earthly voyages

Archives

now browsing by author

 

Eddie’s Bust

We made the bust in a single-family ranch house on the edge of town. It was not very high tech bust, nor a very high drama bust, at least at the start. We’d gotten a warrant issued that afternoon based on what we told the court was reliable informant information. And, in fact, it was good information and the warrant was good for twenty-four hours. We went in at night, around 2:00 P.M., in plain clothes, with our guns drawn. The man and the woman were asleep in a double bed. We flipped on the bedroom light, “Police,” I yelled, “don’t move or you’re dead.” And they didn’t.

The guy said “what the fuck.”

The girl said, “Oh my god.”

I said, “Not another word, not one fucking word, unless I ask you a question, got it.” I displayed my badge. I had my weapon pointed at their heads. They nodded yes.

Eddie went into the kitchen and gathered up a scale and about a pound of pot in a plastic bag in a shoebox. He came back into the bedroom with the items proudly displayed in each hand.

“Lookie, lookie,” he said. “This is more than enough marijuana to support distribution and we are, my friends, well within a thousand yards of a school zone, hence I would say that each of you is about to do a mandatory deuce and a half, no time off for good behavior, serving every day by day by miserable fucking day in state prison. Too bad, too bad, my darlings, no more sex, no more pot, no more Starbucks. Now don’t make uncle Eddie work too hard, where’s the weapons and where’s the cash?”

“There are no weapons, I swear to Christ,” said the guy. “The cash is in my pants, and a sock in the middle draw, and Angie’s purse. Cut us some slack guys, please.”

“Okay, rule one, if I find cash anywhere else I’m gonna hurt you.”

“No no, I’ve told you the truth, just cut us some slack.”

“You are each under arrest,” I said, “you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to a lawyer, if you cannot afford a lawyer a lawyer will be appointed to represent you. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Got it? Good. Speak at your own peril. Where’d you get the dope?”

“Some guy in a car. I don’t know who he is. It was set up for me by a guy I know.”

“Okay, but not very helpful, why not get dressed, both of you, and take a little ride with us downtown.”

“Come on, man, cut us a little slack.”

“And why might we do that? I mean what have you done for us lately. A bust’s a bust. We get brownie points in our jackets. We get promoted.”

“Hey, just take the shit but don’t take us. Pull the weed off the street, smoke a little yourselves if it’s your trip, jack us off for the money, but leave us alone. We’ll leave town. We’ll not say word one. ‘The bust was a bust’ you’ll say.”

He laughed at his own joke. He was cool and smooth and there was nothing about him I liked. The woman looked pathetic, smushed down hair, no make up, bathrobe, hung over, haggard.

Eddie gathered up the cash. He counted out over two thousand dollars. I was ready to roust them. “Get dressed and then I’m going to cuff you,” I said.

“Check this out,” the guy continued. “We go to trial and I say it was all her shit, that I was just knowingly present, which is not a crime the last time I looked. She says ‘it was all his shit,’ that she’d just gotten here to spend the night. The prosecutor argues joint venture. The defense attorney argues reasonable doubt. It’s a coin toss. Why bother?”

I hate this weasel. I really do, but Eddie is waving at me with his firearm, like get over here closer so we can talk.

“I say we let ‘em go. Who gives a fuck,” he says to me.

“I don’t get it partner. What’s the point? Why are we doing it?”

Eddie shakes the box of dope, the sock with the money. He winks.

“Boys and girls,” he says, “here’s the deal. First you give us the name rank and serial number of the guy who helped you set up this buy. Where we can find him. What he looks like. Everything you know about him, and not any ‘just some guy’ bullshit. Second, we hold this evidence in a very safe place, this evidence with both of your prints all over it, for a long time. Any time we want to make you, you’re ours. Any time. You understand that, right? So in light of that exposure to consequences too dire to risk, you do both in fact leave our lovely town. And I don’t mean casually or over time. I mean you pack your bags, you take what money you have out of the bank, you do not kiss your friends and relatives goodbye, you just leave. People will understand. They know who you are. Call from the road. Say what comes naturally. But do not set foot in this town again. Ever. ‘Cause if we see you here, out comes the evidence and away you go. Understood?”

They nod. The guy says, “I need a little cash, man.” The woman said, “I got kids. I need time.”

Eddie says to me, “Fuck them, Guiseppe, they don’t seem to comprehend the generosity of our offer or the gravity of their circumstances, they’re too fuckin’ stupid to save, cuff ‘em and let’s just take ‘em downtown.”

