Category Archives: shards

December 6, 2018 · 11:03 am

arriving unprepared: for Jesse Bernstein & John L. Harter

Arriving Unprepared: for Jesse Bernstein & John L. Harter

Take a look around see what you see tell me when the phone rings the door bell the ring of fire the burning bush the inexplicable answer.

Hopscotch jacks Russian roulette one-season talk shows grievous sin and repentance you can’t short-circuit attraction. I dream of Jeannie with the light-brown skin Mulatto eyes the Jamaican sway of her hips is this sin or just a spark from God’s eye?

For years I lived in a pigeon coop on a roof converted to resemble a mansion. I hang on to the little things.

It all makes sense the key of C G-minor the cool drink in your hand the tamed lion the sweet child with diphtheria.

Mea culpa your weak options a sky full of stars and warped space. The small mice that nibble the fat rats that gnaw the cyberspace evolution out the back door of joy. Here I am starting over like the day I was born you can’t take it with you shake it off dream its guts out.

More noise please I am secretly an important man God bless Jesse and John, wrap your arms around their frail bones, soothe their pain.

I’ve seen the best minds of generations splattered white and viscous on the horizon of long-barreled hate and still there are women who cup my heart like a wounded bird.

Dream on. Up the ante. Fear no evil. There’s no such thing as forgetting just one-eyed misunderstanding a hoarse darkness gorged on infinite light.

Pray tell has my voice gone flat am I wrapped in barbed coils of dissonance?

Grapple with priority, mind wrestling in the mosh pit of your blurred streak of awareness.

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November 30, 2018 · 3:58 pm

wounded lion

Wounded Lion

 

“Looks like your lion needs ink,” the Safeway checker said. It was summer, tank-top weather.

“The ink’s fading,” I said. “I’m fading, you’re fading, we’re all fading.”

That was a little more than she’d bargained for, and her smile faded, just like the ink. “Have a nice day, Mr. Shopper,” she said, and turned her attention to the next customer.

She was referring to the tattoo on the shoulder of my left arm, a lion’s head with bared fangs, a salute to the end of youth, something I got when I was sixty, my one and only tattoo.

***

I walked into the tattoo parlor in the dead of winter. “I want a tattoo,” I told the tattoo artist in the first stall I came to.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I tried to tattoo an old guy last week, and the ink ran.”

I ripped off my shirt, and said (a little too loudly, perhaps, because the whole place went quiet), “You can’t tattoo this body?”

“”Sorry, ” he said. “You’re an old guy with a young guy’s body. I mean–I don’t mean old old, what I mean is–“

I cut him off. “I want a lion’s head,” I said. “On my left shoulder. Fangs and all.”

“Cool,” he said. “Let me show you what I’ve got.”

***

There’s no way to put into words the pain that got triggered when she walked in the door on Valentine’s Day, said she’d met someone else, turned and walked out again.
Depression is a feel-good word by comparison, anxiety doesn’t come close, and every breath I drew in every waking moment seemed an impossible task. And for the first few months after she left, almost all my moments were waking moments.

I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, all I could do was put cigarettes out on my arm, and by the time I showed up at the tattoo parlor, I’d lost thirty pounds. I wish I could say that getting the tattoo was a turning point, but it wasn’t.

They don’t have a pill for this sort of pain, and the therapist I went to see that one and only time (out of the same desperation that drove me to the tattoo parlor) told me cheerfully that at sixty I was now a patriarch of the community, and what I needed to do was start giving back what I’d received.

Jesus!

“This too shall pass,” she said, “but with those burn marks on your arm, I may have to put you on suicide watch.”

I stood up and leaned over her desk. “Think twice before you open that can of worms,” I said, and walked out of her office.

 

***

Now, twenty years later, the ink has stopped running, but the pain still surfaces every time Valentine’s Day rolls around.

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· 3:50 pm

aneurysm surgery

Aneurysm Surgery

Twelve years ago they sliced me open and replaced most of my iliac arteries with what looks like Ace Hardware tubing. Three days later I tried to escape out of ICU but was apprehended. Three days after that I feigned a bowel movement and got to go home. Two weeks later I was back cleaning windows and ripped the stitching loose, so they sewed in a 6×9 patch of mesh to keep my insides from flopping out. Seven months after that they went in again and sewed up all the little hernias that were popping out along the edges of the mesh.

