2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (6 page)

Just last night, in an air
conditioned car, I screamed, “God damn it. I'm going to spend God
knows how long in a fucking coffin. Do I have to start that shit
now?" At which point I began ripping at several little black
plastic levers nearby, forcing the windows to perform some sort of
up and down vacation bible school dance. “
Praise ye the Lord. Hallelujah. Praise ye the Lord.
Hallelujah. Praise ye the Lo
—” Hmmm.
However, I am glad that I said what I said. I think this is a
positive advancement on my part.

Such tirades as the one I uttered in the car
are generally reserved for display to my family and closest
friends, but this last was directed at a woman I have just met. I
suppose most accurately it was directed at the woman's car. It was
one of those very clean cars that is too old to warrant being so
clean. So I feel it was justified. I hate those cars.

Obviously the driver of the car was rather
taken aback and took the liberty of smacking me across the face
with such force that I was knocked unconscious and am unaware
whether I spent the remainder of the trip locked in a sealed
chamber of conditioning.

GRAND PRIX
PARALLELS

Boys of the rich, sit.

Powdery gold eyes

shadowed by a man at the door,

by hats, and scaring us all

left vintage prey, and

shadowed by a cheap night riot.

Boys of the rich, sit.

Boys of the poor, look,

far away fun. The flesh seared to

a cookout afternoon. And then

open. Their hearts perforated

skeleton shells, eaten through working

virtue, easy-for-me, eyes.

Boys of the rich, sit while

boys of the poor, look, fuckable poor,

clutching sweaty drunk fists, and

by parasite faith I am the pretty

listener today for one man

playing fool-fueled

balcony games on a

cookout grill, chatting weather

stories, for me.

Not achievement, or politics, or

blood-borne fights. Just girls,

girls, girls, ugly fuckable girls, and
beer.

And his disposable expense of

how (craning and wide)

I was the pretty attendant for the

sweet regular boy, who cooked

quiet and calm, with the drunken wet

(beer, beer, ugly fuckable beer)

glass shattered in patient hands.

Holding (no money wads in pockets, just)

the shards and blood alike

And proud he excused himself

(ugly, sweet)

to clean up the mess

kissing me gently on the way.

Seventeen days and the wondering time is only beginning. I
should have realized long ago that forever is only a day-after-day
hell that happens to the best of us. I don't know. I got the high
school thing out of the way, and now it's just waiting to see where
the wrinkles will go and how the flesh will fill out. The waiting
time is here and I’m seventeen days in.

EMPIRE QUARRY

I remember once, at night, swimming naked in
a quarry. The blackness wrapped around me with its several
textures. Deep shifting moonlight supported me with waves and
stroked my hair as I lay back in the lap of the water. Stone
severed and scarred and hard with confining presence somewhere on
all sides of me was harder than my strongest days. And the mystery
of the night sky reached so very close to infinity, over and over
again, with just as many stars one behind the other.

I thought about the skyline in New York. How
it must be looking very much the same. How its height was nothing
more than stars and its hardness no harder than here, wherever the
water could go. At no wonder of that at all. Because the rock that
had been where I was swimming was taken there and made into a
towering piece of windows. Everyone was impressed, so many years
ago.

But what of this earth? What of this hole
they left? And how often do they really say it's all from Indiana?
All those important people complaining about natural resources and
hoarding other cultures' treasures at the same time. There I was
swimming where there used to be thick impenetrable land. And that's
what they did. Someone important with a dream and some money said,
"Let's make the tallest building in the world."

But you cannot make tall buildings without
stealing blocks from the other little boys' piles. And so they came
and took our ground and left a hole. Which is good enough for
cliff-dive swimming if you know where it is. It is very hard to
find. Even more so at night.

LAMELLAR

"Wait. Don't freak out." Jason kneeled on
the curb bent over a sewer grate. He balanced himself on his knees
and hands without allowing his feet with new shoes or his new shirt
to touch the street. From his maladapted Downward Facing Dog, he
said, “They didn't fall that far. There's some kind of shelf or
something. Maybe six feet. Or less." He leaned back and briskly
slapped his hands against each other. "Jen, why don't you go in and
get a hanger or something. Maybe an old shoe lace too. I don't
know. Whatever looks good."

A regular-looking girl with a broken ankle
nodded and went toward a white apartment house to search for the
tools.

Jason turned to the other girl. She was
lithe but not about to kneel in the street even if they were her
keys. Instead, after she had dropped them she had stood over the
grate waiting as though the key patrol would quickly be notified.
She was not disappointed. This boy, Jason, and his girlfriend, Jen,
had just come out of the house to see why she had been standing
outside their window for so long with seemingly no agenda.

She had explained simply. "My keys have
fallen." She then pointed in the general direction of her feet and
it seemed to Jen that even if her keys had just fallen on the
pavement and not into a sewer that she still would have waited for
a considerate young man such as Jason to stop and retrieve them for
her.

Jen returned with an armload of interesting
objects. She laid them all on the pavement and sat on the curb with
her broken foot out in the street. "I got a hanger and all this
other stuff. Maybe I should go out on the balcony and get those
cookout tongs."

"No." Jason thought of his grill and his hot
dogs and hamburgers and chicken breasts and knew that he did not
want those tongs anywhere near the sewer. "Your foot is still
pretty bad. Don't bother climbing all those steps. This will be
fine." He looked at her haul.

