Book, J.W.E.

Dodo, Chapter Seventeen, All the Flickering Stars

2009-04-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

The calf looked like a black and white chair caught in a spider web, hanging from its mother’s hindquarters, dangling over the damp early evening grass along the road following the Cuyahoga River as it left the old industrial backyard of Cuyahoga Falls for the flat farm lands to the west. F and I stood transfixed, holding our bikes before the crooked wire fence, watching in complete silence. A small car had pulled up a few minutes after we first stopped. The driver, a young woman with dreadlocks, was standing not ten feet from us, her eyes glued to the scene. She hardly seemed to have noticed us.
   The cow shifted, snorting misty vapor from raw-looking nostrils, digging at the ground with her hooves, her front legs splayed, her neck straining, her big eyes filled with the effort of the standing birth.
   The strands of silky wet embryonic fluid still holding her baby in their temporary hammock were beginning to snap free from her extended vulva, which sagged hideously beside her swollen teats. Even as the glistening folds of pink flesh provided new life entrance to the world, the bearer of that portal seemed on the verge of losing her own. After an agonizingly slow stretch of minutes, the new mother finally gave out a mournful bellow, her fetal discharge collapsing in a streaming heap upon the grass, making a sound that reminded me of football players hitting the practice pads outside our school back in Binghamton.

“Cut the shit, girls – or we’re going an extra hour! You hear me?”
   I was sitting on my hands, feeling the cool metal of the bleachers, waiting for the high to kick in, wondering what was taking so long. My eyes followed Helmut as he laced the line of car tires set across the cleat-scarred turf. I kept expecting him to suddenly stretch out like a snake, to slither the practice course on a serpentine belly of orange and white, our school colors. He was desperate to win the coach’s favor, as he was with just about everything he’d encountered since we’d moved to America. That year he was partaking in every single feature of our high school’s sporting program, muddling his way through basketball, baseball, track and field, and skeet shooting, the shooting his only clear talent. No one could ever accuse my brother of not being ambitious.
   “Is this stuff any good?” I asked, turning to see my best friend, Larry Winston, holding his pimply face in his hands, hunched over the bleachers like some dozing gargoyle.
   “Best shit you can get in this part of the state!” he declared, his heavy-lidded eyes at half-mast. “It’s Canadian. Dude, your brother has one fucked up delivery on those pads. Why’s he open up his legs like that?”
   I watched, seeing Helmut repeat the procedure, the coach blowing hard into his whistle, directing the cool September air with his arms. I couldn’t help laughing. “I think he thinks it’s Sandra Welsh.”
   Larry snickered, stretching the side of his mouth with his tongue, the universal symbol for a blowjob. Sandra Welsh was co-captain of the cheerleading squad and the only reason Helmut tried out for half the sports he did. He swore to us that he’d managed to feel her up after a dance at the fire hall, but word around the school was they’d kissed, nothing more. We knew she was just slumming anyway, waiting until football season began for real and the starting line up was selected.
   I knew all too well Helmut wouldn’t make the cut. He was enthusiastic, and tough, in his own way, but his football skills were about as sure as you’d expect from a guy raised on soccer and field hockey. Nevertheless, he owned the skeet squad, something he managed with an almost frightening efficiency, blowing the clay discs from the sky so consistently the gun teacher had to ask him to sit out every other practice in order to help some of the less-proficient shooters.
   They shot behind the school, into a wooded area known as “Pussy Palace”, the extra-curricular refuge of the red-faced jock elites who topped the school social strata and whose fingers actually did infiltrate the elastic of cheerleader’s underwear, especially after victorious home games, the plastic six pack loops decorating the higher tree limbs testament to that hormonal revelry.
   Binghamton was the sort of blue-collar town where people had enough sense to let the young have their moments of unbridled freedom – within reason, of course. The day Andy Bennix was found in the weight room with a half-naked Patricia Holmes wrapped around him like a scarf was the day the school hired a retired cop to walk the grounds each night with a flashlight.
   “Dude. Your brother’s going to rupture himself! German balls! Gotta be as tough as steel!”
   I laughed. It was easy with Larry. He had none of the knee-jerk attitude of so many of our American peers, all the whispered “Hitler this” and “Hitler thats”, the din of immigrant prejudice that we eventually learned to block out, returning the favor with our own teasing of the numerous Italian-American and Irish-American kids whose grandparents had journeyed the ocean.
   Larry was a bit more world-wise than most of the dirt bike orphans who circled the playgrounds on lazy late afternoons, when the tackle dummies were taking their punishment. His father was Hungarian on his grandmother’s side and had taken Larry and his younger brother to Europe to meet relatives, giving them an early taste of life beyond the dirty brick walls of the old shoe company that then still employed most of the families in the area.
   “Why’s Helmut so angry all the time? Aren’t you guys glad you came to America? Isn’t that why your folks brought you here? Cause it’s better here?”
   I shrugged, suddenly realizing my fingertips were numb. “I guess so. Father got a good job offer and my uncle set things up for him. It wasn’t really that hard, I guess.”
   Larry gave my arm a friendly punch, the way he often did. “When are you going to start calling your dad “dad”? Huh? You’re in The United States of America now, Tot, not the “Hinterland”.”
   “I dunno,” I replied, feeling a familiar ache rising from my gut, almost overwhelming me. I hugged myself, listing forward, my sneakers caught under the lower bleacher. I could smell the wet fields of Worm, the dark, earthy flow of The Rhine, the stones about father’s old vegetable patch, Grandmother Hannah’s elderberry jam. “I feel kind of sick,” I said, dropping my head between my knees, a swirl of tiny stars filling the black screens of my closed eyelids.
   Larry just laughed. “Told you it was good stuff! Breathe – you’ll feel better in a second.”
   I vomited. I knew it was coming. Still, I covered my shoes and the bottoms of my jeans, decorating them with the greasy pizza we’d devoured just an hour before.
   “Jesus, Vogel! Look at all that good Canadian bacon! What’ve you got against Canadian imports – eh?”

F squeezed my hand in hers. I turned to her for the first time since we’d spotted the unusually-shaped cow standing in the field off Potter’s Road, having been making our way home from a disappointing little music festival near Botzum.
   “Wasn’t that about the most amazing, magical thing you’ve ever seen?” she said, her dark eyes moist with the experience.
   I shrugged. “It was kind of gross – don’t you think?”
   She let go of my hand, her face stiffening.
   “How can you call the miracle of life “gross”? It was beautiful! Did you see the mother’s eyes when she finally let go? My God, T, sometimes I wonder if you’ve even got a heart! You’re so – so, so damn European!”
   I just slowly shook my head, not knowing what else to say, watching the farmer and two young boys standing at the ready with a brush and a bucket, letting the mother have her time licking at the sticky newborn sprawled in the dewy grass.
   “How can you just ignore what you just witnessed? Seriously, T – how?”
   I stiffened, keeping my eyes on the field, pushing my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans. I heard the dread-locked girl getting into her car and wondered where she was going, if she was sleeping alone that night, wondering what she had made of the “miracle” we’d just been witness to. I wasn’t being heartless, no matter what F said, I just couldn’t have imagined a cow birth being any less wondrous a thing to behold. It was quick and ugly and so automatic. I didn’t even get the feeling that the mother was particularly connected to it all, other than being relived that the sixty-pound goiter hanging from her groin was now lying in the grass. There wasn’t any violin music, no sunshine breaking through the trees, none of the trappings of a “glorious birth” we’re so accustomed to seeing on television and in the movies. This was the real thing and it was dirty, smelly and awkward. The bored look on the farmer’s face said it all. In fact, that’s what I wisely chose to say in my defense, those very words, words that earned me a punch in the chest and a lonely ride home, F demanding I keep my distance.
   It wasn’t until later that night that we spoke.
   I was sitting on the tiny front porch of the house we lived in, half stoned, half asleep, watching the twinkling canopy over the trees for the next shooting star, the clouds of the afternoon having all but disappeared.
   I heard the familiar groan of the screen door of the first floor apartment, my bloodshot eyes glued to the velvety expanse. F footsteps crossed the wooden porch, a series of muted creaks, followed by a soft cough. “Totty?” she said, her voice small and vulnerable, like a paper cup adrift on some dark sea. She only called me Totty when she was truly sad or hurt – or both. “I don’t want us to hate each other like this. It’s not good. We need to talk about it. Something’s wrong. Something’s gone wrong.” It was then I saw it, a bright waver, not far from the handle of the big dipper. It seemed to be tracing an invisible line, moving so slowly I swear it stopped and turned completely around before continuing. I blinked, trying to focus, determined to follow it, wherever it was going. “Totty?” F said again. She was so close now I could smell her, that sweet woodsy scent her body gave off, mixed with something from the kitchen – nutmeg, I think. She must have been baking. She often baked when she was upset. It was a trait she’d inherited from her mother. “Totty?” she continued, her voice still sounding wounded. “I want us to be happy or not at all. I don’t want to live with a man I need to fight to understand.” The shooting star was drifting now, in wider and wider right angles, like a bird with a broken wing. It didn’t seem to be able to help itself, it just kept moving in a south westerly direction, lower and lower, towards the rustling tops of the group of tall poplars behind the property. I was lost in my own thoughts, remembering something that Larry Winston had once told me, on a night very similar, when we were lying out under the stars, our bare backs on the smooth cool football turf. We were stoned, of course, stoned and young – anxious for our lives to really start.

“Dude! You didn’t know most of them were satellites? Seriously?”
   I’d just been informed that the shooting stars I’d wished upon as a little boy, clinging to father’s collar as he held me aloft in the field across from our house outside of Worms, were in fact the telecommunications hardware of a select group of nations. I didn’t believe him. No one had ever told me this before. I was angry. It was like calling a big part of my childhood a lie. Why hadn’t father told me this?
   “You’re full of shit!” I replied, an edge to my voice. “Satellites? Shooting stars are Sputniks?”
   Larry snorted, amused. “Not even. Sputnik was at least exciting – a pioneer effort, you know? Those suckers moving about up there are just the multi-million dollar investments of a variety of communication companies and military institutions. NASA too. And weather satellites.” Larry regularly had information like this to impart, stuff that made me feel stupid, made me think he was trying to make a fool of me. It always made me defensive.
   “I can’t believe it. Not all of them!” I insisted, desperate to cling to some of my childhood fancies.
   “Well, no, not every single one – but most of them, the ones that move slowly, that seem to wiggle about? Those are satellites,” he explained, now sounding quite sincere.
   I kept my face to the heavens, squinting extra hard, determined to somehow prove him wrong. “Which ones are shooting stars then?” I asked, not really wanting to know, wishing he’d never opened his big mouth.
   “The ones you almost can’t see, the ones that disappear when you’re trying to keep with them,” he said, his voice slow and deliberate. He was good at explaining such things. He might have made a good teacher, if he hadn’t crashed his motorcycle two days before our Senior Prom. They found him, wrapped about his Honda 250 like a red ribbon around a Christmas present. “The ones that go so quickly,” he added. “The ones that are gone before you even realize you’ve seen them.”

“God damn it, T! Stop ignoring me!”
   F’s fist connected with my chest, making me cry out. I pulled my knees to my stomach, pushing deep into the musty old loveseat we’d inherited from the older couple who lived on the second floor of the house. My eyes now stinging, I turned, seeing F’s tear-streamed face, like some terrible moon, hanging before the field of lights, banishing my reverie to some soft corner of my pot-addled mind. She just stood there, looming over me, her lower lip quivering, putting a queer little dimple on her chin.
   She looked so much younger than her twenty-three years when she cried. My instinct was to take her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be all right, but this time I couldn’t make myself do it. Things weren’t going to be all right. I knew it and she knew it. The stars seemed to know it too. “We need to talk,” I said quietly, still wincing, holding my chest. “Let’s go inside, OK?”

“And that one there is the Dove. See him? Just south of Lepus?”
   I peered into the inky expanse, feeling the cool night air on my neck, feeling it slip past the upturned collar of my coat, down into the thin cotton of my pajamas. Father had my bare ankles tight in his rough hands, squeezing me harder than he needed to. I clung to the top of his head, my fingers woven into his thick dark hair, which smelled of pomade and tobacco. All I could see where stars. The shapes of various animals and characters he was pointing me towards were beyond me, but I kept saying yes, yes I could see the rabbit and I could see the bear and I could see the fish – I could see them all, even the tiny little dove.
   “That’s the brave dove that flew from Noah’s Ark and found the sprig of olive,” he explained, adjusting his grip, my slippers dangling precariously from my feet. Mother had gone to special late service at church, something to do with a death in the parish, leaving “the men” to get dinner and put ourselves to bed.
   After we’d picked at the toast and sausages father had managed to burn, we’d gone out into the field to star gaze, a hobby father had acquired while sitting outside the local in the early hours of the morning with his cronies, trying to talk away the edge of his each drinking spell. Helmut was with us, but had gotten bored after a few minutes and had taken off to the stone well that sat beside a chestnut tree in which we’d nailed a wooden platform the summer before. He was lying on the makeshift ledge, tossing chestnuts into the well. We could hear them hitting the bucket that hung in the dark stone cavity.
   “Why is the brave dove in outer space?” I asked, a reasonable question for a boy barely four years into his life.
   “He’s there to catch the falling stars,” replied father, with a grin I couldn’t see.
   “Oh,” I said, seeing a quick streak of white race across the misty heavens. “Did he catch that one, father? Did he?”
   “Of course he did – you don’t see it anymore, do you?”
   I looked and I looked but it was gone, just like father had said, stolen away in the beak of the dove. “I think his belly must be full of stars,” I proclaimed, a sudden greasy belch breaking from my mouth.
   “Almost as full of sausage as yours!” laughed father, suddenly spinning about on his heel, twirling me so fast the stars looked like a swirl of cream in a cup of coffee.
   “Doves don’t eat sausage!”
   “Oh, they do, Totty, they do – when they have no choice they do,” father replied, coming to a quick stop, my stomach lurching, the taste of burnt food rising in my throat.
   “When they’re starving?” I asked.
   “Yes, when they’re starving, when they have no other choice, when – when things tell them they have to,” said father, his voice gone low and flat. “When they have to be the hawk, Totty – when they have to be the hawk.” I heard one of Helmut’s nuts hitting the bucket, a short, sharp clang that rang in my ears, like a warning. I tilted my head back up to the night sky and there seemed to be twice as many stars as before, a thousand doves in flight, hunting their prey.

I listened to F undress and then felt her crawl into bed beside me.
   I lay on my side, watching shadows flitter across the moonlight on the wall, waiting to see what she might do, if she’d speak or move towards me. She did neither. She just lay there, a silent, unseen presence, only inches from me – but a million miles away.
   In the morning we made love. It was automatic. We hardly exchanged a word, both of us playing our part, concentrating on some unseen prize, a last ditch effort to save what we had. It was the very last time.

“They should have buried Winston with his bike,” suggested Helmut, handing me the smoldering roach clip he’d deigned to share on account of the somber occasion, telling me I was dead if I dropped it between the bleachers.
   “His father brought it back from Vietnam,” I said, nervously putting the metal clip to my lips, sucking at the damp twist of rolling paper.
   “Figures,” laughed Helmut, taking the roach from me. “It survived the war, getting shipped half way around the world, and then genius goes and trashes it half a mile from his house.”
   I wanted to defend Larry, but I didn’t say anything, I just looked up to the graying sky, waiting to see the first star, hoping it was real.

Dodo, Chapter Sixteen, Space is Very Cold

2009-04-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

The glass didn’t shatter, not the way we’d imagined it would. Having expected a great big burst of shards, we crooked our forearms across our eyes, a makeshift shield, poised there at the edge of the uneven sidewalk, stressed by tree roots that had risen after heavy Spring rain.
   “Shit!” cried Helmut, in our native tongue, lowering his arm to open his eyes, seeing the red brick he’d thrown hit the window of the savings bank, creating a spiral of cloudy fissures as it fell to the ground. Though it hadn’t shattered the window, it had made a hole in it, about the size of a quarter, like the telltale kiss of a bullet, enough to set off a deafening alarm. “Move your butt, Dodo!” he screamed. “Move it!” The deafening electronic squeal reminded me of the time Grandfather Amwolf had taken us under a small bridge along The Rhine, the pontoon he was commanding suddenly assaulted by what seemed like a million pigeons, the fury of their screeching remaining in our ears as we sat in the sun some thirty minutes later, eating lunch, grandfather’s face growing rose pink behind a tankard of ale.
   There was only one response to such an unnerving alarm.
   We ran.
   Rather, Helmut ran. I stumbled after him, my knees not wanting to bend, my stomach heavy, my ears burning at the shrill clarion, terror wrapping its long arms about me, holding me back, causing me to trip on the opposite curb, even as Helmut disappeared down the wet alley beyond Mrs. Bone’s candy shop, the last building on the small street that pressed lazily to the north end of Worms.
   I shot forward, striking the wooden frame at the bottom of the dusty window of the candy shop. Dazed, on my knees, holding a hand to the cold and sticky numbness that spread beneath my lower lip, I looked up to see old Mrs. Bone standing in the open doorway, her apron decorated with red handprints. I knew she had been making the boiled sweets she sold in the big mason jars that lined the shelves of her arcane establishment, the unwrapped delicacies that mother warned us never to eat, it being “well known” that Mrs. Bones was a gypsy, something very next to a gargoyle in its unwelcome nature. Or so it was, back then in the early 1960s, in our neighborhood, the few blocks of patchwork streets that bled off into the countryside not far from where our modest house sat.
   “Boy?” Fraulein Bones asked, as if she wasn’t sure of what I was. I pressed my hands to the damp stone wall beneath the window, catching my reflection, seeing that my chin as red as her apron. My eyes were glassy, open wide, terror still holding me in its binding arms, the bank alarm crying away in the background. It was before six, a Sunday morning, the hour when all truly pious people were in church, or so mother had been informed by the chalk-faced magistrate when they booked my drunken father into prison just the Sunday before, a stay that would only last a week, one which I imagined was to be a lifetime.

Helmut’s brick toss was in retribution for this incarceration, for the tears it had put on mother’s face. We had all stood outside the big courthouse, watching father driven off in the constable’s black van, helpless to do a thing. That night, Helmut had pulled me into the hall closet, informing me I was to be his accomplice in the greatest robbery Worms has ever witnessed. “If you squeal to mother, I’ll tear your tongue out! Got it?” I nodded through advancing tears, father’s old wool overcoat at my back, enveloping me like a shroud, smelling of sweat and tobacco.
   We’d quietly crept out through the back door, our pajamas bottoms tucked into our rubber wellingtons, our unbuttoned winter coats rising like capes in the early morning mist. Off we hurried, across the garden, around the stone wall and off into the steep brace of black oaks that separated our property from the road leading into the city. Mother was still asleep, wrapped in her bedcovers, her face moist from crying throughout the night. She would be looking for us half an hour later, calling from the garden, her voice pained and hoarse with anger and worry, telling us that we would suffer the devil’s fury if we didn’t show ourselves for Sunday Service.

“You’re hurt. Come inside. Let’s wash your face with some warm water.”
   I looked up, half expecting to see some stone-faced monster reaching for me.
   Mrs. Bones was the oldest woman I had ever seen. Her eyes were yellow, like the glucose drops father used to suck in the morning to clear his breath before he went to work. Her skin was putty-colored and looked as damp as the bricks that made the shop. Grabbing me firmly by the collar, she drew me into the rickety corridor that led to a dark door with a hand-written sign that read Hannah Bone’s Fresh Sweets and Sundry. Closed Sunday. Please knock.
   “Sit yourself in that chair and don’t fidget,” she ordered.
   I didn’t dare say a word. I knew I was safer inside, even with a near-gargoyle. I was sure that an army of policemen had already descended on the bank. It was easy to imagine them, spreading across the slick, dark street, truncheons drawn, their eyes strained to the temple, hounds pulling on leashes, desperate to sink their great teeth into the bank-robbing criminal sons of the imprisoned and disgraced Georg Vogel.

Helmut was always high-strung, even as a boy. I can often remember him at the mercy of some nervous habit, like the incessant cursing under his breath that caused him to be sent home from school when he was about eleven, a paper cone pinned to his ears, the mark of the fool, a punishment prescribed by Mr. Dinter, our theatrical headmaster. I can see him that evening, slumped at the supper table, his ears red from the clothespins Mr. Dinter had attached to his delicate lobes, a purple welt showing on his neck, the shape of father’s hairbrush.
   The involuntary swearing wasn’t his only trick.
   He worked his way through a whole litany of them, on into his teenage years, when the war puberty was waging on his body seemed to momentarily preoccupy him.
   One summer, it was the hand licking that nearly drove us all crazy. He had to lick his hands every few minutes, touching them to his face, constantly complaining that his cheeks were burning. Another year he developed a desperate need to touch the ground with his right hand every dozen steps or so, even when he was running, which made him look like some sort of boy-sized baboon. Once, when we were fleeing from our neighbor, mouths crimson with stolen fruit, Helmut lowered himself to brush the grass and slipped, falling head over heel, right into a thicket of nettles. He came home an hour later, scratches and hives lining his bare arms and legs, having been caught and made to weed the strawberry patch we’d so handsomely raided.
   It was as if he’d been born with too much energy for one body.
   He’d fidget any time he was asked to remain still, which often resulted in a cup around the ears by father, sometimes grandfather, if he was present. Knowing Helmut couldn’t help it, I felt sorry for him, almost as much as I relished seeing him punished. Father would never acknowledge that Helmut wasn’t to blame. He told us he was simply acting up, testing everyone’s patience. Helmut would usually end the day locked in our little upstairs bedroom, pacing heavily across the wooden floor, until father rose from the flickering television, taking the stairs like a younger man, releasing his belt from about his trousers.
   Helmut also talked to himself, a habit that lasted almost a year, before being replaced by another. I can remember the two of us walking the rookery beyond the bogs that marked the old Jewish cemetery, looking for the bones of young ravens pushed from their nests. Helmut was carrying on a strange monologue, as if he were speaking in tongues.
   “What are you saying?” I asked, fearful of his unpredictable rage, but too curious to let it stop me. “I can hear you doing it.”
   “What?” he snapped, his hands tight fists. “None of your business – Dodo!” He lurched at me, making me stumble backwards, crunching a dry bone under my heel.
   We continued, silent but for his ceaseless muttering, the tall grass steaming about the trunks of the spindly poplars that housed the large nests, the distant cawing of some unseen raven making me think of dead things.
   “Space is very cold,” he suddenly declared, loud enough for me to hear. But he wasn’t really talking to me. It was as if he was speaking to the tiny bones caught in the thick grass. “It’s cold around Venus,” he continued, stopping beneath a small tree bent with age. “Really cold.” I hovered near by, listening intently, pretending that I wasn’t. “They carried canisters of fire on their backs,” Helmut explained, his voice flat and hollow, like a recording, reminding me of the hated tapes Grandfather forced us to make. “They used them to melt the ice on their beards,” he furthered, his boney legs splayed in the calf-high grass, his arms hanging at his sides as he stared at the ground, like he was reading the words in the soil between the grey-green blades.
   He’d never spoken this loud before, not during one of his “babbling exercises”, as mother had taken to calling them. “Listen who’s practicing for the Babble Olympics again,” she’d tease, never understanding how helpless he was.
   I was transfixed, and terrified. I stood where I was, hardly breathing, wondering
if my brother hadn’t somehow been taken over by aliens and was about to reveal some terrible plan to invade the planet and destroy all civilization.
   “Cheese made them fall apart, good old Stilton it was. Fancy that! We shook the old bottles until they were full of cheese – then we threw them straight at the horrible spiders and their legs came off – just like that!” continued Helmet, now leaning his forehead against the scarred trunk of the crooked little tree. He stayed there for a long minute, not saying anything. Then, without warning, he screamed, a scream so loud and furious that half a dozen ravens shot up from the grass to my right, their ebony wings tearing at the wet air. My eyes followed them into the distance, where the dark trunks multiplied into what was known as the Black Forest, named after the much larger forest to the south. Helmut was now punching himself, butting his head at the tree. He fell to his knees, dropping to the dewy grass on all fours, howling like a dog.
   I ran to where the ravens had taken flight, wanting to get away, afraid of what Helmut might do next. There, spread upon the flattened grass was a young raven, its stomach torn open, fresh blood shining on its dark feathers. It was still moving, its head jerking about, blind, its eyes pecked from their sockets. I can remember crying, so loud it startled Helmut. I was five or six. I’d been taught that only a baby would cry out at such a thing.
   Helmut had now ended his tantrum. He was looking over at me, still holding himself to the grass, his haunches high. I just stood there, unable to move, the dying bird at my feet. Helmut didn’t say another word. He just got up and walked towards me. Upon seeing the half-eaten raven, he set his boot down upon it, twisting hard, his face glistening like a sugar bun. He then looked straight at me, a pitiful longing in his eyes, one I’d only really understand years later, when the same dark curtains fell upon my stage. “Space is very cold,” he repeated, his voice gone flat again, as if it were uninterested even with itself. “Really cold,” he said, sounding like father.

“Here, have one to take with you. You’ve been a brave boy.”
   Mrs. Bones had taken one of the big glass jars from the shelf behind the shop counter and was holding it towards me, working the lid free, her wrinkled face a twist of concentration. I hesitated, my fingers lingering over the pale green sweets clotted into a lump at the bottom.
   “Hurry up now – I haven’t got all day. Choose and be off with you!” instructed Mrs. Bones, her eyes going to the pot steaming on her little stove. I slipped my arm into the deep jar, almost to my elbow, and broke free one of the sticky marbles. My chin was now dressed with a wide plaster she’d applied, along with a smelly white cream. “You’ll be happy to know you’ll survive,” she continued, choosing her words carefully, a sly twinkle in her weathered eyes, which I failed to notice. “I can’t say the same for that brother of yours, not when they catch him,” she added, almost smiling. I gasped, my eyes wide with surprise. Quickly extracting my hand from the jar, I dashed out of the little shop, down the corridor and out through the brick doorway to the damp morning street. On and on I ran, never daring to look back. I didn’t stop until I was back home, panting for breath, tucked underneath my bed, my socked feet against the wall. Turning my hand over, opening my fingers, I saw it, clinging to my palm, like a new bud on the end of a branch – the sticky little green ball of candy. I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat it, but that no longer seemed so important, not when I was sure they’d soon be coming to lock me up. I put it to my lips, touching it with my tongue, my eyes still wet with tears. It was sour, sour and sweet. Taking it into my mouth, I imagined a great, wicked gargoyle, carrying Helmut over the old cemetery, off into the thick mist, never to return. It was then that I felt something crinkle under my hip. Reaching with my sticky hand I discovered a comic book, one of the English ones Uncle Alder had picked up while on business in London. It was called Space Fun and featured “the thrilling adventures of Roddy and his Rocketship, about a boy who inherits a special spaceship, one handed down through the generations, first built by his great-great grandfather in his potting shed. “Cheese made them fall apart, good old Stilton it was. Fancy that!” I read, in a whisper, turning the pages of the comic slowly, knowing it was one of Helmut’s, fearing he’d arrive any moment to catch me reading it, even as I feared I’d never see him again. “We shook the old bottles until they were full of cheese – then we threw them straight at the horrible spiders and their legs came off – just like that!”
   I read on, the candy now mostly sour in my mouth, hearing mother in the back garden, calling out our names, her voice the ragged clarion of a woman slowly being pulled apart by her own family.

“It was given to me by my father,” declared Roddy, standing before a tall silver Venusian in flowing white robes. “His father gave it to him, and his father gave it to him, and his father gave…”
   “Stop!” commanded the towering man of silver. “I have heard enough of this thing called “handing down”, boy of earth – I tire of its binding ways. Cursed are they that suffer the fate of the generations. We on Venus know not the father or the mother, we make ourselves – from the very fabric of space!”

I stayed under the bed for what seemed hours, until I heard Helmut squealing, father dragging him across the lawn, mother crying at the back door.

