Autobiography no. 28

Her face annoyed me.

It was an exceptionally pretty face.
It had a remarkable quality of joy or despair or mischief or fey magnetism.
It annoyed me because practically every time she was around
I looked at her and smiled
and I was reasonably sure that this made me look like an idiot.

She was laboriously sculpting a rectangle of aluminum foil
into the shape of a heart
and though her wedding ring was on her hand
and I was sure her masterpiece was not meant for me,
it was easy to daydream.

When she finished she attempted to give the heart to one of her friends,
but her gift was refused with a wry observation that all another heart would do is break.
I said,
“Well a normal heart is useless, everyone knows that. But a metal heart is ductile. Malleable. Catches the light beautifully. Does not wither if touched by hands or time.”
I was unsure if anyone was listening to me
and I was afraid that I would continue talking
but I managed to shut up and after a few moments
she handed the heart to me.
I thanked her and immediately walked to the back room.
I put it into my jacket and shivered.
As the chill passed I rubbed the gooseflesh from my arms and returned to work.

When I got home I tossed my jacket down and kicked off my shoes. I took the damned heart out and it was cool as I delicately pressed it against my cheek and then smoothed out a few creases. I lit a candle and killed the lights and watched the flame flicker for a few moments. I blew the candle out and put the treasure on top of my dresser- a thin metal heart for a thin metal man.

Letter to Emilia no. 3

Did I ever tell you why I hate making mistakes? If I did, I was probably being dishonest.

I hate making mistakes because they embarrass me. Whenever I am embarrassed, I am going to blame someone for the way that I feel inside. On rare occasions this assignation of blame happens to someone else. Usually it happens to me.

In an ideal day, I will not ever blame myself for the way I feel, because it is hurtful and useless and dangerous. But the way I feel is always there, seething. I cannot call it caged because I allow it all the freedom I allow myself. It is a facet of the bargain I have established with my brain- I can tell it what to do and it will obey, but I will not tell it how to feel or try to change its emotions.

Tonight I was working and I made a pasta and I put broccoli into it which would have been fine under normal conditions, except it had been ordered without broccoli. It was my third mistake of the day. Three in seven hours. I was furious. I wanted to quit my job, if only so I would not have to make a mistake there again. Of course I did not quit. You know as well as I do that my passions cannot be trusted.

There’s no way out. I know that. This is the deal that I had to make. And I get to live, you know? And living is so goddamn good sometimes, Emilia. I got to come to the room I live in tonight and close the door and put on headphones and listen to Coltrane and Chet Baker and after a little while no matter what I feel, I will tell myself to sleep and so I will sleep. The next day I will do this again.

I tell myself that my crippling loneliness and anxiety are healthy things. They keep me honest and safe. They are a constant reminder that my brain is a weak and pathetic thing, like the minds of the people it feels such contempt toward. I have joked before that I am in an abusive relationship with myself. It is not a very funny joke and not a very useful observation. You see, I have absolutely nowhere else to go.

It’s one thing if everything is suspended and unreal, but all it takes is one overcooked burger or one overvegetabled pasta to remind me that the same emptiness that is necessary for my survival views me as prey.

Letter to Emilia no. 2

The words in newspapers put a certain book into my hands, again. Night. I cannot say I like the book or that I love it or that it is good, because it is an unholy thing, a monstrous book. I will never forget the first day that I read it. I was eight years old and it was the day after my older brother’s birthday and I began reading the book on the bus on the way to school and  already I understood something of violence- but nothing compared to what I would learn. Night is slim, even someone else could read it in a day and so I devoured it before I arrived to sit in chairs and be taught nothing, all day long, again, as would be my fate for the next ten years.

I spent much of that day bursting into tears. I was still learning what people were like— the way they would hurt and manipulate others, the things they would allow to happen to children, the sweet focusing power that pain possessed when wielded against oneself. When I came to the section where Eliezer was being whipped and writes “Only the first really hurt” and when it is over and the Kapo says to him “Understood?” and he writes “I nodded once, ten times, endlessly. As if my head had decided to say yes for all eternity” … it is not possible to overstate the effect these words had on me. Of course I already knew what it was like to nod my head in such a manner. But I did not know that anyone else in the world knew.

I slept last night, pleased with a day spent working hard and not making mistakes. I woke this morning to read of an appallingly casual act of mass murder committed in Las Vegas, hurriedly checked to make sure the people I knew thereabouts were safe, and felt sickened by my relief. Hateful words like “cholera” and “million” are printed too close together for any comfort and my sobriety makes me feel guilty for everything that I have done and also for everything that others have done. I am aware that my penchant for assigning unreasonable blame to myself is designed to render me powerless but that does not make me feel any differently. The constant assault of tragedy grows taxing, but I would be burdened by the past even if all the world was green.

The only thing to do is take a drink of ice water and feel the unearthly sharp pain of the cold striking the crater of my wisdom tooth. The air outside today is pleasant for what feels like the first time in months. It is the kind of day you would have loved. As is my custom I sit on the porch with the breeze washing over me and I think of the question Vonnegut asked everyone, a question I have been trying to ask myself each day: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Letter to Emilia no. 1

How fresh and recent you are in my memory, dear heart, though I have not spoken of you in a lifetime or more and though I would not be writing on this page if there were a chance that you should read it.

