Robbery

I’ll pray first, I thought, and walked up Kagurazaka-dori toward the shrine. I’d been away a year. The fugu shop, I saw, was out of business now, men carted out its wooden innards and loaded them on trucks. The pachinko parlor had been redone in shriven white. At the top of the hill I turned – and stopped. The shrine was gone.

Years ago, I went out to buy a computer cord and came home to find my apartment torn apart. I stood in my doorway, cord in hand, looking around for my computer. I nearly called out for it, like a man who’d lost his dog. It took a long time for me to understand that I’d been robbed.

In Tokyo there are many shrines, but, to me, Akagi always seemed the most alive, as evidenced by the non-stop flow of visitors stopping by to pray. Young mothers dropping off their children at kindergarten, old men out walking, each pausing for a few words, to clap and bow at the orange shrine among its shady grove of trees. For years I visited every Wednesday morning. I felt so welcome.

You’ll think I’m nuts. My first thought was that the shrine had to be somewhere. It’s crouched behind the tin wall, I thought. Like a child playing hide and seek.

But there was only a dump truck and a few dusty men wearing helmets -- as if there were anything left to fall.

I’d never seen an empty space so full: as shocking as the space at the end of my wrist if my hand were gone. I thought the workmen must go home and drink whiskey and beat their wives and not know why.

I am prey to a common form of idiocy, which assumes some things are so obviously special, so obviously important, that of course they will not be destroyed. What a dummy I am. I assume that there is nothing I can do. I assume it is a loss I can afford.

From Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies

"True enough," said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which if you remember correctly, I never had before."

(My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Complete Works of Jane Bowles, page 197)

so many
things
almost
never
happen
and
so many
things
are just
shy
of impossible


so numerous
are these
things,
in fact,
that they
can be
relied
upon
to happen
every
day.

The Church of 4 Dollys

Here we are, again, at sanity's last stand. Onion rings served fresh all night. Geronimo is here, and the 4 Dollys and that lady we busted out of house arrest in Burma.

Ours is the church for when no time is left

We are The Church of the 4 Dollys. Dolly of the melted clocks and the cloned sheep Dolly. Dolly the Lama, Dolly singer of the legendary breasts.

The fire eyed lady from Burma sleeps only out under the stars

Whenever we lose one Dolly, another Dolly takes over. Never are we bereft. We are gathered here to teach the sheep to sing in preparation for when the busty blonde must don the yellow hat and lead Tibet.

To the world we say: do not be afraid we love you we will make time


(Madrid, 02/24/09)

Percy, 39

I’m drinking gay coffee at Downtown when the woman at the next table announces that Percy died this morning.

She expects the waiter to be upset, but he doesn’t know who she is talking about. “But he was here all the time!”

Percy was a fashion designer, well on his way to being famous. He was only 39. He’d been found in his bathtub that afternoon. He slipped and hit his head and that was it.

The waiter, instead of being upset, tells the story of another man he knew who died in his bathtub. And he was only 32!

The waiter says that he is lucky, because he is poor and only has a shower. He says, “It’s always those big bathtubs where you have space to die.”

(Amsterdam, 10/09)

"It is enough to work on the assumption that all the details matter in the end, in some unknown but vital way."

-- E.O. Wilson, Biophilia.

Size

Often it happens I am the wrong size. Walking down a picturesque bricked alley, I discover myself to be Godzilla with luggage. Except, unlike Godzilla, I am entirely ineffectual: just a big lizard in traffic.

Or I’m talking with someone, offering a little something about myself, and I think, “Wait. Did I just refer to myself as the Shah?”

More often I am trying to do something simple and important, such as buy a bus ticket, but when the man (impatient, bored) turns to me, I find myself unable to make a sound. At this crucial juncture I have transformed into an aphid. An above-average aphid--but still.

My job is to diagram the sentence but I am flimsy as a cumulonimbus, floating somewhere in the distance. How does a mustard seed get the attention of the waitress?

It gets so I am nostalgic for human male average. Five foot nine. Nostalgic for when I thought that it would be enough to be in the right place, and at the right time.

(Amsterdam, 10/08)

Talk

My problem is I’m unable to talk like a regular human being. Every sentence sounds like something I memorized the night before.

“Excuse me.” I said. “Could I please have a big cup of coffee?” Which seemed to me a natural and straight-forward sentence. I’d practiced it several times, waiting for the waiter. He has cheeks like a slapped baby’s ass and hair that looks warm and soft.

Because I have been a teacher, I also acted the sentence out, mimed holding a big cup of coffee.

Isn’t it considered polite to speak somewhat slower when speaking English in a foreign country?

Is it possible that I sometimes try too hard?

He paused and then he smiled at me, as if to say, “And here we have another one.”

This happens to me every time I open my mouth.

(Amsterdam, 10/08)

Fresh.

I shower in the morning but never feel entirely clean until night makes the city new and the British boys have had a few beers and the whores are gearing up, tapping at the glass, and laughing at us already. Terrible fried chicken is deliciously available for another seven hours! Not so bad I'm not, not overall, considering the miles. Crazy, not in a bad way, shifting my cock to the left, and staring without apology. I don't have to spend my whole life crawling on my belly! A big man with stubble's gonna lean across the bar and kiss me. He's gonna put his big pink tongue in my mouth, for starters.

(Amsterdam 10/08)

"Everyone has his sharp-toothed sleep-destroying devil inside him, and this is neither good nor bad, but is life . . . This devil is the material (and basically what wonderful material) that you have been endowed with and with which you are supposed to make something."

-- Franz Kafka
(Note: Kafka wrote this in a letter to a very young woman he'd met at the sanitorium. He might not have been so upbeat in his own diary.)

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous
Vintage, 1997

Here's an extraordinary book about how we stopped perceiving the world as sacred and came to feel cut off. A daring leaping mix of ecology, linguistics, indigenous traditions and philosophy. It is also is a book that is remarkably different from chapter to chapter.

The first chapter, about Abram's experiences as a sleight-of-hand magician in Nepal and Indonesia, is lyrical and gorgeous. I admit that I also caught myself thinking, "Dude! I want some of what you are smoking!"