There were three old metal hangers, a pair
of needle-nosed pliers, several twist-ties, a refrigerator magnet
that was sizable and had a laminated postage stamp picture of Mount
Rushmore on the front, a large plastic candy cane that was
partially bent, a gaudy cross on a thick leather necklace most
likely assembled in Sunday school by a young admirer, and a roll of
electrical tape.

Jason leaned over the pile adjusting his
baseball cap and trying to make sure Jen didn't catch him looking
at the other girl’s legs. But neither of the girls was paying any
attention to him.

They were busy and casual, but dressing each
other down.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Elisia."

"That's pretty."

Elisia looked over Jen from behind her black
sunglasses. She looked down the street at a shop window and
wondered whether she could get a bottle of water in there. She let
her eyes ride back to Jen by means of a sleek Jaguar cruising up
the street.

"How'd you break your leg?"

"It's not my leg."

“
If it’s not broken, what
did you do? Sprain it?" Elisia looked at Jason and thought he was
pretty good-looking. Not that good-looking but better than this Jen
person deserved. She smiled as best she could with her cheeks drawn
in between her teeth.

"No. It is broken. But it’s my foot.” Jen
looked at the girl's tight skirt. The little green sausage casing
was so sadly vulgar Jen almost laughed out loud. Pathetic. Blatant.
Jen would give anything to have a look into Elisia's purse. What
would she find? A silver cigarette case from some foreign country
where she had never traveled, an expensive pen and paper too pretty
to write on, and ticket stubs from all the plays that advertise in
the newspaper, no doubt. Jen didn’t take the bait and allow her ire
to rise while Elisia stared at Jason. She just responded to the
question. “Broke it Thursday at my uncle's farm."

Both the girls watched Jason assemble the
contraption meant to retrieve Elisia’s set of keys. He periodically
looked into the sewer to reassess their location. But when he bent
over the grate, his body blocked the sunlight so it was very hard
for him to catch a glimpse of the keys. He crawled back and forth
around the grate on his hands and knees, still keeping his feet off
the ground so as not to scratch up his new shoes.

Elisia replied with pleasant disdain. "Oh.
Your uncle has a farm. That must be nice."

"Yeah. He lets me board my horse there
during the year when I'm here at school. It helps me get out of my
head to ride."

Elisia was mildly interested by the
implication of money behind the ownership of a horse. Her attention
shifted from Jason to Jen. “So what happened to your foot?"

"It's stupid, really. I was up on this box
brushing my horse after we got in. I just tried to reach too far
behind me and twisted the whole thing over on myself. It was
totally disgusting. When I turned the box to see my foot it was
totally flat and bent all the way back, kind of like a hoof. Then I
passed out."

Jason spoke with pieces of blue electrical
tape on many of his fingers. He held the hanger contraption between
his legs and balanced himself against Jen's shoulder. “Yeah, and it
was just like Lassie or something. Molly, her horse, went right up
to the house. Jen’s aunt freaked out because she was half asleep in
a chair on the porch when she felt horse breath all over her. But
she went down to the barn and there was my beautiful Jen all passed
out in a pile of vomit."

"Thank you, Jason, for filling in all the
gruesome details." Asshole.

Elisia oversaw and Jen scooched down the
curb closer to the grate as Jason began to lower his retraction
device into the sewer.

Elisia stepped back from the stench. “God,
that's awful."

Jen looked up at her and wondered whether
her earrings were fake. "I know. Any time we open the window to get
a breeze that's all we smell. One time Jason was making cookies to
prove that he did know how to cook and burned all of them because
he was watching wrestling and forgot them. The whole apartment
filled up with this nasty smoke and a smoke alarm went off and so
we opened the window. All night long that's all we smelled: sewage
and burnt cookies. I still haven't had any cookies."

"Thank you for revealing all my darkest
secrets to this new friend of ours." He stared at his girlfriend as
if to say, “Are you that insecure, Jen? Do you really have to be
such a bitch whenever there is another girl here?”

Jason leaned back to avoid the smell and to
keep a patch of sunlight on Elisia's keys. He poked the hanger
further into the sewer.

A voice echoed below them. "What the fuck is
this?"

Jason jumped back, pulling up his device.
Jen leaned over the grate and squinted into her shadow. Elisia
moved toward their small porch and sat on its low brick wall in
relative safety.

"Who goddamned keys is this?"

Jen whispered to Jason, "There's some guy
down there."

Jason was scared and defensive. "Yeah, no
shit. I was supposed to go to soccer practice today."

"What?" Jen contorted her face in hostile
disgust. “Where is that coming from?”

"Jen, not now."

"Why are you always being so weird? You
don't have to be at soccer practice for an hour and a half, and I
don't see why you get so obsessed with all the intramural shit
anyway."

"Don't I drive you to the barn to see Molly
four times a week? Why is it I'm the one who's obsessed?"

The voice came from below. "Are you all
bickering up there? Why you doing it over my bed? And whose keys is
these?"

Jason looked at Jen. Jen shrugged and
pointed to the hanger, then pointed toward the sewer.

Jason lowered the device and said cautiously
as if he were a marshal with the ATF, "Sir, all you have to do is
put the keys on the hook."

“
Jesus. Get that shit out
of my hair." Then, "And not there either. 'Bout to poke my blessed
eye out with that fool thing. You want these keys, eh?"

Jen looked at Jason. "Why are we always
helping people? You’re talking to a guy through a sewer grate and
she’s not even doing anything. She's sitting on my fucking porch.
I'm the one with the broken foot. And she's pulling on my plants.
Get her out of here."