Dodo, Chapter Fifteen, The Shit-Faced Family Blues

2009-03-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

I made my way back through the lounge car, steadying myself against the seats, the way everybody did, even the seasoned employees who worked the busy Capitol Limited, on its daily progress between Pittsburgh and Chicago, a journey I was now making in reverse, having endured eight days along the brutal and lonely beaches of the gulf coast.
   I had met a girl named Meredith on the lazy train and was excitedly transporting a cardboard tray filled with two orders of fries and two sodas back to our seats. I waited for the doors between cars to open with their automatic clutter, the rush of air from the tiny space like the false roar of a seashell. Stepping over the slippery joint where the floors met, I looked through the next door to see Helmut, leaning into the seat where I’d left Meredith not some ten minutes before, having done my best to look gallant as I refused the crumpled bills she’d tried to force into my hand. “My treat,” I’d said, happy to explain it was my way of showing appreciation for her having helped me photograph a stretch of torn and shattered auto wreckage yards, the cars piled at least fifty high into the mint blue sky, creating a bizarre late-morning landscape of faded painted metal peaks, behind which an obstructed sun was still trying to greet the new day.
   Helmut was a bastard when it came to girls, especially those he knew I was toppling over the precipice for, something I was, of course, all too prone to do – all too quickly. The only girl I’d ever been surprised by was F. The night I first saw her, I was sure she was about the furthest thing I’d ever want to crawl into bed with, let alone fall in love with. Proving my intuition an immature thing, she soon transformed into a raven-haired promise of sexual adventure, a girl whose funny back teeth, flanged like the tips of a hawk’s wing, became a source of thrilling sensation, the times she’d take me past the archway of her mouth and move her jaws side to side, in a circular motion, setting me as rigid as stone as I penetrated the warm well of her throat.
   Meredith was a sandy blonde with a face that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the center of a cartoon drawing of a sunflower. Her pink cheeks were accented by impressive dimples that appeared when she smiled, offering a greeting so reassuring it all but dislocated my natural predisposition to shyness, something so many people took as a classic case of Teutonic aloofness.
   I was, in truth, anything but aloof. But still, I had to overcome the stereotype, even years after my Southern German accent had all but faded into the recesses of my adopted rush of American phrasing and intonation.
   “Hey! Look who’s finally made it! The concessions kid! Ice cold soder – git yer ice cold soder!” Helmut called out, laughing the big way he always did, all teeth and tongue, not caring how loud he was in the crowded car. He made no show of moving as I approached. I was keeping my eye on the tilt of the tray, afraid of tipping Meredith’s orange soda into her fries. “Mere’s been telling me all about her dad’s cow machines!” boasted Helmut, grabbing the flimsy tray, passing it over to the grinning Meredith, who he had all-too-conveniently trapped in her seat against the window, where, only moments earlier, I had been sitting, trying to set the lens of my Leica flush with the dusty window in order to capture the jagged peaks of rusting wrecks. His use of the instantly-familiar “Mere” didn’t slip by me. It was an extra little slap in my face, of the sort he’d used before. That was about the only weakness in his armory – he was reliably repetitious. Every victory bought imitation, which forged a circular evolution, something I have to thank God for. If he had been learning along the way, I would have been dead long ago – from trying to kill him, if not from an irreversibly-broken heart. “Fifty gallons a minute he can collect from just two head of Jerseys! That’s almost enough to keep Bunter Beams quiet!” roared Helmut, his eyes half-closed, chewing at the inside of his mouth, his idea of a good James Dean impersonation.
   Bunter Beams was the fattest child in our primary school back in Worms, a boy as big and round as a buoy, a situation only made worse by the red and white stripes of our compulsory school cap. He wasn’t actually named Bunter, we just called him that, in reference to the popular British character, Billy Bunter, the roly poly, bespectacled schoolboy of supremely nerdish inclination.
   Bunter Beams loved his milk. This was the real kind, the sort we were served with our school lunch, with an inch of cream at the top of each bottle, a treasure we all relished in licking at with our tongues, after we’d peeled back the little foil caps. We had the same delivered at home. Mother would set a six-pint holder just outside the front door once a week. It had a plastic needle and a gauge showing the half moon measure of one bottle to the full compliment of six, to let the dairyman know just how much we needed. No matter how early she rose, the delivery had always been made, every silver foil cap already punctured by sparrows, who relished the cream almost as much as Bunter Beams. Some mornings, I can remember hearing father yelling at the happy little birds from the upstairs bathroom window, spitting toothpaste as he screamed that he was going to shoot them all and make a king’s pie. “That’s blackbirds, Georg, not sparrows,” I could hear mother correcting, in her country lilt, almost effecting a cockney meter, banging their metal bedpan into the toilet, flushing what father had left in the night. Though they’d acquired indoor plumbing two years after Helmut was born, father still refused to completely give up his old manners, swearing off navigating the dark landing for late-night visits to the new bathroom. Being such a heavy sleeper, in those days before the bottle ruined his natural constitution, he was probably sparing us the likelihood of his tumbling down the stairs, cursing with each bump, like the tight bellows of a bagpipe.
   “Here, Dodo – this is yours,” Helmut snickered, handing me my soda, ignoring the ice that was spilling onto the carpeted floor of the train. “Have some fries too, why don’t ya?” he said, dropping a greasy handful into my open palm.
   I just stood there, my feet wide apart, balanced like some Parisian archway, straddling the aisle. Helmut now had one knee set into the seat beside Meredith, its cushion still warm from my recent occupation. I watched her, her beautiful olive eyes flecked with seaweed, her bright teeth, her thin red lips, the lean grace of her pale, freckled neck, and my heart ached, for I knew I had already lost her.
   “Sit down, Dodo, you’re blocking the way!” barked Helmut, sitting down in what had been my assigned seat. I winced, taking my eyes from Meredith. Dodo. It was the nickname that stayed strictly between us, part of our brotherly code, the secret language that had been so important when we first came to the new country. Now it was simply a term of ridicule, one he only used when he meant to emasculate me, such circumstances often involving a pretty girl who had dared speak to me first. In a club, at a party, on a bus, a train, a hovercraft – it didn’t matter – he didn’t discriminate.
   Defeated, I sat down across the aisle, next to the grey-haired lady who had fallen asleep on Helmut’s shoulder half an hour earlier, causing him to make faces at her as we rattled through the broken backyards of eastern Michigan. I knew even then that he was only trying to get the attention of the mesmerizing blonde sitting next to me, the girl who was quietly looking out the window, pointedly not saying a word. I’d tried numerous times to work up the courage, to locate the right thing to say to her, to find an easy opening, but I’d failed, and now there she was, edging into the sleazy embrace of Don Juan Vogel. She might as well have been on a train heading in the other direction.
   “Thank you again so much, Tot!” she called out, in a brittle, but warm voice, across the way, her fingers doing a dance as she waved around Helmut’s grinning profile, a fry dangling from his chiseled lips. “You’re so sweet to have done this! Really. I need to pay you before we reach Pittsburgh – I really do.”
   I smiled back weakly, hating myself, hating the train, hating the plan to meet Helmut in Chicago and ride home with him, a thorn at my side, one I’d end up pressing to my own flesh, the way I always did. My trip north, on the City of New Orleans, had been bad enough as it was.

I’d been half asleep, reading a dry old crime paperback I’d picked up in an antique store in the French Quarter.
   The Case of the Wheelchair Corpse.
   It had a bright cover, picturing an elderly lady clutching an afghan, tumbling from the chair in which she’s just plunged over the edge of a rooftop. I’d bought it, half-intending to send it anonymously to F, sort of a final word in the long and miserable argument that had colored the last few weeks of our two-year relationship. “It’s like you’ve got me in a wheelchair!” I’d declared, in one of our more-heated final sessions. “You’d be happier if I couldn’t do half the things I could – wouldn’t you? You’d like me like some – some invalid – just so you could be in charge. I thought this was supposed to be a team effort? I mean – wasn’t it?” She’d hurled a biscuit tin at me, necessitating six stitches in the musty-smelling room of the Pakistani doctor at the clinic across the street from Tarmonti’s.
   The book was amazingly boring. It made an episode of Murder She Wrote seem nearly as exciting as peeling Fay Wray out of her underwear (an image that had accompanied my earliest nights of self-pleasure, one acquired after seeing the original 1933 King Kong at a year-end school assembly). I’d drifted to sleep, hunched in my seat, my nose poking between the open pages, trapping the book against the back of the seat in front of me, my arms slung lifelessly across my lap. I was startled awake by a fierce burst of coughing, coming from across the aisle. I’d only recalled seeing a younger man sitting there, but it was now occupied a large woman wearing a bright red kerchief about her head. She leaned at the window, her cheek flat to the glass, fanning her face with a travel brochure. She coughed more, sounding like a stream of tiny firecrackers going off inside a wooden trunk. I tried to look away but she caught my eye and grinned, the silver in her teeth reflecting the dim reading light above her head. “Tarzan’s gonna teach those savages a lesson!” she said, as if I knew what she was talking about. “It’s not up to the white man to lord the castle. Worse is if the dark man gets to aidin’ an’ abettin’ the white lord, then you’ve got a sin – a big one!” I smiled quickly, pressing my book to the seat, bringing my nose to meet its splayed aged pages once again, pretending I had dropped right back to dozing, but the big lady just rattled on. “See yourself, son? You’re as white as me, I can see that, but you’re not of me, not at all. Where you from anyway?”
   “I’m German,” I replied.
   I don’t know why I told her, why I just didn’t keep my nose to that old book.
   Actually, that’s a lie – I do know why.
   I told her because it was the first time anyone had spoken to me, all the way from New Orleans – other than the red-faced man who had peered from the mouse-sized toilet between cars when I’d opened the door. The fact that he’d left it unlocked, the green bar showing, did little to quell his fury. He’d actually called me “gimcrack”, a word I’d never even heard before. I later learned it meant something useless. It’s a wonder Helmut never got a hold of that one.
   “I’m German.” That was all I’d intended to say. I thought it would suffice. I thought I could drift back to my semi-sleep, feeling better at actually having heard my own voice, but she wouldn’t let it go at that, she had issues to filter the air with.
   “You ain’t blonde. How come you ain’t blonde? What color are your eyes? Can’t see in this light. You know who your father was? Hmm? Maybe you’re one of those gypsies. Your people would frown on you, son, riding in an electric train.” I almost laughed. I think she actually thought train tracks were electric, like toy trains. “I’m Dutch myself, at least there’s some on my mother’s side,” she went on. “My mother, bless her, was shot in the buttocks by her father. Bullet went right through her thigh and into the shoulder of her suitor – my father – as he was scramblin’ buck naked up the plum tree.” She said it all in the same matter-of-fact tone, as if she were reading me the bylaws of train commuting. I started to make a snoring sound.
   It was a pathetic ruse. I was asking for it.
   She raved on, her voice rising as she did, the beads of perspiration lining the pink flank of her brow growing in size, glowing in soft accompaniment to the sharp sparkles of her fierce dental work. “Harry Truman was a curser – blue as a gas flame in the company of ladies and gentlemen alike,” she said. “He was an American, son, and what I mean by that is he was a man who could talk down a tornado – standin’ in his underpants. Don’t suppose you German’s understand that, now do you?”
   I actually nodded. Some sleeper. I couldn’t have fooled an infant at a card game.
   “Dresden. What’s that mean to a boy like you, huh? If you was of the yellow persuasion I might say Nag-saki or Hiro-sheema to lift the skin from the skillet. We should have put your people back to the stone age. The Asians didn’t deserve any better. Nor did the Italians – but at least they knew when to turn tail and run.” It was like listening to an old man, like some of father’s old work friends in Binghamton. There was nothing about her that seemed remotely like a woman. No mercy. No room for empathy. She was a real bulldog. “But your people cooked the Jews in those ovens, didn’t they? What does that make a boy like you? Huh? I gotta think you outta be bent like a nail – so crooked with shame you can kiss your ass while givin’ yourself a suck-off!”
   I should have hurled my book at her, but I didn’t. I should have told her to mind her own fucking business, but I didn’t. I should have moved, but I didn’t. I was about the most civil twenty-two year-old alive.
   “God only knows what they’re doing letting you in this country. If I wasn’t medicated, I’d turn you in to the train engineer, I would!”
   I opened my eyes, seeing her sitting there, talking more to the hummingbird of paper fluttering before her big face than to me. “Did you say medicated?” I asked, all but ignoring the offense of her barrage. She suddenly stopped her incessant fanning (the car was actually quite cool) and slowly turned her thick head my way. Her tiny eyes settled on me and stayed there for a long, excruciating moment, before she began to recite anew the mad transcription of her mind.
   “New drugs, son, designed to balance an imbalanced brain. They’re made to treat my depression. I got the blues – the shit-faced family blues.”
   I didn’t speak another word. I just sat there, my face stuck to the book, trapped in my failed pantomime of sleep, listening to her detail a life, offering moments that sounded so familiar they practically made me nauseous. The shit-faced family blues, I thought, my ears filling with the rickety-rack-rack of the train running the tracks, each division of lumber like a measure in a song sung in the voice of my grandfather Amwolf, his temples jagged with veins, his throat a lusty bugle, one red fist bunched at the sleeve of his Sunday suit, advancing on Helmut, holding in the other the wooden end of his hunting rifle, intent on breaking it over his grandson’s skull.
   The shit-faced family blues.
   I carried the phrase with me, all the way to Chicago.

The Capitol Limited was scheduled to arrive in the Pittsburgh station at approximately 11:15 PM, but it was almost midnight and we were still in Ohio. We’d just crawled by the dark outskirts of Cleveland, the dead-looking warehouses and brick buildings as silent as a waiting room in hell. I was humming the song about being a passenger, the one by Iggy Pop, recorded in Berlin with David Bowie. I remember the first time I heard it. I was at a birthday party on the North Side, the affair of some friend of Laser’s, who worked at a popular comic book store just over the 6th Street bridge from downtown. The shop was equally revered for its eclectic record selection, certainly to young men like me who had yet to uncover the riches of obscure music, the psychedelic treasures and rock explosions being hatched in countless drab studios across the world. Pop’s masterpiece on rail travel had crept into my mind as a peach-haired girl who answered to “Penelope P.” danced topless for all assembled, writhing like some drugged snake on the glass coffee table still cloudy with the powder that was fuelling the night. She’d been prepared for her impromptu performance, not wearing a bra under her poodle-emblazoned yellow cardigan.
   It was one of the first things I noticed about her, the moment I stepped into the kitchen of the house and saw the extraordinarily dark face commanding so much attention, the big eyes, like beacons, taking in all with an acute sensitivity I later knew to ascribe to the speed pills Laser was dispensing up in the birthday boy’s bedroom. Like some spiky, red-haired, pierced chemist, he was squatting in his combat boots before the little desk beside the bed, groups of the pale pills assembled on tiny sections of torn composition paper. Dazzled into my stupor by Penelope’s electric presence – the rich color of her ebony skin, the elastic grace of her smile, her perfect teeth, the way her top lids hugged her eyes like half-open garages – I knew it was hopeless unless I joined her in Heaven. Bumping into Meat on the stairs, I was carried through the bedroom doorway, cursing him with all my might, kicking at his shins with the heels of my sneakers. He tossed me onto the bed, right on top of two girls, both dressed like new wave gravediggers. They pounded at my back, clawing me, calling me out for what Meat’s stupidity. Escaping with a healthy scratch across my cheek, I tumbled to the far side of the bed, just in time for Laser to slap a little pouch of paper in my hand.
   Ten minutes later, I was wading through the soup of light that had suddenly filled the kitchen, a fluorescent fog growing from the floor, my eyes sliding like a robot’s, searching for Penelope. I found her in the backyard, which was nothing more than a tiny, walled-in patch of brown grass and dried dog shit. There was a keg sitting on a small picnic table, pushed against the far wall. Penelope was sitting on the table, watching her feet slap together, one high-heeled clog meeting the other. She was moving constantly, like a fly trapped inside two windows. I walked right up to her and placed my hands on the wooden table, on either side of her, bringing my grinning hot face to within an inch of hers. It was thoroughly unlike me. I was more alarmed than she was. She just grinned and reached out and grabbed the collar of my paisley shirt, pushing her big pink tongue through her Olympian teeth, using it to lick the bridge of my nose as her free hand cupped my crotch and squeezed. At first, she did it with some restraint, but that quickly went, her heavy grip soon making me gasp, dancing on my toes in a bizarre fit of agony that I kept confusing with pleasure. As I dropped to the dry grass, howling blue murder at the night sky, she walked right over me, giving me a clear view of the space between her legs, revealing the surprising fact that she wasn’t a girl at all, at least not wholly. I never learned just what direction she was headed in, which train it was she’d boarded.
   It was my first experience with such a thing. I was terrified, ashamed of having been so attracted to her, to him. My amphetamine-powered brain made all sorts of wild rationalizations and assumptions for the interest, leaving me a quaking puddle of neurotic impulses, just perfect for Helmut, when he showed up half an hour later, whistling like the Dusseldorf Express as he stumbled into the dimly-lit living room, catching Mr. Penelope doing her thing atop the coffee table. Seeing him so thoroughly taken with the ambiguous sexuality on display made me begin to laugh, so much that I vomited right onto Penelope’s stage, making her slip and fall into Helmut’s arms, my cocksure brother collapsing under her, as ineffective as the Scarecrow of Oz.
   These memories raced along the back of my mind, as I watched my brother paint Meredith’s mouth with his own, their faces two wrestling shapes in the dark of the night train, the haunted lights of Cleveland industry spread behind them in the misty window. It was easy to imagine that it was Penelope he was kissing, still ignorant of her little secret, as he had been at the party, giving her his classic slow-eyed once over, as he squeezed at her upper arms, pushing himself against her backside, his wasted brain cells whispering inside his skull, like a wind spiraling about an empty bullfighting ring, ancient cheers and cries ringing in his ears, envisioning a mad tableaux of debauchery between he and the incredibly-composed black girl. Penelope’s shove had been completely unexpected. Helmut went backwards, right into the wall, knocking a framed sketch of Frank Zappa from a nail. He cursed, rising, rubbing his shoulder where it had contacted the plaster. He was moving towards the defiant dancer when Iceman appeared, grabbing his arm and whispering to his ear. The look on Helmut’s face when he realized what he was being told was the greatest gift I’d ever received, an image I was conjuring that midnight on the tracks, my body sore from its cramped position on the merciless coach seats, my heart silent, no breath in me, seeing perhaps the most naturally beautiful girl I’ll ever meet, pressing herself into the cavity of my brother’s body, slipping her hands under his shirt, her head buried below his chin, tiny moans breaking from her throat, the dull rumble of the tracks reverberated about the torn stretch of a dying city’s extremities, the sunflower melting into the black cloud, oblivious to the secrets he was hiding under his bravado, the anguish of the first heir to the final playing of yet another recording of the shit-faced family blues.
   Rickety-rack-rack went the train, moving through one graveyard, on the way to the next. Just two weeks later, they’d fine Helmut dead, sprawled across a pool table in the basement of a Carnegie Mellon fraternity, a victim of his own emotional fury.

Dodo, Chapter Fourteen, The Flowered Stage

2009-02-03T18:09:00.000-08:00

Day-Glo’s was a little more upscale than most of the clubs we were used to, but it was otherwise no less parochial in its taste for performers. It was the typical mid-80s rust belt review of parking garage rock, new wave, and college radio favorites. They often seemed to book bands from novel-sounding places like Wales and Australia, prompting the tactless owner on one occasion to decorate the front of the stage with stuffed kangaroos and koala bears, a decision that led to a storm of loose stuffing filling the dance floor, moments after the confused band had begun its kinetic barrage.
   Glo’s, as we eventually came to know it, was thoroughly Pittsburgh, in spite of its awkward attempt at being cosmopolitan. We were drawn there, the Manchester Pals – Iceman, me, Meat, Bettina, Carl, even Willy Blanefield III, before he was ejected and tried unsuccessfully to return in various ridiculous disguises. Their liberally-run open stage night was the main attraction, a mad free-for-all of totally uncensored comedy, theater, and music, held every Tuesday, nine to midnight. It was the golden moment of the week, back there in those shabby, hair-brained days in the only American city I’ve ever grown to think of as home, despite my many more years stuck in Cuyahoga.
   The association began one typical, restless summer evening.
   I was living in a house in the Shadyside district, another of my countless temporary residences, existing day to day on the grace of the household, knowing my presence was tolerated by only half the tenants. This was before I’d met F. I was still working at ridding myself of my Bettina crush, something that had been made all but intolerable upon discovering she and Helmut were sleeping together. I’d followed a tiny blonde girl named Dot, who was hardly more than that. If not for her prominent cheekbones, dark-lined eyes, and spiky bottle-blonde hair, she might as well have been a child, at least fully clothed. Her narrow hips and flat chest enabled her to comfortably dress like everyone else, especially the boys, all of us in our finest rags, the accruements of our certified punk bohemia.
   I remember Dot’s favorite top, a black AC/DC T-shirt that she’d raggedly cut the sleeves from with a pair of paper scissors. She wear it without need for a bra, proud of her androgynous aura, as ready as anyone to smash a vacant window or tip over a USA Today box, those strange street totems that had shown up earlier that year, designed to look like futuristic televisions.
   Dot was from Australia. She was the first to grab one of the kangaroos at Glo’s that night and tear off its head with a gleeful relish, sending a burst of sneeze-inducing stuffing my way.
   She told me how she and her father had sailed to the U.S. in a small wooden boat he’d made himself, the night we’d first kissed, soon after we’d made our way into her bedroom, shedding our clothes and squirming about her bed like two gerbils in a cup, each unsure how to take it any further.
   Not much more than four foot ten, with her compact, tanned body, artificially white hair and big eyes, she was more like a kewpie doll than a human being. She’d quit college in Ohio, having come to Pittsburgh to start her own band. Two months into it, she’d found only a keyboard player to accompany her awkward, tribal drumming. They called themselves Botched Abortion and practiced in the one-car garage behind the split-level house she shared with the keyboardist, Tyla, Robin (Tyla’s younger sister), and Bettina. Dating Bettina’s housemate was all part of my approach to getting over her, what I saw as her betrayal of my feelings, the hurt I was attempting to toss right back in her face by spending so much time with little Dot.
   I was sitting out on the tarpaper roof of the house’s big front porch, my arms folded behind my head, resting against Dot’s open window. She hadn’t returned home from her job at a fast food joint on Liberty Avenue, over in Oakland, not far from the Kings Court theater, where I’d see Pink Floyd’s The Wall just a few weeks later, already deep in crush with F.
   It was one of those summer evenings when the whole world feels warm – the air, the ground, the entire city – it was all one big, inviting lap. We usually prowled aimlessly on such nights, those of us without jobs that required an early start. We’d race down the streets lined with affluent older homes, their spire-shaped attics and black iron fences, the gothic mini castles inhabited by professors and faculty of the near-by Carnegie Mellon University.
   I was listening to the reliable static throbbing of crickets, the low murmur of traffic along Walnut street, when I heard the sudden voice.
   “Hey! T-Tone! Rise and shine, motherfucker!”
   Startled, I opened my eyes, leaning forward, remembering I was some fifteen feet above the street, my bare feet only inches from the edge of the roof.
   “Come on down, man! We’re gonna jam!”
   It was Iceman, all six foot three of him. He was the only person who called me T-Tone, a nickname he coined the day I first showed up wearing the checkerboard sneakers that Bettina had found tied to a fence along a playground on the South Side. It was Two-Tone for a day, until the T fell into place.
   Iceman was as tall as Meat, but seemed much smaller, carrying himself like some heartbroken teddy bear, all slouched over, with a cumbersome gait, always in danger of tripping over his own large feet when he had to do anything other than walk casually. He had a voice as sharp as gunfire. Of Russian descent, his real name was Mikel. His father was a big noise in one of the city’s breweries. His sisters were best friends with Tyla and Robin. They were the ones who had talked Dot and the others into taking me on as a fifth boarder, just for the summer, to help them all balance the rent after a prior housemate had run out on them without paying her final share of the bills.
   “Jam?” I replied, slouched against the window, my arms hanging inside, feeling where the dark wall beneath the sill was still almost cool to the touch. “Where?”
   “That new club - over near Reds!”
   Reds was a favorite haunt. An old man’s bar run by an ex-fireman, it was almost entirely red inside, from the ceiling, to the padded booths, to the shattered eyes of its patrons.
   “That place?” I questioned, sounding doubtful. “Isn’t it really fancy?”
   Iceman shook his head, chewing at a piece of gum, a fixture he was rarely without.

“Nah, they’ve got a cool open stage. Lisa and Flakes checked it out last week. It’s punk as shit!”
   “Punk as shit” was something we all strove to be in those halcyon days between childhood and adult resignation. Provincial Pittsburgh was the perfect platform to display our adopted angst, not too high, not too low. We spent many a night roaming en masse, beating on garbage can lids, gas cans, anything we could find. We’d roam the streets, from the cozy grid of Shadyside, to the grassy sprawl of Squirrel Hill, all the way to Oakland, banging out our signature cacophony, one of the few times Willy’s atonal bleating was tolerated. Some nights would end in a fight, some irate driver discharging his drunken passenger to pummel us senseless. Meat would usually cut the campaign short, sticking his chest into the face of the belligerent frat boy.
   “We gotta sign up early – they fill up really quick. C’mon, dickhead – hurry! See if Tyla wants to come!”
   I pulled myself backwards into Dot’s room, landing with a thump on her small bed. I could smell her on the pillow. I lingered there for a moment, my mind drifting to Bettina, the way it always did. “Damn it!” I cursed, punching the pillow, leaping up, feeling about in the semi-dark for my sneakers. Too impatient to tie them, I wrapped the laces about my ankles and made a quick knot at the front. This was something Helmut and I had learned back in Worms, an old playground trick we’d teach the younger kids, telling them it was the proper way to tie one’s shoes, getting them in trouble when the physical education teacher noticed.
   Rushing down the hallway, grabbing a soda from the kitchen, I pounded on Tyla’s door, seeing the band of light at my feet. “Hey! Tyla! We’re going to hit that new place by Red’s! They’ve got an open stage! Ice says it’s cool!” I put my ear to the magazine clipping of Henry Rollins she’d taped to the center of the door, flipping his fans the bird. There was a moan and the sound of bedsprings and a thumping across the wooden floor. The door opened slightly.
   “What?” drawled Tyla, her head cocooned in a pair of large silver headphones, the cord dangling at her waist. Her modest afro was crumpled by the audio gear, making it stick out, like a fortune cookie over her forehead. I could just see her pale brown legs, smooth and alluring beneath her long T-shirt.
   “Iceman and me are going to jam at the open stage at Day Glo’s – that new place on Craig – by Red’s. Interested? We could use drums.”
   She rolled her sleepy-looking eyes, pushing the door to within an inch of closing. “I ain’t making a jackass of myself in that place,” she said. “Break a leg!” The door shut with a click. I shrugged, turning on my heel, heading out the apartment, bounding down the stairs to the building lobby, opening my can of grape soda.
   “Where’s Tyla?” asked Iceman, seeing me alone.
   “She’s not into it.”
   “That’s fucked up! She’s always into jamming!”
   I shrugged, taking a swig of my drink. “Yeah, well, she’s not so into me. You should have asked her yourself. Who else is coming with us?”
   Iceman grimaced, tilting his round head to the moonlit sky. His thick glasses were offset by a dirty smear of a moustache, which only looked silly on his boyish face. “I tried to get Lisa to come, but she’s dancing tonight. Meat’s got work too, so does Carl. You know if Laser’s around”
   “Nope. How about Bettina?” I ventured, knowing all to well she was more than likely with Helmut, at his place on the North Side.
   Iceman shook his head, cracking a quick bubble. “Willy’s meeting us there.”
   “If we don’t make an ass of ourselves – he will,” I sighed, hustling down the porch steps, feeling the warm night air at my ankles.
   “Yeah, well, at least he’s got some real instruments.”
   “If you consider a one-string guitar and a tiny keyboard instruments.”
   “He said he found us some cool old wigs to wear.”
   I followed him along the sidewalk, sneaking sips of my soda.
   “Wigs? What for?”
   Iceman laughed, sharp and loud, making a dog bark behind a closed door. “We’re signing up as The Grandmas. Old-school punk – like your Brit buddies!” He always said that. I never knew if it was a digging reference to old history or just his sense of everything outside America being one place. He wasn’t the only American I’d encountered who thought that way.
   “The Grandmas? That’s kind of a stupid name.”
Iceman laughed again, spitting his gum onto a neatly-trimmed lawn. “Punk as shit, T-Tone, punk as shit!”