“Okay, okay,” says the guy. “Angie, please, we’ll set up in Florida. It’s warm there. We’ll send for the kids. Please, Angie, I can’t do time again. Please.”

She was crying. “You really are a stupid shit,” she says.

He gives us his seller’s name, rank and serial number. If it’s true and accurate or not no one knows. Yet.

“You will be out of this house before noon. You will be out of this town before sundown. If I see either of your sorry asses, ever, I will bust you no questions asked and take you down. Hard. No further questions asked, no further questions answered,” Eddie says. “Now we’re out of here. You best pray we never see you again.”

Eddie and I walk out of the door into the cool of night. We get into the car. Eddie drives. We leave the neighborhood and are out onto East Fifth moving in light to negligible traffic.

“What was that,” I yelled at him. “What did we just do and how are we going to undo it? I just don’t get it. I don’t get you. That’s not our M.O. It’s certainly not my M.O. You’ve compromised me. You’ve put me in a terrible place. You showed ridiculous judgment. I can’t understand how I went along with that stupid play. What were you thinking?” It reminded me of things that would happen to me as a kid, but not as an adult, not as a cop. I was Mr. Clean, Mr. Straight and Narrow. It’s how I kept things together. I didn’t do things that could get me in trouble or that broke the rules. I was nervous and pissed off.

Eddie sat there quietly with his eyes on the road, but you could tell he was excited and alert. After a minute he said, “I figured it all out, Roger. It’s simple and I want your help. We just made an extra thousand dollars each. I need the money. I’m throwing the dope in the river. The scumbags are out of town and not likely to return. The dope is not smoked or sold to little kids or grandmothers. You and I are a thousand dollars tax free richer and the world is a better place. No harm. No foul.”

“You are a stupid shit, amigo. You broke the law. You compromised me. It is a nightmare to me, a lose lose situation, a situation in which I have to pay for your fucking stupidity. I am appalled at you, Eddie. No shit. Appalled. No friend treats another friend like that. You are a bullshit guy, a coercive, impulsive shit. Just go fuck yourself, ‘cause you’ve already fucked me.” What really pisses me off is that there is no sweet or easy out and I know it. It is like the fox with his leg caught in the steel jawed trap. I’m gonna have to chew off my own foot to have any prayer of getting out alive. I sit in the car. The city passes by at night and in the mist.

(… explain why )

Gainey

The fire occurs on the morning after Thanksgiving night. Monique has dropped her beloved four year old Andre off at his grandmother’s house to sleep for the evening with his other cousins and his father who lives there in a room in the basement where he keeps guns and fucks strangers. At midnight Andre’s father goes out with friends. A high tech portable space heater sits on top of a washing machine in the basement and ignites some fabric there. The fire is fed by the air that is drawn into the house through an opened garage door opened next to the illegal basement bedroom, and the home is promptly engulfed in flame and smoke. Six people jump from second floor windows because the smoke and heat coming up the stairwell is too intense. Two are injured. An infant is thrown from the second floor and survives without a scratch. Andre and his ten year old cousin, asleep in the living room on the first floor, are asphyxiated and die.

Monique learns of the fire when awaked by a phone call from friends and rushes to the scene

Her Calls

Her calls really pained me. One day she was thankful and sweet. “I appreciate how you are trying to help me, Todd,” she’d say. The very next day she was as cold and suspicious as she’d been sweet. I could hear it in her first hello. She didn’t trust me, thought I was ripping her off, couldn’t or wouldn’t understand why things were taking as long as they were. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you,” she’d say, “I should just report you to the Board of Bar Overseers.” And, of course, I would feel myself grow angry and hurt, without any critical distance. I should have said, “I understand why you feel that way. I’ll try to explain what’s happening again if you’d like. The law isn’t fair. It’s hard to hear that, I know. You’re not wrong to feel the way you feel. It’s hard being in lock up and not knowing what will happen next. But there is nothing we can do about it at this time. We’ve done everything we can. We just have to wait. There is nothing further that can be done, not at this time, not by anyone, not F. Lee Bailey, or Johnny Cochran. We’re held here awaiting forensic results and our next court date. Period.” I’ve said this before, more than once.

Instead of being my best self, however, exasperation takes over and I tell her, “Look, if you don’t trust me then find another lawyer. I am doing everything I possibly can for you. You’re the one going behind my back; talking to people you shouldn’t be talking to, making matters more complicated. I have nothing more to say to you. Call if you can be nice or leave me alone.”

