An Interruption

This is the first time I’ve heard about your obsession with Adlai Stevenson. What I remember—with mortification—is a lunch we had with Sam    Shapiro when he was still state senator.

I do too. I announced that I liked Ike. And that the democrats were idiots.

Well you humiliated me good that time.

Why? I was just a kid. Sam laughed.

No, he smiled; he was just being polite; politic.

Starched napkins; pewter silverware; stuffed chairs: mistaken colors. Green wallpaper that couldn’t make up its mind. Gruesome oils.

That shows how smart you are.
That place just happens to be a monument.
It was then and it is now.

I don’t care.

You don’t care. Do you know who designed
the place that you thought was so ugly?

This past May I set out on a pilgrimage back to Illinois but a bizarre illness and the reverse magnetic fields kept me from proceeding
south of Chicago.

And your mother said

how do you know?

I eavesdropped.

~

“There is no reason to go back to Kankakee.”
What she meant was: I should have
visited her instead. But she was right:

I didn’t need to go back to that particular town
to see the Chicago Tribune photo of the three men
smelt fishing on the banks of the Kankakee River.
What could I hope to learn, or to regain
wandering a riverbank I never wandered as a child.
I didn’t even remember Kankakee was on a river.

What could I hope to find—that the brick
house on Duane Avenue now had an addition,
or even a subtraction—the removal

of the brutal sunporch where I read my father’s
letter which mentioned Uncle Jack’s death in a P.S.;
 (no more barking out stratagems from the corners

of his mouth as he descended his
sunken living room in ruffled blue terrycloth
in front of his awed wife and brother-in-law,

culling the day by drawing his Minolta from the pocket
of his robe to take a quick snapshot
of his polymathic son torturing

the piano with his hands tied behind his back);
the sunporch my mother transformed into a hothouse
choking with rhododendrons,

which I loathed with all my heart with all my soul with all my might;
or that there would be a trace of the poster
for China Gate on the wall beside the theater

where my friends and I went to a matinee
on my tenth birthday; or that the glass booth
we entered to hear Dell

Shannon sing “Runaway” was still
in “working order,” available
to listeners who had to hear

repeatedly the emphasis in Margo Timmins’ phrasing of
“But”s and “oh yeah”s in the song
about the horse out in the country

she gets to see “every second Sunday”;
or that the standout goldenrod-colored
Frank Lloyd Wright house, then a restaurant called
“Yesteryear,” or “The Yesteryear,”
was now a monument where
people can no longer eat or touch

the slippery grayish-green wallpaper.
I loved and loved this small town—
yet the “Yesteryear”s intrusion of culture

gave off an air of dejection.
Wright was wrong for Kankakee.
The restaurant’s rough-textured walls

fronted the bruised rocks
of the mustard-colored river.
My mood was low when I passed it

one grainy November afternoon and felt
fall when dark devoured the yellow 
leaves that—just yesterday—

blazed like candles on the branches of the oaks! 
I don’t have anything against Wright:
the dark mood he inspired may have been

intentional, like the overheated
prose of a Gothic novel.
I found refuge in the vaulted rooms,

shadowy and cool,
he forged in the Arizona heat;
his private, necessary war

against an outside temperature
that hovers—painfully—
around the human norm.

~

I like that song about the horse. It’s wholesome. And do I detect a slight echo of the invocation in the rhythm there?
“Thou shalt love the lord thy God . . . ”

You bet.

Then something did sink in . . . And yet you claim—.

“—”

There’s something you forgot.

Forgot? Or left out?
Forgot. That “oh yeah” you like—

Yeah.

You don’t even know why you like it, but the “Brain” remembers. It’s an echo of a song by that sweet-voiced, clean-cut Nelson boy (which I did not attempt to destroy) where there’s a memorable “oh yeah” like that—do you remember now or do I have to spell it out for you?

No. “Poor little fool . . . oh yeah . . . ”

So who’s the “fool” now? You liked that song more than the songs you make so much about.

Yeah. “I knew that I would fall.”

Which proves my point: that you’ve forgotten the good and remembered the bad. The pain.

No. It’s the pain that remembers.

I still pray for you. Especially when you go up in an airplane.

I had one of those dreams the other night. There was a blizzard. The world got whiter and whiter as the plane waited on the runway. I was traveling with friends. They didn’t seem to mind. I got off.

