Nouns & Verbs

by Campbell McGrath

  Listen, I’ve driven all over this country, I’ve spun the odometers of a dozen bad cars, I don’t know how many road atlases I’ve worn to sacrificial shreds, but in each and every one New Jersey opens like a flower, dead center, stapled twice through the heart. Thus it is median and first to weaken. Until one sad and inevitable day the Garden State disappears forever, lost blossom of weary abandonment. Which is why for all these years I mistook Chatsworth for Tabernacle, driving blind across the heart of the state to our cherished summer weeks at the shore, stopping for tomatoes at the Green Top Market, for frozen yogurt at the Dairy Bar in Red Lion, steered by memory from landmark to landmark along 206 or 70, 532 or 563, it hardly matters which road you take, it hardly matters the number or the sign, because even without a map I can find it, nameless or mistaken, bypassed or misplaced, past or future, beginning or end, north or south or east or west, because Chatsworth is everywhere and Chatsworth is everything: dwelling place, covenant, congregation, tabernacle.

  Memphis

  Were we in town for the Elvis to-do? We sure were. Did we go to the midnight vigil last night? We sure did. How did we all like it? Wonderful. Every time she went there she got chills. We knew what she meant. She thinks Graceland is about the most moving place she ever was. Just looking at all those things, knowing they were his things, like the cup he drank out of, the mirror he looked into, his little fuzzy pillows, his toothbrush. It was a shame. He would of only been fifty years old this year, too. He was the King, though, he surely was . . . Well, did we like our catfish? You bet. More coffee? No thanks. Y’all have a nice time in Memphis now. We will.

  In fact, we had a miserable time. We drove all day and night and day again to get there from L.A. Albuquerque was a net of lights, magnificently purple in the first tinting of dawn. You slide down into its web from the high plains then back into mountains. And Arkansas at night, picking up the fringe of some tropical storm system, wipers singing that blue tune, coffee from truck stops and 7-Elevens, Woody Guthrie and Black Flag and Elvis on the Walkman. We slept in the car, with Charlie’s surfboard tied to the roof, in the parking lot across the street from green-and-orange-lit Graceland, after the other six thousand mourners left the gates. All those candles, and flower hearts, and women in raincoats crying, hysterical women with bright lipstick, and their husbands in toupees—from his hometown, too, Tupelo, Mississippi—and troops of women sweeping rose petals into the gutter afterwards, members of the Elvis Fan Club, Memphis Chapter, as we tried to sleep in the stifling humidity, the drone of rain and mosquitoes.

  In the morning we fought our way into the very first tour group. All I remember is how small-time the place seemed, just a country house, really, the almost pathetic homeliness of it. No guitar-shaped swimming pool, no solid gold Cadillac. Just the TV he always watched while he ate. A statue he gave to his mama. Racks of spangled, American eagle jumpsuits. We left town right afterwards. Rain all the way home through Tennessee, the tangled hills of Virginia, the storm building up to hurricane strength, past the terrible battlefield at Shiloh, and later Bull Run, places where Americans died in a roar of musket fire, all night through the relentless weather, Hurricane Elvis we call it, until even coffee won’t do, or the sad songs of dust, Woody Guthrie singing about the Grand Coulee Dam, Johnny Cash with “Folsom Prison Blues,” long miles of rain in the Appalachian night, dirges for the fallen, and into Washington as gray light broke from the east.

  Baker, California

  How many times through the suburbs of loneliness, isolated galaxies of vitriol and salt? How many times this transfigured iconography, the dry hum of terror and desolate generation? Trona, Kelso, Baker, how many journeys unto the gates of Death Valley? How many nights without refuge before one is forever marked and transformed? If the desert burns it is a property of darkness, windspur and cloven hoof, thistle like the portal of violet resolve. If the night reveals its inner self it is a property of vision, a kind of violent light, sheer and lapidary, gas stations, restaurants, assembled legions of last-chance motels, nothingness amid the nothingness of everything and nothing. Ultraviolet is the world I’m looking for. The word. It is the word I’m looking for. The moment, the place, the power and righteousness of a certain melody, not even needing to believe its dark intransigence but hear and glory in it only, the moment when noise begins to resemble music, when music comes to resemble noise. This journey, that journey, burdens and joys as hallucinatory as heat waves, the past a mirage of irredeemable distance, the place where light crosses over to water, where water reduces to light. How many times such transubstantiation? Angel of chaparral, angel of mercury vapor, how even to talk about those days now?

