Aleph

א
Hand held radios on every wall called all eyes closer, beckoning inspection of the personal and public history some of us in the room had lived and others of us had studied. When the room filled, chairs were brought in, a trap set was assembled, and a dusty projector revved. It got quiet and the mumbling died slowly, giving way to the curator who owned the floor. The program was laid out, applause was given, lights faded, and we were in darkness, breathing in the silent, scattered images flashing before us. A cat, a woman, Hebrew letters, spikes in arms, a young boy in fields of pot, more hand held radios adorned with blank faces; a woman dancing, smiling and going closer to a mirror which revealed unkempt teeth. Hands opened, hands closed; a middle distance runner, stilled by image; a brunette danced, wild, naked, exposed to the red aura around her. Men taking tokes, and sax players whose muses were elusive jaunted past the eye. The naked brunette climbed out of bed to light a cigarette and crawl back between the covers; Mick Jagger’s ghost appeared. More dancing, more color, motorcycles moving on super-8 towards cosmic entrancement. We saw a man, in the final moments, making a tie of an old shirt and preparing a shot. We had forgotten about the boy, and for those of us who were ignorant of the story behind all of this, we could do no more than sit, stunned and disarranged, feeling something that we did not know.
*
The lights rose, and the young boy from the film (now old) came before us to read pages about his life and share stories about the images. We granted him attention, seeking to assign meaning to the broken stills; wanting to fix them in our minds. His information provided context, he smiled, and the lights went down once more. The musicians were introduced and the film began again, that time to the crash and clamor of free association. Everything became more raucous and clear. The dancing was personal: the woman was the boy’s mother; the cat once rode on the artist’s shoulders—was even doing so when the dancing woman met him. The radios were the same that hung around us on the walls, and Mick Jagger was still a ghost from the Tami show, though seen from a theater seat. The musicians pounded wildly and the information took shape. In my throat it all welled up, and I wanted to scream at them to stop, but no; it was only 8 minutes, and they were overflowing with life. It was then possible to understand what those inexpressible abstractions meant. Tosh told us that the film was for personal use, and played on the walls of his father’s studio for acquaintances: An ice-breaker which revealed all of the freedom and madness associated with the man and his time. Projected through an unhurried eye: Visions of despair and happiness, blanked, telling the story of the undoing of everyone present; a collage of the mind, telling us all that we need to know; sometimes, even more. We were meant to take these images, sort them, store them and relish in their music.
*
The final note had been blown, and we all began to cheer. A new understanding had been made, and we seemed to have lived as it was seen by the boy and his father. In the light, the poets had found and filled the corners of the gallery; the students were still sitting on the floor, scribbling to record their impressions for class, or for their quarterlies. And in between it all, we were still whirling with a humility bordering sadness. We smiled and said our goodbyes to everyone whose name we’d remembered from before the intimate spectacle; making one more round past all of the hand held radios, and their accompanying images. Off into the night, we walked for blocks through the cold New York streets, aspiring to find strong drinks and the warmth of California. ‘Not this night, but some day soon’ we actually thought aloud. It was all still coming together; the visions melting together and solidifying a purpose unlike the notions that once held fast, after the first visceral viewing, and then again by the second, loud and informed mystical mélange. We filed down avenues looking for familiarity. When we finally found and recognized faces, we treated ourselves like old oak barrels, working hard to un-furrow our brows and whet our pursed lips. In the room of red and black, light was not needed. It was like the images we had just seen. Music was creating a context for our experiences; new personal histories. Us, making our own messy collages of mind and body, meeting in the distance, shown the way by Scotch on the rocks, dancing through the letters we wrote and only understood later. From Aleph to Tav, we had begun to categorize the images; seeking a respective undoing.
ת

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3maJ6b0pBkg

Talkshow

At the time of the accident, Daniel “Boneface” Baker was only four-years-old; wearing red shorts and suspenders. He was playing on the front lawn. He didn’t know that when he went to pick up the Frisbee he’d just thrown it would cause him to brush up against a man on a ladder. But as he lay in the yard, momentarily catatonic in the early morning sun, his only thought was “I am dead.”
His parents were able to sue the worker who they’d hired to etch the window of their humble clerestory (as a result of his haphazard handling of his hydrochloric acid) but even the lifetime financial freedom did nothing for the bleached and sickening appearance of Daniel’s face.
In time, namely after the passing of his disfigured adolescence and acceptance of his new nick-name, he was resigned to living as an emotionless shell. This was partly in fact because his lack of facial muscles and subsequent stone like demeanor.

