But they will wait, because I will wait. We will wait for the day when the puncture and cincture of Carlina Rentaria-Cruz becomes for Leonard Shlomith simply part of the day. And we will wait for that inevitable day when silent whistles sound and my one siren leaves me for a man the color of a fine cigar.
And do not say then that I will wait for something to wait for.
LABOV
“Go on out of here with yourselves and leave the lady alone!” I shout at a mobster gang of boys in leather who are taking up all the space of the plastic shelter of the El platform and who are whistling and making with comments at the tears which are frozen by the wind on the thick spectacles of Mrs. Tagus. I can feel in my cold feet on the platform (feet: arthritis also) the fact that the train is coming.
I tell Mrs. Tagus to call when she needs a late taxicab home. I will meet her at home.
A vagrant beside a burning ashcan for trash is singing the national anthem across both sets of the tracks, but the song comes to us and then goes in the strongly blowing winter wind on the platform. All the snow is frozen in rigid positions. I give to Mrs. Tagus the Thermos vacuum bottle of the tea for on the train, the ride takes three quarter-hours except for thank God no transfers.
I tell Mrs. Tagus to tell her boys to call my apartment. We’ll drink something hot, talk the whole matter out.
So here comes the train. Mrs. Tagus feels her way. She never talks when she cries, Greta. We pretend how it’s not happening, for dignity. She is inside the door of the train. She gets a seat alone, but facing away from where the train’s going, which I’m worried is bad for stomachs. Greta takes her gloves from her hands and puts her yellowed hands, which I can remember when they were white, she puts her hands up to remove her frozen eyeglasses. Without her glasses Mrs. Tagus is older. The doors close themselves before I can walk with my stiffness to tell Mrs. Tagus through the opening to face where the train is going. There is so much noise I can’t stand the noise. I have my hands in my gloves I bought over my ears and I see Mrs. Tagus pulled away north on a track. In our building in my kitchen I look at my kitchen and see the train pull her away.
EVERYTHING IS GREEN
She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.
She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette in light through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.
I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.
I light up myself and I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make everything feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you that are in the way.
She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.
I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more.
Her hair is up with a barret and pins and her chin is in her hand, it’s early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.
Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenet is cleaned off from the hard rain last night and it is a morning with a sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the big wheel toy that is on its side under a clothes line without clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY
“As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.”
—Anthony Burgess
“For whom is the Funhouse fun?”
—Lost in the Funhouse
BACKGROUND THAT INTRUDES AND LOOMS: LOVERS AND PROPOSITIONS
Though Drew-Lynn Eberhardt produced much, and Mark Nechtr did not, Mark was loved by us all in the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Writing Program that first year, and D.L. was not. I can explain this. D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of herself she’d extend to the space around her. Thin the way mean nuns are thin. She walked funny, with the pelvis-led posture of a man at a urinal; she carried her arms either wrapped around her chest or out and down at a scarecrow’s jangly right angles; she was slatternly and exuded pheromones apparently attractive only to bacteria; she had a fatal taste for: (1) polyester; (2) pantsuits; (3) lime green.
Vs. Mark Nechtr, who was one of those late-adolescent chosen who radiate the kind of careless health so complete it’s sickening. Ate poorly, last slept well long before the Colts went West, had no regimen; however strongly built, well-proportioned, thick-necked, dark. Healthy. Strong. (This was back when these qualities revealed things about people, before health-club franchises’ careful engineering of anatomy disrupted ancient Aryan order and permitted those who were inherently meant to be pale and weak to appear dark and strong.) Not handsome in a to-die-for way, just this monstrous radiance of ordinary health—a commodity rare, and thus valuable, in Baltimore. We in the writing program—shit, even the kids over at E.C.T. Divinity—could love only what we valued.
Also because D.L. was also weird, and conspicuously so, even in an environment—a graduate writing program—where neurosis was oxygen, colorful tics arranged and worn like jewelry. D.L. carried Tarot cards, and threw them (in class), would leave her loft only on her psychic’s endorsement, wore daily the prenominate lime synthetics—a lonely onion in a petunia-patch of carefully casual cotton skirts, tie-dyes, those baggy pastel post-Bermudas, clogs, sandals, sneakers, surgeons’ clothes.
Also because she also seemed greedy and self-serving, and not near naïve enough to get away with the way she seemed. She idolized Professor Ambrose with a passion, but in a greedy and self-serving way that probably turned Ambrose himself off right from the very first workshop, when she brought a conspicuously battered copy of Lost in the Funhouse for him to autograph—at East Chesapeake Trade something One Did Not Do. Was thus, for our interpretive purposes, right from day one, a sycophant, an ass-kisser.