  Years later, Elizabeth and I came upon it like a vision in the wilderness, checked into the same room at Arnie’s Royal Hawaiian, the same tepid shower, the same beer and pretzels from the Stop N Go store. It was late, pitch black for hundreds of miles, and lovely in the false blue light of palm trees and neon, the rich green glow of the swimming pool. Try as I might, there was nothing I could say or do to convince her how terrible this place was, how abject a seat of desolation, why it signified despair and the madness despair brings down like unearthly snow. On TV, black-and-white helicopters circled the latest disasters: a train wreck, a toxic spill, a forest fire raging out of control in some wild scrub hills outside of—outside of Baker, comes a voice above the buzz of copter blades, the whole town of Baker could be at risk, is all we hear, before the audio sheers to static. Once, in New York, I saw two planes collide in midair: walking along the dock at 79th Street, deep indigo Hudson River dusk, suddenly looking up to a ball of flame, a blur, objects tumbling along divergent arcs like dancing partners slipping their moorings; the first crashing in flames atop the Palisades, starting up small ruby tongues that dozens of fire engines struggled to control over the next three hours; while the second vanished beyond the Heights, a palpable concussion as it hit and exploded among oil tanks miles away in New Jersey. I saw this, and I tell you, that moment in Baker was stranger. In room 106, all is still but the air conditioner. Beyond the window: night, blue palm trees, nothing. On TV: images of flame, multitudes of flame, silent minions and consorts of flame. We move outside to the parking lot and stare into the impervious darkness. Nothing. The ice machine whispers erotic riddles, the edge of something almost cool passes over us in the breeze. Nothing. When we come to the pool we take off our clothes, part the brilliant water, immerse our bodies in its radiance until they transform to fluid emeralds.

  Baker, California, is not hell, though it bears a family resemblance. That night was no infernal mime, though it carries still a tinge of the otherworldly. The forest fire burned in Baker, Oregon, a place I’d never heard of, absurdly far away, and by morning the firefighters had brought it under control. Exhausted, we slept late, and when we opened the door the dry heat sucked the night’s memory from our lungs. The sun was a hammer that bent our bones like iron bars in a forge. Heat-shimmers hissed audibly as they rose in swells to fuse with the roar of traffic and vanish in the colorless vacancy of the sky. Song of the oven of days. Song of the soul in the furnace of the body. At our feet, the desert begins. The grass gives out, the parking lot peters into dust, the endless gray ruined skin of the world runs off into eternity. And there is nothing I can say or do to help you.

  North Carolina

  The more you allow the figures of black, silent trees glimpsed by night from the window of a train near Fayetteville into your heart, the greater the burden you must carry with you on your journey, and the sooner you will come to question your ability to endure it, and the stronger your conviction to sing.

  Manitoba

  Ten miles in we came upon the locusts, road striped and banded with them, fields plagued and shadowed with their mass, fulsome, darker than cloud-dapple, slick as shampoo beneath the wheels. In the next town we stopped to scrape them from the radiator with our pocketknives. Grasshoppers, their bodies crushed and mangled, scaled, primordial, pharaonic, an ancient horde of
implacable charioteers, black ooze caking the headlights to blindness, mindless yellow legs still kicking. Not much in that town: sidewalks grown with goldenrod, grain elevator on the old railroad siding. Not much besides wheat and gasoline, the ragged beauty of the heat-painted prairie, wind with the texture of coiled rope, the solitude of the plains unrolling beyond limit of comprehension. It was time to hit the road. Charlie grabbed a root beer; I topped up the oil. We hosed out the dead and drove on.