On a particular summer day in 1997, Boneface, then 29, was sitting inside his condo watching a locally produced afternoon talk show. The subject was bland and involved fathers. Boneface could have cared less. He was waiting on groceries to arrive, as they had every week since he’d moved into the condo, at 3 o’clock; the ending time of the program. Oh, how he loved TV and groceries.
As the sob stories continued, Boneface stared on. At the show’s conclusion, as the overly-tanned host announced the next day’s topic, Boneface took notice: Modern Day Freaks. He almost let himself get mad about the topic, but then remembered that it was probably just what people wanted to see.
When the groceries arrived, he set about the task of putting them away and deciding what to eat. His mother was still responsible for ordering his groceries. This meant that every time there was sure to be some subtle surprises included. Some weeks it was a new kind of cereal, or yogurt, this week it was a medium-sized bag of apples, a pan, and pie-crust. Thus, Boneface took the cue and called his mother who walked him through the steps of baking a pie.
He waited for a little while until the kitchen began to get hot and the smell of burnt sugar, and when the time came, he took out a mitt and bent down to remove his treat. As had happened so many times before in the past years, he went about this task reflectively; staring into the waves of the open oven and wondering what it would be like if he turned off the pilot and let himself drift. But, as was always the case, he resigned himself to his task, removed the pie, and sat it on the counter.
After a time, he removed a knife from one of the kitchen drawers and scored the pie. He took a slice and returned to his indentation on the couch. With the first bite his naïve excitement faded. The food he so longed for tasted like nothing; again. He finished the pie in silence, and called his mother to thank her. She didn’t know that he couldn’t taste because, while he had no emotions to speak of, he still felt compassion for the few who’d cooked for him.

As the afternoon gave way to the stars from beyond his patio, Boneface stood at the glass door and gazed out, ignoring his reflection. He liked to watch the people come and go from the building. For most, he even made up stories about who they were and where they were going. But tonight was different, and he could only watch.
When it was time to apply his nightly ointment, he pulled a chair to the window. It was the same as usual: the TV humming in the background, and people with appearances to keep up going about their duties. Boneface thought to exhibit jealously over their good fortune, but he realized that this would involve effort, and was not worth the time. “It’s not so bad” he thought. “A nice place. Too many people to bother with. money…this is my work.”

His face twitched, attempting astonishment, at a scene unfolding below as a white town car unloaded its passengers: a ravishing young woman, and the tanned TV talk-show host from the program he’d seen that afternoon. He watched them enter the building, and he pulsed with excitement that the host--his host-- was in the building. He wanted to meet the man who he’d watched for so many years; the man who told him so much about human suffering. He rose again from his chair, and took his medication with a hearty four fingers of port on the side. This made him feel warm, and alone, and in need of something. So many nights in his life he had felt this sensation. This ritual always put him in just the right state of wrong.

Within an hour he’d had a few more drinks, cleaned and concealed his pie knife, and was stumbling through the halls. As he wandered he imagined the things he would say or do if he saw him. By then, he was in a mild rage about tomorrow’s topic and unashamed to be seen by the public. He wasn’t thinking about his looks, he was thinking about finding the host and asking what he thought about “freaks,” really.

To his drunken amazement, he was given this chance earlier than expected. On the third floor, around the first corner, by the elevator, the host stood, lip-locked and disheveled with his companion. He watched on with astonishment as the two gradually took notice of his presence.

“Can we help you with something, buddy?” the host called down the hall.

Boneface stood silently, perhaps star-struck by this acknowledgment and, for some reason, fuming.

