Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (11 page)

T
HIS
is a constant story that I keep telling my daughter who is four years old. She gets something from it and wants to hear it again and again.

When it's time for her to go to bed, she says, "Daddy, tell me about when you were a kid and climbed inside that rock."

"OK."

She cuddles the covers about her as if they were controllable clouds and puts her thumb in her mouth and looks at me with listening blue eyes.

"Once when I was a little kid, just your age, my mother and father took me on a picnic to Mount Rainier. We drove up there in an old car and saw a deer standing in the middle of the road.

"We came to a meadow where there was snow in the shadows of the trees and snow in the places where the sun didn't shine.

"There were wild flowers growing in the meadow and they looked beautiful. In the middle of the meadow there was a
huge round rock and Daddy walked over to the rock and found a hole in the center of it and looked inside. The rock was hollow like a small room.

"Daddy crawled inside the rock and sat there staring out at the blue sky and the wild flowers. Daddy really liked that rock and pretended that it was a house and he played inside the rock all afternoon.

"He got some smaller rocks and took them inside the big rock. He pretended that the smaller rocks were a stove and furniture and things and he cooked a meal, using wild flowers for food."

That's the end of the story.

Then she looks up at me with her deep blue eyes and sees me as a child playing inside a rock, pretending that wild flowers are hamburgers and cooking them on a small stove-like rock.

She can never get enough of this story. She has heard it thirty or forty times and always wants to hear it again.

It's very important to her.

I think she uses this story as a kind of Christopher Columbus door to the discovery of her father when he was a child and her contemporary.

O
NCE
I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.

It was very exciting and went something like this: If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private and seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal's stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiralling pounds of paper leading upward until finally you arrived at being a general.

I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can't remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.

I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I'll have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I don't know where I got the idea that the house was just filled
with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It's an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.

I didn't let it throw me, though. I marshalled my energies and went out and started going door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.

An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of
Life
magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.

At the next house, there wasn't any paper, not even a used envelope because another kid had already beaten me to it.

At the next house, nobody was home.

That's how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block until finally I got enough paper together to become a private.

I took my God-damn little private's stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn't even bother to have the stripe sewed on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with some socks.

I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of
Collier's
from somebody's basement which was enough to get my corporal's stripes that immediately joined my private's stripe under the socks.

The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.

Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my
glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.

I
'M
haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

A few years ago (World War II) I lived in a motel next to a Swift packing plant which is a nice way of saying slaughterhouse.

They killed pigs there, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month until spring became summer and summer became fall, by cutting their throats after which would follow a squealing lament equal to an opera being run through a garbage disposal.

Somehow I thought that killing all those pigs had something to do with winning the war. I guess that was because everything else did.

For the first week or two that we lived in the motel it really bothered me. All that screaming was hard to take, but then I grew used to it and it became like any other sound: a bird singing in a tree or the noon whistle or the radio or trucks driving by or human voices or being called for dinner, etc.

"
You can play after dinner.'
"

Whenever the pigs weren't screaming, the silence sounded as if a machine had broken down.

I
T
was a rainy Pacific Northwest auction with kids running all over the place getting into things and farm women interested in buying boxes of used fruit jars, secondhand dresses, and perhaps some furniture for the house while the men were interested in saddles and farm equipment and livestock.

The auction was in a kind of old warehousebarn-like building with used excitement everywhere on Saturday afternoon. It smelled like the complete history of America.

The auctioneer was selling things so fast that it was possible to buy stuff that wouldn't be for sale until next year. He had false teeth that sounded like crickets jumping up and down inside the jaws of a skeleton.

Whenever there was a box of old toys put up for auction, the kids would bother the hell out of their folks until they were threatened with the strap if they didn't shut up, "Stop pestering me or you won't be able to sit down for a week."

There were always cows and sheep, horses and rabbits
waiting to get new owners or a farmer somberly contemplating some chickens while blowing his nose.

It was great on a rainy winter afternoon because the auction had a tin roof and there was a beautiful wet closeness to everything inside.

An ancient case made out of dusty glass and long yellow wood like a pioneer's mustache contained boxes of stale candy bars. They were fifty cents a box and really stale but for some kid reason I liked to gnaw away on them and would work up a quarter and find somebody to go in with me on a box and I'd end up with twelve stale candy bars in 1947.

I lived in a room that had a bed and a telephone. That was all. One morning I was lying in bed and the telephone rang. The window shades were pulled down and it was raining hard outside. It was still dark.

"Hello," I said.