Also because she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do This. By convention it�
��s seen as pompous and dumb. She made a big deal of flouting convention, but there was little to love about her convention-flouting; she honestly, it seemed to us, couldn’t see far enough past her infatuation with her own crafted cleverness to separate posture from pose, desire from supplication. She wasn’t the sort of free spirit you could love: she did what she wanted, but it was neither valuable nor free.
We could all remember the opening line of the first story she turned in for the very first workshop: “Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival.” Nuff said? Professor Ambrose summed it up well—though not without tact—when he told the workshop that Ms. Eberhardt’s stories tended “not to work for him” because of what he called a certain “Look-Mom-no-hands quality” that ran through her work. You don’t want her facial reaction described.
At least she produced, though. She was fiendishly, coldly fertile. True, certain catty coffeehouse arguments were advanced concerning the preferability of constipation to diarrhea, but Mark Nechtr never joined in. He spoke rarely, and certainly never about the kids he studied under Ambrose with, or the overall promise of their work, or their neuroses and tics, or their exchanges of bodily fluids. He kept his oar out of other people’s fluids and minded his own healthy business. This was interpreted by the community as the sort of dignified reticence only the valued can afford, and so he was even more loved. It was actually kind of sickening—D.L.’s fellow McDonald’s alumnus Tom Sternberg, the diplopic ad actor, had Mark pegged as one of those painfully radiant types whose apparent blindness to their own radiance only makes the sting of the light meaner. Sternberg had Mark so pegged by the time they’d all met as arranged at Maryland International Airport and departed via red-eye for Chicago’s O’Hare, thence by complimentary LordAloft copter to Collision, Illinois, and the scheduled Reunion of everyone who has ever been in a McDonald’s commercial, arranged by J.D. Steelritter Advertising and featuring a party to end all parties, a spectacular collective Reunion commercial, the ribbon-cutting revelation of the new Funhouse franchise’s flagship discotheque, and the promised appearance of Jack Lord, dramatic Hawaiian policeman, sculptor, pilot, and—again under the aegis of the same J.D. Steelritter who’d put Sternberg and D.L. together as commercial children thirteen years ago to the day whose start I’ve interrupted—director of a new and deregulated helicopter-shuttle franchise, LordAloft, that was going national as of today, Reunion day.
All that may have seemed like a digression from this background, and as of now a prolix and confusing one, and I’ll say that I’m sorry, and that I am acutely aware of the fact that our time together is valuable. Honest. So, conscious of the need to get economically to business, here are some plain, true, unengaging propositions I’ll ask you just to acknowledge. Mark Nechtr is a suburban Baltimore native, young, and (another thing he didn’t ever talk about) a trust-fund baby, heir to a detergent fortune. He is enrolled in a graduate writing program at the East Chesapeake Tradeschool, where he turned down the offer of financial aid, for obvious reasons, but pretty gracious ones. He is a fair competitive target archer, has been shooting competitively ever since he lost his technical virginity to a squat sweatshirted Trinitarian YWCA instructor who proselytized him on the virtues of 12-strand strings, fingerless leather gloves, blankly total concentration, dead release, and the advantages of arrows fletched by hand. Mark tends to walk almost tiptoed—something about exaggerated arches—has vaguely oriental eyes, radiates the aforementioned radiance, though he has glove-paled hands and a proclivity for neckless, rather effeminate surgeon shirts—slight imperfections that enhanced the overall perfection of the etc. etc.
How he was civilly married to Drew-Lynn Eberhardt was, quickly: one fine day he witnessed the lime-clad postmodernist write something really petty and vicious on the seminar room’s green blackboard, right before the first bell rang for Dr. Ambrose’s workshop; she saw him see her—shit, he was sitting right there, the only one of the eleven other students in the room that early; but D.L., seeing him see, still didn’t erase the thing, wouldn’t; she was on her way out of the whole Program by then; tactfully cool receptions from Ambrose always broke the hottest bulbs’ thin skins first; she didn’t care what the unproductive big-necked object of the seminar’s love saw; he could go on ahead and rat on her, tell Ambrose what he’d seen her write, or erase it, since you two are on such great good pedagogical terms. Well and she fled, in her pelvis-led way, in tears, as the bell rang, clutching her own polyester chest with a pathetic vulnerability that stirred something in this boy who, underneath a sunny hide-brown healthy surface, saw himself as pretty vulnerable and fucked up in his own right. But so he didn’t move to erase the petty critical limerick, and didn’t rat to Ambrose, to any of us, about who’d written it. He was unworried about us thinking he’d written it, so we didn’t, and anyway authorial identity was obvious—D.L. was the only student AWOL that day, and the thing had her dry, sour spite all over it (besides being self-conscious and bad). Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. And Professor Ambrose, though he said nothing, didn’t even use the eraser at first, was nevertheless visibly hurt: he had the reputation of being a pretty sensitive guy, off the page. Actually he was devastated, was what he wrote J.D. Steelritter, but he never told Mark Nechtr that.