Summer turns to autumn but the air is hot. The national conversation is a rhetorical nightmare, my countrymen on the island of Puerto Rico are devastated by storm and sea, and the Rohingya are dying in Burma. I have been spending nights accompanied by thoughts that sprawl formlessly over my bed and sink through the carpet and floorboards.

There is no woman for me now and I find this terribly comforting- without the constant worry of betrayal my life becomes more calm and controllable. I have not been drinking for some time and so I have not been trying to be a poet, either, which is no loss to poetry although it feels as loss to me. I am aware that the touch of man profanes and my own hand seems to have this effect with great speed, and so despite my lost and discarded relics I try to smile as I go through my days.

I have been thinking lately of the last time that I had guns pointed at me. It was a little over two years ago and one thing led to another and the police were suddenly inside my door pointing shotguns and rifles and pistols at me, which I found surprising at the time. I remember the rush of cold as my blood froze in my veins and I said “This is my house, don’t shoot me” and I was aware that I looked like a madman, shirtless in basketball shorts with sweat glistening on my shaved head and an axe by the bookshelf and so much brandy on my breath that even I could smell it, and although I had wanted to die or thought I did I suffered the supreme indignity- surrender to the threat of violence. Though I had committed no crime but madness I walked from my house with my hands over my head and once outside I kept my hands over my head until an ambulance arrived because the police had shot a handcuffed man in the back of a squad car earlier that year just a mile down the road from where I sat and I knew then as I have always known that if a policeman shoots me there will be no justice. They looked somewhat amused or embarrassed or ashamed when they asked why I still had my hands up and I told them I did not want them to kill me. They said they didn’t want to kill me, so I pointed out that they came into my home and pointed guns at me, and that is what people who want to kill people do. I do not know if they were prepared to concede the point but the ambulance arrived and when the paramedics’ boots hit the ground I knew I wasn’t going to die so I started crying and I do not remember too much after that except sleep.

The first question, and it really is the only question, is “would they have shot me if I was black?” My luxury is that I never have to know.

I shall do my best to never write to you again. I may write to you tomorrow.

Letter to Cordelia no. 3

One day long ago you and I were riding in a car and you were driving of course and I had just been ranting about something that I probably didn’t care that much about and you had been patiently listening. We drove in silence for a few minutes and then I asked you what you were thinking about. You reacted to my question with suspicion, not because you were hiding something but because I had not asked you what you were thinking for many weeks. I often think of this event when I have failed to meet my obligations to someone, especially if my failure is an expression of a habit that I have formed.

For some reason I was thinking about these things today as I sat near a fire-pit on a large stone, wiping bright blood from my hands onto the dirt and grass. They were driving the backhoe around the house to collect the corpse and I figured someone would have to move her so I picked her up by all four feet and her four wounds like metal fingerprints moved along with us and I threw her body into the loader and that was when I walked away and sat down and I almost started laughing although I didn’t want to laugh at all. It was not what I thought I would be doing on my lunch break. I tried to be careful when carrying her but I ended up with bloodstains on my jeans anyway and so when I went back to work for my second shift on Labor Day I did it with the blood of a dog I liked on my clothes. Maybe it was necessary. I was not there when she was shot so I did not know. Anyway it was not actually my business. I do not know why I am telling this story.

I forgot to make my bed when I left for work this morning and so when I got back to my little room I stripped off my shoes and socks and shirt and the pants stained beyond repair and pulled the sheets tight and put a quilt at the foot of the bed. It is a fine quilt I suppose but mine is being repaired at the moment and no other quilt is satisfactory in comparison. When I decide to search for sleep tonight I will slide in beneath the sheets and toss the topmost sheet up in the darkness and wait for it to gently coolly fall on my body and that is not the same as having a good day but it is better than it could have been. I do not control the past, the present or the future, but I control the sheets. That is enough. It has to be. It is what I have.

Letter to Cordelia no. 2

The fallen tree grew a few apples but not many. Fire ants make nests in the hollow of the roots and soon they will burn, and the tree with them. The days grow so hot and it seems that the garden wilts each afternoon. I so rarely dedicate attention to the weather that summer is a bizarre occurrence to me, though it happens every year and I should be expected to anticipate it. As a boy my obligations were subject to the weather day by day and so I was preternaturally aware of what the wind and swamp air promised. Now I only wish to know if it will rain, so I can decide if I must mow the yard soon or if this labor can be delayed.

An impossible thing happened. I was about to eat and so I was boiling precisely four cups of water for my ramen and I had made two sandwiches with turkey and American artificial cheese and mayonnaise and brown mustard and as the water was heating I sat on the couch to read and wait and I looked on the coffee table. There was a photo album on it. It was shaped like most photo albums are shaped and it was old as I am and it was a particular shade of blue just as the photo album of my childhood had been shaded. I thought it had been destroyed. I thought I had destroyed it. I must have planned to do it a thousand times. Through all the unhinged destruction of my past in my early adulthood, it managed to survive and one thing led to another and a decade later Mormon missionaries came into possession of it and returned it to my mother, who returned it to me. I could not make this up.

