Autumn in America. The west bluff sticking
out of the damp morning soil like a white flag overlooking the anthills and
shingled apocalypses of the South Side.
A crumbly platter of carefully dished breakfast barnburner remnants,
scooped out of the scattered spring mulch, riddled in the weedy summer
automatic sprinkler systems, devoured and chewed through off brand fertilizers
and childhood sweat, masticated with open mouths, wailing, and braced teeth
stomping, crumbly leaf shuffling footfalls wind shuddering in-between bicycle
chains croaking and crickets chirping near dusk, overturned picnic tables
serving as transitional fortresses, blanketed teepee’s tented with a quilt Mama
McReynolds purchased via Home Shopping Network and credited plastic digits.
Food for thought. Autumn.
The acorn and buckeyes ripening to
the size of juvenilia testicles. Ratty
bushels of golden leaves raked by long, skeletal adult forefingers into an
offertory pyre. Alighted and lit by fathers in cuffed undershirts and loose
weekend belts, smoke guzzling into thick slabs of currents catching the twirl
of seedy helicopters billowing through hefty fat coughs squeezed by the rigged
October gale. Avenues and intersections give birth to STOP and YIELD-hangover
eyes Lighted Cyclops a rarity in the BLUFF. Corner of Sherman and Cedar with
dead grass and crunched aluminum cans strewn in front of the sunken sad
household digits half-goatee front porches. Bicycles shot dead in the front of
yards. Tulips covered with residual morning dew. Follow the trajectory of the sun, shot from
left of the arch, and you will trek down three blocks of Sherman—outside Dave’s
concrete steps and Shepherd staff railing, past the three point swooshes heard
from behind the Wahls residence, where shirtless neighborhood boys curse the
court and pass to late, in the presence of cup-lipped giggling adolescent
girls- past the New Age self-help organic guru specialty shop (which was once,
like TAKE 5, dance studio), continue
past walking with VonB, who canters into a pimp, shifts the side of his hat,
talks with his hands mentions the possibility of ALIENS and role-playing
campaigns to a ruffled haired boy the size of ALF, a stately companion who
pretends to be smoking something phallic. On the far right, closest to the
houses is a boy, slightly older, robed in neon purple, shifting a Transformer
with a nerdy Rubix cubed agility and shouting the glory of God in between lewd
jokes. Behind him lags a Hale, a well-built shed the size of a Pepsi machine in
girth-twice in width-championing a wobbled smile and requesting that the
lavenders boys insight if his character has indeed died a brutal and lethal
death once again. Come now and walk with
these four, past the round, circular houses with no redeeming corners, houses
with Catholic families in plaid school outfits, past the sight of teenage girls
glittered in boy band apparel and planetary rings fed through lobes, continue
to walk as the avenue widens, becomes more affluent, more evening paper
greeting-a lull as take a right on Sterling, the bicycle lane street. From
there, the sun bobbles and jogs and winks above the broccoli trees tops (the
color of ripe wheat come autumn) floating over the stinted horizon of St.
Mary’s- offering gargoyles and grotesque sculpture and epitaphs. A catholic
cemetery fraught with dorm room sized mausoleums where high schoolers in
lettered jackets are seen making out, groping, flipping zippers south as if
switching a light switch to OFF, as the sun wanes and airplane field size
clouds rake across the east spilling exhaust fumes into puffy waterfall
plume-remnants of which arc across the skyline like a paralyzed rainbow—a ruby
iridescence etiolated into epilogue of ashen waves. The boys turn, the larger
one still inquiring into the purple messiah’s earlobe about his alter ego. The
other two conferring with themselves, laughing. The somber reality of a
catholic cemetery at dusk has little settling effect on them. Tombs chipped slightly above ground like
briefcase with chapped handles, offering births and expiration dates ushered by
a simple hyphen denoting declaration of lifespan. A coming and a going. The sun
doffing it’s astronomical derby cap with one final heap of rippled beam,
covering the entrance to this sacred place-hitting a cotton boll. An alley of
names, Beloved, in the Memory of, chiseled biblical passages almost rise from
grass. Flagpoles saluting left in the wind and statues of the virgin. A gravel
hill slid down without once slamming on the brakes last March. Sunlight
drooping and descending faster, as if the improvisational tempo, the trajectory
of the planet circling laps around the gigantic almost spiritual cinder dust
spatial track, stretching it’s occiput into the inscrutable winks and orbital
emptiness. From space (as the
lighted-slide nostril Mrs. Reinhardt clicks in her hand like cable remote) the
earth is blue, with scattered bald spots and intermittent, infectious rashes
spitting out a worn cancer on both sides of her face. Leaves continue to drop, giving premature
birth to a barrel of grandfather pocketed hard Sunday school candy, colors
unwrapped by twisting both poles, rolling the delicate confection out of it’s
sac, smudging it between our lips. Gulping, biting, sipping. Autumn. The boys leave
the cemetery and reenter life. A car fizzles past; Sunglassed prophet has yet
to comment to the badgering queries about a dead, fictional comic book
crossover creation. An after school sentence written for Misses Mooney. Capital
crosses I’s lined on the left hand side of the sheaf- harvest. Crisp evening
cutout Halloween costumed autumn found in the sticky, wet dream remnants of
pillaged youth. The taupe colored hand wrapped chocolate and stale bubble-gum
deeply buried in the bottom of our trick-or-treat bags. Paperboy morning
autumn. The earth opening up in the east with pinkeye. The hunched heads of
street lamps lulling pre-dawn adumbrations beneath the occasional blitzing car.