“I jus wanen to aks chu abou c’her take on ‘dis freaks.” He said, lacking all eloquence and elocution.

“What? Get the fuck out of here freak.” The host’s face contorted “Go!”

Daniel remembered with his palm why he’d brought the knife. Tonight he was fated to make a difference for everyone like himself. Tonight he would make the host’s next show for him. Then he’d finally try on the oven for size.

Benediction

I’d seen him around town but we had never really crossed paths. I knew that he liked to drink, and I knew that he liked to talk, but aside from these things I knew little else of Hermes Baker. I did know that he’d burned a friend of mine a few months back though. Not literally, but through the presentation of some information that sent my friend into psychosis. For days (four to be precise) he wandered all over Olympia, a frazzled mess, muttering about the reasons why he would die. When asked about it, he would only reply “Hermes Baker is full of shit.” Two months later, this friend shot himself in the mouth.

Hermes had lived in town since long before my family arrived. He was a tall, lanky man who slinked down the street with a candidly exposed bald head on top, flanked by stringy blonde hair trailing off the sides. He seemed to be ill-accepted in the community, and from my stand- point, he was suspect. My step-mother was a native Olympian, and had been I and my father’s reason for moving from Seattle when I was 16. On our first day in town, she was quick to warn me about him. He’d delivered the mail for many years when she was a little girl, and in all that time had never taken the chance to speak with him. There was a strange, sharp uneasiness in her eyes whenever he walked past our house now. With each smile and nod in our direction, it was as if she’d watched him kick a thousand puppies and cried for each as it happened. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her the full story, I simply accepted her as a good woman, and he an inherent plague.
As he passed store fronts the proprietors didn’t look up, and the parents inside discretely shielded their children. He was a ghost to them; nonexistent, but always around. There was something that emanated from Hermes Baker that people just did not like. There was only one place where he was openly welcomed: Arcadia Bar, the bar he owned. It was an establishment that I presumed had very few customers, but was paid for and open seven days a week: His legacy.

I can not say what it was that made me follow him to the bar that day. Perhaps it was the dry August sun, or perhaps it was the fact that it was my twenty-first birthday and I was spending it alone and sad; but whatever it was that propelled me was exhilarating. I waited and watched from the porch as he walked down Arch Street towards Arcadia, and after he’d turned the corner I hopped from my seat and shadowed him. Down Maple, down Pine, down Spruce, and all the other tree streets, past the storefronts on Main, I watched him from a safe distance.
Outside the bar, I waited for a few moments, breathing and gathering the nerve to enter. I was quite sure that it would just be he and I, and I had nothing to say. ‘Surely anyone else who drank here had encountered the same thing.’ I thought.

Beyond the door my assumption was confirmed. There was near silence, broken only by the light chatter of the television behind the bar which Hermes watched intently. I approached slowly, with caution, fearful that he hadn’t heard me come in and might be startled. Upon choosing a stool in the corner, nearest the door, I sat down and waited for him to turn from the courtroom drama he was already invested in.
A cool minute passed before a commercial interrupted the program and Hermes formally recognized my presence. When he turned to me, my ID was already in hand.

“What’s yur dwink, guy?”

I was slightly dumbfounded by his lack of enthusiasm and speech impediment. Looking directly at me with one eye, and off to the other corner of the bar with his other, lazier, eye. It was the first time I’d seem him so close.

“I’ll…I, um…what do you have?” I said.

He turned, brushing his skullet off of his shoulder, and glanced at the bar as if he’d forgotten his own inventory, before turning back with a crack-toothed smile.

“You can see bettew than I can pwobably. It’s all wight thewe.” He said
“Oh, ah, can I have a beer then?” I replied.

It seemed that he didn’t care for my answer, and after an easy reach below the bar he retrieved a Budweiser, popped the cap, and placed it in front of me. I thanked him, but as the commercial had just ended he returned to the television.

“Can you hewe? I can tun it up, if ya want.” He said in my general direction.
“Ok.”