There are not many pictures in it. I hated cameras then and now, as you no doubt remember. There are pictures of me in my infancy and childhood that exist elsewhere, but many of the photographs that I found flung at me from the distant past have no known copies. I do not know how to describe the sensation of looking through those photographs. It was as if I was proving to myself that I existed. That was why I intended to destroy them, of course, in my younger and more volatile years. I wanted there to be nothing left of me- what a bitter and cynical man I was! What a bitter and cynical man I am.

For a month this letter has been finished and yet it remains. I ask myself a cruel question every day: “What’s the point?” Not so many mornings ago a storm emerged and I walked out into the yard stripped to the waist and raised my arms above my head, as is my custom. It was a beautiful morning and later that day the sky turned to yellow and tornadoes threatened but they did not find me. I shivered and was as tall as the goddamn sky and I didn’t ask myself any more questions that day. I wish you could see these impossible pictures, taken of me so long ago, when within me there was not even the idea of evil. I would be faded by time and vision while fishing or wearing ill-fitted suits or playing in the snow and that is a part of me I fear that you have never seen and I could not have shown it to you because I myself had forgotten it and now it does not matter anymore, except in the way that history matters to an old man. And today I feel so old, Cordelia. Seven years ago I never thought I would get so old.

Letter to Cordelia no. 1

Even those who know me from brief acquaintance know that I am fond of speaking in epigrams. Years ago, I declaimed "Self control will make you a bad poet. If you are not one already."

The apple tree behind my mother's house fell a short time ago, in a storm not of my making. I was going to take the axe made holy by your hands and mutter to myself "How proud! How like the sun!" as I looped the dull steel overhead to devour the fallen tree in flat-toothed bites, dragging the corpse to the nearby burnpile— but more gentle rains came and the season was spring, and so blossoms white as angels or the hair of infant children sprung from the branches even as the trunk lay broken on the grass, and my mother said to me "We will not cut it up yet. Maybe it will be able to grow apples this year. We will see."

Today is May 1st, a day that I bear a special fondness toward. Men and women around the world celebrate May Day each year in commemoration of the Haymarket affair, but more than that is invoked for our consideration. May Day is a day to remember the sacrifices that came before our mothers brought us crying into this world. Good people who loved their lives and their families were beaten and slain for standing up for their rights and their hopes. Businesses and the government colluded to imprison, assault, and murder labor organizers for offenses as benign as negotiating for shorter hours or safer workplace conditions.

The point I'm making with self control is, I haven't had a drink in one hundred and fifty one days. I remember the last drink I had as clearly as I remember all the things I know: It was a frosty-cold Diamond Bear Imperial IPA. My woman had broken things off with me before the bell tolled for midnight and I had just finished a cold Diamond Bear Irish Red and I had four more beers in the fridge and I was going to drink all of them and then see what else I could find to drink and I was going to drink all of that and then I looked at the clock and it was December 1st and I laughed softly to myself as my shoulders heaved in sobs and I took a drink of the IPA and I was crying and the hair on my arms stood up like I had seen a ghost or your face and I swallowed the beer and afterward I tasted ash thick and gritty on my tongue and I started singing, with my voice rumbling as deep as my lungs would allow—

"Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Nothing will stand in our way."

And inexplicably I was grinning like I'd just got Marquez's autograph and the tears fell in slow cascades down my jawline and I took a deep breath and I said to myself and to the walls and to my books and to the woman (no longer mine) who was in a nearby room and probably could not hear: "Her Majesty, the Decemberists” and I said it because it seemed like the proper thing to say although the song I sang was not from that album. I wiped my eyes and I went to the bathroom and poured the beer out because somehow with my life in shambles around me and December the first glaring sun-red at me from a clock, I remembered or learned that you loved me once not because I was a monster but because I was not always monstrous and I drowned that old devil my heart beneath the frigid water from the bathroom sink and for some reason on this day five months later I sit with a pen trembling in my hand and I twirl it around my fingers until appropriate words can be found.

I do not know why I write to you these words and I am well aware of my perverse habit of adding dollops of sugar to the truth. I believe that I send this disjointed message to you, in vain hope that it may reach you on this or any other ocean, because I am a dreamer and I am my mother’s son. 

Pulcher

One hundred days ago I was half-done drinking a beer and thinking about drinking the rest of it and then getting another or another ten. Instead, I poured the beer out and I have not opened another.

My niece looked at me yesterday. She burst into tears. She fled the room, as she was unable to bear the sight of me. She is dramatically prejudiced. She is prejudiced against people with beards. I am no longer a person with a beard.

I have never liked the sight of my face, but once upon a forest I must have been young enough to laugh with delight at my visage rippling in a mirror or a pool of water. I knew how to smile at the sight of my reflection once. What else have I forgotten?