Are we dealing with a fifty nine year old lawyer here or a nine-year-old boy? Maybe both.

Her Grandfather

Her Grandfather

Her grandfather called to say he wanted to discuss his granddaughter’s case and I tried to get rid of him. He couldn’t help me and I didn’t have time.

“You know I can’t talk about a client’s case with anyone without my client’s permission,” I said.

“Well, I’ll just talk to you,” he replied.

“Okay, but can’t we do that over the phone,” I asked.

“No, this is something I want to do in person, Mr. Benjamin. Please, sir, this is my granddaughter whose life is in your hands. I want to see you.”

So, of course, I said yes, and here he was, one of these old guys who evoke warm feelings in me the minute I see them. It’s something in their deep mellifluous soft voices, the grip of their hands, the way they look you in the eye, the years and years of history, dignity, and determination etched into their faces. Does every older man remind me of my father? You know in that first moment of appraisal and recognition you are in the presence of beauty and grace borne of long years on the planet and it evokes your immediate respect. You sit back in your chair. You feel your breathing change. There is time to talk after all.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Treadaway,” you say. “Please, have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. How can I be of help to you?”

“Well, Mr. Todd, I don’t know as you can be of any help to me, unless it’s my granddaughter you are aiming to help. You see, Yvonne is my youngest girl’s youngest child and I’ve always been partial to both her mother and herself. Her mother, that’s my Ernestine, I loved her dearly, but she died soon after Yvonne was born and Ms. Treadaway and myself we raised Yvonne from when she was little. Sweet child she was, I tell you that. Used to climb up onto my lap in that huge old chair we kept in the kitchen and just stoke my face and pet me like I was her big old doll. Poke around at my face. Pull it. Push my nose this way and that. Pull the curls of my nappy hair right out till they was long. Flip my ears back and forth. Look me right in the eye. Put her nose right next to my nose so I could smell that sweet milky dew on her breath. God, she was a wonderful child. You understand don’t you? You have children of your own, Mr. Benjamin?”

“Yes, I do understand Mr. Treadaway.”

“I’ve lived in these so called united states of America all my life, Mr. Benjamin. What can I tell you? As an adult I was free to leave and I clearly did not, notwithstanding the temptation and the pain of life here. I’m an American, Mr. Benjamin, and I am as proud of that fact as I am to be Black. I served in what white historians call World War II. And I served proudly. It’s funny how those who shape our language also shape people’s sense of reality. You’ve noticed that I take it. You understand what I mean? I mean sixty million African people, men, women, and children, were ripped from their homes and families and forced to live in the most horrific and degrading conditions for centuries, treated worse than dogs, an entire continent raped and enslaved for centuries, and it is called a “peculiar institution.” Lord god that hurts and makes me crazy. And then when fifty thousand American young men, mostly white boys all, get killed between 1941 and 1945 it is called ‘the Great War, the war to end all wars.’ I ask you.”

I notice his hair and his face as he talks. I notice his long fingers. His eyes never leave me and mine never leave his. It is a deep, comfortable moment, a reminder of rich earth and fertile humus.

“But how can I be of assistance to you today?” I ask.

“You represent my granddaughter, Mr. Benjamin. That’s right isn’t it? Her family loves her. I love her. I want to be sure you know that. I wanted to see the man who has my baby’s fate in his hands. I wanted to remind you that I care very much what happens to Yvonne, that I stand here watching you and praying for you. I want you to know I am beholden to no man, Mr. Benjamin, but that I stand deeply in your debt. We are all somebody’s children, Mr. Benjamin, and deep as you care about your children, that’s how deeply I love and care about Yvonne.”

05. Father’s 26th Birthday

Dec. 5, 1940

My father celebrated his twenty sixth birthday today.  He had to go to work and I think he was a little relieved having to do so.  He is a fireman.  He likes the company of the other firemen, the card games, the routines, being away from the house, the distraction work provides.  It frightens my mother to be home alone with me.  She gave my father a belt and a silver buckle with a dog engraved on it for his birthday.  He didn’t actually like the belt, thought it was impersonal somehow, was concerned for how much it cost and where she got the money, failed to show what my mother hoped would be the proper amount of appreciation for her efforts by throwing it carelessly on their big double bed in front of the wall sized mirror in their bedroom that is also called “the living room.”  Mother cried.  Father walked out angrily.  I was left puzzled, unattended, and cold in the crib after his departure.