  Rice & Beans

  “Dad?” Yes. “You are a wimp.” That’s very nice, thank you. Eat your grilled cheese. “I say you are a little wimp. I learn that at school. From a big kid.” Of course. “Tyrannosaurus Rex, King of the Dinosaurs!” Sam is not yet three. When he roars I stick a spoonful of rice and beans into his mouth. “Dad, did Rex eat ricey-beans?” I think so. “No! He was a meat eater.” That’s right. “They think he was a meat eater.” Who? “Scientists. Dad?” Yes. “Does beans have bones?” No. “Do cheese have bones?” No. “Why do they change the name of brontosaurus to apatosaurus?” I honestly don’t know. “Scientists know. They know, Dad.” Yes. Probably. Drink some water, please. “Dad, water does not have bones.” True. “Water does not have hands.” Right. “Usually, dogs have no hands. But Scooby-Doo have hands. Why, Dad?” He’s not a real dog. “Did he die out?” He’s just a cartoon dog. “Do Scooby-Doo eat ricey-beans—cartoon ricey-beans?” No. Yes. Probably. I think so. Eat your sandwich. “Dad, I no call you little wimp before. Rex call you little wimp.” That’s not a nice thing to call someone, is it? “Rex is not nice. Rex mean!” Sam roars and I stick a crust of sandwich in his mouth. “Dad, can I have a cookie? Vanilla cookie? Please.” You haven’t finished your grilled cheese, have you? “That’s just the bones, Dad. Toast bones.”

  American Noise

  Boxcars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual traffic, nothing at all; nighthawks of the twenty-four-hour donut shops; maples inflamed by the sugars of autumn; aspens lilting sap yellow and viridian; concrete communion of the clover leaves and interchanges; psalms; sorrow; gold mines, zydeco, alfalfa, 14th Street; sheets of rain across the hills of Antietam; weedy bundles of black-eyed Susans in the vacant lots of Baltimore; smell of eggs and bacon at Denny’s, outside Flagstaff, 4 A.M.; bindle stiffs; broken glass; the solitary drifter; the sprinklers of suburbia; protest rallies, rocket launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels of progress and mastery; tugboats, billboards, foghorns, folk songs; pinball machines and mechanical hearts; brave words spoken in ignorance; dance music from the Union Hall; knots of migrant workers like buoys among waves or beads in the green weave of strawberry fields around Watsonville; the faithful touched by tongues of flame in the Elvis cathedrals of Vegas; wildflowers and anthracite; smokestacks and sequoias; avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo tattoos; car alarms, windmills, wedding bells, the blues.

  Capitalist Poem #25

  This is the dichotomy: on the one hand something from childhood. For instance, well—Superman. That is: more powerful than a locomotive . . .; faster than a speeding . . .; able to—(this is it)—change the course of mighty rivers. Like the Grand Coulee Dam. And the people come from all around to see it, the largest tourist attraction in the Pacific Northwest, families from Seattle, Portland, all the way from Bismarck, North Dakota. And FDR created the CCC, which hired Woody Guthrie to come on up and write some songs about the boys involved in the electrification project, a great building and damming and tearing down of trees along the sinuous Columbia choked with logs. And Teddy Roosevelt created the National Parks so you could camp next to the family playing Scrabble in their Winnebago at a reservoir in Utah. And it was Thomas Jefferson who sent out Lewis and Clark in the first place, along the Missouri and across the mountains, and down the same Columbia to the sea. It’s a sort of dialectic. Youth and maturity. Man against nature. Childhood or a motorboat in Utah: that’s the dichotomy.