Willy Blanefield III was already there, involved in a heated discussion with a cute girl at the registration desk. They were at the top of a wide carpeted stairway that took us to the club bar and the small stage used for open mike night. Willy was wearing his customary outfit of charity bin lootings; a pair of huge army issue parachute pants, turned inside-out to reveal the white pocket linings, a stained red satin dress shirt with tuxedo ruffles, over which he’d somehow pulled on a dark blue sweater that had been divorced of its sleeves. On his bare feet were dirty white deck shoes, a good two sizes too large. Atop of his oily black mop top sat a bus driver’s cap, one of two he alternated almost every other day, like clockwork.
   “So what? That place sucked anyway! College is for losers,” he was explaining, his wiry frame bent over the little desk. I could see the frustrated look on the girl’s face as I made my way up the stairs, Iceman breathing heavily behind me.
   “You’re making it hard for new students to get their own loans, you know,” the girl replied curtly, a crease across her brow, the only mark on a face as clear as a model’s in some skin cream commercial. Her eyes were silvery blue. I had an immediate crush.
   Willy slapped his hand on the stack of entry forms, almost upsetting the girl’s glass of water. “Tough! It’ll save them from getting suckered like I did. I’m helping them. I’m a deferment hero, you know. Can you guess where my accent’s from? I’m not from Pittsburgh originally, you know.”
   The girl now scowled. “I don’t care.”
   “C’mon! Just try to guess! You’ll never get it!”
   Willy was born in Toledo. He was the son of a small-time radio disc jockey who went by the name of “The Foghorn”. We all referred to him as Leghorn, in reference to the big rooster in the old Merry Melody cartoons.
   “Are these your friends?” the girl asked, craning her neck to catch my eye as I approached. I immediately wished I didn’t know Willy.
   “Hey! Ice! T!” Willy exclaimed, turning to give the girl a cocky smile. “Get that one? Ice Tea” he laughed, loud and tuneless.
   “You guys are The Grandma’s – right?” the girl inquired, ignoring Willy, pushing an entry form my way, as Iceman forced Willy to one side, pulling his cap down about his prominent ears. I blushed slightly, shrugging. “You both need to sign in here and I need to see your IDs.” Everyone between eighteen and twenty-one had a fake one. It was an old tradition in the steel city, almost expected. Iceman and I quickly showed ours and scrawled our unintelligible signatures. “You guys are punk rock?”
   “Punk as shit!” declared Iceman, giving her a scary wink that looked more like he was having a stroke. I held my breath as he pressed against me, hogging the desk. The two mile trek had given rise to his notorious funk, a body odor unlike any other.
   The girl frowned, looking serious. “Ron doesn’t like punk very much. Better not be too loud. We don’t want anyone getting scared away from the bar.”
   “Fuck them!” hooted Willy, pulling out the old keyboard case he’d hidden underneath the closest table, slamming it down. The girl destroyed him with a look.
   “Sorry,” I managed. “He was born a jerk like that. He can’t help it. Just be glad he hasn’t tried to play you any of his recordings.”
   She rolled her eyes, offering a slight smile. “He has,” she moaned, nodding towards the grey boom box Willy was stacking atop the keyboard case.
   I winced. “Sorry.”
   “Is he retarded?” she asked, with a sincerity that almost fooled me.
   I laughed. “Nah, he’s just from Toledo!”
   Iceman snorted.
   “We only hang out with him ‘cause he’s got instruments,” he offered, brushing by me, his perfume trailing him, like the papier-mache tail of some preschool dragon. The girl wrinkled her little nose and made a face. I hung there for a moment longer than necessary, hoping she’d realize the smell was dissipating, that it wasn’t me.
   “You look a bit like this guy a friend of mine used to go out with. Vogel? I think his name was Vogel too,” she remarked, handing me my ID card, which she’d been holding onto as we talked.
   “Lots of Vogels, I guess,” I lied, not wanting to know any more. The long list of girls that Helmut had hooked up with since moving to Pittsburgh was embarrassing. I certainly didn’t want to be known as the brother of such a lothario. The girls I liked were usually smarter than that.
   “You totally look like him. Wish I could remember his name,” she grinned, putting the eraser end of a pencil to her dark lips. “You guys are on third.”
   “Thanks,” I said, making my way to the table that Willy had claimed as The Grandma’s staging area. He and Iceman were already sipping on drinks, Iceman’s hand covering the play switch of the boom box. Willy was bobbing back and forth in his chair. If not retarded, he was certainly borderline hyperactive. I saw his beat-up acoustic guitar sitting under his feet, the worthless antique he called One-String Newman.
   “I’ve got the keyboard,” announced Iceman, belching gin. “You get drums, T-Tone.”
   I squinted, seeing a small, plastic garbage can poised at the edge of the stage.
   “Stole it from work!” Willy declared, sounding very proud of the fact.
   “The ass says he dumped it right outside,” sighed Iceman, yanking the boom box away from Willy’s reaching hand.
   “All that carbon paper and cigarette ash in the street?” I exclaimed, giving Willy an evil eye. He cackled, like a witch. Iceman rolled his eyes, sucking at his drink through the tiny mixing straw, his red eyes settling on the can. “Nice going, jackass! You’ll get us kicked out of here before we even get to perform.”
   “Take a pill, German!” laughed Willy dismissively. “No one’s going to know.”
   Iceman swatted the cap from his head, making him squeal.
   “We’re on third,” I informed them, grabbing a chair and sitting down.
   “No “Kaiser’s Finest” tonight, Mr. Vogel?” grinned Iceman. He was referring to easily the cheapest beer in town, named Old German, much to my chagrin.
   “I promised Dot I’d stop drinking on weekdays.”
   Iceman narrowed his eyes. “You really like her?”
   I shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s OK, I guess.”
   “Good in the sacker?” he grinned, working on what was left at the bottom of the ice in his glass. Two people had just entered the bar. We were early.
   “OK, I guess,” I replied, trying to keep the conversation low, not easy to do with the present company.
   “She swallow?” Willy asked, almost yelling, making me flinch, fearful to glance back over at the registration desk, sure the cute girl had heard.
   “Shut up, dickhead!” I hissed. We were all free to call Willy anything we pleased. He hardly seemed to notice. The only thing he ever really heeded were Meat’s physical threats. Anyone with any intelligence did the same. Not that Willy had much in that department.
   “She swallows yer dickhead?” cackled Willy, pleased with his own joke, reaching again for the dreaded cassette player, causing Iceman to pull it from the table. Following Meat‘s usual protocol, he yanked the tape from inside and hid it in his back pocket, making Willy steam.
   “Virgin!” Iceman sneered, before giving me one of his disquieting winks.
   “Am not!” barked Willy.
   “Yeah? What’s a pudenda then, Mr. Hefner?”
   “A pussy! Duh!”
   “Yeah, what part of the pussy, fuckface?”
   Willy looked stumped. “What do you mean – what part? It’s just a pussy!”
   Iceman laughed happily, kicking me under the table. “Only a wanker would say it’s just a pussy! Right, T-Tone, my lad?” I grinned, avoiding his eyes. I’d only ever once seen him with a girl who looked anywhere near being interested in him. His bravado was brave, but showing. I got up, deciding to get a soda. I hated catching that vulnerable look in his eye. It made me feel sorry for him.

I was staring into space. The faces at the bar were just a blur, like streetlights in a fog, impossible to distinguish from one another. I knew I was on the stage. I could feel the edge of the garbage can against my thighs. It was turned upside down. I had been banging at it with the heel of my palm, which was bright red.
   “You OK?”
   I suddenly noticed that Grandfather Amwolf was standing before the stage, in a flowerbed that appeared to be growing from the carpet. His suspenders hung about his trousers. A red bowtie pressed at his wrinkled neck. Gold cufflinks shone from his sleeves. He was in his Sunday best, drunk as a crow in a field of overripe grapes.
   “Father? Come on now, time to come home. We’re playing cards by the fire.”
   “Who’s that with you? Who’s the tiny man?”
   “That’s just Totty, father.”
   “A gremlin? You bring a gremlin to grin at an old man in his cups, do you?”
   “No, father, it’s your grandson. Mother sent us to find you. You wandered from the house while you were outside smoking. Remember?”
   I pressed my fist to my forehead. It felt as if it was sinking right through my skull.
   “Hey! Jag-off! You OK?”
   Iceman had me under my arms, holding me like a ragdoll. The front of my shirt was spattered red. I moved my mouth, feeling the pull of the blood that had dried across my lips. A man with a thatch of curly blonde hair behind each ear was leaning at the side of the stage, a towel on his arm, looking concerned.
   “Is he alright? We’ll call an ambulance, no problem.”
   I shifted my eyes. It hurt. The lights at the tables burned. I saw the pretty girl from the registration desk, lingering just behind the man with the towel.
   Grandfather Amwolf laughed, kicking at the begonias, spitting into the dirt.
   “Where’s the television woman then, eh?” he coughed, his voice broken, like a faucet full of trapped air. “Sing with me! The gremlin too! MAR – LARE – IN – O! MAR – LARE – IN – O!”
   “She’s not home, father, I promise you, she’s not. Come with us. Mother is making a toddy. We’ll play rummy with Alder and Helmut.”
   I clutched at my father’s trousers, grasping them behind his knees, terrified, yet mesmerized at the sight of grandfather, listing in the front flowerbed of our semi-famous neighbor, Eva Dinter, a middle-aged actress who had once appeared in a dingy afternoon soap opera, some years before.
   “Tell her to show herself at the window! Tell her! Peter Amwolf Vogel serenades a woman, he expects company! Come to us in your nightgown, Lady Dinter! You want that I piss in your garden? You want that I take myself a shit?”
   “Here’s some water.”
   The pretty girl helped Iceman sit me down in a chair. They’d dimmed the lamp. My head was cradled in my hands, which were still shaking. I tried to remember what had happened. I couldn’t.
   “Here, take this thing off him,” said the man with the towel, pulling at the grey lump of acrylic that Willy had pinned to my hair. It was one of the “Grandma” wigs he’d picked up for fifty cents at a thrift store in Wilkinsburg and had stupidly tossed into a dryer after washing them. They’d melted into fez-shaped clumps.
   “How are you feeling now?” asked the girl, giving me a smile from across the table. I could sense others standing near, watching. There was a murmur in the air, like I often heard at night when I tried to sleep, the voices F would later refer to as “T’s little radio show”.
   “Where’s Willy?” I asked. It was the first thing I’d said since everything had gone funny in my head.
   “Forget him,” replied Iceman. “He got kicked out after the first song.”
   “That kid’s eighty-sixed from here, you know,” explained the man, putting the towel to my face, telling me to tip my head back. The towel was warm and damp. “I think you’re bleeding again. There. Hold that right there.”
   Father struggled with grandfather, trampling flowers, filling the night air with a fragrance that reminded me of the little bottles on mother’s bedroom dresser, the ones with the rubber pumps attached, each full of a pungent perfume, the smells she doused herself with on church days, me sitting at her feet, watching a tiny run in her stockings racing up her calf, as she leaned towards the dresser mirror.
   “Go and get your brother, Totty – now!” ordered father, caught under grandfather, as if he was trying to hoist him from the ground. “Tell him to fetch a pair of trousers from my room. Hurry, boy – hurry!”
   I hesitated, standing there at the footpath that led from our house on down the short lane that crossed the black river where Helmut and I caught tadpoles and beat them to greasy pancakes on the street.
   “Go! I’ll thrash you, Totty Vogel! Go now, Goddamn it – now!”
   “What did grandfather do?”
   Grandfather seemed lifeless. He hung over father like he was just clothes, not a man. I smelt a new scent amongst all the night blooms, one I recognized all too well from the box toilet in the yard at home. Father sighed deeply, giving me a funny look, almost as if he were grinning. Perhaps he was.
   “Your grandfather’s a very bad boy, Totty. Go and tell Helmut to come – and bring fresh trousers. Go on.”
   “What’d he do?” I asked, Iceman leading me to the doors at the bottom of the carpeted stairs, carrying the plastic bucket and the keyboard case.
   “The fucker pissed himself.”
   “Up on stage?” I asked, feeling the tepid night air hitting my face, a napkin of dried blood at my nose.
   Iceman hurled the makeshift drum into the street. It bounced over the remains of the ashes and carbon slips that Willy had left there some two hours earlier. “That’s the last time I chug grain with that stupid motherfucker! He pissed on the carpet! I’m fucking embarrassed! I’m never ever going in that place again! Fuck you, jag-off!” He then lifted the old leather keyboard case over his head and pitched it after the can. It came crashing down upon the yellow line in the road, the rusty latch bursting open, the derelict instrument shooting out, sliding under a parked car, bits of plastic keys scattering in the glow of the streetlights. I felt my head spinning again and fell backwards against the side of the building.
   “We were drinking grain in Day-Glo’s?” I asked, confused, closing my eyes, shutting out the lights.
   Iceman was walking back from the middle of the street. He had a handful of black and white plastic shards. He looked at me, like he didn’t even know me. “No, dumbass – in the alley – behind the dumpster, before we went on. How much did you drink anyway? You little alcoholic.”
   I began to heave, lurching forward, making my nose burst again, warm blood running into my mouth. Iceman just stood there, watching me. I was now on my hands and knees, my whole body shaking, my legs as cold as ice.
   “They think you had some kind of a seizure or some shit, you know,” he said, shaking his head. “Good job too. Or we’d both be six’d from there too. Not that it matters now.”
   “Seizure?” I replied, my left hand in my pocket, feeling something I didn’t recall putting there, a fold of paper. “I did? When? Just now?”
   Iceman grunted, dropping the broken keys onto the pavement about me. “You’re drunk, totally fucking drunk. Come on, shithead, let’s head for home – the fun’s over.”
   I stumbled to my feet, pressing the napkin hard at my nose, taking a deep breath through my mouth. One of my laces had come undone from my ankle. Iceman wasn’t waiting for me. “My grandfather once shit himself in the neighbor’s flowerbed!” I called out, starting to laugh.
   “Who? You mean the Munchhausen guy?” he called back, kicking at a fire hydrant, almost falling over himself.
   “Yeah – that’s him,” I said, unfolding the paper, reading what was written across it, wondering who Isabelle was, and why on earth she’d wanted to give someone like me her number.

Dodo, Chapter Thirteen, The Gulf Between

2008-12-29T22:01:00.000-08:00

The photograph was of a tiny girl, looking no more than two, standing beside what appeared to be a birdbath shaped like an eggcup. The top of her head, covered with a spirited mass of raven locks, hardly reached the lip of the stone drinking pool. She was wearing a white dress, beneath which were two grey socks pulled up to her chubby knees. She didn’t have on any shoes. It appeared to be summer, the short grass of the yard upon which she was standing was blanched with a bright light that placed dark shadows upon her legs and created a black doppelganger that stretched out far behind her. She was in mid-laugh, her well-fed cheeks stretching to reveal a missing tooth and playful tongue. Her eyes, half-squinting to meet the sun, were set wide about her button nose, giving her a faintly piggish, but nevertheless charming appearance. Behind her, to the right, was the side of a wooden house, a non-descript early twentieth century structure, if I’m any judge of architectural design. It appeared neither lived-in nor abandoned. Apart from the birdbath, the only other sign of inhabitance was the edge of a section of striped fabric, blowing in the wind, appearing at the upper left of the picture. The more I looked at it the less certain I was of its origin. It may well have been an American flag, or it might have simply been a bed sheet hanging on a line, there was no good way to tell, and the over-exposed photograph did little to help. Turning over the small, weathered slip of paper, I saw a single name, hand-written in pencil.
   “Imogene,” I whispered to myself, repeating it, trying to decide just who it might have been. My best guess was F’s grandmother, on her father’s side, though I realized I didn’t know her name. She’d died during the great depression, not long after giving birth to F’s father, Jack. “They had to burn her all her clothes,” I remember F telling me one sleepless night. I never knew just why, even though I’m sure she explained. It was my fault, I was becoming increasingly more inattentive, to her, and everything around me.
   I was perched on a roadside picnic table, my ten-speed bicycle placed upside down before me, balanced on its saddle and handlebars, its detached front wheel resting beside it, the tire flat against the rim. Being bored, with no sense of urgency about fixing the flat, the brilliant sun having made the wooden table as warm as toast, I’d been embracing my idle nature, flipping through the little red book I’d stuffed in the side pocket of my pannier almost a week before. The photo had suddenly appeared, falling from the back pages.
   Not ten feet in front of me stood a palm tree, its drooping fronds an unhealthy brown. Behind it lay a field, an acre of tough-looking bramble, growing up through twisted knobs of golden grass, like barbed wire. I’d learned just the day before that the bundles were not natural, as I’d first assumed, rather they were created by local hunters, as a way of making the small deer that grazed the grassy flat fields easier to spot, a measure taken prior to the annual setting of fires to herd them out. Beyond this patch of uninviting bumps was another field of gold, glistening in the rich afternoon sun, the face of the frying pan that had given me a handsome, if spotty, tan, one acquired during the week I’d spent cycling from the city of New Orleans, to Houma, then along a thin peninsula that had eventually brought me to Grand Isle, the southern most tip of the state of Louisiana, a sleepy assemblage of small houses, all built on stilts, in order to meet the regular flood waters, many so high from the ground there was a basketball net just beneath the front door. There was little more situated about the tarnished landscape. I’d encountered one or two small grocers and a couple of bait shops, plus a peeling plaster statue of Jean Lafitte, the infamous bayou pirate of yesteryear, sitting at the foot of a driveway leading to a shrimp shed, a hangar-sized building of corrugated metal that rested on wooden legs, out over the swampy waters of one of the many tributaries that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, the body of water I had pedaled some sixty miles to see, my tiny blue tent right that moment staked to a beach situated less than a mile away, a lonely stretch of gray sand operated by the state parks department.
   I had come south, all by myself, taking a train named The Empire Builder from Cleveland to Chicago, from there riding the famous City of New Orleans to its namesake, my Peugeot PX-10, my tent, a few tools, and a change of clothes all inside a box lying under the baggage car. It was a trip meant to assuage me of the guilt I had been experiencing, ever since the day, just some two weeks earlier, when I’d decided to break up with F, the girl whose book I now held in my hands, the only girl who ever really understood me.

“It’s not that, T, I love your stories – I do – it’s just – I want to know what you’re thinking – what you’re feeling.”
   We were both half-dressed, lying on the bed we shared in our small apartment in Cuyahoga Falls. What had been a night of drinking with friends had become a delirious stumble home in the dark, upsetting the neighbor’s garbage can, bringing old Mr. Drummond outside in his smiley face pajamas, making us both laugh until we had tears in our eyes. Literally falling through the side door that led to our ground-floor of a house owned by a taxidermist and his infirm sister, we’d collapsed in each other’s arms, tugging at each other’s pants, intending to make the most of our soaring spirits, but we were soon snoring away, oblivious to the fact that we’d left the door open. F had woken about four, wondering why she was so cold. My hand settled on her thigh, feeling the goose pimples on what was otherwise a reliably warm place. Making my way through a swirling head rush, I’d shut the door and returned to the bed, setting myself upon her, pushing my face between her legs, rubbing my chin against her underwear, murmuring my desire, but she wriggled, shaking me off, finding the edge of the downturned cover, drawing it up over us, shutting out the bright moon that eavesdropped through the bedroom window. Now awake, too wired to sleep further, she began to talk, peppering me with the regular litany of questions she seemed to reserve for such unguarded occasions.
   “You never tell me things.”
   “Like what?” I mumbled, the cover a shroud across my face.
   “I don’t know – like when you were a kid. What did you want to be when you were little?”
   “Bigger.”
   “Tot!”
   I laughed, reaching for the promise between her legs. She slapped my hand into retreat.
   “See what I mean? You won’t tell me anything.”
   “I have,” I protested. “I told you about the accident on the road, about Alder’s hands, about father –”
   “Yes! Exactly! But not about you, you idiot!”
   I wore a hidden frown.
   “You tell me all these interesting stories, but you leave yourself out. I don’t hear what you felt. It’s like I hardly know you, T. Nobody does.”
   “That’s not true,” I groaned, shifting to my edge of the bed, offering her the silence of my back. She didn’t say anything for a long time. I was beginning to drift off into a troubled sleep, when she spoke again.
   “Did you want to be, I don’t know, maybe an astronaut? A fireman? A doctor?”
   I rolled my eyes. If her voice hadn’t sounded so dry and cracked, so child-like and earnest, I don’t think I’d have given her answer.
   “Grandfather Amwolf gave Helmut and me this old race car set for Christmas. It was metal, just a little circle, painted green. The pieces didn’t go together very well, the wind-up sedans were always getting caught on the separations. There were two of them, one for the gangsters, the other for the police. It had a blue police badge painted on one door. They were wind-up. You know? With a big key at the back? Helmut always picked the police at first, leaving me to be the bad guys. Which made me desperately want to be the policemen. Father had a friend who worked in security at the big paper mill in Mainz. I remember seeing his holster once, knowing that inside the black leather was a gun, a real gun.”
   “So you wanted to be a policeman?”
   “Only because Helmut did. When he switched to the gangster car I wanted to be a gangster.”
   F groaned, rolling onto her side. “Is this a Vogel condition?” she sighed. “Or is this just a German thing?”
   “What?”
   “Fuck, T! You really don’t see it, do you? You’re a sponge your brother and your dad use as a punching bag! Everything you think and do is because of something they’ve said or done to you. Your grandfather did too, from what you tell me.” I began to mumble my objection to her theory. “No, listen, really, it is! I pay attention to this stuff, you know – I’m a girl.” In my stupor I took this as some sort of subtle clue, and again reached for her, making her punch me hard in the ribs. “You’re fucked up and you won’t get any better if you can’t talk about yourself!” she whined.
   “I guess I wanted to be an soldier when I was really little,” I offered up, my side smarting.
   “Why?” she asked, her designs on one day becoming a therapist coming to the fore. “Did you feel powerless?”
   I laughed. “C’mon, F! I was a boy! I wanted to fight in a war, shoot bullets into the air, hold a grenade in my teeth – it was the cool thing to imagine being – we were all the same. I’ve told you about the comics we read, especially the British ones Uncle Alder brought back from his business trips, how they were all about the war. We read and read those things, until we could practically recite the cheesy dialog. It didn’t matter to us that the “Jerrys” were the bad guys, we just wanted to imagine ourselves part of that kind of action.”
   “But you stopped feeling that way?”
   “Yeah, I guess.”
   “Why?”
   “It’s late – we need to get some sleep. I’m not going to waste the first Saturday I’ve had off in over three months.”
   “But why did you stop wanting to be a soldier? Tell me – please?”
   I was never able to resist that hurt tone she employed. It made me want to cradle her like she was a child who’d woken from a bad dream. It was only years later, when I had my own daughter, that I realized how strangely paternal my attraction for her was. I took a deep breath, hugging my pillow, my eyes closed tightly, seeing the trail of my lived life. “One day – it must have been during the last year before we moved to America – father came home from one of his social nights. He was drunker than usual, barging about the little front room, knocking one of mother’s porcelain figures from the mantle trying to hang his hat on it. He picked me up by my suspenders, dropping me on the sofa, hurting my nose. Then, after a failed attempt at kissing mother in the kitchen he stumbled upstairs. He came down a moment later with a ledger in his hand. Helmut and I were huddled on the sofa, barricading ourselves between the cushions, the way we often did when he came home. We both just stared at the book, never having seen it before. Charging for the sofa, father partied us like the Red Sea, each of us clinging to a cushion. He dropped down hard, exhaling the vapors of his bitter drink, and opened the leather-bound ledger, setting it across his knees as he began to read, his voice automatic, wooden, as if he were auditioning for a job. It contained Grandfather Amwolf’s diary, what little existed of it, an abandoned attempt at chronicling his life – for who, I don’t know, because father only discovered it after grandfather had died, hidden away in the locked chest he kept under his bed.
   “What did it say?” F asked, her voice sounding nearer. I could smell her, making me want to take her to me, but I knew better.
   “It was all about the war and how grandfather’s four brothers all died within two months of each other.”
   “In World War II?”
   “No, silly, this was back in the teens. It was the first world war.”
   “I don’t even know who was fighting in that one. It confuses me.”
   “Well, suffice to say, we were on different sides – our countries, I mean.”
   “Oh – right,” She sounded embarrassed. My arms ached to hold her.
   “That was the war where soldiers, on both sides, died like flies, thousands and thousands. Grandfather’s brothers, all older than him, were drafted the same day and were sent to the trenches. Amell, Peter, and Jon, they all were shot or blown up in the first month. Winfred took a bullet through the hand and was sent back home to convalesce. Things were so hard he was only allowed a couple of weeks in the infirmary, before they sent him to the steel works in Frankfurt, which had been turned into a munitions-making machine. His job was to scale the huge chimneys that belched out the black smoke from the kilns. He was a chimney sweep. He slipped and fell over fifty feet to his death.”
   “God, T, that’s horrible. It’s amazing you’re even here, if you think about it. If your grandfather had been old enough to be drafted, I mean.”
   “Yeah, I guess. Still, I probably wouldn’t exist if grandfather hadn’t raped Peter’s girl and she’d been forced to marry him.”
   “What? Are you kidding?”
   “Nope. That’s how father came into the world. It was all in grandfather’s ledger, written up like some cheap paperback. Father, having already known the truth without ever telling anyone, translated it for us that night, making it sound much more vulgar than grandfather’s German. Vogel family history – nice, huh?”
   She took me in her arms, pulling me into her warm body, her breath on my neck, saying my name. I reached around her, sliding my hand deep into the back of her underwear, searching for her moisture. “T! Cut it out, for Christ’s sake! Can’t we just hold each other for once without that? God! You’re impossible!”

I slipped the old photo back into the book, closing it, running my fingers across its gilded surface, the faded gold lettering that read Naked Photographs. I’d taken it from F’s side of the bed, the day I’d made my escape. I’m not sure why, other than that it held a strong attraction for me, its unorthodox conceit, photographs appearing only as text description, leaving me with such clear images, almost as if they were my own memories.
   I’ve always found a sad kind of comfort in my memory, letting an old moment intercede when the present seems an unbearable proposition. It’s a condition I’ve learned only increases with age.
   I know it’s unhealthy to dwell in the past, at least I’ve always been told it is, but it’s inevitable, isn’t it? What do we have as we get older if not more and more memories? How do we avoid lingering on them? What would an old man do without memory, if he is alone, left to see the end of his days in the wounded house his family has left him?
   I suppose Grandfather was right when he told us “regret is the life sentence of those who haven’t lived.” Helmut and I were hardly teenagers when he handed us this cryptic epitaph, having caught us sharing a cigarette behind the garage, back in Binghamton, an act he dismissed with a wink, leaving us to finish our poison. He enjoyed giving us such perplexing lectures, knowing we knew little of what he spoke. But now, after all the time that has gone by, it makes sense. His rare gesture of leniency seems to reach right out through the intervening years, making me almost smile at the vision of his hard and bitter face, the torn eyes that were the font from which we all tumbled, hopelessly, into our own inevitable fate.
   It was with such an inkling of my own future derailment that I held that little book, that hot, breezy day, temporarily mired in the cradle of the Gulf, my thoughts settling wistfully on the bed I had shared with Effie Jones, its addictive warmth, the hiding place I’d found in her soft limbs, the sanctuary I’d created in the broken back corners of my psyche, the paradise I all-too-quickly met with a scowl when reality demanded I take it for what it was, the fragile steering of another’s heart, something I knew I had no good right doing, not a young man whose own had already been traced and cut like a butcher’s diagram. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her, that was the last thing I wanted to do, but how could I explain that staying with her was only going to hurt her so much more in the end? I had to bolt, I had to have her angry at me. I wanted her to learn to hate me, hate me so much her love would be transposed, forever and ever. It was a certainty that gave me some solace, alone there on that isolated finger of grassy brown terrain, thousands of miles from what I knew as home, the result of a flight on the rails I’d taken without even consulting “the very best damn rail rider in these Goddamn entire United States of America”. I know Helmut would have understood, even if he would have given me endless grief for it. He wouldn’t have let me go, he’d have bullied me into staying, regardless of the fact that he was then planning the first of his own great retreats, following father’s desperate tracks into personal oblivion.
   I shook the little red book, the edge of the photograph sliding back into view. I let it fall into my hand and, looking at it one last time, now seeing F’s dark, needing eyes in the face of the child, I crushed it, hurling it as far as I could, off into the burnished field, offering it an escape of its own. I then took a small pencil from my pannier and, in the blank back page of the book, I began to write.