And yet you claim to have loved that hick town. What was there to “love”  about it? (Your mother hated it.)

When I say “the town” I mean my friends. A sense of closeness, inti-­macy, of being part of a community for the first and last time until much, much later....  

That’s ridiculous. You were always part of the community wherever we lived.

You only saw the outside.

“—”

I remember walking home with a girl I’d watched and wanted to ap-­proach for several years and now her dark eyes scanned my face in the light and leaves tore loose and the windows in the rows of empty houses on the long suburban street darkened—a precise lingering, undramatic only on the surface, an inward hurtling toward winter; I didn’t want the afternoon to end because I knew it could never be repeated; any plan to meet this way would create self-consciousness, stiffness, resistance, even anger at coercion; would breed ragging by friends; and as I walked her to her door and she swiveled around on her stoop—her skirt twirling—thought everything would be all right if I could stay forever here where the light was failing but still luminous; the shadows bundled on the sidewalk, firmly planted in range of her alert, happy, twiggy walk, her slenderness and small bones that gave no hint of frailty, her serene confidence, the absence of indecision or hysteria in her pauses: her house a mysterious sanctuary of what, in those innocent days, was still called “ordinary life.”

~

Why did you have to embarrass me at the Yesteryear?

I didn’t mean to do that, I just wanted attention. I was bored, tired of listening—so I said something that I sensed would make

Shapiro’s jaw drop—

I liked Sam.

He and his wife were a childless couple.

Why does that phrase make my skin bristle. It’s like a—tag.

All right so Mark doesn’t like it. All right. So I won’t say it again.

You’re so thinskinned! He let it pass, why can’t you? He still asked you to deliver the inaugural address when he became Lieutenant Governor so the “guilt by association” couldn’t have been that bad.

~

Forgive me that bit about Ike. The sum of what I knew about Ike was contained in the image of him in the signed
black and white glossy
that my grandfather had

displayed

on his mantle—but next to Schweitzer mind you. (Laughter.) My liking of Ike was thoughtless; subliminal.
Your grandfather, that—!

Stay off him.

So I’ll stay off. But what do you think about a big.rhot who buys a box of five cent cigars and stuffs them into Garcia Vega wrappers; who pours cheap scotch into Chivas bottles; who picks up checks when he takes you to some joint that serves tenderized steaks and Heinz 57 sauce and lets you “do the honors” at the Oak Room at the Plaza.

(“Love is not love which alters . . .”)

a guy who lies, who aggrandizes himself

(and who treats his daughter like garbage)

(because that’s how he treated your mother)

I wish I had the breath!

You’re jealous.

Me? (Guffaws.) Why you’re out of your mind.

~

It wasn’t Leon who owned the jukeboxes, but Hi Grace.  He was a great guy, why every
couple of months he’d drop me off a case of Chivas Regal prime scotch or
Jim Beam.

Probably hot.

It wasn’t hot.
Hi was a gross, fat man, wobbly
jowled but with a heart
of gold: pure gold.

Each time I dropped a dime
into the jukebox you’d say
“another ten cents for Hi Grace”

(as if in awe of anyone who could
“make a mill” by proxy, reel in
the dough without being there
in person).
~

I’d done with running away
before I ever heard “Runaway.”

Every day after school
we’d segue into the town’s one

record store and use up our one free play
on “Runaway,” saving our

allowances until we could plunk down
99 cents and take home the 45.

With what stoic patience
the lady let us play it

day after day—squeezed together
in the sound-proof glass booth,

abusing privilege, bending
the rules with each hearing,

waiting for Dell
Shannon’s tenor to quaver

as it hit the high note on
wa-wa-wa-wa-wo-o-n-der

where our own
voices would break.

~

I remember the singer but not the song.
Didn’t he . . . ?

Yes.

With a 45 if I’m not mistaken.

So—another one.
And you wonder

why I tried to steer
you clear of that death-

driven—noise. You were
surrounded by death

but you didn’t know it.
I saw the dementia in your genes;

you had it on both sides.
No sooner had I married your mother

than her brother blew a hole through his chest,
and your father would have knocked himself off sooner

had he not lucked into the head job
in the company Jack built.

(Now do you see why he reserved
the fact of Jack’s death for a “P.S.”

under the guise of
underplaying bad news . . . ?)

That sounds like hindsight . . .

It is not. I knew you. I saw you.