Who is this man my father?  He is where my sorely limited and wholly incomplete knowledge starts.  He remains a mystery to me, this person responsible for half my gene pool, who loved and wounded me, much as he attempted in his limited way to expose his heart and soul, much as I plumbed those depths for the forty-two years we shared on this earth.  He was so arrogant, so self-righteous, and so simultaneously insecure.  I don’t get it. I do get it. Inherited it raw and familiar. Got it – by inheritance and environment. Don’t get it.

04. The First Eight Days

Day One – Passage into this world turns out to be quite lengthy and strange.  At least for me it was. I remember thinking the pond in which I’d been floating was running dry and that I was at risk. I became quite woozy. My head was squeezed. I felt tremendous pressure as I was expelled into a world I had never before imagined. I was slapped and twisted. I drew something cold inside my form. I hadn’t even known there were outsides and insides. The brightness bothered me.  Everything was blurred and indistinct. My arms were pinned down. It was loud. Very loud and I was cold. I wish I’d stayed inside I thought. I was very frightened.  I wanted things to be as they had been.

Having said that, it was also tremendously interesting and different, enlivening.  I had an awareness of other forms, which I’d never had before, a sense of my separateness, my empty aloneness, and my hungry vulnerability.  All of my movements were jerky and unsmooth.  I hardly knew myself and was in control of nothing.  Trust was a big issue then … and would be ever since.  Life is such an improbable challenge.  I wondered where I was before, before I was inside.  I have absolutely no memory of that time, then or now, other than the blood, which makes me feel kind of lonely.

I felt lost.  Not in pain, but vaguely uncomfortable, physically and emotionally.  There were long periods of unconsciousness that were so familiar.  It was the awareness that startled me.  I waited.  I waited a lot.  There wasn’t much I could do about anything anyway.  I had concerns and gripes, but was clearly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.  At least I thought so.

Nov. 13, 1940 – Second Full Day

Nothing much different than yesterday, it seems, the same mix of pleasant and unpleasant sensations.  I like being held and purred to and don’t get enough of it.  There are others like me, crying separate forms.  It’s not like the big forms want to hurt us, but we were left alone and unattended more than I like.

At times I suck on something that releases a warm sweet substance into my mouth.  It is my best experience, absolutely amazing.  I hardly have words to describe it.  I like the sucking.  And the taste is fantastic.  And the sensation of that stuff going down my throat was just so wonderful and sensual, unbelievably sensual.  I loved it.

Nov. 17, 1940

There was a lot of movement yesterday.  Wherever it was I was staying, with the many big forms and the bright lights, is no longer there.  Where I am now is much cooler and much quieter.  There are only two or three of the big forms that move around me and hold me.  I am still unconscious most of the time.  When awake I see things a bit more clearly, but don’t know what any of them are and don’t really care, just as long as I’m comfortable, which I mostly am.  I sense a fear around me that I do not understand, but it quivers in me like the cold when I am taken out of the wrappings and placed on the hard table to lay exposed while they pat and push and turn me over, back and forth.  It makes me dizzy.  I scream a lot then.  I also scream when I feel the hungers, mostly for the sweet stuff.  Also when I’m cold.  I like that the sound comes from me.  I have no idea what it augurs, but its presence is both a relief and a distraction.

Nov. 19, 1940

Now that was something I really didn’t like.  Didn’t understand it at all.  Found it very frightening and quite painful actually.   Huge numbers of large forms, called “people” it turns out, came to our apartment.  The noise and the rumbling were constant.  Most of the people had their faces partially covered with masks.  They looked grotesque.  Scary.  An old smelly guy with a huge beard who wore no mask picked me up and held me in the air, said some words.  Someone took off my swaddling and left me bare on a table under bright lights in the kitchen.  Jokes were made.  People laughed nervously.  I felt fingers grasp and pull me out from under my stomach.  A liquid both sweet and bitter was dribbled into my mouth.  I sucked on a cloth that tasted of this liquid.  There was a sharp sensation down there, like a pinprick when the diaper is changed, only sharper, and far more long lasting.  Intense.  I cried.  I screamed.  I had no idea what was going on, but I assure you I didn’t like it, although I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it, or about anything frankly.  I do wonder how often something like that happens.