They told me I’d die if I started smoking again. They told me I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. They told me I was lucky to be alive, those gigantic aneurysms should have taken me out. Not could have, should have. They told me I now had peripheral cardiovascular disease.

After a year they wanted to put me on a special treadmill to confirm their prognosis. I was about to decline the offer when the physician casually mentioned that this thing increased speed and incline in increments from one to ten and the only person he’d ever seen take it all the way to ten (and then turn around and run backwards!) was none other than Steve Prefontaine, a one-time Oregon distance runner and a one-time hero of mine.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.” I was out to tie Steve Prefontaine’s treadmill record.

They had electrodes hooked up all over my chest. They had a gurney nearby and a nurse on one side of the treadmill, a doctor on the other. There was a burly guy with a beard in surgical scrubs, his ponytail tucked up under a hair net, seated behind a control panel with wires running out of it into the electrodes attached to my body. It was supposed to start beeping if it looked like my heart was going to explode.

They told me I only needed to take it to level two to get the readings they needed, but not to push myself if I felt dizzy or out of breath before I got that far.

I took it to level three, grinned over at the doctor and winked at the nurse. I hit level four and the doctor said, “Okay, that’s enough, shut it down.” But the burly guy in surgical scrubs couldn’t find the off switch among all those dials and toggle switches and blinking red lights, and the treadmill kicked into level five.

I let go of the support bars and my arms fell into running position. I began pumping. I was drenched in sweat and my legs were like rubber, but I kept going. I was in 10-K mode, coming down the homestretch and gaining on Steve Prefontaine who looked over his shoulder in panic. I tried to give a victory cry, but it came out a raspy squeak, and then the burly guy jumped up from behind the control panel, wrapped his arms around me from behind, and yanked me off the treadmill. He slammed me down on the gurney and the doctor and nurse began working on me.

The test was inconclusive, the doctor told me, the control panel malfunctioned, they’d do it again in a few weeks.

They gave me a glass of orange juice and a tiny Baby Ruth candy bar and turned me loose.

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November 22, 2018 · 6:39 pm

age shells (the movie jarhead)

AGE SHELLS (The movie Jarhead)

Humanity has its demographics, a breakdown of the good, the bad and the ugly, the dumb-as-a-log and the acutely intelligent, the sensitive and the coarse. But within humanity’s framework there also exist Age Shells, the essence of which eludes demographics. Whatever Age Shell you’re in, be you good, bad or ugly, its essence permeates and subjugates all other aspect of your existence, and those who share that Age Shell with you are your tribe.

For example: you can’t throw fifty sixty-year-old men into a platoon bay at Camp Lejune and turn them into killing machines in eight weeks. But with a cross-section of eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds, it can be made to work. This goes beyond intelligence and ignorance, innate sensitivity or lack thereof–it has to do, simply, with being eighteen.

***

I saw Jarhead last night on DVD. It’s not a John-Wayne glorification of the Corps, it’s a study of a group of men in a young Age Shell in 1991, made savage and then sent off to fight an upcoming faux war–Operation Desert Storm. Six months in the desert with no enemy in sight, and they turn their savagery inward and direct it outward at each other and at women in general. Then, after a four-day computerized mostly air war, in which they don’t get to fire a single shot, they’re flown home again, TWA commercial.

There they are in their pressed desert fatigues on a bus driving through the streets of small-town America, streets lined with people from other Age Shells who are cheering and waving signs that read “Welcome Home” and “God Bless America.”

Somewhere along the parade route a Vietnam vet manages to get on the bus. Once he’d been a jarhead, but now his body has lost its shape, his hair is scraggly and long, and he needs a shave. He’s wearing an unbloused jungle tunic sporting medals and decals–the patterns on his shirt are the same as those on the shirts of the Desert-Storm jarheads, but the colors are different. He extends his esprit de corps, but it’s rejected, not by the men, but by the dynamics of their Age Shell. The Vietnam vet gets a glimpse of an Age Shell that he once existed in but no longer has access to, and it leaves him unsettled; it’s as if he’d never been there.