  As far as I’m concerned just about anything from TV was a more significant cultural phenomenon of the ’60s than Vietnam. The Flintstones, or Mission Impossible, or Lost in Space. I could tell you things about Lost in Space you wouldn’t believe. The carrot creatures crying Moisture! Moisture! The music that signals the invisible bog monster’s approach. Uncle Angus covered with tendrils. I don’t even know which are real episodes and which ones I made up anymore. I could tell you about the Baltimore Orioles. Roster moves, statistics, a twi-night doubleheader in August when the hot wind curls over the top of the bleachers and Eddie Murray wins the first game with a two-run double in the 8th. Between games the lines for beer and nachos are filled with laughing, smiling people exchanging jokes, weighing the season’s prospects, savoring the victory. The second game is a pitching duel, scoreless through nine, until Jim Palmer tires and gives up a run in the top of the 10th and leaves to a standing ovation. As the Orioles come to bat the crowd hums with energy, excited but not at all nervous, certain of victory in fact, because this is the magic summer of 1979 and fate is on the side of Baltimore. Inevitably, the Orioles get two men on, and with two out, Eddie Murray comes to the plate. Ed and Charlie and I are up screaming, Memorial Stadium chants in unison—Edd-ie, Edd-ie, Edd-ie—and when Eddie swings at a 1–1 pitch we know it’s gone even before the ball rockets off his bat in a tremendous arc, moving slowly and even gently through the air, perfectly visible, stage-lit against the deep green of the grass, the right fielder not moving, just turning his head to watch it go, and it’s like the perfect arc of youth, a constellation made up of baseball, booze, girls, and loud music, and even at 19 or 22 when the stars have shifted slightly to malt liquor, loud music, women, vandalism, and sports in general, that ball is still rising, old age and death are impossibly remote, and anyway those images of hooded figures and the grim reaper with his scythe are impossibly outdated, and now death is a giant incarnation of Fred Flintstone, impossibly huge, skewering passersby on cocktail swords like giggling olives, and he roams the outfield shagging flies, pulling the ball out of the sky in midflight, laughing loud as a hyena in the yellow-and-black-spotted skin he wears like a bathrobe, and even Eddie Murray can’t hit one beyond his reach as he lopes across the grass, immense and belligerent and well-intentioned, like America, clubbing his friend Barney Rubble on the head, and even if he were to slip, just once, on loose gravel near the warning track, say, we know the laws of physics, we know the parabola must start downward somewhere, and in the split second it takes to react to the home run you see that this is life, a luminous rise and a steady, frictional wearing down, a curve disintegrating in the sure pull of gravity, Eddie Murray dropping his bat and starting the slow trot around the bases, the crowd coming to its feet, the ball finally crashing into the bullpen.

  And you’re rising up with a great emotional surge swelling inside you. You’re standing on the aluminum bench with Ed and Charlie stamping your feet. You’re waving your arms wildly in the air. You’re looking up, past the glowing towers of lights, at the floodlit sky. You’re yelling like there’s no tomorrow.

  Krome Avenue (January 17)

  Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields sliding to sawgrass,

  cartloads of corn, or mangoes, or clean fill dirt,

  orchards of citrus and avocado, shade houses of the enigmatic orchid growers,

  dusty horses in a crude corral fashioned from cypress limbs where the canal is edged with sugarcane and banana trees by the freight tracks

  hard against the Casa de Jesús,

  convicts collecting trash along the roadside in their FLA CRIMINAL JUSTICE jumpsuits with the SHERRIF’S DEPT school bus on the shoulder, joyless troopers overseeing what appears to be a collection of high school kids caught with bags of pot in the glove compartments of their Trans Ams,

  security towers around the Krome Immigration Detention Center, razor wire reefs on which the rough boats of the lo
as bound for Lavilokan have run aground,

  gravel quarry gouging the template, coral rock pits and barrows,

  panel truck offering shrimp and stone crab claws from the Keys,

  pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons, pickups heading into the fields loaded with campesinos,

  faces of the Maya picking pole beans in the Florida sunshine,

  Krome Avenue: the Third World starts here.

  * * *

  Midwinter, and we have come to pick strawberries and tomatoes, flowers and herbs, our annual nod to hunting and gathering, a voyage into the remnants of agricultural South Florida, vanishing order endangered as the legendary panther. Sure enough, Rainbow Farms has been swallowed by exurbia, and we must head farther south in search of a passable field, crossing the canals where anhingas hitch their wings to hang like swaths of drying fabric beside the dye vats on the rooftops of Marrakech, tree farms and nurseries on all sides, freeholds of the Old Floridians or ranchitos run by cronies of long-deposed caudillos, ranks of potted hibiscus and party-colored bougainvillea, bromeliads, queen palms, Hawaiian dwarf ixora. When we finally find a strawberry field it’s late afternoon and many have given up, but there are still a few families in the rows, hunched abuelas with five-gallon buckets they will never fill today, and I wander out among them and lose myself altogether.