Spring, 1941

Life in the crib is a very mixed kind of experience.  On the one hand, I have lots of quiet moments just laying here playing with my toes or watching the light patterns change on the wall.  Occasionally I hear the singing of birds.  I like this and am content.  I also have many uncomfortable moments, mostly because I’m not getting something I want or getting something I don’t want.  I get hungry and cranky sometimes.  Sometimes the diapers stay cold for hours.  Sometimes I am scared to be alone.

I am never spontaneously picked up or comforted.  It doesn’t matter if I cry or scream.  I am picked up, held, changed, and fed only once every four hours, by common parental agreement.  When we have visitors they must wear surgical masks before they come into the room to see the tortured prince.  One of my mother’s uncles came to see me in the crib and peered over in his surgical mask and I screamed and cried and my mother laughed and my father covered his ears, but no one picked me up.  There will not be one time in my childhood when I am succored and comforted when frightened.  My father will adore me, but find me flawed and disappointing from infancy.  My mother finds me too demanding of her time, too repulsive and disgusting, with all that pee and shit to clean up.

When I was less than a year old a cousin was born to my Aunt Martha.  He was named Richard and we shared time together, but he was damaged goods, Mongoloid perhaps.  He was sent away to a school for the unacceptable forever.  We were told he was dead.  I knew the consequences of being unacceptable.

Nov. 11, 1941 – My first birthday party.

I was born on Armistice’s Day, an ironic fate, a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew America and my family into War.  My father’s grandmother, his mother, his two sisters, and a guy my father works with at the fire department and his wife all came over to our little apartment.  There was a cake mother made from some stuff in a box with one candle in it.  Everyone squeezed around the kitchen table.  They sang a song and were loud and happy for a while.  My father seemed proud and pleased.  He held me in his arms a lot, as did everyone else.  I remember how distinctly they each smelled, the roughness of my father’s check, the warm musty smell of my grandmother, the cloying powder of my aunt Marsha.  The adults drank coffee and tea.  The cake had chocolate frosting.

Dec. 8, 1941

Some place far away, in a warm salt sea called Pearl Harbor, there is an attack in which many people die and the world is changed.  And, as far away as that harbor was, we are all afraid.  I don’t know what this all means but it is a source of much concern and consternation in this household.  My parents actually listen to the radio together.  My father tells my mother these are dangerous times.  I am not surprised by that news.  Dangerous is everywhere in my world.

My father does not want to go away to war, is frightened of war.  He grew up in the Bronx, Sam Taub’s fourth son and fifth child, one of ultimately seven children born to these poor Jewish immigrants who came to live on the lower east side in poverty, to share beds, and become Americans.  He remains a mystery to me, much as I plumbed those depths for the forty-two years we shared on this planet.  He was so arrogant, so self-righteous, and so simultaneously insecure.  I don’t get it.  Even when I look inside myself and find the raw and familiar. I don’t get it.

And then there is my mother, part of the something uneasy which I carry inside me, part of the great I do not know what it is, the uneasiness, anxiety, and fear.  Or fears.  I seem to have always been afraid.

War raged in my Bronx neighborhood and Bronx home from the moment I was born.  I have known well the meaning of cruelty, stupidity, irony, sarcasm, and deceit ever since.

Christmas, 1941

When I cry I am mocked or scolded or ignored.  My father may even cover his ears.  I am not picked up.  I am not succored.  I am not comforted.  I am often lauded in public for my size and appearance, but outside the public eye I am subject to relentless criticism.  “Stop behaving that way,” I am told.  “What is wrong with you?  Are you crazy?  I’ll give you something to cry about.  Grow up.  Act your age.”  I am all of one year old.  The messages will be repeated for decades, will abide in me forever.

01. Preface

One of my favorite Charles Schulz cartoons involves the little boy Linus, who’s always sucking his thumb and carrying around his security blanket dragging on the floor, in the first frame demanding that Charlie Brown read him a bedtime story, which Charlie Brown does not want to do notwithstanding Linus’ insistence.
“Read me!” “Read me!” “Read me,” demands the bedtime resistant Linus, whose persistent and annoying cries finally breaks down the resolve of Charlie Brown, who grabs any old book off a shelf, opens the cover, and begins to read.
“A man was born. Then he dies. The end!!” Charlie says, slamming the book emphatically closed.
“He sounds very interesting,” says Linus. “I wish I’d met him.”
And so we begin.

First Journal Entry – 2022

… though we weren’t ready for this, we have been readied by it … no matter how we are weighed down, we must always pave a way forward.” Amanda Gorman.