I thought chapter two might advocate wearing amethyst pendants. Not remotely. The next two chapters -- on philosophy and linguistics -- require black coffee and a clear-headed morning. It is exhilarating to watch someone think this way -- like watching a daredevil making leaps over cars -- except the leaps he is making are not sport but the leaps we need to survive on the planet.

Abram investigates the present, the past, the future, and where each can be found in the landscape. He even goes so far as to offer, on page 202, a meditation on how to dissolve time. (Of course I annotated my copy; you never know when you're going to need just this sort of thing.) The last section is about writing, how the Hebrews left out the sacred vowels but the Greeks left us marooned in the abstract. (My crude summary does violence to the text. It is exhilarating to read.)

Then comes the coda and, a few pages before the end, Abram says, basically, "This might be true and it might not and what is true anyway? Truth is what heals the planet and falsehood is what harms it." Part of me agreed and part of me felt like, well, the victim of a sleight-of-hand magician. I want my truths to be, well, true and not just gorgeous. The whole section made me uneasy.

I do not mean to condemn the book. Not at all. I have told everyone I know to read it -- because I want people discuss it with! Abram gave me raptures, lectures, arguments and questions. A beautiful book, well worth wrestling with and re-visiting.

On Being (Briefly) the Hottest Man In the Bar

As I tug my sweatshirt over my head, my t-shirt rides up and the men at the bar -- who only seconds before were quiet dull Iowans -- are hooting and hollering like fratboys gone wild with jello shots, bikini girls, and MTV cameras. By the time I've got my head through the hole they're quiet again, grinning and winking, and I don't have to pay for my beer anymore.

I'm a star!!! Hot. Desirable.

Clarification: I am in Des Moines. At the Blazing Saddle bar. And it is January. It is 4 in the afternoon on a weekday. Most of the men at the bar are over 60. The younger ones -- and I mean that only relatively -- appear somehow different, in the Iowa sense of the word, dif'rent, as in there might have been some challenge there, cognitively, even before they started drinking as a career twenty years ago.

These clarifications clarify nothing for me. I'm the hottest man at the bar. The air sizzles with my seething sexual energy -- at least for me it does. And someone must have discreetly placed an air hose in my asshole because I feel myself expanding, swelling up. Soon I will rise into the air like a blow-up doll full of helium.

Except I am not full of helium. What I am full of is boring thoughts. Does he want me? Yeah, he wants me. Does he still want me? Yeah, he totally wants me. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

Vanity is like a head injury. Suddenly there are no Icelandic novelists in my mind. No leaf-cutter ants of the Amazon. No Beats, no Surrealists, no Luminism. Actually, there isn't even any Iowa, even though I'm sitting in it. Is there a local beer? What are these men's stories? How old is this carpet? None of that. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

I'm not content to let my hotness just sit around. No. I've got plans for my hotness. I want to go to all those sleazy clubs in Denver. I should fly to Amsterdam. Because this hotness -- this raw sexual force -- it ain't gonna last forever. (Am I still hot? Yes -- I think so. Maybe I should check? Maybe I should yawn and rub my belly seductively and see if anyone responds?)

Swollen up with boring thoughts, I find myself suddenly vulnerable. Anxiety arrives. Because I really ought to make it to the gym more often. Maybe get a trainer? How long has it been since I took any fish oil pills? Is a cheap moisturizer really good enough? What is 'photo-facial rejuvenation' anyway? What am I going to do when I'm 40? 45? 50? 55? 60? 65?

Plastic surgery is getting better all the time. Look at Madonna. What about penis enlargement? Don't hear much about that nowadays. Maybe I should do penis enlargement -- just as, like, gay sexual insurance? If I have mega-dong someone will always want me. Won't they?

A few hoots and hollers, one free Miller beer, and I have been transformed into a gay balloon of boredom and anxiety. Even making it to the toilet is going to be quite an operation because I appear to be taking up most of the air in the room.

The door to the bar opens with a shudder: a kid ambles in and knocks the snow off his boots. He looks sleepy; he's got three days worth of stubble on his college boy chin. He's not staying, just dropping off the free papers, but can I use the restroom sir? Sure you can. He's just a straight guy but I could convert him 'cause I'm so fucking hot except --

He Did Not Even Look At Me!!!

Which is probably a good thing because one side of my face has entirely collapsed, along with my inflated chest. Oh yes, I'm the Hindenburg disaster all over again. Zipping around the room, making a prolonged farting noise, like a birthday balloon somebody let go of. Nobody even notices this disaster because I am, like, invisible.

At last I come to rest back on my bar stool, a shriveled raisin limp-dick sort of man, a wizened husk.

My next beer I pay for. My career as the hottest man in the bar (god! it was glorious!) is over. From now on I'll have to fly economy, bag my own groceries, jack off.

As recompense, as a consolation prize, here is the world: Icelandic novelists and leaf-cutter ants, a long line of drunks sitting here at the bar in Des Moines on an afternoon in January when I was, for a very short time, the hottest man in the bar.

Of Visions

Recently at the sauna I met a 6'5" blonde Dutch muscle god, who as we lay together in a cubicle after sex, told me that he had had three visions.


He'd been an opera star in America but came back to Holland to care for his mother after she got cancer. For three years he took care of her and then she died. For two years he grieved, until one night he awoke to find her sitting on the edge of his bed. Just looking at him and loving him. When she vanished (and since that time she is always with me!) the room was full of light, he thought it must be morning, but when he pulled the curtain back it was still night.


The second vision he had was in the hospital -- the lining around his heart was swollen with water and he had to gasp for breath. Dozens of tests had been made but the cause could not be found. He had been prepped for surgery -- the water had to be relieved or he would die. In the hour while he waited, a light came to him and filled his body. When the nurse came to bring him to surgery, he was breathing normally. (And the refrain is always the same: and the doctors had never seen anything like it!)


The third vision was simple: he was out on his balcony in Germany and the light came to him and he saw that God was in the world and he saw that he was God. I say it's simple. It never happened to me. If I go out on a balcony, it's to guess what the weather might be -- and most of the time I'm wrong.


Synchronicity and psychic phenomena were sprinkled liberally throughout his story. For example, when he was suffering in the hospital, his best friend consulted a psychic who without knowing anything! declared "your friend has tears on his heart."