   There is a tiny girl, no more than two, standing beside what appears to be a birdbath shaped like an eggcup. The top of her head is covered with a spirited mass of raven locks…

Dodo, Chapter Twelve, The Twisting Road

2008-11-26T17:56:00.000-08:00

“You’ve never really told me,” F whispered, shifting her weight in my lap, the warmth of her soft breasts against my chest. My hands had traveled under the silk of her skirt, my fingers finding themselves beneath the elastic of her garters.
   It was just after eleven. We were parked at a rest area on the Ohio Turnpike, not far from Cuyahoga Falls. It was a favorite spot for such a rendezvous. I’d treated her to a late dinner at Tarmonti’s, an Italian restaurant known for the dusty suit of armor that greeted customers in its lobby. It was our tenth anniversary. Ten months in each other’s company, a milestone that would have passed unrecognized if I had been at the wheel.
   It was almost four weeks since we’d moved back to Ohio, from Pittsburgh. We’d found our little second-floor apartment in Canton two days before, only a mile from the street where F had grown up. I’d been scrubbing cars at her father’s used car dealership and had just cashed my first paycheck. We’d spent the first part of the day searching for a much-needed couch and were feeling positive about things. We were two adults in love, a real couple. It was a new situation for both of us but F seemed to be absorbing it in stride. I felt as if I were walking on the moon.
   Coming out of the restaurant, she’d surprised me. She’d taken my hand and had run it against her thigh, letting me feel the ridge of what she had to explain was a garter. “Wow,” I’d whispered into her ear, my cheek lingering against hers in a sleepy, pleasant way. We made our way towards the pumpkin-colored ‘79 Pacer she’d secured from her father the week before. It was a hideous-looking car she’d nevertheless fallen in love with, naming it Cinderella, “Cindy” for short. “The panties and bra are leopard print,” she’d whispered in reply, her full lips almost touching mine. “Just like in the magazine, you bad German boy.” I blushed, recalling the old pin-up I’d gushed over a few days earlier, in an antique shop, how she’d teased me about my interest in bondage wear. We shared a wet kiss, before she made her way around to the driver’s side. “Let’s go and park somewhere,” she’d smiled, struggling with her keys at the finicky ignition. I’d suggested the tree-lined parking lot behind the city park. It was a dark and forlorn spot, about as private as one could want, but she had other plans. Pulling onto the turnpike entrance with a sly grin, one hand having settled on my thigh, she spoke in a firm, seductive voice, telling me things I’d never heard a girl say before. My ears went hot as she ferried us across the leaf-lined rest area blacktop. Before I knew it, the engine rattled to a stop and she was sliding herself upon me, crowding my face with her breasts. “You never really told me,” she repeated, my attention lost between the buttons of her blouse.
   “Never really told you what?” I replied, letting my fingers inch upwards along her thighs, my wrists now passing under the garter elastic. She shifted again, making me wince in the moonlight, the weight of her wide and firm bottom threatening to snap the erection that had sprung to life even before the engine was quiet. Our lips met for the umpteenth time, our tongues gliding.
   “Why you don’t have a license. It’s not because of epilepsy, is it? I mean, the test said you don’t have it.”
   I pulled away from her mouth, my throat going dry. I lowered my forehead to her chest, breathing softly into the opening of the cotton blouse, which I’d begun to ungracefully part, struggling with the buttons. My heart began to pound. All at once I was laboring for air.
   “T?” she whispered, taking my hair in her hand, stroking my forehead. “Are you OK?” I nodded weakly, not taking my face from her bosom. “No you’re not. I know you’re not. What’s wrong?”
   “Nothing. I promise.”
   “Uh-uh – something’s bothering you. Your heart is going like a jack hammer.”
   “That’s because your butt’s in my lap!” I declared, laughing quickly, desperate to change the subject.
   She worked at the part in my bangs, arranging it like a child might a doll’s, tenderly and methodically. “Tell me what’s wrong, T – please.”
   I sighed. My erection had already disappeared. “Can we talk later?” I asked, sounding hurt.
   “When?” she replied softly, putting her lips to my forehead, cooing.
   “When we’re not in the car.”

Helmut had broken up with Bettina and had moved back to Cuyahoga Falls to help mother, taking the tiny room we used to share. This was during father’s first extended absence.
   Cuyahoga Falls was a fairly non-descript place, not unlike so many small cities in Eastern Ohio. For every nail salon there was an auto body shop, and for every auto body shop there was a bar. It ambled along, neither noisy nor peaceful, a town with its fixtures, its regulars, a tight history of small to medium happenings. Its most appealing feature was the Cuyahoga River, which ran through the middle of town, along a series of descending twists and turns. This was the same river that famously caught fire in 1969, due to its intense pollution, but that was a good thirty miles north, near the Cleveland city limits.
   Seeking work, father had brought us to this sleepy burgh in the late 70s. He’d been told the river created a lot of industry and there was always an open spot at one of the factories, be it the rubber plant, the glass works, or any number of the varied industrial fabricators that had established the modest city during the first half of the century. Unfortunately, like much of the information father managed to attach to his addled mind, this piece was a good decade out of date. The community we arrived to was now mostly residential, just beginning to acquire its commercial identity. The factories left standing along the crooked brown river were mostly empty shells, rusted catacombs of cobwebs and broken windows. The only full-time job father could scrounge up was a custodial position at the Cathedral of Tomorrow, a strange, round building sitting on the outskirts of the business district, one that Helmut and I, upon first viewing, decided was actually a secret UFO. We imagined all sorts of outrageous things were secretly going on in the late 50s concrete structure, the least of which was the villainous gathering of fuel in order to leave the Earth, accomplished by sucking out the fluid of the congregation’s brains. The church’s figurehead, a popular television evangelist with hair like Elvis Presley, was clearly the leader of this evil alien space ministry. These stories were hardly tolerated by father, who’d toss his slipper at us whenever he caught wind of the regularly growing narrative, one in which his part as nighttime superintendent was soon a key chapter. “Polishing the UFO” is how we referred to his occupation, the task that kept him away from the house from just after suppertime to the early hours of the morning, when we were dragging cobwebs about the tiny kitchen, trying to delay the rapidly-advancing school day.
   “Your daddy cleans up brains?” queried Matthew, the precocious five year-old son of our immediate neighbor, on one of these slow, cold mornings, as Helmut and I occupied the front porch, me dreading the sound of the approaching school bus. Matthew asked this every time we began to spin our tales of alien subterfuge. His porch abutted ours, the walls of the two houses all but touching, leaving an alleyway no wider than a skateboard, a vertical gutter that had filled with stray bits of garbage over the years, leaving a knotted, fetid mass of paper and plastic that no one had ever ventured to clear out.
   “Our daddy is a special agent, Matty, he works for the aliens. He cleans up all the brain juice that gets splattered on the floor,” explained Helmut, rolling a cigarette on the curled tip of his leather shoe. Little Matthew’s eyes widened.
   “Why, Hel-mat?”
   “Why? It’s a trade off, dummy. He gets to go with them, of course, back to their planet – when they leave the Earth.”
   I snickered, one eye on the thin black road that followed the Cuyahoga down to the brickyard, watching for the pick-up truck that brought father home each morning, from another long night scrubbing the halls of the television ministry. It usually arrived a few minutes before the bus. The street was a pothole-filled stretch that passed before the row of nearly identical, depressing houses, in the middle of which sat ours, nestled like a sickly scavenger among a wire of crows. The homes had been built a good sixty years before, to serve the workers of the now-abandoned brick factory. They remained at the mercy of a hillside choked with overgrown bramble and ancient apple trees with branches bent like witch’s fingers, which often came crashing down upon us in violent fall and winter storms.
   “Do the aliens eat kid’s brains too, Hel-mat?”
   “You bet they do. They like the brains of five year-old boys the best.”
   Matthew squealed, clamping his hands over the top of his head. He jumped up from where he was sitting and hurried off down the porch steps, sprinting up his own, like he always did. He burst through his front door, slamming the screen behind him, screaming to his mother that “Mister Vojel” was going to eat his brains.
   I gave Helmut a critical eye. “Maybe you shouldn’t have said that,” I offered, grinning. Helmut scowled, slipping his homemade cigarette between his lips.
   “I don’t give a shit if father finds out, if that’s what you mean,” he replied, taking a small lighter from his shirt pocket. I turned away from his hard stare. He was eighteen and almost six foot two. He no longer ran from father. Just the day before he’d brushed right by him, straight out the door, ignoring father’s demands that he get back inside. They’d been arguing about was he was going to do with himself now that he had graduated high school. Helmut had no good plans and less ambition. “Why should I care what the neighbors think anyway? They talk about him all the time. They think he’s nuts,” he scoffed, wetting the end of his wobbly cigarette with his mouth.
   I wanted to say he was only make things worse, but I couldn’t do it. “Can I have a puff?” I asked.
   He snorted and laughed, getting up from the top of the steps, where he’d been sitting. “Piss off, Dodo! Get your own!” he declared, bounding from the rickety steps, heading off up the road, in the opposite direction from the old brickyard. I could only imagine what he was doing with his mornings, now that he was no longer required to board the old bus. I’m sure he would have happily slept in, but that would mean being home when father arrived.
   A moment later, I heard the familiar knocking sound of father’s ride. I sat where I was and watched the rusty green truck weave towards me, like a fly with one wing, putting stitches along the faded yellow line in the middle of the road. It pulled up along the thin gravel strip between the road and the porch, groaning to a stop. I’d never seen it driven so poorly. Father slid from the passenger seat, holding his lunch box, his body as crooked as the apple trees behind the house. No words were exchanged between he and his workmate. The truck rolled off noisily, waking a dog three houses down. An angry voice hollered for it to shut up. The sun was just beginning to show itself behind the stand of maples beyond the stream across the way, appearing as a fluorescent white ball, cut by the spidery black veins of the leafless tree limbs in the steam rising from the damp morning ground. I instinctively sniffed at the air, catching the expected stale odor of whiskey, along with the remnants of Helmut’s lit cigarette.
   Father hobbled up to the porch, not raising his head. He staggered at the first step, almost dropping the metal lunch box. He seemingly hadn’t noticed me until then. He looked up, giving me a scowl, just like Helmut’s. “Is your mother still sleeping?” he asked. I nodded yes. He grinned sloppily and pitched the empty box up onto the wooden porch. “Get your coat,” he coughed, fumbling in his pockets, muttering something under his breath. I hesitated, not understanding why. “Hurry!” he barked, shaking a bent cigarette, attempting to straighten it against the palm of his hand. I made my way into the house, wondering what was going on, dreading that he might have spotted Helmut heading off and wanted me to go and fetch him back.

The dollar cinema was empty but for F and I. I slumped deep into my seat, smelling the musty carpet, a toxic perfume of mildew and old popcorn.
   “When we reached the turn after the tunnel by the old brickyard gate I could see the car sitting against the telephone pole. The front was peeled open like a banana. You could smell burnt rubber and gasoline from yards away. I then noticed the two shapes lying in the road, one set across the center line, the other stretched onto the shoulder.”
   F murmured thoughtfully. A story flickered on the screen, ignored by all.
   “What where they? Bits of the car?”
   I didn’t answer.
   “T?”
   I felt her warm hand taking mine, bringing it to her lap. She stroked the top, pressing softly at my knuckles.
   “They were people,” I replied, my voice a hoarse whisper.
   “People?”
   “Yeah. The driver and his passenger.”
   “From the smashed car?”
   I took a deep breath, feeling my arms and legs tingling, my heart ricocheting between its own beats. I knew my face was palsying, my mouth turned down at the sides, my eyes moistening. It was just like that morning, just the same. “I don’t – don’t want to do this anymore, F – sorry – I just can’t.” She took my hand in both of hers and squeezed it reassuringly.
   “I think you should. I think you need to. Have you told anyone this before?”
   I shook my head. Tears were now running down my cheeks. I began to sob. It was noisy, I couldn’t stop it. My eyes fluttered about the darkness surrounding us. I was relieved to see we were alone again. The only other person in the theater had left ten minutes ago.
   “It’s OK. I’m here, we’re both safe together here. Please tell me – I want you to.”
   I was breathing through my nose, biting my lip, forcing myself to go on. “Father was waving his arms about, the whole way down the road, telling me how the bodies flew out of the car. Like dolls, he said, they looked like two giant dolls, followed by bits of broken glass and a seat belt that reached outwards and then pulled back, like a slingshot. He said it all happened so fast but seemed so slow. It was early morning still and no one hardly ever drove along that way. Most people were still asleep. They hadn’t seen what caused the car to leave the road. It just swerved as it came towards them, out of the tunnel. Father’s co-worker managed to hit the brakes and pull over, even though I know he was as drunk as father. He wanted to get out and help the men but father told him no, that they had to drive on to the house and get help because they’d be arrested for driving intoxicated. This scared his friend, who abandoned father at the house. He must have seen Helmut up the road because he dragged me back with him, never even asking for Helmut. I remember feeling really dizzy the closer we got to the first man, the one lying over the line. He was wearing a brown jacket, corduroy, I think. That’s all I can remember. Father suddenly stuck out his arm and stopped me. Stay here, Totty, he said, stay right here. His voice was half-gone, all shredded and dry. I just stood there looking but not seeing anything. I heard father cough. It sounded like he was going to be sick. Follow me, Totty, he then said, but don’t look. I stumbled after him and I looked. I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t – couldn’t…”
   F lowered her head to my hand, pressing her cheek against it. “Go on, T, go on – you can tell me.”
   “I know the man was dead, F, I know he was, even though it never said so in the paper. At least I can’t seem to remember ever reading it. I know he was dead because a big bit of his head wasn’t there – it was a few feet away, with hair on it.” I was breathing fast, my eyes closing about tears. It was all coming to me, flooding my emotions, taking me there, back to that twisting stretch of road.

“What the fuck did you look for? I told you not to look! Not to look! Not to fucking look!” screamed father. He was crying, his words coming out on great sobs. I moved towards him, away from the dead man. He was standing near the car, his red hands loose at his sides, as if he hadn’t any idea what to do. “I’m going to turn the motor off. Don’t move.”
   “We should call the police,” I muttered, my thoughts racing, my eyes glued to the broken car, imagining it blowing up any moment, like they always seemed to do on television. “We should have called from home first.”
   “You want your mother to wake up to this?” father yelled from the driver’s side. “We go down to the coffee shop and call – after I turn the motor off!”
   The passenger door hung limply open, the seatbelt dangling to the ground like the tongue of a dead serpent. The window was shattered. There was dark red clotted along the frame. I buried my cold hands deep into the pockets of my jacket. I felt a coin nestled among the lint. I began to press it between my thumb and forefinger, over and over and over. I couldn’t stop it, it was purely reflexive.
   “Stay right here!” father suddenly commanded, pointing to the ground at my feet, where I stood, just off the side of the road. “I’m going to call the police.”
   “But – but I want to go with you – I don’t want to stay here. Please!”
   “You stay here, damn it! You think I’m going to talk to the policemen like this?” he cried, pointing weakly to his mouth, the cracked lips that had been nursing a bottle less than half an hour before. “I call from the coffee shop! You show the police what has happened.” I began to blubber out in protest, my eyes red and stinging. He suddenly rushed at me, forcing me back against the now idle car. I hit with a painful crunch, broken glass under my feet. He held me by the collar of my jacket, pulling it up about my neck, making it hard to breathe. “You do NOT tell them I was ever here, you understand me? Never here! I am drinking coffee this morning! You walked along and found them – not me!” I began to cry, everything in me was coming undone. I begged him to take me with him, clawed at his arms, pulling on his dirty coat sleeves. He shoved me backwards, his eyes splintered red and wild. “You are nearly sixteen years, Totty Vogel – not five! Act like a man and do what I tell you! Do what I fucking TELL you!” Hearing him swear in English always seemed so much harsher. I could do nothing but relent. Crouching down against the car I watched him stagger off down the road, steam billowing around him as the waking sun made the glass strewn about my feet glisten. I wiped my sleeve at my eyes, swallowing hard, tasting salt. I was beyond terrified. I could feel my toes and my fingers, but they no longer seemed connected to me, it was as if I’d been filled with Novocain from my palms to the tops of my feet. I blinked, noting the warmth of the growing sun on my face. Then the strange sound hit my ears. It was low and soft, almost like someone talking to a young child or baby, a sort of cooing sound. I opened my eyes and saw him, the man, the one who had been thrown to the berm on the other side of the road. He was trying to sit upright, his back to me, his hands slapping at the ground as if he were blind. The cooing sound was coming from him.
   I’m not sure how I managed to get to my own feet and cross over to where he was, but I did. I was compelled. I don’t think it was me, not my conscious self, that did it. Which is perhaps why I’ve never quite been able to recall everything. But I know I was there, putting my hands out to steady him as he toppled backwards. He couldn’t do any more than sit up. I can still see his thick, dark hair, an afro, huge about his shoulders. I just stared at it and watched as bright red bubbles began to appear amongst the tight curls. They poured out and soon were streaming from his hair, soaking the collar of his denim shirt, staining his back. I don’t know what I did next because I suddenly realized there was someone behind me, whispering gently into my ear, pulling me away from the injured man. I turned mutely, seeing the friendly face of my school bus driver. She said something, using my name, and smiled as she took my hand and offered it to a grinning older man. I remember seeing an empty school bus parked alongside the road and another car and then a man was hurrying across the road with a blanket, which was wrapped about the bleeding man. I looked to the middle of the road and saw someone else, kneeling, covering the other man with a plastic tarp.

“And that’s all I can remember – I promise.”
   F pulled me to her lap, across the seat divider. She held me there awkwardly, for what felt like forever, just talking to me, repeating herself, telling me it was going to be alright, telling me how brave I was and how much she loved me. In the background I could hear the voices on the screen, a woman shouting at a man, a car speeding off, sad music playing, violins braying like lost sheep.

Dodo, Chapter Eleven, The Knife

2008-10-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

I’ll never forget the look of terror in the man’s eyes. He reached for his companion, pulling her from my path, wrapping his arms about her neck and waist like a parent would a child.
   His frozen stare followed me as I passed.
   Confused, nervous, I didn’t dare look back.
   Feeling the night wind opening my jacket, I strode across the downtown street, trying to fathom the unusual attention I’d aroused stepping from the bus. It was only when the wind died and I felt the handle of the large kitchen knife against my ribs, that I realized what had happened.
   “Idiot!” I thought, instantly feeling like some wretched pariah.
   There was the long blade, sticking from the shallow inside pocket, reflecting the glow of the street lamp above me.
   To the frightened couple I might well have been a murderer, a rapist, or a serial killer. I scolded myself again, hurrying from the small crowd gathered about the transit station.
   Why had I ever let Helmut force the stupid knife on me in the first place?
   Pittsburgh wasn’t Mayberry, but it wasn’t some vicious den of villainy either. I had no right walking about armed like some third world bandit.
   Stopping over a drain, I decided I had to lose the knife, and the nausea that was suddenly swirling about me. All I had to do was drop it through the grate, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Fear was crouching in the cavern of my ear, whispering, warning me. It had Helmut’s voice.
   “It’s after ten, idiot – you know the kind of shit that goes down after ten on a Friday night? They’ll fuck with a skinny kid like you – rob you, beat the shit out of you and then fuck you in your ass, stupid – just like that.”
   I must have rolled my eyes, for he grabbed me by my collar and yanked me towards him, thrusting his imposing chin at my throat.
   “I ain’t kidding, dick-face! You know what happened to Iceman and Lisa.”
   Bettina was standing in front of the refrigerator, holding a slice of pizza to a paper plate. She nodded her agreement. “You can’t be too careful, Tot,” she said, sounding unsettlingly like mother.
   Iceman and Lisa had been mugged just the week before, near Wilkinsburg. The mugger had a screwdriver, which he stuck into Iceman’s gut, holding him at bay against a window as he ordered Lisa to empty her purse onto the sidewalk. When Iceman had tried to grab the end of the screwdriver the mugger had raked it across his face, breaking his glasses and leaving a healthy gash above his left eye. He was then kicked repeatedly, until he collapsed to the ground, covering himself, terrified of what might happen to Lisa.
   Lisa was Iceman’s “platonic girlfriend”, as he liked to put it. Barely half his size, she had a button nose and perpetually pink cheeks. She reminded me of the silent film actress Mary Pickford. Like Bettina, I’d had a crush on her since the day I’d first set eyes on her, a horrible, relentless crush, the sort that made just seeing her almost unbearable. That she ended up married to an abusive jerk, dancing at a topless bar to pay their rent, simply made it worse. I think the only thing that saved me from doing something desperate and stupid was meeting F and falling in love.
   “Here, take this – and don’t come home without it,” Helmut ordered, taking the ten-inch blade from the kitchen drawer and dropping it into the inner pocket of my black sport coat, a well-worn thrift store treasure. I bit my lip, relenting to his bullying barrage, the way I always did.

It was mid-January.
   Pittsburgh was a mausoleum in the heart of winter, a jackstraw blueprint of colorless, bitterly cold, mostly empty streets, depressing stretches of old commerce and unforgiving industry, staid structures that seemed to press against the slate-colored sky, slipping into dusk’s lowering shroud.
   I made my way down Liberty Avenue, a tawdry procession of peep shows, florists, and watch repair shops that cut through the triangular thatch of downtown streets, a bleak arm reaching from the east, ending before it could disappear into the Monongahela River.
   I was on my way to a rendezvous with my father.
   It was a clandestine meeting, an act that defied reason, one which, only a week before, would have been all but unthinkable. That I was coming, unwittingly armed like an apprentice butcher, made it only more surreal.
   Father had left mother for the first time, some two weeks earlier. It was not a surprise. It had been in the making for a long while, ever since I’d graduated from high school. His moods had become increasingly more erratic, his temper more severe, his willingness to forgive forever diminishing. Mother could do little right in his eyes. Her every attempt to confront his drinking was met with outrage and indignation. “I do with my time what I choose, Mrs. Vogel,” he’d sneer, his head in the ice box, looking for the beer Helmut and I had been told to throw into the river beyond the railroad tracks. It was a routine we performed every Saturday morning, while father slept off the previous night’s tavern occupancy. He’d return from these drunks, a brown bag of bottles under his arm, stumbling through the front room of the small house in Ohio he’d brought us to when his job at the snack food factory in Binghamton was suddenly terminated. I never told mother that Helmut kept the beer for himself, drinking two or three under the highway overpass as I stood watch, having been instructed to whistle twice if I saw a police car, once if I saw father. The rest was stashed behind the wooden hutch at the rear of the brickyard down the road, the same place I’d once tried to keep a baby raccoon I’d found orphaned beside the highway. Helmut brought girls there, forced them to drink, and felt inside their underwear. I knew because he told me.
   I recognized that agreeing to meet with father was a towering betrayal to mother, and to Helmut. I realized it was a mistake, but I couldn’t stand him up.
   I now know it was fear that ruled my mind. I made myself feel better by convincing myself it was a sacrifice I had to make, a grand, unselfish gesture, a way to reach out and help father, somehow, someway. That he had chosen to contact me gave me a false sense of belonging, a notion of purpose in the adult world. It fed my weaknesses and he knew this all too well. He was an intelligent man, a ruthlessly orthodox commander of the seemingly crazed forces that drove him onward. Even drunk and lost to his overwhelming moods, he was a man to reckon with, which is why this particular meeting was so memorable, so illuminating, so ultimately terrifying.
   Father always had strange friends. Almost exclusively male, it was a club groomed to appear like the heavies in old Hollywood movies, with deep-set eyes, collapsing brows, and chins poised like waiting fists. Many had nicknames, as colorful as their appearances, tags like Tiddly Winks, Ratchet, and, my favorite, Pokerface, who I had little trouble imagining was a long lost member of Dick Tracy’s rogue’s gallery. An emotionless slab of a man, he had unblinking dots for eyes, and a countenance that could scrape paint from metal.
   I’d encountered a slightly different variation of this motley passel of middle-aged toss-offs in each place we’d lived. From the old country, to Binghamton, to Ohio, it was the same cluster of grey, dour faces, their beers cradled to the bar, drawing on discount cigarettes, backs bent, resignation and regret painted on every last downward turn of mouth. I expected more of the same when I reached the oppressively shuttered, brown facade of The Shanty Inn, the designated location of our familial tryst.
   The Shanty Inn was a windowless fortress of plywood and false bricking, decorated with faded shamrocks, the wood beneath peppered with cuts and tears, exposing past frontage from bygone businesses, glimpses of old tinplate advertising.
   “Flavored with the Juice of the Pressed Mint Leaves”, I read to myself, attempting to decipher one of these, an old ad for Wrigley’s Spearmint gum that featured a character with a head like the moon sitting on a triangle.
   “Hey! Get in here! What’re you doing – loitering out there?” a gruff and familiar voice suddenly called out. “Trying to make me look bad, are you?”
   Just like that.
   There was no hello, no greeting, nothing, just an order.
   It had been more than five months since we’d last seen each other.
   It was, in essence, an exchange that well described our entire relationship.
   Walking awkwardly to where he father peeking from behind a brown door that was decorated with one of those cardboard Christmas tree air fresheners, I offered him a shy grin, catching the dark, steely eyes that looked threateningly from the shade of his rumpled, plaid hunting cap.
   “Get your keister inside! You know what kind hangs about streets like this?” he said, reaching up to swipe me across the back of the head as he closed the door behind us. “Lowlifes – and derelicts – and queers – that’s what!” The stink of stale wine and beer was all about him.