"Who invented the revolver?" a man asked.

Before I could hang the telephone up my own voice escaped me like an anarchist and said, "Samuel Colt."

"You just won a cord of wood," the man said.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"This is a contest," he said. "You just won a cord of wood."

"I don't have a stove," I said. "I live in a rented room. There's no heat."

"Is there anything else you would want besides a cord of wood?" he said.

"Yeah, a fountain pen."

"Good, we'll send you one. What's the address there?"

I gave him my address and then I asked him who was sponsoring the contest.

"Never mind," he said. "The pen will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Oh, yes, is there any particular color you like? I almost forgot."

"Blue would be fine."

"We're all out of blue. Any other color? Green? We have a lot of green pens."

"All right, green, then."

"It'll be in the mail tomorrow morning," he said.

It wasn't. It never came.

The only thing I ever won in my life and actually received was an armored car. When I was a child I had a paper route that went for miles along the rough edge of town.

I would have to ride my bicycle down a hill, following a road that had fields of grass on both sides and an old plum orchard at the end of the road. They had chopped down part of the trees and built four new houses there.

Parked in front of one house was an armored car. It was a small town and every day after work the driver took the armored car home with him. He parked it out in front of his house.

I would pass there before six o'clock in the morning and everybody would be asleep in the houses. When there was light in the morning I could see the armored car from a quarter of a mile or so.

I liked the armored car and would get off my bicycle and walk over and take a look at it, knock on the heavy metal, look in the bulletproof windows, kick the tires.

Because everybody was asleep in the morning and I alone out there, after a while I considered the armored car to be mine and treated it as such.

One morning I got into the armored car and delivered the
rest of my papers from it. It looked kind of strange to see a kid delivering newspapers from an armored car.

I rather enjoyed it and started doing it regularly.

"Here comes that kid in the armored car delivering papers," the early risers said. "Yeah, he's a nut."

That was the only thing I ever won.

I was sitting in a bar last night talking to a friend who was from time to time looking down the bar at his wife. They had been separated for two years: no hope.

She was palling it up with another man. They looked as if they were having a lot of fun.

My friend turned and asked me about two books of my poetry. I'm a minor poet, even so, people sometimes ask me questions like that.

He said he used to have the books but he didn't have them any more. They were gone. I said that one of the books was out of print and copies of the other book were down at City Lights Bookstore.

He took a look down at his wife. She was laughing at something the other man had said, who was then quite pleased with himself, and so it goes.

"I have a confession to make," my friend said. "Remember that night I came home from work and found you and my
wife drunk together on sweet vermouth in the kitchen?"

I remembered the evening, though nothing had happened. We were just sitting there in the kitchen, listening to the phonograph and drunk on sweet vermouth. There were probably thousands like us all across America.

"Well, when you left I went and got those two books of poetry out of the bookcase and tore them up and threw the pieces on the floor. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't have put those books of poetry back together again."

"Win a few, lose a few," I said.

"What?" he said.

He was a little drunk. There were three empty beer bottles in front of him on the bar. Their labels had been carefully scratched off.

"I just write the poetry," I said. "I'm not a shepherd of the pages. I can't look after them forever. It wouldn't make sense."

I was also a little drunk.

"Anyway," my friend said. "I would like to have those books again. Where can I get them?"

"One of them has been out of print for five years. The other one you can get at City Lights," I said, busy putting together and filming in my mind what went on after I left the kitchen and went home, glowing like a lantern in sweet vermouth.

What he said to her before he went and got the books of poetry and tore them up. What she said, what he said, which book went first, the way he tore it. Oh, a lovely act of healthy outrage and what was taken care of after that.

I was at City Lights a year ago and saw somebody looking at one of my books of poetry. He was pleased with the book, but there was a reluctance to his pleasure.

He looked at the cover again and turned the pages again. He stopped the pages as if they were the hands of a clock and he was pleased at what time it was. He read a poem at seven o'clock in the book. Then the reluctance came again and clouded up the time.

He put the book back on the shelf, then he took it off the shelf. His reluctance had become a form of nervous energy.

Finally he reached in his pocket and took out a penny. He placed the book in the crook of his arm. The book was now a nest and the poems were eggs. He threw the penny up in the air, caught it and slapped it on the back of his hand. He took his other hand away.

He put the book of poetry back on the shelf and left the bookstore. As he walked out he looked very relaxed. I walked over and found his reluctance lying there on the floor.

It was like clay but nervous and fidgeting. I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this, having nothing better to do with my time.