~

I could have burst when your teachers asked
“what is Mark thinking about”
because (—and I’m being candid
now that I’m dead—)

I HAD NO IDEA
but I guaranteed them that you r—
distractedness was not
hostile or malicious.

But I could not risk
saying that you didn’t carry out
certain commands and instructions
because you didn’t hear them:

I sensed that while you were a walking
“emotional catastrophe” that the one
lucky card you’d drawn
was an ability to flee

the present—in order to be
more fully in it.
—Don’t forget—you were my student
as well as my son.

~

Your eyes floating
above the radiator’s hiss, out
the window, past the huddled,
squinting fence stakes,

while the cold wind whirled
the autumn leaves around;
your lost, tortured, yet rapturous,
expression—as you were drawn

almost bodily toward the dead
leaves as they rode the wind:
you heard pain in their being torn
from their branches; an all

but inaudible click
like a cane tapping in memory
down nowhere corridors;
like an impression that remains

without the source from which it came:
your gaze trained on that
doomed, disintegrating shape
until the instant when,

no longer suspended ecstatically between destinations, it stopped
falling—and car after car would
pour over it like murder.

~

I looked out for you! If it wasn’t for me
I don’t know what you’d be, or where.

You had your trains. Trains to look at and trains
to play with. You hardly looked up
except to look out. And then those
twins—what were their names?—
that lived down the hall would come over
and there’d be trouble.

(Narrator is dying to say—“That’s because when I brought Carol home, or Karen, you got weird”—but refrains.)

~

Uniforms

The Cohen twins. I wish I could erase them!
The two demons . . . never more demonic

than when on their way to Catholic School in Hyde Park
in their uniforms, the blousy white shirts

and gray slacks and medallioned
blazers they never removed even after school,

and wore even on that fatal—final—afternoon. . . .
Twins. . . . Pure malice when together

saint-like and gentle when alone—.
They cheered up at the sight of me

because it was two against one, four really,
more like eight, given the chemistry.

They didn’t talk much except to ask to be handed something.
The father, I don’t remember. The mother hated my guts:

Long before she caught me on my belly
in the freight elevator discovering an untold,

untoward pleasure—after it had risen to our floor—
a precise point on the glans of my penis which produced

a non-erectile, non-ejaculatory orgasm.
The look on my face must have been zoned out,

and it was from that moment when she stood
before the open elevator, her pale face ashen

below her helmet of fiery red hair
and against the reassuring navy of her dress
that she felt justified in her hatred.
I was an evil force, that had been decided.

She looked like the actress Jesse Royce Landis,
who played the reluctant kidnapper in Hitchcock’s fifties’

Technicolor remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much,
a creature of misguided compassion.

She had a smart professional air but no profession.
She was radiant, virulent with anger.

The three Cohens burned with a fever to destroy me
as if I stood for the undersoul.

And so her boys should attack me gratuitously in my own room,
like an octopus, their four arms and legs

everywhere doubling in the flare-up—
knocking my trains off their tracks,

dumping the cattle out of the cattle cars.
They were not boys who indulged in reveries;

they merely smirked, making fun of the very system they embraced,
as if to say just how far their uniforms were removed

from their true selves, while I was utterly
costumed in camouflage to get me less

battered as I made my way daily through the gauntlet
of switchblades and brass knuckles

on the mean streets of Chicago’s South Side:
motorcycle boots and jacket, white tee shirt, jeans.

Real danger I countered and survived, with only a rock
clutched in my fist, but the twins were something else.

Sometimes they followed me around the neighborhood in silence,
sometimes they pounced, and once when I led them—

mistaking the calm of their silence that afternoon for benevolence—
to that sacred ground where the orange boxcar sprawled

on the isolated section of track in the railroad yard,
where a secret source of ecstasy was to squeeze through the door and look out

at the slatted light stretching ahead like a ladder to the unknown. . . .
The twins immediately scavenged the ground for weapons

and went at me with two disused poles, facelessly, robotically,
as if they were beating dust out of a blanket,

poles that disintegrated even as they brought them down
on my head and ears and body, poles I could not

wrest away because they left splinters like the spines
of a sea urchin in my skin. They acted with such

disinterested cruelty, they were no longer,
to my mind—if they ever were—children,

but bullies who wanted to dispose of a mess;
as if I had become an inconvenience.

And the sun burned on the boxcar roofs.
And the pebbles along the rails flared,

and Chicago was on fire in the light.
This was happening now.