Tautly strapped bundles of recycled paper thick as Vedas dropped off on the
corner of Ayres and Waverly beneath the saxophone late-night lull of the
automatic streetlight. Mamma and Papa bear in the station wagon at 4:30 a.m.
inserting papers with bulletins and advertisements. Sears and JC Penny’s
pre-Xmas sale. Coupons offering discounted doubles at Thompson’s Food basket.
Always Double-Coupons at Kroger’s where Sandy Hale shops and Grandpa Harvey
works in the butchering department. An alter-boy haircut David drops provisions
into the prison cart without asking first his mothers consent first, saying
simply, “Here, we need this.” Helen McReynolds shops at HaDDads in the West
Bluff-purchasing meatloaf, which the family will consume around a fiftyish
Stonehenge sheeted davenport and hit seventies television trays while sitting
on sofas and rocking chairs surrounding the stuttering eyelash of the
television screen. The newspaper costs less than two-fifty a week, and a
bespectacled boy whose skin is the color of cinnamon toast from running four
miles a day without his shirt on last summer hammers his knuckles into doors
meekly requesting overdue payment.
“Two forty-five.” He modestly says,
adjusting the stems of his glasses, trying to calculate in his head how much
change is needed in exchange for a five spot.
“Two dollars and forty-five cents.”
Grouses Patrick, at lunch one day, in fifth grade. He mentions how, every
Saturday his ears register the monosyllabic ding of the doorbell, and, upon
answering, he anticipates that it may perhaps be an ALIEN from the movie this
time, or a red capped superhero or mutant with adamantium claws or perhaps,
yes, perhaps even a United States Marine who stands up straight like an
unopened elevator, clicking his heels together with panache as his right hand
sharply slants out a salute. Patrick imagines that this officer is the type of
officer who’d wear a tank top under shirts revealing a tattoo of bearing skull
and nipples on his shoulder requesting Patrick’s tactical expertise.
“Sir.” The thickly tinted eyed
soldier with a plateau for a flat top says to the boy of almost but not yet
twelve. “We couldn’t help but notice the configuration of the roped
swing-ladder outside your house. How old are you. Twelve? Fuckin’ precocious.”
Upon which the military personnel reaches into his belt buckle and raises his
walki-talkie to his lips. “Lewis, better phone up our friends at NASA. Tell him
he’s just what we’ve been looking for.”
Rather no, it is neither mutant nor
marine, sighs Patrick rather heavily inside, but a paperboy with cuffed jeans
and minor league baseball cap swiftly floating atop his blonde cornchip. The
boy joggles his pear shaped Adam’s apple, requesting the same monotonous weekly
denomination without vocal alteration.
“Two dollars and forty-five…” Emits
a throaty pubescent gurgle as Patrick configures the tips of his finger into
his signature shotgun.
“BOOOOOOOOM!”
Blowing reams of invisible smoke
from the nozzle afterwards, shrilling out loudly for Dad that it’s only the
goddamn paperboy again.
The
newspaper is jokingly called the Urinal Jar, to those of us in fifth grade and
the Journal Star by those Adults who drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups and
vote in the primary. To Hale, Von Behren and Patrick only Calvin and Hobbes,
The Far Side, and the Sunday Funnies claim top authoritative perusal. Next to
that is the Sunday Advertisements displaying silky bra’d and scantily pantied
females twisting their heads with subtle contortion like their bodies are made
out of origami.