All this was told to me, as we lay together, rather sticky, after sex in a dark plywood cubicle at the day sauna in Amsterdam. I'd told him that I didn't ordinarily get guys like him. The tall Dutch gods generally only want each other, the very pretty or the very young.


"I'm deeper than that," he said. "I'm not religious but I'm very spiritual."


Gosh. Thanks. Let me make sure I understand. You're Saint Francis. I'm the leper.


I'm not religious I'm spiritual. Of all the infinite varieties of bullshit, that is the sentence I personally find most nauseating.


Then again, he was 6'5" and he did love his mother and he had spent the last hour, uh, ardently reciprocating, so I said, "Of course you are" and he went on to tell me his three visions.


"But I'm no better than you," he said, as a CEO or rock star might, knowing full well that he IS better, unutterably, self-evidently better. He's a 6'5" opera star who has seen God. I'm a jug-eared punk with a crippled leg and an unfortunate personality. It's my job to say that he was "gracious and down-to-earth" and consider myself lucky.


I do consider myself lucky, incidentally.


Sometimes I think it would be the easiest job in the world to be a writer of newspaper editorials. Most of the time, two opposite statements are both true. Especially in regard to human beings.


He was a profoundly and authentically spiritual person. C'mon. For three years he gave up his opera career, where death takes only eight minutes and arrives with an aria, to care for his mother. He didn't ask for those visions, they came to him. As for final proof, you'll have to take my word for it. I held him in my arms. There is some radiance that can't be faked.


He was also a shallow puffed-up egotistical ass. He was there to impart his vision -- since he'd already shot his spunk. I had no more right to claim mystic experience of my own than a cornflake.


I mentioned that I was the author of a well-received essay about the practice of Buddhist loving-kindness meditation in sleazy gay bars. But he was not interested, not in spiritual me. The termite.


I am forever amazed by how things can be so true and so false, all at the same time.


For example, how life manages to seem, on one hand, perfectly random and meaningless, and, on the other, as intricately and thoughtfully plotted as a door-stop Victorian novel, an old-fashioned one, unapologetically heavy-handed with impossible coincidences and deus ex machina.


Does life seem this way to you? Sometimes it's a monkey at the typewriter. Other times I want to clutch my hair and howl mad scientist style: Everything iz connected!


The 6'5" opera god lives in a world where everything has meaning and synchronicity spills out in every direction. I want to live in that world, too. Sometimes I think I do. Then there are times that magical thinking seems positively inspid, as if one day I had an epiphany: "Ohmigod! It IS all about me after all!" As if God were only an all-inclusive travel agent making sure the prize in the Crackerjack box has a special meaning for me personally.


Then again, there is a convincing case to be made, I believe, for the idea that God, at some point in the twentieth century, became exhausted by the population boom, and rather than puzzling out individual destinies, decided just to assign people plots from literature. My life, for example, is a transparently cobbled together mish-mash of common summaries. (I suspect God did not even take the time to read the book and thus we live out lives based on the Cliffs Notes.) My childhood was King Lear -- bad enough, followed by "The Fall of the House of Usher" -- even worse. Now I'm basically re-living Don Quixote, which is bruising, but, on the plus side, also very funny. It's a disco queer Quixote re-mix actually, wherein Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo are married -- but more about that some other time.


On the off chance that I am ever a ghost, peering back from the edges of life, what I will miss most are these small peculiar events, as when a hunk in a sex dive wants to discuss his spiritual life, or, on the Metro in Madrid, a man with an accordion begins to sing, and must sing double-quick so that he can collect his coins before the next station arrives.


Meaningful or meaningless? I am completely convinced of both. Adorable, certainly -- also obnoxious. And I do feel lucky (also unlucky) to be marooned in a such a world.


(10.22.08, Amsterdam)
(11.19.08, Madrid),

George W Bush: Vindicated At Last?

It may be that George W. Bush is about to be vindicated. Keep an eye out -- the bastard may yet turn out to have been right about everything.

The Bush administration will be utterly vindicated if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find, under the mattress, three trillion dollars. Three trillion, better make it five. Five trillion dollars, somewhat damp and crumpled since we forgot we had it and put it through the laundry.

And if this turns out to be true, whoa, we are really going to owe George W. Bush an apology.

George W. Bush's environmental policies may be about to be vindicated. His frontier-attitude will be found to be entirely correct if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find a new treasure trove of natural resources to exploit, as George W Bush has so fearlessly led us to exploit. If we discover, in an old coat pocket, say, a Brazil's worth of rainforest and Greenland's worth of ice.

Actually, considering the damage we've done, we'd better hope to find, in our attics and our basements, alongside the Civil War uniforms and the Atari cartridges -- another planet, brand-new. A gloriously exploitable brand-new planet, maybe two planets, or three at the rate we are going.

If this turns out to be the case, well, the policies of the Bush Administration will turn out to be entirely reasonable.

After all, he always said he protecting us. And perhaps he is about to be vindicated. It may yet turn out that clean water, which he has steadfastly opposed, is actually very bad for us. What if pure oxygen is carcinogenic? Well, then, we can thank George Bush. And it may yet turn out that civil rights are bad for us and we'll be grateful to George W. Bush for taking rights away from us.

Watch: Massachusetts may soon be reduced to a smoldering mass of purple ooze. Why? Turns out gay marriage really was dangerous after all!

And, if all this turns out to be true, well, then we'd better all apologize to George W. Bush, that bastard, because he turned out to be right about everything, after all.

Essay 01.12.09

Out. Only because I am afraid to be out. Checking my hair is just an excuse to make sure I've remembered my ears. And that my penis is -- where it should be and not over my shoulder or next door.

Wouldn't I like to have long black hair dyed on one side lipstick red? As it is, one is consigned to being odd 'for no reason that can be pinned down.'

It is the most natural thing in the world for someone like me to love museums. The space between things!

I remember the relief I felt in Chicago when I realized I only had to keep track of the ground floor. I guess I was afraid I might be hit by a falling filing cabinet. Or executive. (It took me several days to arrive at this realization.)

When he was eighty, Miro made art with two lines and three dots. I don't know where he is now. But by now I figure he must be down to one dot.