For the next twenty minutes I watched over his shoulder as the old man on the television took the stand to defend his innocence, only to be shut down by Sam Waterston and later convicted of rape and murder. I couldn’t really hear the dialogue, but I’d seen the episode before and still didn’t care. Afterwards, Hermes turned towards the cash register and put a tape in the sound system which sat below it. A few short moments later “Marrakesh Express” was playing at an uncomfortably loud volume. A smile shot over his face at the first mention of ducks and pigs and chickens.
Suddenly his mood lightened and he began wiping down the bar. I sensed that I’d been his only customer in quite some time; that he was simply paying me a certain amount of distanced attention. And so, in keeping with my original decision, I finished my beer as the song was concluding, and ordered another.

“You know, I’ve nevuh been to India. But, aside fwum that song, it sounds awful.” He said, rag in hand, handing me the beer.
“I haven’t either…Been to India.” I replied.

The tape continued and the dinghy bar windows grew more and more dim. There was little I could do, except pretend to enjoy the first few beers of my adult life, and wonder what would come next. In time, sides A and B had finished, leaving us in peace. I was 4 beers deep, and wanting desperately to ask him what it was that he’d told my dead friend. In stead:

“What else you got?” I said “musically – for music. What else is there?”

Taking his cue, Hermes Baker fumbled through the tapes behind the bar.

“Almon’ bwuthers ok?” he posed.
“I dun know them.” I said.

It wasn’t long before I too was tied to the singer’s proverbial whipping post, learning about the pains of the years to come. The tape continued and another man joined us. He sat at a few stools down, and was greeted by a smiling Hermes offering a beer and a shot. I then realized that the pariah I had set out to find was actually a businessman with a few regulars to entertain now and again; possibly even friends.
The evening wore on and a small crowd assembled. All of us swilled away, and after my second visit to the bathroom I could tell that I was, what I thought of as, drunk. My legs weakened, and my toes pointed every-which-way I didn’t want them to as I walked back to my stool. Once seated, I watched the patrons—all men—tend to their drinks, exchange laughs, and then tend to their drinks again. Between the fraternization (of which I was not included) and the bubbles welling within me, I gradually began to fade; somewhere, wondering why I’d come to this place.

There was a man at the end of the bar, staring into his drink, that looked like my dead friend’s dad, but he spoke to no one and wore a crusty ball cap pulled down low. I thought about the way my friend had described his father to me. Perhaps his honesty, and our grievous dads (mine: not fully recovered from his wife’s death, and his: a man who’d seen everything within his small sphere), was what drew us together as friends. That sense that all hope was lost; it was something that we feared and revered, I being new in town, and he being naturally timid. I remembered his father drunk, picking him up from school; later handing my father nails as he worked on building a new shed; the bruises on my friend’s arms that kept him in long sleeves all through high school.
I remembered the last sip of warm beer and then a flash of days past. (Suddenly I was back in high school on the day I realized that my friend was in serious trouble. It was another one of those days in which his father was running late and I stayed behind with him to pass the time. We were sitting outside throwing rocks into the woods across the street. It was getting dark and we walked to my house. Thomas didn’t want to because he said his dad would get mad if he wasn’t there, but it was also getting cold, so we started out. I remember after a while of playing video games he was getting itchy and uncomfortable. He went to the bathroom, and returned asking where the band aids were. When I asked him why, he showed me a series of scratches on his leg that resembled the word help. I was scared for a little while, but he just kept laughing about it; said he “found a nail on the floor.” I never told my dad.)

I woke up on the floor with three of the patrons, and Hermes Baker, watching over me.

“Hey, hey dere guy…You awite?” Hermes said.

My eyes cleared and I tried to figure out what had just happened. The only answers were provided by my surroundings and the tepid pool of puke that laid by my side. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was at Arcadia. I felt around and became alarmed by the fact that I didn’t know how long I’d been out. Hermes tried to quiet me.

“Now we’wr gonna call you a caw.” He said “But we need to know yuh addwes.”