The Shanty Inn was as miserably drab inside as it was out.
   Squinting at the mist that clung to the exposed bulb hanging above the drafty doorway, searching the dim room beyond, I made out a narrow bar to the right, its half dozen stools occupied by a collection of heavy coats, all sprouting red hands that nursed glasses and bottles, dying cigarettes propped between their fleshy fingers, listing like markers on a country road. To the left the room stretched out to include three or four compact booths and a pool table, upon which sat a box of toilet paper and an unmarked glass jug of something bright blue. “Window cleaner,” I thought, noting the irony.
   “Second booth. Go sit down,” Father instructed, never once looking directly at me.
   I did as I was told, sliding into the tight arrangement, the red cushioned back of the high seat rising inches above my head. I fell into a slouch, preparing myself for the bitter pugilist, the man whose fury had ushered me into this world. How well I knew his unmade face, its bruised-looking eyes, its pink and paunchy flanks of unshaven skin, its weak, dimpled chin. My father was not a pretty picture, then or ever. What mother had ever found attractive in him was long gone before I arrived.
   “What are you – an idiot? Take off that damned coat!” he declared, staggering my way, two bottles of Old German shaking in an unreliable grip. It was his regular drink, not so much for its name, more for the fact that it was the very cheapest beer in the Tri-State area, cheaper even than his first love, Budweiser. “You’re insulting your host! You think Henry don’t know who you are?” he barked, bumping into the table, making me flinch.
   I looked across the way, seeing an unnervingly thin man leaning behind the bar, looking in our direction with a benign alertness. His bald head, shining under the dim yellow light that dangled above a parade of evil-looking whiskey bottles, was surrounded by a crest of dirty grey hair that crawled down his temples in wiry clusters, meeting his cheeks, two paper moons that disappeared into the hollows of his skull.
   “Hurry up with it! I ain’t got all day!” father growled, falling with the beers onto the table, his breath assaulting me.
   I struggled to free myself from my jacket, feeling the knife pressing into my side. I’d completely forgotten it was still there. I was looking for a place to stash it when the old chewing gum ad had caught my attention.
   Father, seemingly not having noticed my concern, pushed a bottle my way, and, without a word, dropped heavily into the booth, coughing as he settled himself under the rickety table, like an impatient hermit crab pulling on its shell.
   I carefully removed myself from my jacket, keeping the blade hidden, all the while watching father. His shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, his thick, hairy arms resting on the table, he was steadying his beer, his head tilting slightly, the bent peak of his cap covering all but his thin, cracked lips that formed an upside down horseshoe, an indicator of his mood. It meant I could expect just about anything.
   Why he’d come to Pittsburgh, why he wanted to see me, I just couldn’t figure out. That he’d called Helmut’s number and asked for me wasn’t like him. He normally would have simply tracked us down. He’d have confronted us, on the stoop outside Helmut’s building, berating Helmut, shaking his head my way in disgust, before forcing a dollar bill into Helmut’s pocket. He’d then have left, without a word. But this was totally unlike him.
   When I picked up the phone in Helmut and Bettina’s apartment, he seemed to be still making up his mind what he wanted. I think getting me alone was what put the idea of the clandestine rendezvous in his head. He made me swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that I wouldn’t let Helmut know a thing about it. I’d kept my word, telling Helmut I was going to a party with Willy Blanefield III, something I knew would keep him from investigating, his hating Willy with a passion.
   My jacket now hanging on the curled hook at the front of the sequestered booth, I wrapped my fingers about the cold bottle sitting before me and took a long, deep breath, expecting father’s eyes to shoot towards the jacket any second, the knife suddenly exposed, his mad fury unhinged.
   Though my throat was quickly going dry, I was afraid to lift the bottle to my lips, afraid he’d see the nervous way I was working my hands.
   “How’s your brother?”
   I blinked, finding my voice, my eyes on the label of the bottle. “He’s OK.”
   There was a snorting sound. Father lifted his bottle to his mouth. “Tell him his mother wants him to come home. She needs a driver to help with her shopping.” What was he talking about? She’d never ask Helmut to do that, not after she knew he’d found a steady job, and a girlfriend. “You doing good at your painting school?” he then asked, bringing down his bottle with a thud, almost toppling it. I blanched, scanning the table furtively, noticing the blackened burn hole in the middle, about which some creative customer had scrawled a thicket of pubic hair, along with a pair of skinny legs in high heels, spread wide in carnal invitation.
   Father was referring to the commercial art school I’d supposedly enlisted in a few weeks earlier. Mother had been excited to hear I was thinking of my “higher education” when I first told her. What I hadn’t mentioned was that I never even made it to the register’s office before bailing on the idea. I was a student of nothing but my own random attention to life, but I wouldn’t let mother know this. I’d kept up the art school ruse, which father had obviously heard about. It meant he was at least talking to mother. I didn’t know if I should feel good about that or not, his attentions so often leading to dangerous circumstances.
   “It’s going OK,” I lied, risking a sip of my beer, coughing hard.
   Father suddenly grinned, presenting his uneven teeth. “You get to paint those nudes with the big cans?” he asked, using one of the adopted phrases he thought made him sound American.
   “Um – sometimes,” I breathed, glancing at the crude bit of table graffiti. “It depends on the class.”
   He laughed. It was a strangely light and womanly laugh. A sound I wasn’t used to. “The class of the dame! Ain’t that right, Totty? You better not be painting no sluts or prostitutes at your academy. You keep away from that kind, you hear me? They’ll give you no joy.” It came out almost tender. I half expected him to reach out and pat the back of my hand. “You see your brother’s girl?” he then asked, taking another swig of his beer.
   I nodded, keeping my eyes from his.
   “She good looking?”
   I nodded again, quickly.
   He laughed, slamming his bottle down. “That’s a Vogel! Vogel men always get the pretty dames. Ain’t that right, Totty? Keep away from those dirty ones, you hear me?”
   “I will – I promise,” I croaked, my voice breaking.
   Father laughed more. “Keep out of that dirty pussy, Totty. I want my boys with clean American girls.”
   I blushed. It was impossible not to.
   “What’s your brother do with his girl?”
   I shrugged. “I don’t know, normal stuff I guess. They hang out and stuff.” I was downplaying the whole affair, wisely keeping our new life from him.
   He regarded me for a long moment, fingering the neck of his bottle, picking at the label with his thumb. “You got a girl?” he finally asked.
   Terrified at what he might think if I told him the truth, I nodded that I did.
   “Lisa,” I lied. “Her name’s Lisa. I met her at school.”
   He didn’t say anything. He just smiled softly, watching me. It made me think of the time I came home from a birthday party with swollen lips and red marks all over my neck. He’d carried me to the kitchen sink by the back of my trousers, pushing me under the faucet, rubbing at my skin with the lye soap mother used for cleaning the floors. I couldn’t have been more than five. The boys and girls at the party had retreated to the back garden of the house where it was being held. Lacking a chaperon, we’d taken it upon ourselves to start a spirited game of Postman Knocks, my then-round face quickly becoming a favorite target for the cake-sweetened lips of the giggling girls in their pastel dresses.
   “You treat this Lisa well, boy – you understand?”
   I nodded, feeling my cheeks warm, hating the lie I’d put myself in.
   “It wouldn’t be any kind of a world without the women in it, Totty. You remember that. A man has to know he’s gotta worship his woman, but that don’t mean he’s going to stoop to her – you understand me?”
   I nodded, wondering if he knew what he was saying.
   “Blessed are we, to have them with us on our journey,” he muttered, his gaze going faraway, taking another pull on his beer. “Blessed are we.”
   I closed my eyes, seeing him cutting a great hole in mother’s favorite skirt with his penknife, to spite her when she’d received a compliment one Saturday afternoon from a strange man on the high street in Wurms.
   “There’s an angel waiting for every man, Totty. A blessed woman to look after him and give him sons. You find yourself one with strong hips – and a healthy face. You’ll do the Vogels proud, you will.”
   I breathed into my bottle, beginning to relax a little, realizing that he only wanted someone to talk to, a son to help him pretend he was a real father.
   Rationalizing it that way, I knew I could act my way through the meeting. I just had to avoid his eyes. They cut too deeply, no matter how thick my camouflage.
   “A man without a woman is just hamburger,” he sighed, turning his gaze towards the bar, shaking his head slowly. “See Henry the Fly there? He’s a dead man, Totty, a dead man in an empty bed. He carries himself about like a chore. No joy there, no warm pussy in the night.”
   I glanced at the gaunt, sickly-looking bartender, seeing him busy wiping at an empty mug, his hangdog eyes searching an unseen space, his face lost in the rising snakes of smoke coming from the row of hunched backs at the bar. I couldn’t have seen what father saw. I was barely nineteen, far too young to feel the dread of the barren eventuality such a picture painted, not the way father had intended.
   “You treat her like an angel,” he reiterated, referring to my fabricated girlfriend, with a sincerity I’d rarely witnessed. Thinking of mother, the constant anguish he caused her, made me want to leap across the table and squeeze the breath from him. My hate towards him was equal to my love for mother. It was a balance that worked to perpetuate the situation, though I didn’t realize it then. Home was a raging storm of confrontations, absurd accusations, insane demands, silent appeasements, and uneasy truces. In the thick of it, none of us could see the sad, resounding truth, that we were all essential parts of a madness we were unwittingly nurturing, even as it was destroying us, day by day.
   Just then, the front door of the bar opened, emitting a noisy conversation, already well under way. Two women in high heels and long winter coats stomped towards the bar, shiny leather handbags swinging on their crooked arms. They brought with them the smell of diesel exhaust and sickly perfume.
   “…damn police again! The motherfuckers think takin’ the seats away is goin’ to stop me workin’ they got anuther thing to be thinkin’ about!” declared the tallest of the two, her hair like the blown mane of some ebony lion. “A girl can take a break and have a cup of coffee, ain’t no crime! They think I’m takin’ johns in a donut shop? Crazy, I tell ya! Crazy. They don’t know nuthin’.”
   The other just nodded her head. Both ignored the roosting drinkers. The taller snapped her fingers in the air, catching Henry the Fly’s attention. He lifted his dour face, his eyes offering a mute “What’ll it be?”
   “Scotch, no ice. A White Russian for my bitch here,” the taller woman curtly requested, digging in her handbag. As she did, the smaller turned to survey the booths and caught sight of father, his face buried in his bottle. I saw her eyes widen as she tugged on the other’s sleeve. They both turned to look, the taller instantly shooting icy daggers into the top of father’s cap. “Hey! You! I know you!” she called out, in a voice like a fire alarm. “You owes me twenty bucks!”
   I shut my eyes, preying they weren’t about to cause any trouble, hoping against hope it was a case of mistaken identity. I heard the hard shoes clicking our way, caught the pungent wafts of perfume advancing upon my nostrils.
   “You! Mutha! You cut out on me at the Edison!” the voice wailed. “Give me my twenty bucks!”
   I squeezed at my bottle, keeping my eyes closed tight, hardly breathing.
   “Get away from here,” I heard father reply, his voice suddenly heavy with the slur of inebriation.
   “Twenty bucks, mutha! I sucked your nasty old prick for twenty bucks. Give it me – now!”
   I heard father sliding his bottle on the tabletop. Murmurs came from the bar.
   “Put that thing away and get out of here,” father repeated, his voice going dark. Right then I knew then she had the right man.
   I opened my eyes to see the brassy woman holding a small knife to father’s neck. He was gripping his bottle, tensing his fingers, not looking at her. He gave his warning one more time. She flared her nostrils, her ashen, painted face twisting with rage, her heavily-lined eyes burning right through him. She was about his age. Her circus makeup only made this more obvious.
   “Go away,” father growled, lifting his bottle ever so slightly. I was concentrating so hard on the blade of her knife, willing it to move from his throat, that I began to feel dizzy. I started seeing stars, flashes of white that moved about me like tiny insects. I could only watch as the woman pressed the point of the knife into the flesh above his collar. He tried to bring the bottle up, but she was quicker, knocking it from his hand with surprising ease. It shattered on the concrete floor and father seemed to disappear before me, wilting like some neglected flower to the surface of the table. He didn’t move as she rifled through the pockets of his overcoat, which lay on the seat beside him. She quickly found his wallet and withdrew two greasy-looking bills. Searching the rest of the wallet she threw it at the wall, spitting in the air angrily.
   “That’s all you got? Six bucks?” she screamed, the knife now brandished over the table, crinkling the dirty bills in her other hand. He didn’t answer. She gritted her teeth, hissing. I could see her friend, standing halfway between the bar and our booth, holding two drinks, her face as still as stone. Henry the Fly was busy cleaning another glass. The pigeons at the bar sat watching silently, their heads crooked about, cigarettes burning in their hands.
   “Yes. That’s all,” father finally said, his voice small, sad, like it was when he came down from one of his surges.
   The woman turned to me for the first time, looking at me as if I were a stain on a rug. “He got any money?” she said, sliding her knife through the air, now pointing it my way. I saw the thick vein on father’s neck move, his empty hands gripped the air.
   “Leave him, he’s just a boy, he’s got nothing for you.”
   I stared at the knife, thinking of my own, the much larger weapon hanging just above me, wishing I had the guts to go for it, to beat her down and chase her from the bar, to see the look on father’s face when I did. But it wasn’t going to happen. I knew that. It made me realize that Helmut had only given me the knife to make fun of me. He knew I’d never actually use it.
   I began to feel sick, nausea rising, tickling my throat.
   “Now you owes me fourteen bucks!” the hooker reminded father, stuffing his money into her coat pocket, still holding the little knife before her as she began to back away. Doing so, she almost bumped into her friend. They exchanged funny looks and the shorter began to giggle. The knife was put way and the drinks were strolled to the far booth, where shadows laid shadows upon one another.
   No one said a word for a long moment. An uneasy silence had all but sucked the air from the musty room. I’d placed my open hands on the seat cushion on either side of me. My stomach and head felt connected, like two ends of a Q-tip, each pulling at the other, one needing to explode. I blinked hard, wishing away the stars that continued to gather before my eyes. I knew what was happening, but not why. I’d felt the same way many times before, as if I were about to vomit my insides. It’d been that way, even when I was a child. It was a sensation that came with stress, a warning sign that left me as the danger removed itself. I sat there, concentrating, determined not to let father see me that way, to hide myself from him, as I had so successfully done with he and mother, all my life.
   Henry the Fly suddenly coughed.
   Someone at the bar waved his hand before his nose.
   A joke was made about Henry’s stale farts. I heard giggles coming from the far booth. The stars were gone. My head and stomach no longer felt tethered. I breathed easier. Looking over at father I could only feel pity for him, the way I did whenever he collapsed in mother’s arms, when the uncontrollable tears flowed down his leathery cheeks, when he begged for forgiveness, a forgiveness that always came. His head was still hung low, his hands on his lap, a pool of spilled beer before him. I wanted desperately to say something, to offer some kind of encouragement, but nothing was there. It all seemed so completely hopeless, so useless.
   Why had I come from this man, I wondered. Why had he made me, if only to use me to hate himself all the more? Was his pain so great, so much a part of him that he needed to share it through the generations?
   Right then, for the very first time, trapped there in that womb-like little booth, I realized how much Grandfather Amwolf and father were alike, and how much Helmut was like the both of them. I suddenly saw my own future, laid out before me, a tunnel of darkness and despair.
   In that defeated moment, I lost my grip on the golden deception of childhood, on the unconditional, trusting hope of a promised happy ending.
   A few minutes later, the two hookers made their way noisily from the bar, not even looking our way. I watched them disappear back into the rumbling of the night, the door groaning shut behind them. Father still hadn’t spoken, hadn't moved. I reached up to my jacket and took out the kitchen knife Helmut had given me and carefully slid it across the table. Father lifted his head at its approach, his eyes going round, his mouth moving silently. He gave me the briefest of glances, before taking hold of the knife. Touching the sharp blade with his finger, he made a low sound in his throat and proceeded to conceal it in the folds of his overcoat. Then, without a word, he staggered to his feet and exited the bar, leaving me sitting where I was, wondering what I had just done.
   I must have sat there for a good ten minutes, lost in thought, before I noticed Henry the Fly, hovering above me, wiping at the spilled beer with a damp rag. He looked at the half-drunken bottle before me. “Get you another?” he asked, grinning.
   “No, I’ve had enough, thanks,” I awkwardly replied, getting up, pulling on my jacket. I made my way to the door, wondering what I might find waiting for me on the other side, no longer terrified of the inevitable.
   A moment later, I stood on the broken sidewalk, watching the frozen blackness of Liberty Avenue through the mist of my own breath, wondering where father had gone. Then I saw him. He was coming out of a dimly-lit pawn shop across the way. I could see him counting money in his hands, slipping it into his wallet and staggering away, his own breath like a specter fleeing his soul.
   It would be almost another two years before I’d see him again.

Dodo, Chapter Ten, The Swallowing Depths

2008-09-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

“No, idiot, I whip the rock right at his coffin – it makes the biggest thump in the world – everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there – I can see myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel,” explained Helmut, seated on the icy cold pavement of Sixth Street, busy unlacing his sneakers.
   “I thought you were going to say he woke up and beat the shit out of you.”
   “Here – hold these.”
   “What are you doing? It’s freezing.”
   We were standing in the middle of a bridge, where Sixth Street crossed the unforgiving murk of the slow-moving Allegheny River, one of three tributaries that formed the triangular cut of land upon which Pittsburgh had been built. It was early November. We’d just scored a bottle of Night Train at the most reliable of all the late-night package stores that would still serve Helmut. I never quite knew just what he had done to have himself blacklisted from so many of the sad bottle temples, the dimly-lit businesses that attracted men who either stared at their shoes or the backs of their own eyes, but I knew it was something bad, probably something violent. I was yet to understand the true shape of Helmut’s increasingly regular transgressions.
   The wind cutting across the bridge was fiercely cold. My winter coat, a full-length canopy of bulletproof tweed, a hand me down from Uncle Alder, was all that kept me from catching pneumonia. Even so, the freezing air found its way inside my upturned collar, running its icy fingers under my thin T-shirt.
   “What are you doing?” I repeated, holding his shoes obediently, his socks bunched inside them. I watched him sit up on the yellow metal siding of the bridge. It was about four feet high, tall enough to stop you from just walking off, but hardly high enough to stop you from climbing over, something you’d only do if you planned on jumping. The Spartan span’s architecture offered nothing but empty space beyond the ill-considered wall, all the way down to the depressing slough of dirty water. “Tell me what you’re doing, Helmut!” I insisted angrily, seeing him swing his leg over the other side of the wall, his body quickly following. Soon only his hands were visible, clinging to the rounded edge. They seemed to linger there for an eternity. I stood there, not breathing, terror squeezing at my heart, trying to understand why my brother’s unfolding suicide seemed so strangely inevitable.

It took me back to our first house in America. It was a drab, split-level, brick row house in Binghamton, New York, one of twenty-odd such homes that ran alongside a creek, a dirty ribbon of polluted water that was as unpredictable as father’s moods. At a moment’s notice, under heavy rain, the soft, slow current would become a raging torrent, the creek rising up over its banks and onto the road before the houses, flooding each and every basement, sparing no one.
   The second winter we’d been there, the creek began to swell from melting snow, pumping its frigid, churning contents under the ill-fitting door of our basement, which faced the street, at the foot of a short set of descending concrete steps, a good two feet below the road. The muddy water quickly covered the basement floor, rising about the washer and dryer, the plastic baskets of musty clothes waiting to be laundered, the toilet and cavity drain where we showered. Within minutes it had reached more than half the way up the wooden stairs that lead to the kitchen, swallowing father’s boxes of National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and Consumer Reports, three American publications he’d so unexplainably taken to.
   We never could quite figure out what he found so compelling about them. For years I’d believed it their intricate maps and diagrams, his math-oriented mind having found in them a language that was universal. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that mother casually explained one afternoon that he’d had been using the magazines to learn to read English, something he swore he’d never bring himself to do, no matter how necessary it was, in order to make a go of it in the new world.
   His insistence on it was always a secret joke between Helmut and I, adding to our clandestine code, the language we’d fashioned together over the years, the only manner in which we felt safe discussing father, even when he wasn’t around. “Grandmother,” we’d whisper to each other, if someone in the early days inquired how his English was coming along, meaning “dad’s mum”.
   So it was hard to understand, at the time, why he almost drowned trying to save those out-of-date magazines.
   I clearly remember being upstairs, in the small corner room Helmut and I shared, with its slanted ceiling formed by the roof of the attic-free house. My mattress lay wedged in the sharp angle, buttressed to where the ceiling met the floorboards. Directly over my pillow I’d taped a large poster of The Incredible Hulk, bright green on yellow. I was studying the intricate, brick-like lettering of the cartoon logo when I heard mother screaming. She was at the front door, making sure the water hadn’t reached the porch. Father was hollering from the basement stairs, informing her that the “river was in the house again!”
   Battling each other for position on the steep staircase leading downstairs to the front room, Helmut and I catapulted from our mattresses, dragging sheets and blankets with us. When we reached the kitchen, mother was rushing back and forth from the basement door to far end of the kitchen, heaving stacks of dripping magazines into the sink. We reached the stairs just in time to see father, in his undershirt and drawers, slipping headfirst from where he’d been awkwardly perched. To this very day I can still see his hands, white at the knuckles, glistening, holding onto the top metal shelf, the rest of him lost beneath the angry, swirling brown water.

“Helmut?”
   The hands were still there.
   I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t moved, why I hadn’t heard him smack into the river below. A conversation ran through my head, one I’d once overheard, between two policeman, about how a suicide jumper who hits water often forces his stomach right through his rectum.
   “Check this out, douchebag!”
   The hands suddenly disappeared, the top of Helmut’s knit cap appearing behind the wall. Completely confused, I stepped forward, enough to see him, standing on one of the spindly light fixtures that marked the bridge for the benefit of passing barges. Speechless, I just watched him out there, hanging above oblivion, one bare foot on either side of the twin metal brackets that ended about seven feet beyond the wall, secured to the bridge by two metal cables. His back now to me, he proceeded to make his way further along, stepping ever so slowly, as if he were on ice. As he approached the end of the fixture, the blinking light caught him in its blood-red glow, illuminating his jeans and ski jacket. Watching the light moving, rising up and down, made me swoon, the veins at my temples draining. I was certain I was having another of my attacks, the episodes that the doctor at the clinic hadn’t been able to diagnose, even though F was all but convinced I was epileptic. Mother hadn’t been any help when I phoned her to talk about it. She evaded my questions, instead going on about her painful corns, and the weather, her neighbor’s dogs, anything to change the subject. She was always a terrible one to pin down on the telephone.
   Still hardly breathing, I dropped Helmut’s shoes, my hands numb, almost as if they weren’t there. The wind howled at my ears.
   “Check me OUT, Totty!” Helmut suddenly laughed, turning about at the very end of the fixture. “I’m Like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever!”
   He began to bend at his knees, making the whole fixture drop inches. Bouncing up and down in the eerie scarlet light, he waved his arms, the ties of his jacket hood dancing about his flushed and drunken face like seaweed in a broiling sea.
   Somehow I found my breath again. “It wasn’t Travolta – it was the other guy!” I hollered, squeezing my hands together, beginning to back away from the wall, not wanting to see his white toes curled about the edge of the metal holdings, knowing they were all that separated him from falling a good fifty feet, into the merciless current.
   “Phuck YOU, Pizzburgh, you fancy town! You’re for pussies!” he yelled, slurring his words, his eyes rolling back in his head. “I am Ubaman! Ubaman! Gain my supapowah wif Nigh’ Twain! Woo-HOO! Woo-HOO!”
   I couldn’t take any more. I turned and began to make my way towards downtown, leaving his socks and shoes and the half-empty bottle of bitter wine on the sidewalk, swearing at him, crying that he was going to die and I didn’t care, I was leaving.
   “Uba! Ubaman!” he cackled, clearly oblivious to where I was. “Phuck You, Pizzburgh! Phuck YOU, Unided Stades ov ‘merica! Phuck YOU, eveyone – I am Ubaman! Ubaman distroy!”
   I kept going, half-hoping he would fall, realizing that I’d never have to put up with his shit again. At the same time I was terrified, terrified he might leave me all alone in the strange, compact metropolis, rife with its exotic enclaves, its crowded hillside neighborhoods, the old houses, those moribund upright caskets of working class refuge, brick edifices of a whole world of represented peoples; Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Greek, Irish, Czechs, a generational tidal wave of immigrants who’d shifted themselves to this graven marker of a bygone industrial era. Moving on quickly, I closed my eyes, my hands deep in the pockets of my uncle’s coat, imagining that Helmut’s dream was true, that father really was dead, that Helmut had been chosen to shovel the first earth upon the coffin, that he’d spotted the large stone in the soil and that he’d laughed hysterically, hurling it at the brass memorial plate over where father’s shrunken head lay.
   “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there, seeing myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel.”
   I also saw him plummeting from the bridge, down into his own watery grave, where father’s hands appeared, darting the surface like furtive fish. I imagined the two men embracing, father’s grayish arms wrapping about Helmut’s neck, clawing at his insulated jacket, which billows out about him like the body of a sea ray.

“One more box! You get me one – more – box!” father gasps, pushing Helmut’s head under. “You’re not coming up until you do!”
   There was Helmut, barely a teenager, stripped to his underwear, shivering at the top of the basement steps, begging not to have to go down into the cold, dirty water, father pointing the way.
   I turn, seeing mother, her eyes closed tight, clutching at the front of her dressing gown, softly praying to herself, pressed against the kitchen counter, leaning into the sink.
   “But I helped get you out! I don’t wanna go in anymore! It’s cold!” Helmut cried, before father put his foot into the door, slamming it shut, Helmut’s whimpers disappearing.
   I was staring right at him, as he turned, squatting, his hands going to his knees as he approached me, his hair plastered to his face, his vest soaked and soiled, translucent against his arms and chest, the veins on the backs of his hands blue and angry under the matted black hairs. “You best be watching this, Totty Vogel, you best be paying attention. We family are a team – understand? The one who swims best does the swimming in this house!”
   “I whip the rock right onto his coffin –”
   I feel mother’s hands taking me, pulling me towards her, drawing me into the dry and warm dressing gown.
   “It makes the biggest thump in the world –”
   Father exhales deeply, straightening his back, lifting his hands to his face, running them through his hair, cloudy water splashing at his feet.
   “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there –”
   Neither mother nor I speak. We dare not even move.
   It is the wait we both know well, the wait we have endured so many times before, in countries old and new.
   It is that moment of absolute unknowing, that delicate, breathless balance on the edge of limbo, the breath that draws in from nowhere, as the man who has used us in order to make us peels off his drenched shirt, revealing the flattened tendrils of black hair across his chest, the obscene bulge of his belly, the fearful white scars disappearing into the waistband of his underwear, the body that can destroy, that knows no mercy, that suddenly doubles over in a burst of tears, that drops on its wet knees to the linoleum, that begins to sob like an old woman, that begs, that whimpers for forgiveness as mother takes it into her arms, leaving me pressed to the sink, the very fabric of my existence stretched so tightly before me that I can see the future, the blinking towers of light the beckon, even as I hear Helmut’s hurried footsteps behind me, the sloshing of the cheap wine, the cursing on his lips, the fury born of father’s drenched limbs.

Dodo, Chapter Nine, Father's Saharan Exit

2008-08-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

I was transfixed, standing in the corner of the tiny motel room, watching the beetle amble its way across the bed, its body the color of blood and bruises. It moved with uncharacteristic sloth, over the indentations made upon the mustard bedcover, marks left by my father, who had lain there only moments before, his arms and legs all akimbo, like some dropped ventriloquist’s dummy.
   Outside the room’s sole window, glowing a diffused orange behind the thin, matching mustard curtains, was the rotating light of a police cruiser, making a regular, lazy rhythm, one that seemed to acknowledge the beetle’s languid, sated pace. It was like a metronome, whispering “it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone”.
   I noticed there was a paper bag sitting on the bed stand. I recognized the coffee shop logo. Inside, I found one uneaten, powdered donut. Wondering if it had been father’s or if one of the many attending policemen and paramedics had left it, I took it and hurried to the far side of the bed, trapping the beetle inside the sugary hole. “There’s your dessert,” I announced, turning to see a pair of father’s pants hanging over a straight-backed chair occupying the tiny causeway between the bed and the dark, paneled interior wall of the musty room. The pockets had been turned inside out. Again, I didn’t know if father had done this, perhaps looking for a match, or if the young detective with the crew cut had been searching them, for what I couldn’t guess. “He’s been dead since about five Monday evening,” the detective had explained, seconds after I’d first arrived, gesturing about the room, as if to say “And there you have it – not much is it?”
   No, it wasn’t much, but it was everything father had and that still meant something. After so many years of worry, and fear, and resentment, father had finally left mother for good, having retreated from our lives, becoming just a painful memory. I’d not really ever expected to come across him again, dead or alive.
   I’ve always heard that having a parent die is the first real introduction to your own mortality, but it didn’t feel that way, not the way it did, just fifteen days later, when I stood at mother’s bedside, feeling her hand tighten one last time about mine and then go soft, the life disappearing from it with a shudder, a wash of energy that I took to be her final goodbye. I was suddenly besieged with a series of random memories. It was like being ushered into an unwelcome surprise party.

   “Mind yourself on that road, Totty, it’s not safe.”
   “Don’t let your brother see I gave you that dollar, Totty, it’s yours – you earned it.”
   “This is the old key, Totty. You be a good boy and make sure your father watches you hang it on the hook. We don’t want him knowing where I’ve put the new key.”
   “I’m going to pray for you, whether you want me to or not, Totty Vogel – pray that you don’t end up like the other men in my life.”

   Father’s passing was very different. It was more about recognizing the life I still had ahead of me. It was as if the old man had finally stepped aside so that I could see my future, even if that future might be nothing more than an echo of his own sordid existence.
   They never did give me a clear cause of death, other than the county coroner’s somewhat awkward, hopelessly vague “Died in response to a variety of failings in major organs,” an epitaph more suited to an accountant or mailman, some colorless drone who had performed with the regularity of a clock, not the wild wind of emotion and unpredictability that was my father, that was Georg Stefan Vogel.