“Dude.” An open jawed Hale says
when Von Behren unearths for his friend his covert collection of SEARS ads. “Yo
man check this out, you can almost make out her Yin- Yang.”
Other than cup sizes and pensive
expressions registered as ‘Take me now’ the furrowed newspaper headlines of
that year were of little or no pertinence to boys of not yet but close to
almost eleven or twelve years of age. Who will win the ’88 election? Who is the dictator of Panama or the tyrant
of Iraq the boy down the street claims is the anti-Christ? An unsavory close up
of Dan Rather’s craggily-ash visage filled the television screen every evening
at five-thirty. Harvey Bailey, Hale’s grandfather, escorts David to get a
haircut every two weekends at Ed’s, yelling at his sole grandson to put socks
on when he goes out in public. Art VonBehren is seen stopwatch outstretched at
Minen field, shouting out split times for his son, who circles lap after lap,
effortlessly. Warren McReynold’s still addresses his eldest son by the moniker
of Pete. Bussing him to Cub scouts and helping him engineer Derby cars replete
with the swift innate innovative McReynolds ingenuity and cutting edge
velocity-guaranteed to breeze right past the protestant competition. Inside classrooms there are acronyms-SRA and
USSR. Hale reads about Johnny Tremain and envisions his haircut pinned under a
triangular helmet, his friends calling him ‘Rab’, his shot gun adhered to the
title of musket. Patrick reads books on war and trench detritus; scientific
manuals, issues of X-MEN (almost always confiscated) which he keeps ripping
open in the middle of Pastor Morningwood's sozzled confirmation lecture, during
Mr. Mooney’s on going fascination and video’s broadcasting the human
reproduction cycle and God the Father’s role, Mrs. Mooney’s English class, and
once, (and only once) during Vespers he reads Stephen King and underlines the
sex scenes with a clickity multi-color pen-showing chocolate milked mustached
boys at lunch- over clattering dice and errantly tossed sporks a thirteen year
old Beverley fornicating with flannel cuffed and snot smeared boys who are our
own age throughout the sewer systems of North Eastern Maine.
“Dude, can you believe this? Shit.
Maybe we should bring Karen and Holly down to the tunnel. See what would
happen. Girls go crazy inside places like that.”
“As long as a clown doesn’t get a
hold of us first.” An eleven year old Hale adds with a stately nod of parental
concern.
The tunnel was located in the lower
level of Bradley Park, sticking out of a horizontal heap of earth like the
freshly severed, cut off neck of a gargantuan curious adamantium laced
tortoise. It looked like it could have been a dank stage setting for shelled
reptiles brandishing oriental sidekicks. Tacitly regarded throughout the side
alleys of P-town as the notorious abode to noisome stench of rat shit and fetid
creek backwash, littered half-eaten beer cans bobbing between prodigal concrete
heaps and estranged barbed wire. While standing barefooted in the creek,
sneakers double-laced and flung over bladed shoulders, we deeply ogled the
inside of this gaping mouth. The tunnel
sat surrounded by a frieze of spray painted emblems; of added initials sans the
sum negligibly equating soured teen lovers, embryonic coma’s sweating off high
school graduation epochs. All indelibly spray painting and rashly immortalized
in a different shades of color. Weak azure, limed-purple—a furious yellow.
Sprouting under the malaproprian heading of CLASS OFF. Patrick likes to come
down here to be alone by himself sometimes. He likes to come down here to smoke
cigarettes, pondering the blinking stretch of the sprawling sunset in late
March. Patrick likes to come down here to get away from pesky household germs.
From the pestering barracks of his siblings Allan and Sarah. From Warren’s sentinel
straightforward-deep-shit downward glance. From dinner dished out on near
aluminum television trays.. From Mrs. Mooney lambasting him for, again, not
finishing his homework on time. She gives him a stapled note made out of
scratch paper to take home so his parents can put their signature on it. Last
time Pat had Hale pencil in his John Hancock on the slip.
“Hale when I said put your John
Hancock here, I didn’t mean write the exact name thereof.” Patrick says trying
to erase the pencil smear like a toddler holds a crayon. “Mrs. Mooney will
never believe that I have a deceased Continental congressional delegate for a
step parent.” Barks Patrick.