I couldn’t think clearly enough to recite it, but after fishing in my back pocket, producing my wallet, and finding nothing, I began to frantically search my other pockets. In the hip I found and fumbled my ID out before handing it over to Hermes.

“You’d the Johnson kid, I know you’w mom! And happy biwfday!” he said.
“Youdunknow, my mom’s dead.” I sputtered.
“No, I usedto dewiver her maiwl. Bwonde, right?”
“She’s notmy mom.”

He called a car and got me back to my stool. I no longer cared about my original mission, whatever it had been. The car company said that it would be about 10 minutes. After fifteen had passed, Hermes came around the bar, passed his trusted patrons, and escorted me to the street.
We stood in the cool night, under a dim and flickering light, as I swayed and hiccupped. Hermes told me about life as he knew it, relating it, of course, to my current situation. I tried to listen, but retained little. After a while of waiting, I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the bar and remembered my only question.

“What’d did you tell my-fren?” I said, hazy.
“What?”
“Thomas Aaron, what’d did you tell him to make him die?”
“Tommy Awon?”
“Yesh.”

There was a pronounced pause.

“I knew Tommy’s father. He’s inside wite now…I just towd Tommy the twuth… I told him the twuth and nufing else.”
“And just what do you think was the twuth?” I asked, un-mockingly.
“I told him that his fathew was a dwunk and that, one day, he’d pwobably be just like ‘em.” He stopped and looked at me with an empathic grin. “You, you though. You don’t have anything to wouwy about. You’we gonna wiv longuh than evewybody you know…I just call ‘em as I see ‘em... Maybe pway about it.”

I was done talking and waiting, and tried to stand. (My mother used to talk about prayer.) My stomach was churning curds.

The car pulled up outside the bar and I didn’t want to get in. But after being guided by Hermes I really had no choice. He jimmied me into the backseat, handed the driver $15, and told me Happy Biwfday again. On the short ride back, I watched the night flash by, wondering about why Thomas had done it, and, moreover, why he blamed the surprisingly delicate Hermes. It was true that my friend had started drinking and cutting himself early in life, but it didn’t seem to be a death sentence. It was all just supposed to be fun and release.
I thought about Thomas and I thought about how sad it would be to see everyone around me pass. My mother and my friends’ demises had been enough. I didn’t want to see more caskets or bottle more memories.

I stumbled up the drive and made it to the porch. Sitting where I’d been hours ago, I looked out on the same street I’d looked at for years. It didn’t last long though. It was still early in the night, and my father and stepmother—having not been informed of my impromptu plan—came out onto the porch to find me drunk, bowing my brows to them.
They walked me inside, and I was led past a table containing dinner, and a chocolate cake centerpiece. They led me up the stairs, lovingly, took off my shirt, put me in bed on my side, and placed a trashcan within easy reach. When they left my bedroom door cracked I knew that, despite our personal histories, they both loved me. I couldn’t stand to lose them too.
As I lay in bed watching the wall spin, wishing that I’d stuck around for dinner and stayed away from the bar, the only answer I could come up with was that Hermes may have been a little bit right in Thomas’s case. He already had things to fear. He’d never even had the chance to be taught about redemption.
My outcome would be different though. I’d prove him wrong. Right then, I would have shot him if I could. ‘There is no place in the world for those who can predict the truth.’ I thought. After that, I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and thought hard before praying.

The Colonel in Alarm

There was once a time when everything seemed to make sense. My friends and I were pleased with ourselves, and convinced that we’d live forever. But now, by turns that one can only call natural, reality and the absurdities of that notion of pleasure driven erudition have long-since given way to grief and frustration with the world.
We once thought that we’d make our careers as we imagined them, and that everything would fall into place just like our grandparents had told us in times of strife when we were young and down on everything. But, it has become blazingly clear that we are nothing more than the very beings we wished to avoid becoming. The three of us are now southern “Colonels” living in a single house and wearing nothing but the color white to hide our many years of debauch. At the ages of 84, 85, and 87, we all have grey mustaches, eat chicken on Tuesdays, and drink bourbon until we fall asleep. This is what we’ve become. And many days, I have a hard time with this fact.