I am in a very challenging place/part of my oh so finite life journey. Profoundly alone at 81 I have done it to myself, dedicatedly and skillfully, with great care and persistence: living in Covidland, reducing my anti-depression meds, being abandoned cruelly by Joy, being genuinely bereaved by the loss of Kara, feeling ashamed, empty, fearful, depressed, being old, weak, in pain, less powerful, less. I can hardly get outta bed and no one knows it but me. I feel unattractive and unloved. I can barely bear these truths. 

I justify this self-preoccupied writing as “practicing” writing, like practicing law – the same as practicing piano. No one need hear, just you and the piano. Just you and the keys, the notes, the sound and the silent spaces. Here we are awaiting words, ideas, images, pages. I’d like to be engaged in something deeper and more interesting than my own life, but it doesn’t come to me. I have been rejected by more than most: my best friends Steven, Craig, Isaac, Lyn Rosoff, Lyle, my brother, Larry. I am enraged at Joy … as well as understanding her rejection of me. I can forgive her and myself but choose not to. It is lonely. I miss human company/intimacy. I also miss the time and space the woman/partner occupied, what I had and felt w her, whoever she was.

I am trying to survive my life journey feeling as if I was one of those stone age men often found frozen millennia after their deaths dressed in animal skins with minimal tools (no matches) out alone in the mountains, a relentless environment encasing me. I’ve made plans to be away for 2 months in California, to be nearer my children and grandchildren, to travel as best I still can … alone. I have things to do to get ready! It is very expensive given my fixed income and limited resources, but it is also something I want to give myself… and if not now, when? I am immensely aware of my finiteness, my mortality, my ordinariness, my worker bee-ness, my fear. I keep coming back to the issue of my relationship with myself.

I’m not sure I ever looked at my relationship with myself in this way. I also never was 80+ and all that accompanies that for me. I judge myself negatively and critically. It is very unkind. It is my father and mother yelling at me, telling me I am not behaving as a man should when I’m 4 years old. To what extend do I actually like myself or accept myself? I see myself as an everyman and I forgive my ordinariness, non-success, and nonaccomplishment. I’m ordinary. Okay. I’m also quite extraordinary, just like every other transitory snowflake is unique. And I seem to mostly comfortably accept my limits, much in the same way as I mostly comfortably find defeat too easy to accept.

I note that behaviors consistent with biological age arise almost automatically. Behaviors becoming to us at a given age arise as our bodies and objective age/statuses evolve.  I continue to imagine there is something called the future, something called here-and-now, and something called consequences, all a bit of a challenge to me, an acknowledged confused person living in great chaos, flailing about trying to find any stroke that will keep me afloat. And being public about my distress? Why not? I am the realization of a series of potentialities made manifest, some even the result of choices/decisions someone thought of as “I” made based on “options” I felt existed.

I didn’t choose to be 14 years old, for example, but it happened. I was graduated from public school in the Bronx. I entered into high school where I didn’t try and my grades confirmed that. Years later as a college freshman I registered for a Latin class which I failed. The professor who obviously saw I actually attended class every session but still failed wrote next to my grade “You cannot intuit Latin.” It said much about how I survived high school, i.e., just by going to class. No studying. No homework. Dressed a certain way. Had my hair cut a certain way. Played on the school soccer team. Was interested in girls, breasts, kissing, friends, sports, popularity, Israel, Cuba, Indians, Black people, cars. I became me almost automatically. I had fights. I went to dances, roller skating rinks, beaches. I was voted class vice president, I wrote poems. This was my first – on assignment as a freshman from the evil English schoolmaster, Dr. Manheim, who described my effort as “terse” and worth a “B” – see …

And now I am 80 – and I move as if 80 – a perfect enactment of 80. I even look the part which embraces me more than I embrace it. I am soooo much weaker, less attractive, less respected. Just less. I am also completely aware that nature abhors a vacuum and I have time on my hands. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. Or even what I want to do next.  Often when I see what I want next I am able to manifest it, but in my current circumstances I am adrift without the wind or direction, perhaps with no sail no oars, no compass. I am puzzled by my own experience. Why is this happening to me? Why do I think it is happening to me rather than that I am making it happen?

You are a sculptor and you cannot move your arms. The marble stares the way desire waits.” From Suspending Disbelief While Brown, Part II by Hossannah Asuncion.

Occupation 101

The History of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.