“The inside of your foot touches the ball, Totty, the inside.”
   Uncle Alder looked ridiculous, his pale, boney legs protruding from his ill-fitting cotton shorts, his thick socks bunched about his large, dirt-brown gardening boots. Having removed his trousers, on a mocking dare from father, he was still wearing his Sunday shirt and vest, a pipe stuffed in one pocket, a handkerchief sticking from the other. He was sucking a mint, the way he often did, holding it to one side as he spoke. Father was slumped against the front gate, ostensibly guarding Alder’s trousers, busy wetting the tip of a cigar in his mouth. It could have been Grandfather standing there, I thought, as Uncle Alder raised his right foot, pointing to his instep, like I didn’t know exactly where such a thing was.
   “You’re wasting good time with that one,” grumbled father, sighing as he lit his cigar. “His brother’s the footer in the family.”
   Alder grinned my way. “Teach them young, Georg, and the teaching will stick,” he replied, winking at me, as he lobbed the scuffed football across the lawn. It hit the grass inches in front of my foot. I reached out, intent on connecting as instructed, but my toe struck first, sending the tightly-inflated ball shooting sideways, right into father’s rose bush, creating a flurry of showering pink petals. Alder laughed nervously, hurrying over to fetch the wayward ball, one eye on the gate, and father, who hadn’t missed a thing.
   “There’s a reason you do these things on a Sunday, boy,” father intoned, pushing away from the gate, his cigar held between his teeth. “Nothing more wicked than a devil on a Sunday, is there?”
   I hadn’t moved from where I’d met the ball, my hands deep in the pockets of my wool shorts, studying the ground at my feet. I knew father was striding my way for the horrible smell of his cigar preceded him. I barely had time to steady myself before I felt his hand strike the back of my neck, sending me forward into the grass, my jaw cracking as I hit the turf with my chin. I lay there, my arms over my head, my knees curled up defensively, a position I had learned well in my five years.
   “Watch the little worm, Alder, make sure he doesn’t wriggle himself down into the dirt and out under the front gate,” declared father, his voice moving off towards the house. “I’ll be back.”
   I dared open an eye, peering between my fingers, seeing Uncle Alder still standing by the be-headed roses, holding the ball with both hands, wearing an awkward expression. He didn’t say a word to me.
   A moment later father returned, exiting the house with something cradled under his arm. I closed my eye as he neared, pushing my face deeper into the grass, feeling the back of my neck starting to sting from where I’d been hit. “Get up on your feet, little worm,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”
   I did as I was told, following the dark-toned man to where a carpet of pink and blush petals lay scattered about the roots of the rose bush. Uncle Alder stood aside as we approached, still wearing that uncomfortable look on his face, a mix of embarrassment and fear, leaving him with a queer half-smile, and wide-open eyes.

   I now could see that father had mother’s sewing basket. “You’re going to sew my roses back together,” he explained, setting the basket on the ground, opening the lid, pointing to mother’s needle case. “I expect them to look just like they did before – do you understand, boy?” I nodded, holding back the tears that strained to flow. “Your Uncle and I are going for a drink – your mother won’t be back from her church duties until one. That gives you almost two hours – plenty of time.” I swallowed, kneeling before the basket, afraid to look up, not knowing how on Earth I’d do what he’d told me to, but knowing I must, somehow, do it, all the same. I heard Uncle Alder begin to protest, but his mutters were quickly drowned out by father’s commanding voice. “The right-minded know all too well what happens to idle hands,” he growled. “Get your trousers on, Alder, I’m not drinking with a half-naked dolt!”

The young detective looked at his notes, then at the bed, then back to his notes. He turned to me, a quizzical frown on his face. “Did you put the donut there?” he asked, trying to sound stern.
   I nodded slowly. I was still standing in the corner of the room, my arms now folded behind me, resting against the stucco wall, inches from the door.
   “This is still an official investigation scene, sir,” he stated, scratching at his notes, making adjustments. “I need to ask you not to touch anything else, or move anything, until the initial investigation is complete.”
   “You think he was murdered?” I replied, offering a quick grin.
   “We’ll telephone you with our findings, sir, along with the coroner’s report.”
   “Of course you will,” I breathed, wondering if he was going to move the donut.
   He walked towards me, stuffing his little notebook into his shirt pocket, the one decorated with the badge. He stopped inches from me, looking up, momentarily meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry about your father, sir – I can’t imagine what I’d feel if it was my dad, I mean, it’s got to be hard, I know.”
   “They’re all different,” I said evenly, as he made a quick movement, heading on through the open door, out into the parking lot, where the ambulance holding father’s body still stood. There were two paramedics drinking coffee, leaning against it. I saw one of them cover his mouth to laugh. The other had just stood on one foot, imitating, I was quite sure, the peculiar positioning of father’s arms and legs, the way he’d been discovered on the bed. It didn’t take a genius to know what they thought was so funny, the infamous symbol father’s body strangely mimicked was the first thing I’d noted when I’d stepped into the room. It was perfect fodder, a story that would be spread from county agency to agency by the end of the day. Once a German, always a German, I thought, turning back to the bed, my jaw set, trying to recall how many times I’d walked through a room of silent stares, wishing to God I’d been born an Italian, or even a Englishman.
   “Mr. Vogel?”
   I turned to see a pleasant-looking, middle-aged, female paramedic, a clipboard held in her arms. She smiled warmly. It seemed genuine.
   “Yes?”
   “Can I ask you a few quick questions about your father?”
   I sighed, rubbing at my brow. It was still before ten. The call to come out to the Sahara Motel had awoken me from a troubled sleep.
   “It won’t take very long, I promise,” she smiled, her large eyes full of sympathy.
   I nodded. “OK.”
   She looked to the bed, grinning. “I’d usually say have a chair or sit on the edge of the bed.”
   “Official investigation scene,” I replied, smiling.
   “Right,” she agreed, making a funny face, glancing at the donut. “Was that there with the body?”
   It was my turn to grin. “No. I put it there just a moment ago. I had a reason. Go ahead and have a peep,” I suggested, motioning towards the bed.
   She gave me another odd face and walked over to look. Her eyebrows shot up when she leaned across the bed. “Is that what I think it is?” she said, her voice rising with her surprise.
   “Carrion beetle,” I stated. “Body’s been here almost four days, right?”
   She looked doubtfully from the bed to me, and back again. She shook her head slowly. “Still, that’s pretty f’d-up – shouldn’t have been able to get in here, you’d think. What a dump – it needs reporting.”
   “Never imagined my father would die in the Sahara,” I grinned, appreciating her candor and friendly tone.
   She smiled quickly and then her face went serious. “Your father, George Stefan Vogel, he was a German immigrant?” she asked, putting her pen to the clipboard pad.
   “We all are – well – we all were,” I replied, sliding my hands into my front pockets.
   “Georg is survived by?” she asked, writing as she went.
   “Just mother and I now,” I offered, wishing Helmut could have been there to witness the morning’s events.
   “Your father was seventy four. Did he have any ailments or chronic conditions that you might have been aware of?”
   “No,” I replied, wanting to avoid the complicated truth. “But he was a regular smoker, a pretty decent drinker too.”
   She nodded knowingly, writing quickly. “Any major accidents – head trauma?” I must have given her a suspicious look for she smiled. “These are really just basic, routine questions, Mr.Vogel, I promise you.”
   “No, not that I know of,” I offered, quickly realizing the error. “Oh, well, he did knock himself out once, a long time ago, tossed from his car – an accident,” I explained, wondering, for the first time in my life, just what role that icy road had played in father's troubles. An image of mother, bent at the kitchen table, polishing that tiny mint spoon, flashed before my eyes. The paramedic wrote feverishly, biting her lip.
   “This was in Germany I take?”
   “West Germany,” I corrected.
   “A long time ago,” she grinned.
   “Yes,” I said, sighing. “A very long time ago.”

Black Weather, Scroll Nine

2008-08-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

Black Weather, Scroll Eight

2008-07-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Eight, The Wild West

2008-07-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

I opened my eyes and saw the purple shape floating on the surface of the filled tub, just between my knees. It reminded me of a rose petal, drifting across some quiet pond.
   Mother had opened the door moments before, without knocking, the way she always did. Quickly averting her eyes from the sight of me, submerged up to my chest in the grayish water, she’d backed her way towards the bath, holding out a small carton. “Epsom salts, Totty,” she’d whispered, as if lowering her voice was somehow making her entrance more discreet. “Sprinkle some in the water, it’s good for aching muscles.” She’d then hurried out, closing the door ever so gently.
   I lay there, my arms circling the back of the tub, watching the bruised nail that had separated itself from my big toe, seeing how it cast a c-shaped shadow upon my stomach. I was alarmed, but not surprised. I had, after all, run almost ten miles, along a grueling course of hilly, unforgiving country road. My legs no longer felt like my own. It was as if I were Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, awoken to find myself attached to another’s limbs.

“How many miles can you run?” I’d asked Helmut, earlier that morning, my foot perched on a kitchen chair, working the laces of my high-top sneakers.
   “Twenty, twenty five – a marathon I guess,” he’d replied, sounding as confident as ever.
   “You’ve really run that far?”
   “Almost, maybe – doesn’t matter, I can do it,” he shrugged, avoiding my stare. He was standing before me, adjusting the red, white, and blue wristbands he’d bought the day before at Barker’s, the discount store located less than a mile from our house, a cavernous emporium of discarded merchandise where we’d recently begun buying sealed boxes of original-label 45s, ten for two dollars, sweetening our ears with the likes of James Brown and Wilson Pickett. It was early summer, 1972, the family had only been living in America for a few months.
   Helmut, desperate to blend into his new home, was clearly willing to meet any challenge. He seemed to believe that by besting the Americans he would gain their acceptance, like some nomadic warrior, stumbling into a strange camp, wrestling their strongest brave into surrender. This, in fact, is how he essentially saw the world, and himself.
   “I hope I can do the whole thing,” I breathed, satisfied that my sneakers were adequately tight. I was referring to the twenty-kilometer running race we’d entered the evening before, riding our bikes to the local fire hall to register our names and pay our six-dollar entry fees. Sponsored by The Pioneer Steakhouse, a popular local gathering place, the fee had entitled us to bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the restaurant’s logo; a prime rib, crossed by two muskets and topped with a coonskin cap. We’d both proudly worn them to breakfast, earning quietly critical looks from father.
   Following my older brother into his latest reckless venture, as desirous of fitting in as he, I soon found myself on the starting line, having made my way through the tight throng of two hundred or so runners who had gathered on the narrow road before the drab concrete building that housed the Hudson County Volunteer Fire Department.
   “Don’t let any of these guys muscle you off the pavement, Totty – you hear me?” instructed Helmut, giving me one of his serious looks, before cracking a toothy grin. “Watch the heels in front of you too – trip in this bunch of turkeys and the red shirts are going down like freakin’ dominoes!” He loved his new mastery of current American slang. I watched as a bald man pointed a gun to the white sky and fired a single, muffled shot and we were off, a parade of moving advertisements for The Pioneer Steakhouse, all ages and disciplines, from the seasoned county champion to an eleven year-old West German immigrant named Tot Vogel. “Take it easy until we start thinning out!” I heard Helmut call out, as I was quickly swallowed by the mass of early morning runners. “You hear me, retardo?” I was quite happy when, coming to the first of many winding turns, I was cut off, forced almost to a complete stop, losing sight of Helmut in the crowd ahead of me.
   Hudson County, Ohio, consisted of a few hundred thousand acres of rolling, tree-choked hills and smelly farmland. The nearest town was a good four miles from where our small house sat, at the foot of a steep ridge, only yards from a busy railway line, rocking cars full of coal and ore passing so regularly the pictures mother had hanging in the front room made half-circle marks on the wall as they swung on their nails. The Fifth Annual Pioneer 20K Steakhouse Run wound through this rough-hewn territory, making a mockery of any pre-planning on the part of novices like Helmut and I. Less than two miles into the race I was stooped over a low stone wall, coughing my lungs out. I didn’t know it then but it was allergies, the swaying grasses, ripe with seed, giving rise to a throat of mucous. Sitting on the uneven stretch of moss-lined boulders, which reminded me of home, I watched at dozens of runners pass me by, before my lungs allowed me to continue. Biting my lip, I rejoined the mostly-older procession, trying to ignore the burning nausea building in the pit of my stomach.
   The morning sun was soon bleeding across the sky, replacing the thin clouds with dramatic patches of blue that appeared sporadically, directly overhead, as the gulag of amateur athletes padded through arches of blowing, green leaves, the road at their feet tattooed with the shadows of listing trees. I had given up looking for any sign of Helmut long ago. He was obviously far ahead. The hot sun was soon making me wish I’d bought wristbands too, salty sweat running the bridge of my nose, pooling about my upper lip. My knees were beginning to ache, my shins all but numb, my feet throbbing inside my flat, pinching sneakers. I didn’t know it then, but my white socks were already pink with blood.

“What do you want with running in a race?” father had questioned us, sitting at the breakfast table, shielding his head with the paper. We rarely saw his pained-looking face before lunchtime.
   “It’ll be a kick,” replied Helmut, scooping boiled egg from its shell, spreading it across his toast, like butter. “I’m going to win.”
   I could almost see father’s sneer through the newspaper.
   “Twenty kilometers is a long way, Totty,” cautioned mother, reaching out to touch my arm. “You shouldn’t go. Why don’t you just watch your brother?”
   “Let them kill themselves,” father snorted, turning noisily through his paper.
   “I don’t want you leading your brother into such foolishness,” exhorted mother, now squeezing at my arm. Though talking to Helmut, I knew she was really appealing to me, digging for the weakness she knew was there.
   “Mother,” I moaned, twitching at her touch, afraid to catch Helmut’s eye, more afraid of the rustling newspaper across the table.
   “They go together – or no one goes,” father stated, his tombstone face suddenly appearing over the morning headline. I could feel mother’s hand soften its hold, slowly pulling away. “A joint funeral is cheaper,” he laughed, enjoying his own joke, his eyes all shiny inside their reddened lids. He’d managed to remain sober for the first three months at his new job in the new country. I think he considered it some sort of a gift to the rest of us, one he was now eagerly taking back, night after night, bottle after bottle, filling the garbage can by the shed with green glass, as mother lay in bed, pressing the cover to her ear, preying into a tear-stained pillow, already knowing that the alternative was worse.

Looking about me, I realized how much younger I was than the vast majority of the runners. This shouldn’t have been a revelation, for Helmut had lied to the lady at the registration table, telling her I was thirteen, the cut-off age for the race clearly posted as twelve. Being tall for my age had helped.
   It was becoming increasingly more difficult to keep my arms bent, pumping them at my sides in accordance with my stride, as Helmut had shown me. I now dropped them every few steps, letting my fingers hang loose, giving momentary comfort to my aching shoulders. My hearing was going all funny, like it did when I was upset or confused, making everything sound flat and muffled. It could have been the allergies, or the humidity, but it was more likely my nerves, the condition that was then only a larva, buried deep underground, just beginning to sense its own existence. I caught the dim cacophony of running shoes hitting the road and the constant flapping of the paper number Helmut had roughly pinned to my right shoulder, catching my skin, leaving a thin trial of blood along my forearm. “This is so they can shoot you with their camera at the finish line,” he’d explained, making me stand still. “Means they’ll have your face on record, retardo, so don’t go robbing any banks or assassinating any elected officials – they share their files with the FBI, you know.” I winced, recalling a film we watched in school back in Worms, J. Edgar Hoover gesturing at the press with his cigar, pointing towards a shape lying under a blood-stained tarp, dumped squarely in the middle of a squalid-looking Chicago street, like some dog’s accident.
   America was an endless source of fascination. Any worries mother had of us not being able to adjust were unfounded. We’d both taken to the cultural displacement with a determined gusto, an enthusiasm that belied our nervous trepidation. It had always seemed somehow mystical, less than real, a country one read about in books, perhaps saw in movies, but not a place young German boys ever imagined they’d visit, let alone live in. Being barely eleven when we stepped onto the dark tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, I was full of miscomprehensions about my new home, myths that Helmut’s teasing and father’s silence had done little to remedy. Mother was the only one I could ask questions of, but her knowledge was hardly more accurate than mine. “Rock Hudson has a home on both coasts,” I remember her explaining during the flight, dabbing at my cheek with her napkin as a pretty blonde stewardess retrieved our dinner trays. “And the Empire State Building is so tall, airplanes have to fly around it!”
   The idea of this had instantly caught my imagination.
   “Will we fly around it, mother?” I’d asked, glimpsing past the stoic profiles of my brother and father, seeing the endless blue sky that peeked through the little window.
   “I’m sure we will, dear, I’m sure we will,” she’d replied, returning to her glossy magazine.
   “Huh – we’ll probably fly right into it,” breathed Helmut, his eyes closed.
   “No we won’t!” I cried, causing father to stir, making Helmut flinch nervously.
   “Hush, boys, you’ll wake your father,” whispered mother, busy absorbing all she could about Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, those glamorous, iconic metropolises, the sparkling jewels in every immigrant’s eyes, places we’d hardly ever see, at least not as a family.

I was now walking more than running, the pain in my feet making it hard to do even that. I’d not noticed the change at first, my every stagger, every limp shuffle, a welcome distraction, bringing me a moment’s respite from the stinging coils that seemed to be tightening about my toes.
   “Like some water?”
   I looked up, seeing a teenage girl standing beside the road, just ahead of me. Her long, straight hair was almost white in the brilliant sun. She smiled, holding out a small paper cup as I hobbled towards her. I managed a grin and took it, drinking so fast I splashed half the cool water down my neck. I meant to say “thank you” but instead a weak “danken” came from my throat. I saw the girls’ eyes widen with surprise. Digging my chin to my chest, I gritted my teeth and forced myself on, into a trot, my pride the only thing keeping my going.
   It’s impossible to explain the immigrant experience to those who have never immigrated, other than to suggest one imagine being transported to a world that looks much like Earth, but which is otherwise entirely different, its every movement, every sound, wholly unpredictable. Of course, it was much easier for Helmut and I than it was for mother and father, we had mastered English in school and regularly digested as much of the American mythos as we could. Like most Western European children, my head was dizzy with imagery of the romanticized “Wild West”; cowboys twirling ropes, shooting each other in lonely standoffs, red-faced Indians looming behind every rocky crag, squinty-eyed sheriffs passing through swinging saloon doors, tumbleweeds rolling lazily by; it was all waiting for us, just beyond the horizon, seemingly as tangible as Heaven’s promised harp and wings. The day I learned that the Americans had acquired the automobile, along with other modern conveniences like the telephone and television, was a day of much confusion and consternation. I asked mother how this could be, how the Wild West could have airports and electric toasters and Beatle boots. She pulled me to her and kissed the top of my head. “Your cowboys and Indians lived a long time ago, Totty, they aren’t there anymore – just like the knights and the Vikings of Europe.” That evening I’d retreated to my side of the tiny bedroom I shared with Helmut, spreading my collection of plastic and metal “army men” across my bed, an assortment that included rifle-shooting cowboys, arrow-aiming Indians, shield-toting knights, Cossacks, barbarians, and German infantrymen, along with the prerequisite British paratrooper, gouged with a penknife to indicate the wounds of combat. Though confused, suffering a curious sadness, I was soon giggling to myself, imagining my fierce Indian brave sitting on a toilet, the gunfighter in the sombrero loading his dishwasher. It was a joy that suddenly vanished, the instant I heard a violent pounding on the back door and mother telling Helmut to hurry off to his bedroom.
   Mother and father continued using the old language in the home, right up until father’s death. Only then did mother begin talking to us in English. Helmut and I had used it around her from the very start, the day we’d first raced up those narrow stairs to the dusty, empty room that would be our haven for so many years to come. Around father we reverted to the old way, not daring to offend or upset him, for we never knew which way the wind was blowing.
   It was a strange thing, being so openly referred to as a “German”, for I’d never thought of myself as such before. In America, my identity preceded me, from the classroom to the street corner. I was called nastier things, of course, like “Hitler-Boy” and “Nazi-Fuck”, but these came mostly from the bitter-faced grandson of one proud WWII vet or the other, men forever stuck in the past, still clutching invisible rifles, much like the little men in my cigar box.
   At first, it seemed I could do little to please anyone. Those who wanted me to be American were disappointed with my accent, my awkward politeness, my somewhat aloof, cool nature, those who were looking for an exotic foreigner were frustrated with my limited knowledge of my own country, with the fact that I looked very much like they did. I was, after all, just a boy. I might as well have come from France or England. I had not packed the cultural history of my people in my suitcase, I had, in fact, determinedly left all that I could behind, keeping what I chose in my memories of Grandfather Amwolf, Grandfather Meyer, Uncle Alder, and the grey, damp stones and nettles that lined our garden wall.

I don’t know exactly how long I had been out on the road when I heard the car engine approaching. Amazingly, I was very nearly still managing a run when the horn sounded. Almost stumbling over myself, I turned to see a familiar station wagon, leading a trail of dust. Apart from a farmer on his tractor, it was the first vehicle I’d encountered all morning. It suddenly dawned on me that the race was all over, that I was the very last person still out on the course. I tilted my head to the sky. The sun had already passed its highest point. I gasped, searing pain racing from my toes to my hips.
   “Hey, retardo!” came Helmut’s voice, sharp and critical, as the station wagon pulled beside me. “What are doing?”
   I saw father’s shape at the wheel. He was smoking. It was strange thing to see, for he never smoked around the house, more a response to his own upbringing than any sort of consolation for mother.
   Helmut was leering out of the passenger side, an unlit cigarette between his red lips. I saw a pack of “cowboy cigarettes” on the dashboard. This is what father and Helmut called Marlboros. It was their favorite brand. Father often enlisted Helmut to hide the contraband from mother, often in the ceiling of the garden shed, the secret stash usually consisting of a carton of Marlboros and a twelve-pack of Budweiser, always cans, never bottles. The shed was commonly referred to as The King and Cowboy, as if it were a public house, even in front of mother. “Marlboro and Budweiser, two things America does like no one else,” I can recall Helmut once claiming, parroting father, as we chugged sweet, cold soda, waiting for mother outside the local supermarket.
   “Dad’s really pissed,” Helmut whispered, now leaning out of the car, cupping his hand over his mouth in confidence. The engine suddenly cut off. “Seriously,” he added, with uncharacteristic solemnity.
   I came to a stop, standing very still, staring at the ground, my lower body insensitive, my head spinning, feeling the heat of the car’s engine rising over me. I was sure, after all I had endured, that I was going to pass out, right there, in front of Helmut and father.
   “You’re goin’ to get it,” whispered Helmut, the tease back in his voice, just like that.
   I heard father’s door open and his hard shoes on the road. The car was parked half on it, half on the broken shoulder. I counted the footsteps, hearing them soften as they reached the dirt. My eyes were now closed, a heavy feeling coming over me, as if I were about to swoon. I wondered what I would do when father hit me. A great terror blossoming, I bunched my hands at my sides, preparing myself for the worst.
   “You beat your brother by almost two miles.”
   I held my breath, going dizzy.
   “Never knew you had it in you, Totty. Doubt you did either,” father added, putting a hand on my shoulder. I winced, pulling away from him, before I even realized it, almost tripping. He steadied me and drew me back towards him. I heard a low chuckle coming from within the car. “What should we do to celebrate? Hmm?”
   My eyes stinging with sweat, I turned, blinking, catching the big grin on father’s face. I couldn’t believe it. Still terrified, I grinned back, wiping at my eyes, realizing I couldn’t feel my feet at all. “Celebrate?” I heard Helmut whine, his voice all but disappearing into the car.
   “You made yourself a real man today, Totty Vogel –yes, you sure did,” father announced, giving me a solid slap on my back, making the sour feeling in my stomach take a dangerous climb. “Give me that pack, Helmut!”
   I glanced over at the car, seeing Helmut, wearing a queer look on his face, one as much wounded as fearful. He handed the Marlboros to father.
   “Here you go, boy, you’ve earned this,” said father, holding a cigarette before my lips, waiting for me to mouth it. I hesitated, not knowing if I could even manage. “Go on, boy, take your prize,” he added, touching the filtered tip to my lips. I took it, terrified of dropping it. “Raise your head, cowboy, you get the champion’s smoke today,” he insisted, with an odd chuckle, something I couldn’t ever remember him doing, not in my honor. He lit the cigarette. I just held it there in my mouth, my arms at my sides, inhaling and inhaling, until it seemed my ears were about to emit great plumes of smoke. Then, all at once, I was pitching forward, my trophy lost on a gushing cascade of all that Helmut had forced me to eat for breakfast.
   “Gross!” came my trainer’s voice, from within the car.
   I was instantly on my hands and knees, losing my guts with dramatic fashion.
   “Look at your mess!” declared father, his mirth a fleeting thing. “I should make you walk home. Clean yourself, boy, and get in the back seat, your mother is worried sick about you. Why would you run on like that, after your brother had stopped? Do you enjoy making your poor mother worry herself over you? Hmm?” I was sure my vomiting was the only thing that had stopped him from striking me. I could hear the violence rising in his voice, a tone I knew all too well.
   Staggering to my wrecked feet, wiping at my new shirt, I climbed into the car, unable to restrain the tears, my eyes flooding with the realization that America wasn’t going to be any different, after all. It wasn’t going to change father, not like I’d been secretly hoping, ever since I’d raced through those sliding doors at JFK, breathing in the first taste of my new home, listening for the gunslinger’s discharge, the war cry of the Indian, never considering that I’d brought the wild west with me.

Black Weather, Scroll Seven

2008-07-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Seven, Naked Photographs

2008-07-14T01:12:00.000-07:00

I awoke to a great humming sound, an incessant vibrational drone issuing from the blue, flickering bowels of the huge, octopus-shaped furnace that rested only inches above my head.
   I’d been startled by a queer sensation growing in my left hand, like pins and needles, but far worse, so much it made me wince.
   Staggering to my knees, I crawled across my bed, the musty mattress I’d procured the day before, the day I’d moved into the basement of the derelict nineteenth century townhouse affectionately known as the “Ice Palace”, as much due to its penchant for freezing tenants in their sleep (the octopus being less than reliable), as for it being the home of the troublemaker named Iceman, perhaps the nuttiest of Bettina’s nutty gang. “It’s – it’s – my – my –” I gasped, rolling onto the hand, hoping to suppress the pain, but it did little good, it felt like my fingers were about to explode.
   Beating my fist into the mattress, I began to whimper, like a scolded puppy, flashes of white light hovering before my closed eyes. I cried out, smacking into the base of the ancient furnace, where its rust-coated belly sat on a pedestal of concrete, its pilot light sending dull tendrils of shadow across the basement, reaching the corner where a red-haired punk named Laser was lying, coiled inside a dour-looking blanket.
   “Can you maybe keep it down?” moaned the blanket, opening one eye, watching me strike the furnace with the back of my hand. I was now offering up a rapid succession of howls and breathless expulsions, which lasted two or three minutes, before the pain finally began to subside. A moment later, there was just a numb, burning sensation in my fingertips. I lay there, not moving, sprawled across the dirty floor in my underwear and T-shirt, my chest heaving as I sucked in the warm, stale air.
   “What the fuck’s going on?” asked Laser, now blinking his eyes.
   “I think – I think I just had a heart attack,” I breathed, holding my fist to my chest, trying to assure myself it was really over, that the horrible feeling wasn’t about to come racing right back.
   Laser just laughed. “Heart attacks are for old people – you must have been sleeping on your arm, that’s all. You knocked me out of the best fucking dream.”
   “Sorry,” I offered, still clenching my fist, my heart beating in my ears. I suddenly felt very tired, weak, as if I’d run a great distance.
   “Won’t do any good now,” sighed Laser. “Madonna’s long gone – her girlfriends with her.”
   Normally I would have laughed, but all I could do was stare, my new roommate’s grin belying the poison look in his pale eyes.