(Madrid)

18. Birch, Spruce

My father planted a stand of birch trees when I was born. Three trees for his three sons. One was rather spindly and I thought, "That one's me." Three decades later, spindly or not, that one has also grown into a tree. None compare to the blue spruce my father planted for my mother, her last Mother's Day. The blue spruce towers, fragrant, over the house.

17. Woodsman

I swam splashing to the raft -- to discourage hungry bass and also to attract the legendary scary hunky homo woodsman -- gay yeti of the Granite State -- wandering afoot at night clad in boots and overalls, smoking a cigar and keeping one hand on his axe handle. I waited naked on the raft surrounded by all that dark water and all that black night. And it was on nights like these I began to think I might just be all right.

"If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex." -- from the memoirs of Anatole Broyard.

16. Bait

Skinny-dipping in black water, enraptured and scared. The water, I knew, was pleased to receive me. Never mind my crooked body -- the water received me unconditionally. The water generous and teasing, nuzzling me between the legs as I swam.

Also I was scared a small mouth bass might dart up and nip the tip of my dick off. I'd never heard of this happening but I was 100% certain it had occurred somewhere and could happen again. Because the very best bait, as everyone knows, is a small thing wriggling and dangling.

15. Lovers

My first lover was a black pond beside a willow tree. An irrigation pond my father dug long before I was born. At sunset when I went to swim, a heron often vaulted up from behind the willow. That heron was a god to me: I addressed prayers to it. Year later, in Amsterdam, I was scandalized to find herons hanging out by the canals, taking donations even, and acting like, you know, birds.

"When you make peace with uncertainty, you find a kind of liberation. You are freed from bracing yourself against every piece of bad news, and from constantly having to work up a sense of hopefulness in order to act -- which can be exhausting. There's a certain equanimity and moral economy that comes when you are not constantly computing your chance of success."

-- Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self (p. 143)

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Joanna Macy

World As Lover, World As Self
2nd revised version, Parallax Press, 2007

I read a lot of spiritual books. So many, in fact, I fear I am becoming immune. Most spiritual books seem awfully cheap and flimsy lately. Out of touch. Our world is gravely threatened and all most of these books can offer is a slimmed-down, buffed up self. Washboard abs for a gutted earth. The air is full of carcinogens -- but at least my teeth are white!

For real spirituality, for a view of the self and the world both exhilarating and useful -- see Joanna Macy. Put her picture in the dictionary next to the word 'visionary'. She is helping us re-imagine time, the world and the self. She's not skipping the pain and she's telling the truth.

We say "everything is interconnected" but what does that mean? We produce depleted uranium with a half-life of 4.5 billion years -- how do we even start to think about that kind of time? What if it's already too late? Am I just a drama queen when I cry thinking about the polar bears who drown because they can't find ice on which to rest? These are the questions I have -- and this is the book for them.

I read an earlier version of this book when I was nineteen, sitting in a college library. I remember writing "the forests are my lungs outside the body" and understanding a little bit and reeling. For a week, I staggered around like a man hit on the head with a plank.

If our species and civilization are going to survive, we have to take a humungous leap. Recycling cans and eating blueberries is not going to be enough. Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, Lester Brown are lined up with suggestions but where does the strength and vision necessary for transformation come? For that, Joanna Macy is the best guide I have found.

14. Insurrection

I avoided my body whenever possible and felt queasy if I went near it, like an illness I just had to live with. Who needs a body, I decided, if you can have a library instead? I thought it was brave and honest to remove myself from circulation, to stamp myself Discard.

Sex, of course, paid no attention to any of this nonsense: bounded right along, puts its paws on my chest and began to slobber. The bears at the zoo began losing hair in places, jimmying the locks, shoving their shorts to the floor, and letting themselves out of their cages.

13. Departure

The cats got leukemia and died one after another. Ninety-three slowed down, his belly bloated. I sat with him, fed with sardines, and he purred until he died. A boy should have a dog, my father said, and got me a golden retriever from the pound, a bright generous creature who stayed three days. On the third day it darted across the road and, even though I screamed at it to stay, ran back toward me and was killed by a car. Without animals, the house was uninhabitable. I said I wanted to go away to school. My father had been in that house fifty years; he didn't want to stay there either. He sold it to my brother and later I heard he'd told people, "There was just no way to live there after the dog died."

12. Heart

I believed the farm had a heart. I had found it. In the middle of the swamp the beavers had made, there was thin finger of land that jutted out with tall grass, pricker bushes and saplings. At the tip of it was a stand of bamboo grass with plumes that stayed golden in winter. This was the heart of the farm. It wasn't easy to access but I went there sometimes, if I needed to pray about something important. One afternoon I walked into the swamp and discovered that my father -- because he was a dangerous lunatic -- had taken out the tractor and mowed the spit of land. I did not investigate further but ran home yelling. That night I had a dream that the tractor had stopped just in time and left the golden feathery heart of the farm intact. The next day I walked further into the swamp and discovered that this was true. I extracted a promise from my father to never mow again. I still sometimes call home to check.

11. Brother

My brother was ten years older than I was. He went away to school, and then to jail; he became a far right reactionary, and through it all he drank. But there was a time, while our mother was still alive, when no one loved the world as much as my brother did. The farmhouse was a zoo. Snakes my brother caught at the well, frogs from the pond; an injured owl lived in his bedroom closet.

Nothing compared to the day he walked down the hill to the house, shouting out my name, calling me to come and see. My mother saw. "God, be careful" and even my father was amazed. I was allowed to look and, with one careful finger, to stroke the wet fur. My brother was famous forever after as the boy who stuck his hand in the pond and pulled out a beaver.

10. Experiments

The cats were all female -- the only tom cat a visiting stray. Thus every cat had the same grandfather, father and husband. The kittens were increasingly strange. When two were born deformed and died I christened them Orpheus and Icarus and buried them in a tube sock. I was lucky, I think, to have been taught mythology at school.

9. Ninety-three

Ninety-three was most beloved of the cats -- we named him after the interstate my brother found him on. He'd lost his tail, one foot was on backwards, and another was off to the side. He had a peculiar cock-eyed cat grin and couldn't ever quite get his mouth to close. Ninety-three's purr was like an outboard motor. He loved everyone. Many nights I was halfway into the demons' mouths, when Ninety-three hobbled amiably through the doorway to rescue me, grinning in his odd cat way, which meant, "Do not be afraid."

