I laughed with them—even when they frowned and tried to shoo me away. But, of all the children on the block, I especially hung around to listen, for it seemed to me important to know which men the women preferred—although they often changed their minds about the one when the other truck would reappear.
The other vehicles that came down the street were not as magical. They were situated somewhere between the borders of our lives, between the extremes of coal, ice, and eating, and so were more familiar yet less instructive—less emblematic of our needs.
But the ordinary vehicle this story is about was once transformed in an extra-ordinary way—and it took on a magic far beyond the others. It was actually not a truck, this one, but a wagon, pulled by a slow horse and driven by a heavy man with a thick face who was deaf. The wagon carried a load of watermelons, and it only came by in summer. As the deaf-man drove the wagon down the street, he would shout out “warramerroo”—not a word, of course, but a signifier we all understood.
One very hot summer’s day, I was standing on my aunt’s stoop when I heard shouts and saw people running. I ran after them, and in the middle of the street, just down the block, I saw the watermelon horse, still in harness, sprawled flat on the hot street in front of the wagon—quite dead, as it turned out.
The women came quickly from their houses with pots of water that they poured upon the horse—it was midday, you see, so the men were working; and those who had no work would stay hidden indoors until after dark. When the water did no good—did not revive the horse—the women turned upon the driver and berated him for not taking better care of his animal—for many of the women had come from farms in eastern Europe and knew about such things. The old man, hearing nothing, but surrounded by flushed gesticulating women, waved his arms—at the horse, the melons, the heavens—and uttered loud croaking sounds which punctuated the spittle and the sweat running down his face.
Eventually, a wagon from the Sanitation Department came along, also pulled by horses—which to my amazement took no notice of their species-mate—and the dead one was cranked up and taken away. But the city wagon was quite long in coming, so we all (half the neighborhood was there by now) had a good while to gape, recapitulate, and explicate—to offer competing versions of how this natural disaster came to be, and how it would fit into our lives. To me, the horse seemed much larger dead than living. Before, he was just an ordinary wagon-horse, about which mothers would say: “Don’t get too close or he’ll step on your feet or kick you.” Now, dead, the horse was not only monumental, but also unique, for he was my first dead horse—my first dead animal—although I had already seen dead people in their open-for-view perfumed coffins.
But this horse was lying dead without a ceremony or a wake. I looked carefully at the twisted neck still dangling in its harness, and the head with its opaque eye, the tongue spilled out onto the pavement, and I watched the green flies as they settled down to feed upon the moisture of its sweat. But my greatest interest was in the view from behind—following the crease between the haunches that travel from the opening beneath the tail, and culminating—my first portent of natural sublimity—in a huge black penis, quite stiff and longer than my arm. The swollen balls that supported it seemed as big as the watermelons they once swayed in front of—only darker.
Although the women said that such a thing is not for us to see, they also were interested, and they seemed not to mind, after they shooed us off a bit, that we snuck back and looked some more. I was much moved by the spectacle—indeed, entranced—beyond the point I would ever reach in front of human nakedness—but I was also puzzled. How could this most powerful pecker, this super-model of my early morning tugs and dreams, this exemplary priapus, be on something that is dead—how could an erection come into being just when its body dies?
Peeing, as I realized later, is the enemy of erections; it imparts a dual function to something which should be autonomous, free of the mundane task of waste-disposal. My pecker always seemed restless when I peed, as if it were over-qualified for the job. But when it was free, not working at peeing, it became the least physical thing about me, for it provided a clear contrast between the ecstasy at its tip and the grunge of ordinary life. Is the pecker—despite what the tight-ones say—an instrument of the higher things? Do they (those wet mysterious emanations) become clearer—more doctrinal—each time it (the pecker) gets bigger? Could it be, then, that the pecker in its final erection is the launching-pad of the soul—the sturdy sign that shows us the straightest way to Heaven?
In the dead horse lying on the street in the summer’s heat in Brooklyn, I had found a bridge between my earlier and later life, and for the first time I realized that I was a traveler on that bridge as well; and I thought that dying wouldn’t be so bad if one had a cock and balls that big to show.
THE TIMES OF LIFE
For you and me, it’s time to pee—
but after you my dear, my second me—
or done by us in tandem, holding hands.
Then we’ll fly, both you and I,
across the waning summer’s sky.
To that other shore we’ll go,
although it lies too far for us
to appreciate its flowers and trees—
because our purpose (really) is to contemplate
the doings just before the pearly gate.
But we’ll try—the door to excess is ajar:
Apfel Strudel. Wiener Schnitzel.
Cunnilingus by the Sea.
Saltinbocca. Tarantella—also Salmonella.
Annunciation hoping for a better strategy.
In the morning, after matins, we’ll eat some waffles.
Evenings—why not taste the prolix of Rijkstoeffel?
Good times will come, you’ll see,
when skating up and down—over’s fine, but never under—
(best is going round and round)—
the cold indifferent waters of the Zuider Zee.
SCHOOL DAYS
One day, when I was in fourth grade, I was transferred to a room that had tables around which students sat, perhaps eight to a table, so that they could look directly at each other. This was a big improvement over my other room, the standard one, in which everyone sat facing front in those one piece chair-desks that seem designed to slowly but inexorably deform young bones. I’m not sure why I was transferred; it was the middle of the term, so I thought I was being promoted.
It had to be so; I had never seen a classroom like the one I now was in—large bright lights, with complicated smells of paint and paste, and pictures and maps all over the walls. The students, none of whom I knew, also seemed complicated. They looked better than the other ones, didn’t seem afraid to move about the room, and were all doing different things. They looked like what are now called high-achievers.
I had not been achieving much in school; mostly I was being yelled at. I take yelling to be a more assaultive version of loud speech than shouting; the rare moments of physical fury in my later life usually came in response to someone’s yelling at me. But back then, in public school, I mostly sat still until it stopped, or looked away pretending it wasn’t directed at me. There was little point in trying to reach for origins, causes, reasons. The episodes erupted and passed by too quickly; they were natural phenomena as were the teachers, not to be talked to—but the violence of the sounds made me wary. Considered as language, the yellings were like parentheses around periods of droning—they didn’t define these periods, but they did give them a shape—an