“I swear, my hand felt just like a balloon.”
   “Was it “Comfortably Numb”, Pinkie?” F teased, keeping her back to me, her attention focused on a bulging shelf of old books marked MISC./ETC./NAME A PRICE. Just the week before, we’d seen The Wall, the new Pink Floyd movie.
   “I’m serious!” I stressed, frustrated I couldn’t make anyone understand exactly what had happened. “I thought I was dying – how funny is that?”
   “Rolling around the basement in your underwear?” she giggled, turning to glance at me from behind her thick, dark bangs, a familiar crease across the bridge of her nose. “That only makes it funnier, T.”
   I marched right by her, snatching an oversized atlas from a pile of boxes. “Maybe you should spend the day with Laser.”
   “Oh, listen to the poor little baby,” she remarked, selecting a small red book. “I was only teasing you. You’ve got to be the most sensitive guy I’ve ever slept with – I swear you are.”
   I slammed the atlas shut, shoving it back into the box, making a show of it, looking across the aisle, disappointed to see that she was still lost in her own book. “I am NOT sensitive,” I insisted, moving back towards where she stood. As I passed her she suddenly backed up, trapping me to the bookcase by the wall. She pushed into me with her backside, its familiar and inviting softness making me almost instantly hard. “What are you doing?” I gasped.
   “You’re too much sometimes,” she sighed, reaching back with one hand to cup me. “Do you even know how many guys in Pittsburgh would happily fuck me in a bookshop – right this very minute?”
   “I fuck you in bookshops! You know I do!” I stammered, wriggling free, the front of my jeans as tight as a boy scout’s tent. “In Squirrel Hill that one time – remember?”
   “Squirrel Hill? Are you sure? I thought we did it downtown, or was it in Oakland? Oh – wait – sorry – those were other guys I was dating at the time.”
   Shifting my belt, nervously adjusting myself, I strode noisily to the stairs that led up to the cluttered front of the second hand bookstore, a favorite haunt, one we’d retreated into, wanting to escape the heavy rains that had deluged the city for two straight days. “I’m going – I’ll see you outside,” I said, my voice taking on an uncharacteristic flatness. I caught F’s eyes following me as I went. Pressing the little book to her chest, she hurried after me.

“The furnace kept me awake half the night.”
   “I don’t know why you don’t just come and stay with me. It’s no big deal, you know,” F replied, busy investigating the red book, which now laid open before her on the table of the booth we’d secured by the front window of a George Aiken’s restaurant in a depressing stretch of Wilkinsburg, a rough, mostly forgotten neighborhood to the east of downtown. Wilkinsburg was the sort of place where someone would die in their home and not be discovered until the police dogs began their troubled sniffing.
   “I know, I just want to – I like hanging with the guys, that’s all. I see you pretty regularly, don’t I?” I said, wanting to tell her that I was really concerned with rushing into things, that I cared about her. It was a sudden sense of caution that made me nervous. Picking at my dinner, a piece of battered fish lying in a pool of graying tartar sauce and oil, I tried to remember what it was like before I met her. We’d only been going out for a couple of weeks.

I first set eyes on Effie Jones at one of Bettina’s wild parties up in Mount Washington, the one where Caligula had almost dropped Willy Blanefield III from a porch overlooking the steep hillside.
   She’d been sitting in the dark with another girl, ignoring the rest of us as we watched Meat guzzle a milk jug filled with Bettina’s toxic punch. They were so close together, whispering into each other’s ear, that I at first mistook them for girlfriends. I mean real girlfriends. Later that night, as we walked along Grandview Avenue, I told her what I’d thought, hoping to amuse her, but she instead snapped at me, calling me a witless jerk. Thinking that was it, that I’d blown my chances with the most attractive girl I’d met since moving to Pittsburgh, I just took off, leaving her to make her own way back to the dying embers of the party. I was completely surprised the next day when Helmut tossed her name and number at the couch, where I was still sleeping. “Treat her right, Totty,” he’d warned, giving me one of his hard looks, as I clawed out of my sheet, grabbing for the bit of folded paper. “Tina says she’s gone through two real jerks in the past year – she doesn’t need another.”

“T?”
   “Hmm?”
   “Are you even listening to me?”
   “Sure! What were you saying again?”
   F sighed, giving me a long, thoughtful look. “I was saying this is a Harver, a Mary Wilson Harver, one I’ve never even heard of – let alone seen before. Can you believe it?” She carefully turned back to the front of the compact book. “Naked Photographs, A Book of Words for Pictures not Shown, by Mary Wilson Harver.”
   “Naked Photographs?” I snickered. “Let me see one.”
   “Idiot, they’re just words – didn’t you listen?”
   “Naked words?” I suggested, watching the rain running down the greasy window, making the street beyond a liquid blur.
   “Eat your fish and listen, pea-brain,” she said, turning back to the middle of the book. “A young woman, perhaps twenty, sits on the lawn beside a red brick wall, her long skirt arranged about her like the petals of a marigold. Her sleeves are loose and billowy, lined with gold sequins, as is the hem of her skirt. She is squinting into the sun, smiling, showing bright and even teeth. Her complexion and dress suggest she might be a gypsy, of Mediterranean blood. Behind her is a house, the front of which has been all but consumed by ivy, covering everything but the doorway and two windows, which appear, nestled in the thick canopy, like the deep-set eyes of some aged man, watching the young woman from his solitary retreat.”
   “That doesn’t sound much like a book for kids,” I remarked, pulling the wet batter from my fish. Mary Wilson Harver was mostly known as the author of Spaceship Elleven, a popular children’s book. Popular in Canada, anyway.
   “I don’t think it is,” F murmured, checking the back pages. “It doesn’t even mention her other books.”
   “Are you sure it’s the same Mary Wilson Harver?”
   “It has to be – it’s printed in Canada. A different publisher, and there’s no date, but it’s her, I know it is. Listen to this one –”

An old man in the booth directly behind us suddenly coughed, a violent succession of phlegmy retorts, like you'd imagine a submarine backfiring. F looked up, her thick eyebrows at attention, until the sound stopped. She then continued.

   “A heavy-set man, about forty-five, with close-cropped, dark brown hair, wearing a cream-colored jacket and grey slacks, stands on a leaf-covered dirt path, a folded newspaper sticking from his jacket pocket. He is holding an open palm towards a doe that cranes her neck in order to get at what he is offering her. The deer seems tame, as if she is used to feeding this way. The man is grinning, apparently amusing whoever is photographing him. In the background is a small grove of mostly leafless trees, and a barn, listing to one side, as if it is very nearly ready to collapse.”
   I made a face. “So, that’s it? We’re supposed to imagine the photographs?”
   “I think so,” said F, sounding lost in thought.
   “Why isn't it called “Invisible Photographs” then?” I asked, pushing aside the soggy cardboard container that held the remains of my dinner.
   “Listen to this one,” she proceeded, ignoring my remark. “A woman, probably in her early thirties, crouches beside a boy, who appears to be about five. They are in a field, there is a long stone wall behind them. The woman is holding the boy close. He is wincing, arching his body away from her. She is looking straight at a man who stands to the right, holding a wooden plank in one hand. About the same age as the woman, the man is poised tensely, as if he is about to move. He is rather short, but solidly built, veins showing on his forearms, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. His face is shiny and dark, his eyes white and large. There is another man, taller and thinner, standing to the left of the woman and the boy. Behind them all, leaning against the wall, is another boy, a bit older, perhaps eight or nine. His eyes are glued to the man with the plank.”

“Georg? Put the stick down, Georg, you don’t want to hurt anyone.”
   “Keep your distance, Alder. This is between the boy and me.”
   “Georg – please – listen to your brother!”
   “Let go of the boy, Mrs. Vogel – so I can beat the lying eyes from his head.”

“T?”
   I had been staring outside, watching the buildings and utility poles beyond the veil of rain that coated the window, mesmerized by how they were moving, up and down, left and right.
   “T?”
   I turned to look at F. She was moving too.

“I didn’t DO it! Helmut did it! Helmut did it!”
   “Release the little liar, Mrs. Vogel – God help me, woman – I’ll hit you too!”
   “Alder! Do something! Please!”

“Tot. Tot! What’s wrong with you? Stop it!”
   I don’t remember waving my arms about, grabbing the vinyl seat, crying out that my hands were on fire. I don’t remember knocking my drink over, soaking the little red book before F could rescue it. I don’t remember passing out. I don’t remember hitting my head on the table. I only remember opening my eyes, seeing F, seeing the lady from the counter.
   “Your friend is epileptic?” the lady was asking F, who was on her knees, leaning across the booth, holding my hands, gently rubbing them.
   “No, I don’t think so. T?”
   I looked up, seeing the concern in F’s dark eyes. I grinned. “Guess I’m a bit too “sensitive” for those naked photographs, eh?”
   She frowned, biting her lower lip, the way she often did. I caught the flash of a tear in her eye.
   “I promise, F, I’ll never do it again.”
   She managed a little smile, continuing to rub at my hands, as if she was afraid to let go. I didn’t know it then, but she had already fallen in love with me.

Black Weather, Scroll Six

2008-07-07T22:46:00.001-07:00

Black Weather, Scroll Five

2008-06-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Six, Not Far From the Tree

2008-06-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

My father's trouble started before he was born.
   His father, Amwolf, was of a generation that failed to recognize the brain's dependency on specific chemical arrangements in order to function properly. In those days, sufferers of acute depression were diagnosed as “melancholics”, treated as moody or sickly, prescribed mostly useless remedies like iron pills or fresh air. Being a man of intense pride and self-conviction, my grandfather's every outburst, and subsequent retreat from the company of others, was viewed as a simple characteristic of his difficult personality, as were the beatings he inflicted upon his first wife, Katharina, my father's mother.

Amwolf Peter Vogel was a short man.
   Carrying himself about on bowed legs, like some angry, horseless cowboy, he met everyone with a forceful handshake. His face, as I recall it from my youth in Germany, was a knotted mass of lines and furrows, all converging on a nose that looked much like a beet. His eyes, wounded, hard portals, vicious gaps revealing a shipwrecked soul, were yellowed with age, as were his nails and fingertips. He smoked furiously, one cigar after breakfast, another after lunch, a pipe in the evenings, a regular diet of tobacco religiously observed.
   When inclined, he was a busy, boastful talker, his conversation wholly self-absorbed.
   Catching Helmut and I at some boyish task, crushing worms on the pavement or pursuing a rat under father's shed, he'd instruct us to “deposit our behinds and listen”, wetting his cigar in his mouth, searching his pockets for a match, cursing under his breath. He'd then proceed to inform us of all he'd accomplished in his life, working through the details with the impatient tone of an overworked pedagogue. “You take pride in your grandfather,” he'd insist, scanning us with those waxy eyes. “Your grandfather was a semi-professional tennis player in his day – a good one.” He always spoke in the second person, as if he were his own biographer. “Your grandfather played men half his age and twice his size and he beat them – and don't you boys forget it.” His larger-than-life stories usually involved some such competitor or villain, down on his knees, pleading with the almighty to spare him from the superior Amwolf Vogel. One day it would be as a semi-professional tennis player, another he was a semi-professional golfer, yet another he would be an opera singer, courted by the great tenor Caruso, leaving beautiful women to faint in their seats, even though a local newspaper reviewer had once written that he possessed “the voice of an angel, but the face of a clown”.
   He was, in fact, a little bit and nothing of these things.
   As a young man, he'd enjoyed some renown for his tennis and golfing skills, but nothing more than a weekend of glory on the clay courts at the village health club, a minor celebrity to which he'd long ago ascribed the “semi-professional” title. According to father, he had a punch “as quick and final as a cobra snake” and was well known for taking arguments outside, where he'd “thrash grown men, leave them wet with their own piss, lying on the cobbles”. But father's stories were just as suspect as grandfather's, both men acquiring the nickname “Munchausen”, after the famous book by Rudolf Raspe about the infamous yarn-spinning baron. “One day your grandfather's going to tell a tale so tall he won't be able to climb down from it,” I can recall mother once remarking, rolling her eyes, as we heard grandfather's walking stick striking the front gate, trying to undo the latch. “Better make way for old Munchausen,” she'd sigh, retreating into the kitchen, leaving Helmut and I to rush out and spare the gate from its thrashing.

Of all the things grandfather boasted, one was perhaps almost true.
   He did indeed have a powerful voice, a rich baritone that filled the eaves of churches and local concert halls alike, a tenor so rich it sent him all the way to Blackpool, England, to sing with an American military troupe during the second world war, a performance that led to an invitation to study at Enrico Caruso's school in Italy.
   Having no money for such a venture, he took it upon himself to educate Helmut and I in “the mysteries and majesty of the operatic voice”, hoping to secure himself a prodigy.
   Helmut proved an all but impossible student, grandfather's attempts often resulting in fierce fits of screaming and toppled furniture. I, being that much younger, proved more pliable. He often used to catch me by the collar and hold me, his body shaking as he instructed me to follow him in his daily vocal exercises. “MAR – LARE – IN – O,” he'd bellow, his mouth open wide, brown spittle hanging from his false teeth. “MAR –LARE – IN – O, MAR-LARE-IN-O, MAR-LARE-IN-O, MARLAREINO, MARLAREINO!” he'd continue, steadily increasing the pitch until it sounded like an alarm.

One of the last times I ever saw Grandfather Vogel was from high in one of the towering pines that lined our back garden.
   I was holding a baby starling in a tea cup, grandfather and father at the base of the tree, imploring me to “climb higher, boy, climb higher!”
   Mother had discovered the newborn lying in her rhubarb, not far from the tree line. “Pushed from its nest by another bird, I suppose, the dear thing,” she'd explained, as Helmut and I jostled for a closer look at its heart, a throbbing, purple, pea-sized smudge, just visible under translucent skin. “We should save him,” she added, setting the undeniably ugly little creature atop an old dish rag she'd spread on the kitchen table. “He's too young to feed himself.”
   Helmut and I had been all too eager to search the front path for worms, something we were busy doing when father and Grandfather Vogel arrived, pulling up in father's sputtering Heinkel. “We're getting worms!” declared Helmut excitedly, stuffing his pockets with mud, as he ran to unlatch the gate. “Mother found a baby starling and you can see its heart! We're going to feed it!”
   Father looked to grandfather, a grave and silent exchange. “Take the worms from your pockets, Helmut Vogel,” he said. “And see your brother does the same. No one in this family is feeding a bird.”
   Helmut knew better than to argue. Turning his muddy pockets inside out, he reluctantly let half a dozen large, pink earthworms wriggle free. I did the same, fearful to even look father's way.
   A few moments later, “we four men” were gathered at the foot of the pine, where mother had found the fallen nestling. Father had tied one of his shoelaces about the handle of a tea cup, into which he'd put the starling. He did all of this, not saying a word, silently following grandfather's orders. When he'd encircled my head with the loop of the lace, he stepped back, letting grandfather come towards me.
   I stood breathless, terrified by the grave ceremony of the affair, wondering why Helmut was left to simply watch.
   Taking me by the arms, squeezing hard enough to make me wince, grandfather looked me in the eye. “We're counting on you, Totty Vogel, we're counting on you to be a man,” he intoned, his breath reeking of cigar. “Can you be a man for us? Can you be a man and climb to the nest?” I nodded quickly, avoiding his jaundiced stare, focusing instead on the heaving chest of the baby bird slumped at the bottom of the cup. “Let me hear your voice, boy.”
   “YES, GRAN'FATHER AMWOLF!” I proclaimed, in my best approximation of a baritone tenor, my eyes shut tight.
   “Make us proud, Totty.”
   I turned to the trunk of the old pine.
   I knew the tree well. Helmut and I had, over the years, broken the lower branches, fashioning a relatively easy climb to about nine or ten feet. Reaching the nest, which we'd spotted a good ten feet higher, was going to require navigating branches grandfather determined only I, the smallest and lightest, could safely manage. “We're all counting on you, Totty, don't let us down,” I heard him say, his deep voice seeming to race up the tree, challenging me to follow.
   More fearful of failing than falling, I hurried up through the lower branches.
   Soon I was standing on the limb directly beneath the nest. The only problem was it was too far out for me to reach. I had to inch my way along the branch under my feet, which tapered dramatically and began to sag. Going as far as I dared, I held onto the higher branch, reaching into the cup with my free hand. “Put it in the nest, boy – we're watching!” came grandfather's booming voice. Feeling the limb beneath me drop a few inches more, I stretched my arm, the baby cradled in my fist. Opening my fingers, I gave a little push forward. The bird rolled onto the lip of the nest, but quickly tumbled backwards. Hitting the branch, it then plummeted all the way to the ground.
   “WHAT HAPPENED?” father called out.
   “He DROPPED the bird!” proclaimed Helmut, gleeful at my error.
   “Get back, Helmut, you'll step on it!” I heard father cry.
   “Come back down, Totty, it's still alive, you can try again,” grandfather's voice commanded.
I wanted to protest, wanted to tell him I couldn't, that I was afraid of dropping it again, but I was just a boy, barely eight years old, I had to do what I was told.
   So, again I scaled the tree, the battered, dirty bird slumped at the bottom of the tea cup. Again I dared my way out across the withering limb, feeling my feet sinking, the branch swaying dangerously, creaking under my weight. Again I reached out, catching the edge of the nest.
   Unfurling my hand, I forced the newborn forward, only to have it roll backwards for a second time, striking the branch, quickly falling, hitting the ground with a soft thwump.
   “NO, Totty, you're not doing it RIGHT,” grandfather called out impatiently. “Come down and we'll try it over!”
   As I made way down, I could hear Helmut snickering.
   I held out the cup, my hand shaking terribly, as grandfather dropped the seemingly lifeless starling back in. “A Vogel never gives up, Totty,” he breathed, giving my shoulder a sharp squeeze. “Your grandfather didn't make it to Blackpool by surrendering. You get up there and you try again.” I started to sob, but knew to turn my head and hide the tears.
   Again I scaled the tree, the air becoming tight about my chest, my cheeks hot, my legs feeling rubbery and weak. For the third time I made it out as far as I could dare, taking the now quite cold bird from the cup, not even looking to see if its chest was still rising.
   “THIS TIME YOU'LL MAKE US PROUD, TOTTY, WE KNOW YOU WILL!” grandfather sang out.
   I bit my lip, all but throwing my tiny charge at the twig and straw target. Closing my eyes, afraid to watch, I opened them a moment later to see an empty nest.
   “Come on back down, Totty,” I heard father sigh. “I suppose we'll have to tell your mother what you've done.”

Black Weather, Scroll Four

2008-06-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Five, The Manchester Pals

2008-06-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

The last time I ever saw Willy Blanefield III, he was sprinting down the middle of Negley Avenue, trying to overtake a runaway bowling ball.
   Willy was the sort of kid you either wanted to hug, or slug in the face, it all depended what side of his personality you were greeted with. To his credit, he hadn't been the one to liberate the bowling ball, that was Iceman's doing. Iceman was a roly-poly giant of a boy, with coke-bottle glasses and a laugh like a donkey. He'd hidden the ball under his full-length winter coat, walking right by the manager of the bowling alley and out onto the double yellow lines of the busy street. Iceman and Willy were part of the little gang I ran with in the early 1980s, during the years I spent dodging responsibility in Pittsburgh. This was before I met F and we eventually moved back to Ohio.
   There were five of us, inseparable to the end: Willy, me, Iceman, Caligula Carl and Meat. We called ourselves The Manchester Pals, the quaint-sounding “pals” to us having a more sinister definition, one rooted in the world of cheesy gangster movies.
   Manchester was a neighborhood of historic red brick buildings and oak-filled parks, just to the northwest of the industrial city's triangular downtown. If you continued walking through the stately old homes and businesses you'd end up on the east bank of the Ohio River, amongst rail cars and barrels of chemicals and barbed wire fences. It was not far from here that the Pals first came together. Though I was a good two years older than the others, I looked nearly as young as Willy, the baby of the gang. A lanky young man, only three years out of high school, I had about as much sense of direction as that bowling ball racing down Negley.

I'd followed Helmut to the steel city, encouraged by his tales of easy girls and fun to be had any direction you chose. He'd moved there the year before, ignoring mother's pleas that he “find a steady job in Cuyahoga, save some money, and then think about living in a big city”. He'd borrowed a hundred dollars from father, who was living away from home at the time, on one of his many prolonged “episodes”.
   Jumping a train east, Helmut had met a shady older rider who secured him work cleaning an adult theater, a night job that offered him plenty of opportunities to familiarize himself with Pittsburgh's seedy underbelly.
   He was still working there (a personal record for Mr. Impatience) when I showed up on the steps of the building he was living in. This was on the Northside, only a short jog from Manchester, in another Victorian-era district known as the Mexican War Streets, named for the neighborhood's planner and essential founder, General William Robinson, Jr., who, upon returning from the Mexican-American War in 1848, set about to designating the area with its distinctive character, labeling streets after the war's major battles.
   Helmut's residence was a decrepit brick tower of gothic solemnity that sat at the very end of Palo Alto Street, some eight floors of flint-cheap apartments and boarding rooms. The hallways were usually filled with occupied sleeping bags, looking like worms on the sidewalk after a heavy rain. Navigating these were punk brats and their pregnant girlfriends, alongside old ladies with sharp, defensive eyes, clutching plastic shopping bags to themselves like soldiers rising from a bunker, and dark, European-looking men in oily jackets who paced before suspect doorways.

I'd gotten friendly with a girl on the Trailways bus from Ohio. Her name was Bettina. She had short, shorn-off auburn hair and big, grey-blue eyes. As we said goodbye at the downtown station she handed me a small piece of card. I didn't look at it until after I'd watched her disappear into the midday crowd, mesmerized by the pendulous sway of her wide hips, wishing I had Helmut's nerve when it came to girls. Scrawled across the back, of what turned out to be an expired temporary library card from the Toledo Public Library, was an address, followed by her name. I'll never forget her handwriting, how the two t's in Bettina locked together, as if they were waves on the sea (ironically, I later learned she was AWOL from the Navy). Bettina was every bit as much the rambler as my brother. I was no match for a girl like her, I'd fitted my own leash the first time I locked onto those liquid eyes. It didn't take long to lead me into the crazy world of Willy Blanefield III and The Manchester Pals.

Helmut insisted I spend my first night in Pittsburgh with him, helping slop a smelly, disinfectant-soaked mop across linoleum floors stained with a day's worth of spit, urine, come, and other substances I was terrified to even ponder. Right from the start we'd argued over the perils of my traipsing about an unfamiliar place, a debate that continued as we made our way towards the large doorway of the once-grand old vaudevillian theater, now emblazoned with a red and gold neon marquee that promised HOT ADULT ACTION!
   “Pittsburgh's not half as bad as Cleveland,” I moaned, turning to the city that glowed behind us, a warm summer night giving it an allure I found impossible to resist.
   “You go runnin' around out there and you'll end up sorry, Totty,” he replied, pushing me inside the great copper and glass doors. “Did you catch those brothers on the corner back there? You'll get yourself mugged or knifed.”
   I snickered. “Yeah – right. What could really happen?”
   “Your balls could end up hangin' from some motherfucka's necklace – that's what!”
   This comment elicited a hoarse laugh from somewhere behind the thick-glassed ticket window at the far side of the wide lobby. I looked to see a ruddy face appear in the narrow light coming from an illuminated sign that read ADULTS ONLY! This was the sort of business where everything was deemed worthy of an exclamation point.
   “Got my kid brother with me tonight, Louis, hope you don't mind,” Helmut explained, giving a dismissive nod in my direction.
   “Watch he doesn't jack off on the carpets, just had 'em vacc'd!” snorted the older man, holding a thick, hairy arm out from under the glass window.
   Helmut grabbed a big set of keys from Louis's hand. “No worries about that,” he snickered. “The little pussy's been whackin' it all the way here from Cuyahoga Falls! Ain't ya, Totty?”
   I scowled, wishing I'd never even mentioned Bettina.
   Turning my attention to a showcase featuring a garishly-colored poster for a film titled Flesh Sacrifice!, I fingered the small card in my pocket, deciding then and there that I wasn't going to spend the whole night in that musty old theater.

“You don't sound like you were born in Ohio,” declared the skinny kid sitting on the railing of the big steps outside the apartment building that matched the address Bettina had given me. He was wearing a cap on his head, the sort a pilot or bus driver would wear. It all but covered his eyes, but couldn't hide the big smirk plastered across his face. His clothes were a jumbled assortment of mismatched layers, an outfit he wore most every time I ever saw him.
   “I wasn't,” I replied, searching for his eyes in the shade of the brim. “I was born in Worms, it's a...”
   “WURMS?” he shrieked, almost pitching backwards over the railing. “What was your mom doing in a bucket of worms?”
   “Worms is a city in Western Germany, dumbass – don't you know anything?” came a familiar voice, floating down from the open window above us.
   I looked up to see Bettina, smiling my way, as she leaned through the window frame. I found it hard not to stare at the way her hip spilled over the sill. “Glad you found us, Tot! We were about to head out to check out a really cool band - you wanna come?”
   I grinned. Of course I did.
   I was smitten, there was no denying it. I'd follow her practically anywhere, even if it meant splitting on Helmut while he was cleaning out the projection booth, stealing off into the night streets of a city I hardly knew. I was going to fetch hell for that later, but right then I didn't care, not one bit, not as long as Bettina was nearby.

“So – your dad's a drunk, huh?”
   I tensed at the remark, feeling my face harden. I gave Willy a harsh squint, watching him fiddle with the buttons of the boom box he held perched on his shoulder. I silently cursed myself, knowing I'd spilled too much to Bettina during our bus ride. I've always had the habit of rambling on when I'm with an attractive woman, I think that might be a German trait, or maybe it's just from mother's side, the “jawful” as father always used to say, one of his odd conversions of the English language.
   “SHUT UP, DICKHEAD,” the tall, muscular, dark-haired guy trailing Willy suddenly warned, reaching out to give Willy a quick push, making him stumble. This was Meat. Apparently he was Bettina's boyfriend, I never quite knew for sure. They all seemed more like a family of circumstance than friends, a clan that came with its own pecking order. Bettina was clearly in charge, with Meat as a reliable echo, backing her up with a stern look or shove, most of it going Willy's way.
   “I don't care, not a big deal,” I replied, catching Bettina's eye, hoping to see a look of apology, or even sympathy, but she quickly turned away.
   “Feel free to belt the little snot next time he bothers you,” offered Meat, in a friendly manner.
   Willy, having recovered his footing, cut in front of me. “Check this out!” he exclaimed, his boom box now blaring out a horrible, tuneless noise, followed by an angry voice singing something that sounded like “I'm a snow man, baby”. He grinned my way, now light in his step. “IT'S – MY – LATEST – RECORDING!” he shouted over the din, far more than was necessary. “WHAT – DO – YA – THINK? HUH?”
   Meat reached out and grabbed the box, this time causing Willy to spin about, almost falling over. “The little jerk's always playing that shit to everyone he meets – I guess he wants his face punched in on a regular basis,” Meat offered, jabbing the STOP button and opening the cassette deck. He pulled out the tape and stuffed it into the pocket of his jean jacket.
   “GIVE IT BACK!” squealed Willy, lunging for the tape. “IT'S MY ONLY COPY!”
   “Too bad, dickhead,” Meat grinned, catching my eye. “You'll get it later – don't sweat it, retard.”
   Bettina just laughed. “You'll like the music we're going to check out, Tot, don't worry,” she said, meeting my eye again. “The Vacuum Bags are practically Jesus Christ.”
   Meat nodded his agreement. “Wait until you catch Iceman,” he enthused. “The dude's totally APESHIT on the drums!”

Turns out he was totally apeshit on everything.
   Even before we reached our destination, an all-ages club located in a weathered, white concrete building that used to house a hardware store, we heard a great roar and then a car horn sounding and then a round of cheering and laughter. “Sounds like Iceman's wrestling! I bet Carl's challenged him again! COME ON!” declared Bettina, rushing on ahead, her boots slapping hard on the pavement as she zipped past rows of listing brick townhouses, making her way towards the river.
   “Yoo-HOO!” Willy yelled, quickly following, one hand holding his big boom box (which Meat had happily relented), the other his cap.
   I turned to Meat. “Wrestling?” I inquired, a bit confused.
   The big kid grinned, his slightly-misshapen mouth curling upwards, revealing a missing front tooth. “You'll see when we get there,” he replied, showing no signs of hurrying after the others. “Looks like it's going to be a pretty good night.”