By now Mark and D.L. were being seen together. Why? You can bet that question got asked, the subject of their fluids receiving the attention of many oars.
She because Mark was healthy and loved, and hadn’t ratted, had minded his own business, even in the face of what he’d seen and what we all wanted from Ambrose. He hadn’t ratted, which D.L. couldn’t understand and so genuflected to as mystery, as something deserving of respect, as virtue (she loves the word virtue, and even manages, as the coptering three of them sneeze in a harmony with the abrupt Midwest dawn, to pronounce the word vaguely as she sneezes: vuh, vuh, vuhrshoo—the habit drives Mark quietly up the wall).
Yes and but he, Mark: why? Well, first because, that fine sea-breezy day, Mark had thought he’d maybe seen a little true thing, a tiny central kernel of illumination in that failed limerick D.L. had composed and graphed critically over Professor Ambrose’s—and American metafiction’s—most famous story, an accidentally-acute splinter that got under Mark’s skin and split wider the shivers and cracks inside him, as somebody being taught how but not why to write fiction. He had, quietly, stopped totally trusting his teacher, inside, by then. Mark was down, blocked, confused then about what he was even doing at E.C.T., not producing what he was supposed to be producing. This condition was not helped by the respect—love, really—that came at him from everywhere in the Program, except from D.L.
Well and Mark saw D.L. around—he was a demon for coffee, and D.L. always sat there, in coffeehouses, alone, with a notebook for trapping little inspirations before they could get away. To make it short, they eventually hooked up—more or less because of something she’d written and something he’d not said. Just hooked up, in that gloaming territory between just friends and whatever isn’t friendship. They’d rap, do the beach, collect the odd shell, she’d tell him about the day’s troubles, she watched him place third in the Atlantic Coast 30-yard Championships, Young Adult Division. One rainy day, when the breeze off the bay didn’t smell like anything at all, when she’d had word about something vague and parental and was just awfully down, she propositioned him. They happened to make love. But just once. They were lovers one time. There nevertheless took place, as D.L. liked to put it, a little miracle. The sort of miracle that transubstantiates the physical (blood) into the spiritual (certain claims on Mark as an honorable lover). It’s very important to Mark that he be able to see himself as a decent and responsible guy, and so he sucked up the objections of practically all his friends and did right by a one-time unloved lover. Most in the Program thought it was the kind of rare unfashionable gesture that these days only someone of incredible value could afford to make. The little miracle—basically from one fuck, with protection, his—is now close to the
third trimester, though the way D.L. carries herself you’d never know it was that far.
Invited to the civil ceremony are twelve guests, among them D.L.’s psychic and Mark’s old Trinitarian archery coach. Mark’s Dad gives them a Visa card with no limit, in the Dad’s name, to help establish credit. Her psychic gives D.L. a quartz crystal way too big and phallic to be taken seriously. The proselytizing coach gives Mark a Dexter Aluminum target arrow with a nock of Port Orford cedar. Top of the line. The BMW of target arrows. Though D.L. makes no secret of her distaste for BMWs, the Dexter Aluminum’s the best arrow Mark’s ever had, and (sadly?) the main reason why the ceremony was, for him, the high point of a not at all promising marriage, so far.
OK true, that was all both too quick and too slow, for background—both intrusive and sketchy. But please, whether your imagination’s engaged or not, please just acknowledge the propositions, is all. Because time is severely limited, and whatever might be important lies ahead. So, as we say in the nation’s flat green gut, Hibbego, without further hemming or ado, in an uncompromisingly terse flash-forward, straight and without grace or delay to
THE DAY OF THE MOMENT WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR
For lovers, the Funhouse is fun.
For phonies, the Funhouse is love.
But for whom, the proles grouse,
Is the Funhouse a house?
Who lives there, when push comes to shove?
was the piece of anti-Ambrose doggerel the poor sensitive birth-marked guy walked into the seminar room for his MF 3–5 to find drawn onto the slateboard with the kind of chalk you almost got to wash off. He was devastated, said the long letter Ambrose had sent Steelritter to threaten about why he was maybe as a client and entrepreneur pulling out of the whole Funhouse franchise idea. Kids and students are a shitty and shifty bunch, in J.D. Steelritter’s opinion. Like dogs, that you have to worry about getting bit when you hold out the meat they whine for. Ambrose said he’d been devastated: there it was, he’d said—when you rendered all the flourishes and allusions and general crap out of his letter—there it was, criticism, right there, even where you ought to be able to least expect it. Criticism: it never left him alone. It lowered his quality of lifestyle. So why go ahead and try to build a Funhouse in every major market, for people to criticize, he’d realized, he said. Who needed the grief? Ambrose needed not grief, he’d written, any more than brave Philoctetes of yore had needed that snakebite.
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