8. Cats

Tragedy earned me sympathy: I saved up all the sympathy I earned, supplemented with paternal guilt, and spent it all on cats. A long line of cats, from the Humane Society at first, then the strays and kittens came. (Many cats were required; the farm was bisected by a brutal road.) My father worked, he fell in love, he was important in the town. Many nights I was alone, the farmhouse had fourteen rooms, and the only rooms safe were rooms with cats in them. At night I ran from room to room through the dark with a cat in my arms.

7. Comforter

I remember my mother beneath her green velveteen comforter, her tired and pale face as she studied me in the darkened bedroom. "Don't be like me," she said. "Learn to ride a bicycle. Learn to swim." My father borrowed my toy stethoscope, the night she said her heart felt funny. She died on the operating table. I was seven. Because children were not allowed in hospital rooms, I sat in the lobby and read illustrated Bible stories.

6. Feet

When I was a very small child, my feet had conversations. My hands talked too, of course, but weren't so interesting -- they were too nearby. My right foot was a gregarious bully, making plans and talking television -- an all-American boy foot. My left foot, the crippled one, was quieter. He let the right foot do most of the talking and when he did speak, he apologized. He was a crippled foot and expected everything he said to be mistaken.

Still, he wasn't really so helpless -- or so agreeable. Never mind that he was more or less frozen and resembled a hoof. His leg, it's true, was not as long as the other. Still, he reached the ground and that is the number one qualification for a foot. He had his own resources. Already he was a specialist in mythology. Sometimes he performed in Bible stories and always he trembled when he heard the words: and the angels stirred David's heart with courage.

5. Destiny

The way some children know, at a tender age, that they will be a doctor or a painter -- in that same way I knew, at the age of four, that I was ugly. I was fitted for bifocals -- I had a lazy eye -- and I remember the shame I felt to be an ugly boy. My ugliness was the plot of nightmares. An evil old man with greasy gray hair waited for me on the stairs and chased me through black corridors. If he caught me, he'd tickle me and his touch would make me ugly, even uglier than now. Here was the thing: I was acceptable, barely acceptable, by just a fraction of a hair. If I became point-zero-five percent more ugly, I'd be cast out.

The first time I lost a fingernail, I didn't know they grew back. I looked at that black fingernail and thought, "That's it for me. I'm a goner."

4. Nature

A thousand times I was told to go outdoors but I was an inside child and did not want to go. I wanted to read my books. Nature, I was told, would make me strong. I was dubious. Nature had made me what I was already -- a crippled boy, my left leg withered beneath the knee and, instead of a foot, a crumpled hoof. Many times I had been told that my mother and I had nearly died the day that I was born. That was nature. Nature was not nearly as wholesome or straightforward as people claimed.

3. Surprise

I worried the trash bag under the Christmas tree meant I had been bad. My mother laughed. "We were out of paper, honey. And I was tired." In the trash bag was a gorgeous stuffed bear, not like a toy, but like a real bear, a Kodiak, with realistic mottled fur. Later, I heard my parents fight about the bear. She'd spent more than a hundred dollars. She'd driven all the way to Maine. Still, I can't blame my mother for going to so much trouble, just for some silly bear, that Christmas that was the model of a perfect Christmas ever after, the last Christmas she was alive.

2. Bears

When I was six, I lay in a sunbeam on a gold sofa and dreamt of bears. I wanted to get into the cage with them. To bury myself in fur, and be held between dark heavy paws. Each afternoon I slept an hour that way, folded into bears.

1. Apple Tree

When I was eight, my father dug a hole in the backyard, filled it with cement, and planted a dead apple tree. I was supposed to climb on that tree and become healthy and strong -- a real boy. Never mind that the backyard was full of living trees: maple, beech, crabapple, black walnut, pine. Never mind the hundred acres of pear and apple orchards. My father had stripped off all the bark and all little branches. (It must have been a jungle gym he had in mind.) For years that skeleton tree stood in the middle of the backyard. I was careful to never go near it.

THE OUT-OF-MINDERS : a short introduction

There exist a group of people (never mind how many -- they themselves have no idea and anyway do not wish to be counted) devoted to being forgotten. To vanish, they believe, is the flower, the firework, of an ideal life. They aim to live entirely, to die and leave no residue, not on the earth or in the mind.

In the public imagination, the Out-of-Minders are known almost entirely for their pronounced aversion to trash. Their horror and aversion upon being offered, say, a plastic lid, may seem to us extreme. A styrofoam cup, a plastic spoon, a swizzle stick, is a stake driven deep in the thick hide of the future. To an Out-of-Minder, every object is in danger of becoming a monument.

Out-of-Minders regret the attention given to recent events at nuclear processing facilities at which Out-of-Minders, arrested for protesting, were unable to present government-recognized identification* and purported, furthermore, to have forgotten not only their Social Security Numbers, but also their names at birth. They are sorry for police headaches and hope the incidents will be swiftly forgotten.

To know the Out-of-Minders only for their attitudes toward trash and waste however, is like knowing Digambara Jains only for their face masks and fly whisks. Behind these beliefs is perhaps a complex philosophy of beliefs, motives or ideas -- though it is true that no Out-of-Minder will admit to this.

Out of Minders wish to disappear entirely after death -- and in the meantime keep a low profile. They eschew interviews, awards, accolades, titles. (There are rumors some Out-of-Minders pursue higher education and may even receive advanced degrees--but no Out-of-Minder can be found who will confess to doing so.) Seeking anonymity, Out-of-Minders use flimsy aliases, quickly switching from one to another lest they become known or, as they say, "solidified". There is nothing they fear so much as becoming important.

Refusing awards and burning certificates, Out-of-Minders do not wish to be given credit for anything. Not infrequently they are caught trying to pawn off their best achievements on others. An Out-of-Minder painter signed his work 'anonymous' -- until he became known for it -- and thereafter signed his paintings Bertrand Russell, Charlotte Web, or Miro.

