more accurately like pinball bumpers.
Dear American Airlines Page 8