*

I met Frank and Jerry in New York City in the summer of 1951. It was the place we’d ignorantly chose to carve out a living doing the things we thought we wanted to do at the time. We were all southern transplants. Frank’s gig was journalism, and he was pretty good. Jerry’s baby was music, and I saw him play some excellent shows (and I don’t just go around throwing out complements like that). My trade was the poetry. And boy what a sham that turned out to be. You can either do it, or you can’t, and I couldn’t, but I did anyway, to spite myself, for many, many years.
It was a good summer though. We all got a lot of things done. We ran in to each other pretty regularly, and usually we made a time of it. But then the days kept going. People stopped flinging and got girlfriends, everyone found routines, read too much or drank too much and just got generally tired and unreliable. But, yeah, up until the end of September, it was a pretty good time.
By the early 60s, we’d all managed to keep in contact. I ended up chasing a girl to Dallas. We didn’t work out, but I had stayed because it was easier that way. The day I reconnected with my old friends I was on the Knoll when Kennedy got shot. (Right before it happened; I’d just got off the phone with Jerry, who was holed up in New Orleans, and only wanting to babble about jazz and life. He and I were going through our respective hard times then.) I think I was happy just before I heard the commotion. Now it’s nothing more than my blurred smile in the Zapruder film to remind me of the time.
Frank, as it turned out, had made a name for himself working for the New York Times, and when Jerry had made it known that I was on the scene, we all had a connection: I was there and they wanted to be too. And just like that, we had a reason to be back together.
For close to three weeks Jerry and I watched and recalled the facts as we knew them; Jerry, provided more inspiration than inquiry, but helpfully. Those three weeks in ‘63 were golden. All around us, things were happening and we were participating whether we liked it or not. Until a few years ago, I thought that those were the best, worst years of my life.
In the end, Frank got a Pulitzer for his Kennedy coverage but continued to drink heavily; Jerry did the same—without the prize—and ended up buying a house in South Carolina from the royalties of a single he’d sold, called Jazzin’ My Baby. I was still in Dallas, writing conspiracy poems, milling about, wearing too much black. But we talked often for the following years and, a decade later (after the war in Nam that we’d all avoided), decided that we needed to take ourselves off the map; reconfigure ourselves, maybe form a commune.


*

Now, here I am, sitting on a porch in South Carolina; old. I am bored, and I am overly expectant of the dark (I go to bed at 8:30 usually to ensure my safety and sanity). This morning I watched Jerry, drunk, kill a chicken with his bare hands. He laughed for several moments, in sheer delight that he’d accomplished the feat—and won the bet between me and Frank. The whole bargain was: Was he, at 87, still spry enough to catch a bird? Ten dollars said no.
After it was completed we all laughed, set the chicken to roast, and settled back with our Juleps, it was pristine. But when I’d laughed my due and noticed that I and Frank’s white shirts stood apart from Jerry’s bloodstained v-neck, things became much worse for me. I had to admit it. I was sad, and had been for many years.
I looked at the blood on his shirt, and I hated him for it. Sure, I’d paid my five dollars of the bet, but I was feeling as if I were just another old Colonel wearing white on a porch and slurring out my last speeches and recitations. A permanent fixture of the Deep South, echoing the sadness and strife of my days throughout the swamps and willows; I knew that this was not me, but then again, it was.
I was once proud of my home life:

November 8, 1978

-For my first wife

Time and a half,
I’ll take it!

For the money I burn
Is like bacon—

And boy, do I love
That scent from above

When I’ve brought it
Home, and we’re makin’ it!

That was when everything was going well. But now, now things are just pathetic. It’s almost funny how terribly odd life has turned out. I’d never imagined in a million years that I’d end up an old frail alcoholic who’d taken up a false, but honorary rank in a society in which I didn’t participate anyway.
Tonight, the night of the chicken murder, I can’t sleep. It’s well past nine o’clock and I’m terribly perturbed. All those happy years spent; put away on paper. I suppose that’s all I can do to chase a smile these days. Just write it down and stow it away.