The Desert-Storm jarheads are uneasy too. They don’t understand why, but it’s because they are seeing not what they’ll soon become, but the outer shell of what they’ll soon become–you cannot know the essence of an Age Shell unless you’re in it, regardless of whether you’ve been there before. Nevertheless, war is a force that comes close to breaking down the invisible barriers between Age Shells. Perhaps this is why we refuse to stop waging it.

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November 20, 2018 · 8:42 am

aging

AGING

The new topic of conversation with the old folks I do windows for is health. They tell me about their cancer and their triple bypasses, and I tell them about my triple-A aneurysm surgery. They take in my neck brace and ask what happened, and I say, “Just some messed up vertebrae.” This is a long way from how it was when I first started cleaning windows and now and then a young housewife made a pass at me.

Yesterday I did a farm house I’ve been doing for years. There’s a senile woman in a wheelchair who spends her days staring out a big bay window, and a man with a litany of operations behind him and a belly full of hernia mesh like me. We compared the pros and cons of having mesh sewed into our bodies, and then I remarked that my stamina isn’t what it used to be. A rancher all his life, he replied, “It’ll get worse as you get older.”

I smiled and casually asked his age. I expected something between 60 and 65, and then I was going to hit him with my age, 69, and impress the hell out of him. He said 83.

“Get out of here!” I said. Christ, he has a head of black hair, clear blue eyes, and a flat stomach.

“Yep,” he said. “That’s what all the doctors say, too.”

I kept my age to myself.

He wrote a check, we shook hands, and I adjusted my neck brace and went out into the cold, realizing that for the past three years I’ve been asking him how his mother in the wheelchair is doing, when his mother is his wife.

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November 19, 2018 · 9:53 am

advice to a freshman composition class from an adjunct prof

Advice to a Freshman Composition Class from an Adjunct Prof

“Just do it,” he told them, “pick up your pen and slam down the words, don’t examine your motives, you don’t need motives, you need motivation, which is an air-brushed word for fire in your loins, which is an air-brushed phrase for a hard-on, a hot pussy–wait now, where are you going? The bell hasn’t rung…”

He regroups around the six students who were still in their seats. “Write about how it makes you feel to be labeled a consumer, how it makes you feel to have education labeled a product, write about your sex fantasies, about your wildest dreams, put down on paper what you’ve never admitted even to yourself, write down ‘Geronimo!’ and then jump off the cliff, write a manifesto, a haiku, a grocery list, come out of the gate like the black bulls of Palermo, gore the matador in his tight sequined pants flashing his distracting red cape, break your chains, do it and I’ll give you an A, fake it and I’ll fail you, try to change classes and I’ll wait for you after school. I’m not here to hold your hand and administer euthanasia, I’m here to brand your minds with the hot iron of freedom!”

Then the bell rang and the remaining six students filed out of the room. He shuffled his papers into his satchel, leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He smoked it down to the filter and then snuffed it out with his shoe on the floor under his desk. He walked home, cracked a beer from the frig, and sat in the dark drinking it.

***

There were three hours of meetings the next day, this committee and that, a faculty advisory committee, a closed-door administration committee, the Students for Straight
A’s Committee, they even dragged the janitor in and encouraged him to sign an affidavit about the cigarette butts under the adjunct’s desk.

Everyone on the various committees did his level best to remain oblique (directness courts reprisals), and in the end it was left to the non-tenured and therefore vulnerable Committee of Adjuncts to denounce one of their own and draw up the dismissal draft, which was praised (off-the-record) by the president of the university for its courage and honesty before his secretary printed it out and stuck it in the mail.

***

The letter was returned by the post office a week later, the addressee had moved and left no forwarding address, which left all of them except the janitor with a vague yearning for closure that segued into indignation–they felt they had been denied redress.

A tenured professor took over the class, apologized to the students for the adjunct’s violation of their trust, and then gave them an assignment they could sink their teeth into: a one-thousand-word essay on what it means to be an American.

Four of the 32 essays began with the sentence: “America is like the coolest place in the whole country.” Obviously someone was picking up some spare change writing papers for other students. But so what? Free enterprise was the backbone of the economy.

The faculty settled back down to business and began pushing product.

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