56
Maybe I should be dead sixteen ways, but they can sledgehammer my rim back into shape and plug on any old tire; I’ll pay. Because these folks are fine at the wheel replacement facility. They’re no different. They’re practically the same as the same people I meet over and over in the middle of the night in Mobile when something very frightening is happening to me.
We’re congregated in a stifling hut—the stucco mechanics’ garage.
I lean on a tiled wall. There are fizzing snapping light tubes overhead. The room seems hollowed out to me, a green cavity.
I try to talk to them. I say, “Did you ever read Pierre; or, The Ambiguities? It’s the most disturbing Melville.”
I am crying but I try to stop. “White Jacket is more accessible,” I say.
57
Here’s a resting place for me—an all-night laundromat. It has a padlocked washroom, a line of shrimp-colored scoop chairs bolted to a wall.
My doctor did not prescribe enough drugs for me. If that ever was, in fact, his intention.
A tumble dryer is spinning my bandanna and the raggedy shop towels I carry in my trunk.
A berserk ringing noise issues from a game machine all the while.
Now a length of red hose untwists itself on the floor between me and the washers, snakes over and squirts water on my sandals and toes.
My car keys are where? They’re my only keys. I know I had them. I got here, didn’t I? Mightn’t those be they, clangoring around in the clothes dryer?
Men Who Are Too Young
“Clean as you go,” Hollis tells me. He says this is something he’s lived and learned.
He says so during this phone call he’s made to me at four a.m. Clean-As-You-Go is his reason for calling.
59
After I broke up with somebody and there were no more men, I called an old friend of mine, Lillian, and asked if she might fix me up.
“Oh certainly,” she said to me. “Plenty of people.”
“Great, great,” I said. “So, who’re you thinking?”
“Give me just a second.”
“O.K.”
“There’s somebody,” she said.
“Thank you,” I told her and told her I was hanging up.
“Wait,” she said. “Let me try a few things.”
So Lillian called around and she came up with Hollis. Grief-stricken and fresh out of his many-year marriage to Midge.
60
Now he and I are watching as some charitable organization pleads away on the television. The spokesperson says that without our donations many Third World children will go blind.
“Where the fuck is my government?” asks Hollis. “Why should this be left up to me?”
He says, “Suppose I don’t have any money to contribute?”
I don’t want to hurt his feelings or make things worse but I have to say, “That, is not too big a suppose.”
61
I should be ashamed, though. This is a man who buys, at a reduced price, milk and bags of bread that have expired.
62
We’ve moved over into my dining room. Hollis is backed up against the wall, measuring his height and marking over his head with a pencil. “You go next,” he says to me. “It’s fun to do!”
“Can’t just now,” I tell him.
He’s giving me a cool look and preparing a criticism. He carefully pockets his pencil, eases into the chair opposite, stirs the green tea in his steaming cup. “I don’t think—” he begins.
I say, “Well, no you don’t, do you? You don’t think this! You don’t think that! Don’t relay any more thoughts to me if you do not have them.”
63
I don’t open the door very wide for the spiteful hunchbacked landlord. He’s snooping around to see if I have a pet.
“No pet here,” I tell him, which is true, true, true.
64
I end up at the cat shelter. I step inside and announce that I am here for an animal who needs me.
Which is not true if they think I mean any cat in an iron lung or this ET-lookalike with the plate-sized face; technically a cat, considered so by a stringent application of the rules.
65
I say to myself, “Stop it.”
Or so I say. It doesn’t work.
Ain’t Life a Brook
Paulie says he’s crying because he’s tired and because his trousers are too long. He says they’re the only pants he brought to the hotel and they’re too long. He’s calling from somewhere in Manhattan. I know this from the 212 showing on my caller ID.
There are two cops keeping Paulie company tonight, I hear them in the background. They are Mikey and Rob. “Where are the other channels?” one of them is asking. And the other says, “No! You mean it isn’t even cable?”
Simple Machines
I would remind the ex-husbands, “We’re still awaiting your well-wishes and cards of concern, your outpourings and bids of assistance. You, who had something or other to do with my son.”
68
Paulie’s caretakers from the Sexual Crimes Division escorted him to the medical facility where the doctors are giving him TB tests and what all to learn something about his immune system. The Crap-Head Rodent Criminal, meantime, is in a cage at Rikers. That answers a few of my wants and desires. Not all.
69
Now I’m at a mall having indecision shopping and trying to buy something nice to send along to Paulie. A coat? No, no, he’s got plenty of coats. What’s that leave, then? I can’t think. A what? A what? A shower curtain?
70
And with bitterness sigh before their eyes.
And it shall be when they ask you,
“Wherefore sighest thou?” that you shall answer,
“For the tidings, because it cometh.”
And every heart shall melt.
—ezekiel 21:6–7
I’m at IHOP in a red booth seat, over a swiped tabletop and a Swedish stack.
In the booth ahead, with her back to me, is a woman, her bushy hair under a moss-green scarf. “Just say you’re my brother,” she tells her companion. “They’ll believe it. If they ask you, say you’re my brother.” The companion is facing me. He peeks up as he pours salt. Should I wag my head at him, no? Is that the right thing to do or the wrong?
I’m nobody’s judge. Not these days, certainly. On my blouse here, for instance, I missed the buttoning sequence by two.
Straight across from me there’s a couple on a study date. The male has a loose-leaf binder opened. He says, “Now we’ll go through these notes and pick out similarities and differences. O.K.? Here we go: ‘Traditional beliefs, customs, laws. Social strife was commonplace.’” He stops and peers through his wire-rims. His girl’s Rollerball is wiggling furiously. “Sheila,” he says, “don’t write the verbs. You don’t have to write ‘was,’ just write ‘commonplace.’”
Ah, but I hope they keep it up.