This time
Patrick has thought well in advance and plans on contacting an older friend of
Dave’s who lives on the pier edge of Sherman named Tim. Pat has seen Tim only a
few times and almost always in passing. Tim is the size of a Kitchen trash
dispenser and always wears very purple-rimmed sunglasses partially shielding
his saltine countenance from the sun. Tim looks a tad Hispanic for some reason
and a tad vampirish. He is a freshman at Manual and (rumor has it) still
collects Transformers.
The tree’s
outstretched, akimbo limbs appear that the sky is a cracked windshield. From
above the leafless trees the sun dips into an ice-cream barrel holding all
eternity. Patrick thoroughly stomping out the cherry of his smoke Irish jig
fashion. He then reaches inside his pocket for a complimentary travel size
bottle of Listerine his mother brought back gratis from a hotel in Iowa. He
swooshes the liquid around in his mouth making the sound of a washing machine
before he spits. From behind the cocked necks of trees Patrick hears the
blistering pop and volley of tennis balls. He hears middle-aged Christian men grunt
when they serve and say the word ‘crow’ when they falter. He sees a speckle of
birds chirp out conjugations prior to flapping out a flutter. He hears the
voices of college students hurtling plastic discs into chain fountains. He sees
the ponytail sway of girls pass by running, pumping their arms to pace,
intermittently checking the inside of their wrists to witness how much time has
momentarily dissolved. His eyelids avert into the apparent nothingness of the
tunnel. A vacuum of distilled blackness nestled into an eternal long-stretched
fix. The tunnel is black and tenebrous. A botched telescope ordered from MADD
magazine designed to give its patron a black eye. A severed pipe; bottle
orifice, flumed into blank darkness; a dragged muffler abandoned on the side of
the interstate. All of life seems to stem from outside this womb. The welter of
noise, the flush of the water over concrete and flotsam, the dirt and mud
swooshed around the merkin entrance. The thud and booms of stereos blaring
gangsta rap. Trees sprouting a pre-come kiss forming diminutive buds. The
wetness all around is ubiquitous and filling. The lilt voices yelling 'tag' and
'it', the rusty swaggering of chains and swings, children sliding down the
aluminum tongue-all seem to have their inward source, matriarchal womb here-in
the stomach lining of Bradley Park. The tunnel. The creek that looks like the
back of an old lady's arm curving West into-invalid tottering, like an badly
crippled and medical yellow. The beer gut. A flab of sour digestive lining left
out on the autopsy table hardening into a solidified heap of yeasty lumps.
Patrick folds his eyelids into a
triggering pierce as if he is remembering something primal and long ago
forgotten. With keen hunter crunched eyed insight his periphery narrows in on
the Tunnel. A pirate patch of forlorn blankness. A burnt out flashlight. The
lid to a camcorder covering and pressed into ocular view. It looks like
something that once was. Expired. A casket or shell. He wonders if there are
cave paintings inside. A long, narrow, tenebrous plume. A cylinder or boner
that leads into darkness away from the light.
Above the shocked mouth is spray-painted the words A HOLE crooked with
quotation marks and followed by an interrogatory symbol.
Patrick frisks his pockets. The
curved snake like leather stitches of a softball is found comfortably stowed in
the left pocket of his brother-in-laws military coat, next to vacuous gun
shells and double rubber-banded Marvel trading cards and b.b’s and personified
plastic relics. Patrick takes a deep breath, thinking to himself that as long
as he can find where the ball lands he'll be safe. After all, he thinks, he can
always turn back around as long as he remembers the direction in which he
initially entered. The place he originally came from.
There is a hurtle accompanied with
splashes and a reverberating slosh. The sound of entire planets knocking
together, beads on an intergalactic abacus- heaving itself out of its
gravitational solar pull-steadily colliding with other masses and polarities.
Patrick clicks his bic lighter and leers into the entrance like a sweet
confection on the tip of a young confirmed tongue.
Above, bandanna
boys clink plastic spheres into chains and shout out either 'shit' or 'par 3'.
As they tap their Frisbee into the steel fountain at whole four, one older boy
notices a camouflaged boy the size of an ewok jet into the mouth of a
protruding metal pipe. He jogs in for three of four feet, tentatively looks
behind him, inhales and plunges forward with a glint of integrity stowed in his
eye. All the bandanna clad hippie comments openly is like Dude while staring at
the question mark lingering above the orifice like an old person’s earlobe.
No comments:
Post a Comment