It was.
   I had such a good time I didn't mind the riot act Helmut read me the next morning, when he caught me trying to sneak into his tiny apartment. I just grinned, looking away, elated at having found new friends so quickly.
   Not even the broken finger I endured when he threw my dictionary at me could dissuade me from joining them again the next night. Though that wasn't the only broken thing I suffered.
A few weeks later, I awoke from my couch bed to see Bettina standing in the kitchen area, fixing breakfast, wearing Helmut's old football jersey and a pair of socks.
   I moved my stuff to the basement of Iceman's building that same afternoon.
   I couldn't tell Helmut exactly why.
   I chose to suffer alone, never telling anyone of my feelings for Bettina.
   It's just the way I am. No one would have understood anyway. The only person who might was suffering herself, back in Cuyahoga, waiting to hear a key in the back door.

Black Weather, Scroll Three

2008-06-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Four, The Missing Fingers

2008-06-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Mother's father, Grandfather Meyer, Mr. Meyer, as he was known to all the children, was a professional photographer. He was well respected in his profession and many a prominent citizen would go out of their way to visit him in his large house in Zweibrucken, sitting for their picture on a tall, austere chair he referred to as “the throne”. His studio, a stone building nestled under the wide canopy of an old tree at the back of his garden, was filled with all manner of then-modern equipment; great bottles of smelly chemicals and metal boxes perched on tall, spidery legs, things that readily captured the imagination of a young boy in the late 1950's. If allowed, I would have happily spent the entirety of my visits with Grandfather Meyer in that dark, cool studio, but that was before the piano arrived.
   A silent totem of mystery, the mammoth, old black upright all but covered one wall of his front room. It mainly served as a mantle for a row of yellowed photographs placed in stern-looking frames, each an official portrait of a baron or baroness or some other wealthy German, all prized clients. Going to grandfather's was a special event, each visit offering me an opportunity to stand before the monolithic machine (never once having heard it played, I hardly thought of it as a musical instrument). Even on my toes, my chin barely reached the lid, itself a massive, seemingly impenetrable form, under which lay keys I had only ever seen on one occasion.
   It was during a party for my Uncle Alder, who had just received a medal of commendation from the local government, something to do with getting safe drinking water to rural areas (to this day I've never quite understood what his job was). I recall this because everyone made a special toast with a tall glass of water, Helmut and I spilling ours as we raced to finish up first.
   Uncle Alder didn't look anything like father. He was very thin, with oversized hands he always kept hidden in a pair of stylish leather driving gloves, which I always thought was odd, being that he didn't drive. His eyes were wide and heavy-lidded, outlined by long, bristly sideburns, giving him the appearance of an insect. He was three years older than father, but their relationship would have one believing it was the other way around.
   Grandfather's house was full of guests, all talking, drinking and smoking, the things I'd learned to associate with adult gatherings. Wanting to avoid the teasing of Helmut and my older cousins, I'd positioned myself before the piano, offering my back to the festivities, standing so close I could feel my knees touching the quilted bench kept underneath. I stared, transfixed by the brilliant array of keys, and the lid, pushed open to reveal a wonderfully ornate music stand. I was pondering why it was open, having been told more than once how it “upset” Uncle Alder, never understanding why. I was about to brush one of the white ivories when I suddenly felt two firm hands slip under my arms, hoisting me into the air. It was Uncle Alder.
   “You know that's quite forbidden, Totty!” he declared, in a deep and rich voice, one that belied his slight build. “Have you not been told the tale of the Fehlend Betasten?”
   Wriggling in his clutches, his long, hard thumbs hurting as they pressed up under my suspenders, I crooked my neck, glancing back down upon the keys, which now looked like a field of black and white stripes. “No, Uncle Alder, I haven't,” I replied, in an awed whisper. I was lying. Uncle Alder had told me the gruesome tale more times than I could remember, but I never grew tired of hearing it, especially the way he presented it, pausing at the moments before the truly terrifying parts, his big eyes looking ready to pop from his head.
   “You haven't?” he answered, in mock surprise. “You mean to say you do not know that all pianos, even your grandfather's, once had only white keys?”
   “No black ones on Mr. Meyer's?” I asked, with an innocence every bit as staged.
   He shook his head slowly, a grave look etched upon his lean face. “No,” he breathed, bringing me so close I could smell the brandy on his lips. “Not a single, little one – every key was a brilliant white, Totty, as white as the pillows in Heaven.”
   “Then why does Mr. Meyer's have black ones?” I asked, continuing my charade, dangling my arm, tracing over the keys with my finger, pretending to count them.
   Uncle Alder smiled, his big grey eyes all but disappearing behind thick folds of skin. “Ah, but you see, my boy, this was the doing of the wicked children, two brothers and two sisters, who had disobeyed their mother and had lifted the lid of the family piano and were running their tender little fingers all over the shiny white keys. They were being so naughty and were so lost in the sweet cacophony of their disobedience they didn't hear their father just outside the front door, stomping his muddy boots on the paving stones – stomp –”
   “Stomp - stomp - STOMP!” I squealed, forgetting my supposed ignorance.
   “He stomped so hard he shook the entire house,” continued Uncle Alder, ignoring my outburst. “And – SLAM – down came the heavy lid – right upon those bad little children!”
   “What happened to their fingers, Uncle Alder?” I gasped, hiding my own in my mouth.
   “Why, they came right off – severed at the final joint – trapped shut beneath the lid, along with four of their nasty little thumbs. And no matter how hard their mother and father tried, they just couldn't lift it. They called a neighboring farmer from his field to help, but he had no more luck than they. The farmer then fetched two builders who tried but failed as well. It seemed that nothing would open the lid. The poor children cried and cried, their bleeding hands all wrapped up in their mother's apron.”
   “I don't want them to cry anymore, Uncle Alder!” I suddenly pleaded, my eyes beginning to tear themselves, but Uncle Alder seemed not to notice.
   “The doctor might stitch their fingers back on, but they are lost in the piano, declared the farmer. Perhaps we could chop it apart with an axe, suggested one of the builders. Never, said the father angrily, this is an heirloom, from my father's father's father it has been handed down to me, I will not see it destroyed!”
   Uncle Alder was now only a watery shape before me. Warm tears raced down my cheeks.
   “But, what of my dear children, cried the mother, her apron now all but red,” continued Uncle Alder, lost in his story. “What futures will they have without fingers? They will be beggars - or worse!”
   “What - what's worse than a beggar, Uncle Alder?” I choked.
   But he no longer seemed to be addressing me. His eyes were cast to the ceiling. “So be their fate, hissed the heartless father, stomping off, followed by the farmer and the builders, leaving the poor mother and her children.”
   “Never to see their precious fingers again?” I finished.
   “Not until the day a traveling player came passing by, on his way to a grand recital in Stuttgart,” announced Uncle Alder, giving me a little shake. “This master pianist, seeing the fingerless children sitting by the roadside, took them to the house, where their mother showed him the terrible piano, long sealed shut with the children's blood. The pianist sat down and removed his satin gloves. Running his beautifully-formed hands across the lid, it all at once sprung open, revealing thirty six little fingers – lodged between the white keys – each as black as coal!” I began to sob. “And the master pianist began to play,” Uncle Alder exclaimed. “He played as never had been done before! A rhapsodic miracle it was, a sound that traveled up to the angels on high!”
   “Alder! Hush!” declared a familiar voice. “Look at what you've done!”
   It was mother. I felt her warm hands taking me. Rubbing at my burning eyes, I tried hard to stifle my flowing tears, but the tale of The Missing Fingers always got the better of me. It was why I loved it so.
   “There, there, Totty, it's going to be alright now. Your uncle should know better.”
   Looking rather sheepish, Uncle Alder made a dismissive motion with his hand and excused himself. As mother dabbed my eyes with her blouse I watched him amble over to where father and Grandfather Meyer stood, both with drinks in hand, cigars blazing. He seemed to hesitate before them. I saw father turn, taking in Uncle Alder with one of his dark scowls. He then glanced across the room, seeing me, my face still flushed with tears. He frowned, avoiding mother's eye, quickly turning back to the others. Grandfather Meyer reached out and gave Uncle Alder a little push and father began to laugh. Father then dipped a hand into his glass and withdrew it, flicking his drink into Uncle Alder's face, moving his fingers across the air as if he was playing a piano. He and Grandfather Meyer both now laughed, sharp and loud, great puffs of smoke rising between them.
   “Momma?” I asked, as I watched Uncle Alder shuffle off, looking defeated. “When does Mr. Meyer play his piano?”
   She smiled, pressing my face to her. “Your grandfather is not a player, Totty. You know the piano was your uncle's.”
   “Uncle Alder's?” I murmured, things I thought I understood suddenly not seeming to make any sense. “Why is it in Mr. Meyer's house?”
   Mother stroked my head, speaking extra softly into my ear. “Your uncle doesn't play anymore, Totty, not since the accident.”
   I glimpsed back towards the piano. It looked blacker than it ever had, filling one side of the room, like an entrance to some secret tunnel. Though just a boy, I was beginning to recognize the terrible truth that lived within adult whispers. Too young to absorb it, but old enough to carry their careless comments with me, I was left with bits and pieces, a monstrous patchwork reality, stitched together with the overactive mind of a child. It wasn't until some fifteen years later, when the telegram arrived in America, informing us that Uncle Alder had died, that I learned the truth. Or, at least, the only truth I would ever discern.
   Uncle Alder's indeterminable profession had merely been a resource to avoid poverty. His real career had been as a pianist, a classically-trained auteur of some renown, one who was destined for a life of the appreciated performer, before his brother, my father, bullied him into a task too dangerous.
   Our little house in Germany had a well, located beneath the garden. Heavy rain often caused it to back up, flooding the bathroom and kitchen. Mother wanted us to join the city lines, but it would have required almost a quarter mile of digging and pipe laying, and a cost father was determinedly against. Thus, each great storm resulted in father calling Uncle Alder over to help him clear the clogged line. This involved lifting a heavy iron cover that sat a few feet under the ground. Father, dismissing his brother's strength, always insisted on holding the cover, as Alder lay across the opening, reaching into the open piping to pull free the backed-up waste. Uncle Alder had resignedly performed this unwelcome chore on a good half dozen occasions, getting filthy, but otherwise unscathed, until the day tragedy struck. It appeared in the form of a rat, one that suddenly scampered across Alder's arms as he was clearing the way, causing him to cry out. Father panicked, letting go of the cover, just as Uncle Alder was drawing himself up. The heavy iron plate came down upon Alder's hands, crushing them. As mother told it, at the wake, sitting before an uneaten sandwich, Uncle Alder never again touched a piano, for years experiencing anxiety even when he'd come close to one. “I know he blamed father for what happened, he didn't want to ever let it be over. He stewed in it, Totty, and your father did too. They both suffered for it.” She said this, picking at her sandwich, tears lining her face. I tried to make this fit with what I'd witnessed all my life, the terrible animosity between the two men, Uncle Alder's fearful regard of father and father's callous lack of respect for his older brother. In doing this I saw, for the first time, that, as much as I loathed father's actions, there was some truth in what mother said. Both had suffered, both had carried the weight of that fateful day, one losing his dream, the other his grip, the fragile hold he'd had on himself.

Black Weather, Scroll Two

2008-05-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

Dodo, Chapter Three, The Trouble with Father

2008-05-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever witnessed father truly break down was on a Saturday, only a few days after I'd moved back to Cuyahoga Falls.
   It was late afternoon. I was making my way along the muddy alley way between the houses. Walking just behind me was F, my girlfriend. Her real name was Effie, but I never called her that, to me she was just F. Most other people knew her as 4F, a nickname Helmut had come up with, making fun of her flat feet. F preferred F too. She called me T in turn, like we were characters in some Kafka novel.
   F and I had been out in the woods, wandering and talking, the way we often did when there was nothing else to do. I'd found a raccoon skull, separated from its scavenged body. I'd Insisted on keeping it, stuffing it into my coat pocket. All the way home we'd been arguing about it, the grey sky hanging heavy over us.
   “It's not funny!” F exclaimed, pointedly remaining a few steps back. “You could get sick from it – rabies – or anthrax – or – or something even worse.”
   I'd already explained, at length, how I'd read an article about germs and how our bodies are equipped to defend themselves against disease. It quoted a scientific survey where children raised on farms, in close contact with all sorts of animals, actually had fewer germ-born illnesses than children raised in sterile, suburban homes. “T,” I sighed, tired of the conversation. “I promise – I'll soak it in bleach – OK?”
   She replied, making a sharp, little, laughing sound, a sound I knew well. It meant she had completely dismissed my side of the argument; I was a fool and only she could possibly hope to teach me the error of my ways, something she would take it upon herself to do, for she loved me and I had best be smart enough to realize it.
   I was about to make things worse for myself, referring once again to the article, when I heard a loud noise, coming from behind the concrete garage that separated my parent's back garden from the neighbor's. I looked up and saw father's old, red wheelbarrow, suddenly sitting out in the middle of the tire-lined path ahead of us.
   Just then, another noise erupted, from somewhere in the garden. It was like someone trying to flush a bucket of stones down a toilet, a horrible, grinding, scratching sound. F covered her ears as she came even with me, making a face. “God, T – make it stop!” I gestured helplessly, breaking into a stride, moving towards the wheelbarrow, fearing what was coming next, even as a shrieking cry filled the air.
   A second later, father appeared, dressed in his black suit, the one he wore to church. He was bent at the waist, like a cloth doll on a shelf, as if he had no bones in his body. Stumbling this way, he headed straight for the barrow, throwing himself into it, sending it over into the mud, trapping himself partly underneath. Helmut would have said he looked like a turtle who'd grown too big for his shell. His shrieking now became a deep, guttural moaning.
   I stopped, hearing F treading tentatively behind me. I was afraid to go any farther. Why did this have to happen now, I thought, feeling both frustrated and scared. I'd promised F it would be okay for us to stay at my parent's house, until we could find our own place. We'd only come because Helmut had split for parts unknown, leaving mother at father's mercy, something I knew I couldn't allow, even if it meant risking what I'd managed to build with F since we'd been living together in Canton.
   Though Canton was only twenty-odd miles from Cuyahoga, F might as well have moved to another state. The only person she knew here was an aunt, Florence, who was essentially disowned by her family after shacking up with her brother-in-law. It wasn't F's father, fortunately, for F loved and admired her father. He was actually a pretty great guy. He'd found me a job, on my nineteenth birthday, the day after we'd moved into our apartment. I cleaned the used cars at his auto dealership, working the sponge, while Dutch, an older man who had a glass eye and swore like a teenager, held the hose.
   That first night F and I lay in our bed, swimming in the strangeness of the new apartment, I quietly had a panic attack, something I hadn't experienced since I was in elementary school.
   F was the first girl I'd ever shared a home with. Seeing her sleeping, so close to me, her dark bangs covering her eyes, her chest rising under the bed cover, I suddenly felt as if I'd made a terrible mistake, one that would shape the rest of my life. I felt trapped. Just thinking about it made my breath go shallow. I squeezed at the sheet beneath us, bunching it into my hands. My eyes now wide open, I stared up at the white ceiling, noticing the dull shadow of the tree outside our window, how its limbs seemed to reach across the room, spread like some giant, open jaw.
   “T?”
   It was F, whispering, placing a shaking hand on my shoulder, bringing me out of my reverie, back to the present.
   “T? Is your father – is he – okay?”
   She said it as if she was referring to a car that had just died on the side of the highway. She didn't understand. How could she? I never spoke about father's trouble, not to anyone, not mother, not Helmut. We all knew he wasn't right, we weren't oblivious, we just simply refused to consider what really might be wrong. No one wanted to pinpoint the thing, the dark shape, the tumor that sat heavy amongst us, gnawing away at the family. When father was drinking that at least was something you could understand, a sickness other people had, a problem characters in stories showed us was treatable. The problem was father's trouble only presented itself when he'd stopped drinking. It was the ugly face behind the bottle, the nasty truth he drank to hide in the first place.
   “Sure, he's just stressed – that's all,” I replied, instinctively putting my hand over F's, giving it a little squeeze. “It's not easy kicking booze.”
   “People don't crawl under wheelbarrows because they can't drink!” she insisted, angrily.
   “The hell they don't!” I said, trying to laugh, watching father's boot move along the edge of the wheelbarrow, his heel leaving a furrow in the mud. “Helmut once tossed his bicycle right through the front window, after mother found his whiskey and poured it all over the lawn.” Even as I said it, I felt a shudder trace my spine, realizing just how similar father and Helmut's behavior often seemed, something I hadn't ever truly considered until right that very moment.
   Father's moaning now seemed to surround me, pressing at my ears, blanketing everything with a muted silence, a vibration locked somewhere inside me. It was a feeling I'd known since I was just a little boy, a terrible murmur that lived within me.
   “T?”
   A memory suddenly entered my head, as if revealed by the white-gloved hands of some great magician. I was no more than three, sitting in father's lap as he shelled walnuts into a bowl he'd cradled between my legs. Helmut and Mother were outside, hanging the day's washing.
   “Damn it!” father swore, cursing himself. I turned ever so slightly, fearful of what had happened, of what I'd see.
   There he was, sucking his thumb, a dark trail of blood running across the palm of his hand. He'd cut himself with the little pen knife he'd been using to remove the walnuts from their hard shells.
   “Tot?”
   A horrible look came to his face when he saw me staring. Transfixed with fear, I locked onto the blood, watching it move down about his wrist, terrified of meeting his eyes. I'd been placed on his lap with strict orders to keep still and not to ask questions, he was only tolerating my presence to appease mother. “You ever taste a grown man's blood, Totty Vogel?” he asked gruffly, taking his thumb from his mouth, his voice wet with spit. I quickly shook no, turning from him, fighting back warm tears. “About time a boy learned what a man's blood tastes like,” he said, gripping me behind the ear. Twisting my head to face him, he smiled, showing his uneven teeth, bringing the red thumb towards me.
   “TOT!”
   F had gripped me about the waist and was pulling me back, away from the hulking shape now rising from the wheelbarrow, staggering towards us.
   Clearing my head of the memories, I turned about, removing F's arms, mouthing the word “run”.

Black Weather, Scroll One

2008-05-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

The following illustrated novella, Black Weather, was created, as a gift for a friend, in the fall of 2007. Inspired to revisit my earliest approach to graphic storytelling, that of wholly improvised, panel-to-panel, page-to-page creation, I set out, over the course of two weeks, to fill a small, 4“ x 6”, 82-page sketchbook (a cheaper variant of the perennial Moleskine, amusingly named “a la Modeskin”). My goal was to utilize the entire book, allowing for no mistake that would have required removing a page, leaving the edition intact, transformed into a tiny, original, one-of-a-kind “automatic picture book”. Accomplishing this, to some surprise, I must admit, I wrote and illustrated a story that shaped itself as I turned the pages, leading to a conclusion that seemed to craft itself. I can claim no sole ownership of the tale that follows, rather I see myself as a conduit for its telling, a fable channeled through the vibrancy and mystery of the moment, strung together with the enduring bond of friendship, presented now, with the blessing of its owner, for all to experience.
Understanding the fashion in which it was born, please allow for any spelling and/or grammatical burps, to say nothing of narrative coherence. Technical particulars: All text and line art came from a Pilot brand P-500, extra-fine pen. The greytones were created with brush, using ink washes.
I will be presenting Black Weather in 10-page “scroll” installments, over the next few weeks, of which this is the first. I hope you might enjoy it, automatically, as it were.

Dodo, Chapter Two, Helmut Needs Motion

2008-05-09T01:12:00.000-07:00

It was late August, 1982, I was sitting on a dry, earthen bank, facing a row of concrete buildings that constituted the entirety of the Centralia railway station. Located approximately half way down the coast of Washington State, Centralia was a small, nondescript city, chiefly made up of taverns and feed stores, a place about as dull and obvious as its name.
   Keeping one eye on the station, I was minding the tracks to the south, where my older brother Helmut was attempting to force himself into the narrow opening of an idle transport car. “Rusted tight on the inside...” he gasped, cursing under his breath, his broad frame not making it an easy task, muscling his shoulder against the stubborn sliding door, one foot inside the carriage, the other dangling over the tracks below.
   I suddenly heard a banging sound, coming from the building at the northernmost end of the line of cars. Rising quickly to my feet, I squinted into the bright afternoon sun. Lying on the loading platform was a sack, the sort they transported mail in. It hadn't been there a moment earlier. “Helmit – Hel-mit!” I called out, as loudly as I dared. “Someone's in the station! Hurry!”
   Helmut grunted fiercely. With one mighty effort the car door lurched to the left a precious few inches, just enough for him to bully through into the darkness. A moment later, I saw his hand sticking out, urging me across the tracks. I didn't hesitate, the thought of being caught by a railroad employee putting fear in my heart.
   “She's empty – I bet this one hasn't been used in years – get a look at those spider webs – enough to knit a sweater!” he joked, when I was safely inside. His eyes seemed to glow in the black. “Nobody spotted you, I hope.” I shook my head, sure I'd avoided detection. Saying a silent prayer, I felt the leather case strapped about me, my thoughts on the two dozen rolls of film I'd shot over the past two weeks, already anticipating getting it into the darkroom I'd rigged in the upstairs bathroom back home in Pittsburgh. Following Helmut's lead, I crept back into the shadowy interior of the metal car, feeling cobwebs against the nape of my neck. As we settled down, only inches from one another, Helmut chuckled softly, pulling a small packet of rolling papers from his shirt pocket. He began to build himself a cigarette, proceeding with uncanny ease, instinct, not vision, being his guide. I'd experienced the same routine countless times since we'd made our way into that first rail car, back in Seattle, some fifteen days earlier, an afternoon which now seemed a lifetime ago.
   Helmut Vogel was a restless man, just as he'd been a restless boy. Not once in his forty-two years do I remember him staying still for more than a few moments at a time. Growing up, I'd often feel his large hands about my collar, yanking me away from a favorite comic book or daydream, forcing me to accompany him on some new misadventure, my heart heavy and conflicted, for I knew we'd soon to be up to no good, but I also knew it was bound to be the most exciting half hour of my week. I'd never dare such things alone, but Helmut was fearless. I'd more than once seen him stand up to a man a good ten years his senior. I really had no choice but to play his silent and abiding sidekick.

Nothing had really changed, I reflected, smiling, catching Helmut’s intense stare in the light of his homemade cigarette, knowing he was about to explain how he was “...close to, if not the very best damn rail rider in these Goddamn entire United States of America, Totty – and don't you forget it.”
   We were on the last ride home. Free ride, anyway. When we got back to Seattle we'd be striding up to the ticket office, like everyone else, showing our return vouchers for Pittsburgh. As far as mother and father knew, we'd been visiting Helmut's old school chum, Harley, and his wife and kids, down in Portland. But that only lasted a day before Helmut's restless spirit brought us to the rails again, taking us down the coast, to Sacramento and points south. He’d finally agreed to turn around when we'd reached the town of Martinez, birthplace of the great Joe Dimaggio, a man more enshrined in my mind for having slept with Marilyn Monroe than for his batting average.
   “Totty,” Helmut had remarked that afternoon, rolling a smoke, his eyes half shut, sitting in the cemetery overlooking the Southern Pacific depot. “Life ain't much if you don't make something of it, it sure ain't. You can go when they say go and stop when they say stop and all you'll end up with is a little house in Cuyahoga. A man's gotta keep his heels warm if he's looking to get anywhere in this damn crazy universe.” He said this, as he often did when he got preachy, with an air of affected certainty, as if he were in a school play, dispensing the single most important bit of advice in the world.
   I grinned, nodding quietly, as I always did, thinking how much other thirty two year-old men were accomplishing, forging real careers and starting families. I knew Helmut was wrong. He never seemed to notice how hard it had been for mother to raise the two of us and keep her own life together, all through the worst of father's dark days. Mother's heels were anything but cold, but Helmut would never understand this.
   Still, as strange as it sounds, I understood him too, I even felt as he did, though I knew it was shortsighted. To both of us, father was a pole lodged deep in the dirt, a sign to nowhere, going nowhere. I knew Helmut feared this his own fate, feared it more than anything, and that's why he was determined to keep moving, thinking he could somehow avoid his sorry inheritance. “The lord gave us feet for a reason, Totty, not just for stretching our socks. You remember that, remember it good,” he added, blowing smoke my way.
   I smiled sheepishly, nodding my less-than-heartfelt agreement, idly tracing my finger along the name etched into the headstone beneath me. “I will, I will,” I assured, thinking, that after forty two years of running his life in circles, my brother must have known his own feet pretty well, to say nothing of his tail.

Dodo, Chapter One, The Spoon

2008-04-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

It was a silver-plated mint spoon, perhaps the most-beautifully crafted spoon I have ever seen, one so small as to line up against a man's forefinger with length to spare. It was early Winter, 1963, father was on route to Stuttgart, heading through the Black Forest in his Heinkel Kabine, a teardrop-shaped, three-wheeled vehicle. Hitting black ice at a high rate of speed, the absurdly-designed car careened across the roadway, like a pip jettisoned from the mouth of an unmannerly giant, its body-length door springing open to let loose its only occupant. Father never knew just how long he lay unconscious on that frozen road, but when he finally opened his eyes there was the tiny, delicate spoon, sitting on the black tarmac, only inches from his bleeding forehead. He often claimed it was a sign from above, an assurance that he had been saved by design, but any God inclined to choose surely could have found a man more deserving of continued life than father. Nevertheless, the spoon was unfurled with grave reverence upon his return home, mother having to polish it a dozen times to satisfy him. It then took a special place in the cutlery drawer, seated like a flute upon a soft section of plush red velvet. But it was no mere trophy to only be looked upon. Father insisted on its use at special meals, those Sundays when he had the clarity of mind to present himself at the back door for supper, a leg of lamb or veal sitting on the table, a jar of vinegar mint beside it, the treasured utensil dipped into the green-specked pool.

It must have been 1970, perhaps 1971, when that special spoon suddenly disappeared.

It was the morning following a Sunday meal. The family was living in America by this time, of course, and father was experiencing one of his dry spells, but his anger was still a thing to be reckoned with. I can still see mother standing at his side, as he pointedly ignored her, his red face hidden behind the morning paper. “Georg,” she whispered, squeezing her hands together against her apron, her head bowed. “I have something to tell you – something rather awful, I'm afraid.” He rustled the paper, still ignoring her. “Georg,” she continued, in the tone of one who'd suffered more than her share, the voice of her side of the family, the Jewish side, the people who bore despair better than any other, as she so often reminded us. “It's the mint spoon – it's, I – it's gone, Georg – I think it accidentally got put out with the trash.”
I had certainly seen my father hit my mother before then, but never so viciously, never with such an overwhelmingly desirous look on his face for the very violence of the act. He struck out so quickly that the paper caught in his ring finger, tearing the front page, which folded about his open hand like a glove, a newsprint mitten that connected with mother's brow, sending her backwards, staggering against the sink. Even though I was tall for my age, I was only eleven, all I could do was watch, watch as he forced her to search the kitchen for that spoon, search every last place it might possibly be. I sat there, glued with terror to my chair, catching the desperate rage burning in his eyes, seeing how he drove her into another flood of tears every time she begged him to understand it was truly gone, only to have him swell up like a sail to the wind, bellowing through spittle, demanding she think of another place to search. When it was apparent to even his addled mind that she wasn't lying I saw a change in his face that I will never forget. He almost grinned, that jackal of a man, wiping his moist lips with his hand, the hand he'd hit her with. He then waved a finger in the air before her face and coldly stated: “But you'll keep looking for it, Mrs. Vogel, you'll keep looking for it.” And she did, for how long I don't care to recall, him standing there, his belly working its way from under his T-shirt, his greasy forehead etched with the contempt of a man who measured his failure by the days he felt he had to endure his own family.
I suppose it's a wonder I can still find such beauty in a spoon. I might want to justify that by claiming it a little victory over the memory of father, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with him. I believe it has more to do with mother, bless her, for somewhere in heaven I know she is still looking for that fragile, beautifully insignificant little implement.