The few Out-of-Minders who can be coaxed to speak give names so flimsy and generic they are hardly names at all -- Brian Williams, John Mack, Cate May** -- and insist, furthermore, that they do not speak in any way officially, but only for themselves. These Out-of-Minders emphasize their beliefs should not be mistaken for nihilism or an ideology of disconnection. Not seeking to "make their mark", not wishing to succeed, they focus instead on the cultivation of a small number of close personal friendships. They desire to be known, fully and idiosyncratically, by a small circle of people and for that knowledge to be obliterated upon the death of the last friend in their circle.

Research into the Out-of-Minder movement has proven uniquely frustrating. The Out-of-Minders delight in providing false or nonsensical information. Thus the highly embarrassing recent 'expose' in which were written statements such as "pineapples are routinely worshipped" or "auto-fellatio is that for which we earnestly strive". Used in their presence, the phrase 'Out-of-Minder Movement' may produce screams of hilarity, horror, or derision. Whole dissertations on the Out-of-Minders have been written and then have mysteriously disappeared, often with their authors, who had lost interest in receiving a PhD, or no longer had a name to pin it on. The few snippets which have been published are buried in magazines read by virtually no one.

The Out-of-Minders themselves, when intermittently located, refuse to give any indication of whether they now number in the tens of thousands, or if they are like members of a dying language, who aim to say a few more words amongst themselves and then fall silent forever.

In unguarded moments, the Out-of-Minders seem to find us, who seek names and accolades, as frustrating as we find them. Clearly it annoys them to explain, for the twentieth time, that, yes, they really do want to be entirely forgotten, and that losing everything is the best thing that could happen.
_____________

* Cereal box tops and soup labels were deemed unacceptable forms of I.D., even for a man named 'Turkey Noodle'.

* * A web search on these names produces absolutely no useful information whatsoever. All you learn is that Cate may or, then again, Cate might not.

(Madrid, 11.24.08)

My Immortality

Aspiring fools of words -- and I am one -- dream of artful editions of 500, with an elegant typeface and covers handmade on the letterpress. To be read by sophisticated contemplative people -- as well as a few nice-looking barbarians who maybe didn't actually read the book, but are anyway willing to sleep with the author. Money and fame are unnecessary, thank you, I would just like to communicate, connect and in some small way matter.

Still, I wonder what this imagination is worth, when it is so slow to catch up with the current situation. When Shakespeare has been forgotten a thousand years, the plastic coffee lids through which I sipped while I thought all my deep thoughts will continue to poison birds, to break down further in the ocean, but they will never become nothing.

There is no longer any doubt that I will have, even after my death, significant influence. The fifteen or so transcontinental flights I took, while obtaining an MFA, will continue to make a modest, but deeply felt, contribution to the atmosphere. How much difference is there really, on the scale of conspicuous luxury, between MFA and SUV? There are days I feel like a perfectly ornamental human being.

My endless book purchases help support small presses and unheralded writers. But, considering the gas, I've contributed much more generously to jihad and the brutality against women.

It is likely that our trash will outlast our best ideas, to say nothing of what we consider our venial and mortal sins. How can we possibly fast-forward our moral imaginations fast enough to recognize that failures in recycling may be more serious than coveting the neighbor's ass? I doubt any bar fight I ever get myself into will ever do the harm of one trans-Pacific flight.

I write because I don't want to die without the world knowing how I loved it. I mean to witness and to praise -- and meanwhile I play my part in poisoning the world. I hoped to be remembered. Well then, very good: if I think all my plastic, and give it the name "soul", I can be confident that I am, indeed, immortal after all.

(Madrid, 11.25.08)

Note:

Many more stories and essays are available. (Posts to this blog seem more likely to embarrass colleagues and horrify family members than to actually to make their way out to the world. Thus I've limited posts!) If you'd like to read more -- please send a note to guttersnipedas@yahoo.com and I will be delighted to send more work along.

Peace,

G.S. Das

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Tatyana Tolstaya

(Tatyana Tolstaya, portrait by Akemi Shinohara)


Tatyana Tolstaya
White Walls
New York Review of Books, 2007

If the literary style genie were to suddenly appear--he’s bare-chested, muscled and tattooed like the rest of the genies, but wears spectacles and travels amid a flock of white index cards--I would say to that genie, “I want to be a queer Tatyana Tolstaya.” She is the grand enchantress of the More Is More School, firing off one inspired rant after another. Her characters launch diatribes on why women should have fur tails, or teeth that receive radio signals. Plot matters less than the gleeful generous fireworks of language. Or the plot is the only plot that matters, namely, ‘I’m going to find some meaning and/or delight in this world’.

For more than a year now I’ve been attached to this book; every month I reread a few stories in hopes that they will prove contagious. Most of the stories in magazines seem so stilted and mannerly in comparison, like a respectable dinner party with white wine and filet of sole and the whole time you’re sitting there wishing it would finish already, so you could go out and carouse. Carouse and cavort is what Tolstaya’s stories do--they are parties with dancing and fireworks. The New York Review of Books Classics series has rescued a lot of important books (check out: Walser, Desani, Chaudhuri, Pintorelli, Krudy) but this is one of the very best. And read Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx too, but read this one first.

Guttersnipe Culture Watch

August 2008

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde.

Let it not be said that I never made noise on behalf of the books and artists I love.

1. Bobbie Louise Hawkins has a new book, Absolutely Eden, available from Small Press Distribution. This book adapts pieces from her celebrated one-woman shows 'Life As We Know It" and "Take Love, For Instance".

2. Danielle Dutton has a small and graceful book, Attempts at a Life, from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Gorgeous, inventive and daring. We'd expect no less.

3. Gary Young has a new book of prose poems Pleasure. A pleasure, indeed! New readers should still begin, I think, with his earlier masterpiece, No Other Life.

4. At the moment, Lucia Berlin's 3 brilliant books of stories are available from Amazon.com. They appear to be waffling in and out of print. The Library of America ought to issue these stories on acid-free Bible paper with silk bookmarks. Until they come to their senses, you'd better grab what you can. Begin with So Long. If that one isn't available buy Homesick or Where We Live Now.

5. Two books of Kenneth Patchen's brilliant picture poems, We Meet and The Walking-Away World are being re-issued in fancy combined volumes. And we say, it's about damn time.

