The bathroom of the 7-Up plant in the Bronx is an artist’s canvas for pornographic drawings. A giant penis, balls with hair, vaginas, large-lettered dirty language. A perverse form of hieroglyphics. This new, raw world is a wonderment, far away from green suburbia.
She shows us a photo of a boy and tells us he is from Korea and will be our new brother. He’s standing on a wooden swing, clinging to a rope. He’s looking right into the camera, but the person taking the picture forgot to tell him to smile.
At the train station, Amber greeted me with bells on. Underneath a school-girl uniform, crotchless panties tinkled the chime of a lone brass bell. I spun her love atop my fingertip, dribbled between my knees and launched the fadeaway jumper. Returning from dinner, she asked, “How come you don’t hold my hand anymore?” I called her a bitch. The comparison of a lover to a female dog conjured a deeper truth.
My friend Danna Ephland’s pink flamingo earring hung from my rearview mirror. When my hound dog Truffle and I had visited Danna in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a cross-country road trip, she had gone upstairs and rummaged around to find a pair of pink flamingo earrings. She and a friend had bought them on a road trip to Florida back in the eighties. Danna handed me one and kept the other. “This way we’ll always be connected,” she said.
She still has that dark line running up the back of each bare leg. Women did that during the Depression and World War II: drew lines up their legs to simulate the seams of the stockings they could no longer buy. Each time I see this cashier I wonder if she’s making a statement, an unspoken protest about the present state of our economy. Or maybe she’s an immigrant and this is simply the fashion where she comes from, I consider, forgetting for a moment that I’ve heard her voice. She speaks pure Michigander, just like me.
My mother’s pasta sauce always tasted just right to me, even though she often didn’t remember my favorite foods while I was growing up. She didn’t remember that I hated ham, that I wouldn’t eat mayonnaise. For years, my three brothers and I didn’t understand why my mother was the way she was because we didn’t know. All we knew was that she forgot our birthdays, confused our names.
I say, “He was nice,” and watch the fair-skinned, jolly man slip into his car and drive away. From the kitchen, Mom says, “That was your dad.”
I lift my bare foot from the boot, its fur lining like spent cat tails, and lower it into the snow bank, so my toes are buried. The burn of ice, prickly and electric, the shock I’ve gotten when I hold onto the stove and open the refrigerator at the same time. Why is this sensation so enticing?
I tried pills first, and when I woke up the next morning, I decided to jump off a bridge. The bridge swayed under my feet that night as I stood beside my car, hazard lights still on. I walked a few feet. I thought about my son asleep next to Holly, my wife, who will soon be my ex-wife. I thought about my daughter growing inside of my wife, who will soon be my ex-wife. I thought about the man, with whom I had had the affair…
We sit on the worn couch, as we do every visit. Once pale gold velvet, now smoke-stained and yellowed. We rub the dingy fabric one direction, smooth. The other direction, prickly against our fingertips.
Grandpa and Grandma sit in their twin recliners drinking martini after martini, smoking cigarette after cigarette. We “sit still” on this couch, we “quiet down” on this couch, we “KNOCK IT OFF!” on this couch; the grown-ups are talking.