6. Have you seen all the recent work of Tokyo artist and illustrator Akemi Shinohara? Visit her website and check out some of the portraits, as well as posters and illustrations.

7. The best reading discovery I've made this year is Sunflower by Gyula Krudy, an early 20th century Hungarian writer. There's just nothing like it.

8. I would like to here go on the record as saying that Salman Rushdie's new book The Enchantress of Florence shows that the master is again at the height of his powers. While it may be that Rushdie's own mama does not love the man as much as we do, Fury and Shalimar the Clown did not produce as many screams of ecstasy as his previous work. (However, I have been known to become hostile and aggressive toward anyone who disparages The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I've seldom, if ever, had such a good time reading a book. Imaginary goats!)

9. Kevin Coffee has opened a new bookstore, Oasis Books, in Lafayette, Colorado. Kevin Coffee is part of the family that hauled me in out of the gutter in the mid-nineties--without whom I would have been one dearly departed guttersnipe. I am hoping this bookstore will be a grand success, so that I may some day have a job.

But maybe that's not such a good idea, because it occurs to me that I have stolen books, at least a few, from every bookstore where I have ever worked. (I'm very moral, really I am, except when confronted by things I really want.) In my defense, I also spent at least half of my wages on books and, I believe, increased bookstore sales overall by thrusting books upon unsuspecting customers. In my defense, I only earned $5.25. That said, why don't you purchase your books from Tattered Cover and Barbara's Bookstore, thereby reducing my karmic debt?



Do you know artists and writers who demand trumpeting? Who is on your list of People Who Ought to Be Famous ? Send an email to guttersnipedas@yahoo.com. Review copies happily accepted. We aren't so wealthy. And you'll keep us from theft.

Flowers Are the Plants' Bad Habits

The hope is that if I could just trim back my addictions--which is to say, 85% of my personality and hours--something new and green might sprout from the stump of my bad habits. More bad habits presumably. But, if I kept chopping them back, day after day, if became very good at being uncomfortable and doing nothing about it, who knows, I might even burst into flower--

but who knows, perhaps flowers are the plants' bad habits? Put your ear to the ground and you can hear the green leaves apologizing, blushing clear to their roots, I am so sorry--I just couldn't help myself, I don't know what it is, something about me no doubt, every year I swear I won't and then--May comes, the sun, all those cute bees--I can't control myself, I send up shoots, I bud and--even though this time I swore I wouldn't--I bloom.

Just try acting innocent when you're covered in petals!

Disgusting, isn't it? Making a spectacle of myself, so much energy for a few days of frippery and the hangover lasts the rest of the year. Just think what I could accomplish if I put all that energy into greenery, christ, I'd cover hectares! Instead I bloom, as I have bloomed for thirty million years. Oh, the vanity, the vanity! When am I ever going to evolve?

Illustration by Akemi Shinohara

Mary Ascending Into Heaven / Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado
Originally for the Story: A Life of Bright
(If you're reading the story, remember to click through and start at #1.)

Maddalena penitente (The Penitent Magdalene)

(second draft)

For the last five weeks here in Florence, I’ve studied Art History at the British Institute, attending lectures and visiting churches among the fresh blooms of upper-class British womanhood, faultlessly gorgeous, designer-clad, twenty year olds adding Florence, adding art, to their pedigrees. This rite of passage has changed little since EM Forster was here: Miss Lucy Honeychurch now shows her navel.

Among such flowers I feel hairy, middle-aged, and depraved. Obviously some miscalculation has been made, as if I went out to the local leather bar -- for Bondage Night -- but wound up here instead, at The Museum of the Works of the Duomo.

This was where we toured yesterday, admiring the work of Arnolfo diCambio, the Cathedral’s first architect, as well as Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise and Michelangelo’s last sculpture, which he tried to destroy with a hammer.

The lecturers at the British Institute are admirably serious. Even if they suspect we might be better served by tips on glossy hair and strong nails, they persist in untangling the Medici family tree, and explaining the lost wax technique, and why Vasari matters, and exactly what Mannerism is.

Over the last month I have not been educated so much as converted. For the Renaissance I now display frightening zeal. Previously at the Uffizi I was only interested in determining which naked Jesus was the hottest. Now even the countless Virgin altar pieces are compelling and I always want to see another church, another fresco, another sculpture Michelangelo didn’t finish, another sketch Leonardo didn’t paint even though he got paid for it.

That said, it was possible that, by Week Five, I’d become somewhat inured to masterpieces. After all, you can’t by a quart of milk without seeing one, and you’re likely to see half a dozen or more as you frantically search out a toilet you don’t have to pay for. Even an old Cimabue is easier to find than a decent pizza in Florence, this city of masterpieces, over which has been superimposed a god-awful tourist trap.

Our tour leader explained that the Museum was a particularly fine place to see the work of Donatello. Now, I have a soft spot for Donatello, who was apparently half-mad and hopelessly disorganized, and who sculpted male nudes with entirely more enthusiasm than the 15th century was really ready for. Dutifully, I admired some lovely works in marble; I admit I was only half paying attention -- my legs hurt, I thought it must be time for beer -- as I was lead into another room and the tour leader said, “There’s lots of Donatello here but this seems to be the one people remember.”

At the center of the room was a statue made of wood: a gaunt Magdalene with her hands joined in front of her, fingertips just touching. She looked like hell. Like a crack whore with sunken cheeks, like a junky with filthy matted hair. I have seen many Magdalenes, but this one was appallingly familiar: she could have been one of my hustling friends, whispering to the john -- twenty bucks, you can do anything -- one of my friends on meth or almost dead of AIDS.
For this five weeks of marble and gold had not prepared me. I found myself crying in a crowd of rich daughters, lucky girls who were not for sale, who washed their hair every day. Decorous young women, they looked away; they hurried on to the reliquaries.

I eyed the guard slumped in the corner. I wanted his job. I wanted to sit, as long as I lived, a vigil with Magdalene, and make sure no harm ever came to her. The guide had said that the statue was terribly fragile, and had been badly damaged by the Flood of 1966 when it was buried in mud and shit. Very well, I thought, let me stay here with Magdalene.

Someone else would look after Michelangelo’s musclebound David. Someone else would protect the over-powering Jesus on the ceiling of the Baptistery and Gianbologna’s fine bronze birds nesting upstairs at the Bargello. I would stay here, in a side room at the Museum of the Works of the Duomo. I would look after the Penitent Magdalene. This was an image I’d looked for all my life. Now, we recognized each other.

In my early twenties, I lived in Denver, Colorado, on Colfax Avenue, where the great basilica sits amid pawn shops and payday loans and terminal bars. I am not a Christian but I used to drop by the basilica to pray to the Mother whenever I was off to do something exceptionally foolhardy, whether because I was adventurous or just needed the money.

Outside the basilica in Denver is a bronze statue of Mary ascending to Heaven. She looks to be about 15, a perfect doll. She looks like she could star in a musical. The benches around Mary were always occupied by sleeping homeless people. I always thought, how much more useful it would be, if Mary were shown ascending into Heaven as a grief-stricken ravaged hag, a woman who’d attended the murder of her son. How were all of us, so profoundly damaged, ever supposed to relate to a woman who got off scot-free?

And here was Mary Magdalene, the greatest sinner, our guide reminded us, usually shown fleshy and beautifully dressed. Now she was almost a skeleton, covered either by a camel skin or by her own hair grown long in the desert. And Magdalene had been redeemed -- the guide emphasized this. This Magdalene was meant to be the object of praise and veneration, not a chronicle of failure, not a pious warning. This was Magdalene set free.

I would be standing there still, except I was afraid of making a scene and haven’t figured out yet how to get a job upstairs at the Museum of the Works of the Duomo. For starters, my Italian’s gonna have to get a lot better. And probably I’d fail the background check, as would Magdalene herself, so she’d better hope that no one checks.

In the meantime, I see her here on the streets of Florence, as Donatello must have seen her, Magdalene among the junkies who huddle at the end of Borgo Pinti, or the sex addicts at the Florence Baths, in all of us buried in ravenous hungers and the steep price paid for them. Magdalene, among us.

"The man with the sky blue eyes invites everyone to keep on working, fabricating, jointly creating: we are all of us dreamers by nature, after all, brothers under the sign of the trowel, destined to be master builders."

Bruno Schulz, "The Republic of Dreams"

On Trying to Make Less Noise

Recently I’ve been experimenting. I imagine that every thought makes a sound. Rehearsed conversation is like rain on a tin roof and self-justification like a squeaky old cassette. Lustful crotch-watching makes a snuffling sound. Resentment, of course, is loud. Fury toward oblivious waddling tourists here in the narrow streets of Florence produces barking.

And I say to myself, “Now, dear guttersnipe, on your way to the library, try to be as quiet as you can.”

I aim to see how gentle and unobtrusive I can be, so that the cobblestones will receive no injury from my feet, so that I may pass unnoticed. I aim to be instantly forgotten. I try to walk so as to make no sound and leave no trace.

I am lucky, of course, that my thoughts do not make sound. Otherwise I would be immediately arrested for lewd lascivious irritating enervating disruptive dangerous conduct.

Actually I would throw myself into the arms of the police. I am all the time longing to do so. Have you seen the police here in Florence? Ohmigod. It is impossible for them to actually do anything because lithe young female tourists are constantly asking them to pose for photos. I am jealous of this. The only way I can get their attention is by getting myself arrested. Yes and I would beg, “Please, officer, don’t use too much force. But a little force is okay! No handcuffs, please. Just hold me.”

A moment, please, whilst I regain my composure.

As I was saying, it’s a good thing my thoughts do not make noise. My mind is that of a drug dealer who smuggles a stolen subwoofer into a stolen ambulance and uses both bass and siren to make his rounds. Yes, my mind is at the same time both Boom Boom and Woo Woo.

There is something very strange about the sirens of ambulances here in Italy: their tune is unmistakably victorious, like the bells that ring as coins pour from the machine in Vegas. These are good Catholic ambulances, firmly of the opinion that the next world is better than this one.

“This is my day!” these ambulances seem to say, as if in hope that the mind will be silenced with death and there won’t be this nonstop deafening cacophonic hubbub, all the time barking and snuffling, muttering and shouting, all day and all night blaring both Boom Boom and Woo Woo.

AT HOME WITH THE PUMPKIN KING

Below are all the existing parts of At Home With the Pumpkin King slightly revised, in more or less the correct order, with two new sections.

FATHER.

(from At Home With The Pumpkin King)

Our mother was the fount of tolerance, our father the test case. Reputedly charming in his youth, or at least good-looking, he’d gone mad, tragically, sometime around the birth of his children. He imagined himself some kind of petty king. His house was a castle, his family only subjects, and he was the lord of his domain, as well as some kind of imperial arbiter on matters of good taste and decorum.

He spoke only in pronouncements, which invariably began “it is obvious that. . .”, “it is needless to say. . .”, “it is unassailable how. . .” and, his favorite, “any idiot would know. . .” My lunatic father was certain he was the only non-idiot left in the world. This was natural, of course, since my father saw himself as privy to all manner of secret information, all of which was about as real as the Loch Ness Monster’s birthday cake, its waterproof blue frosting, its underwater candles.

Since becoming an adult, I have met many people who had fathers similar to mine and suffered. This seems to me both crazy and stupid. Our aunt talked to leprechauns, our father imagined he was in charge. We fed and ignored them both. It did not occur to us to suffer.

The first time your beloved granny imagines you are her English maid, you correct her and feel horrified. After ten times you get used to it. After twenty times you say, “Shall I get you a spot of tea and some scones, mum?”

We did not need to follow his orders, he forgot them. Anyway, it did not matter what we did, he was perpetually aggrieved, the victim of a world of idiots. He made his own unfathomable connections. In the morning he demanded geraniums. In the evening he lamented our deplorable lack of nationalism.

Once my father left the room, there was no pretense that his ravings had any connection whatsoever to reality. We were inconvenienced but not harmed. I firmly recommend this strategy to the American family.

Also, it helped that my father was a pumpkin farmer. Not exactly anesthesiology. Not even as complicated as grapes or strawberries. If he wanted to be the Pumpkin King, let him.

My father decided to have a secret affair. Of course everyone knew. The farm had hired a secretary for pumpkin season, a local aerobics instructor who never seemed at home with herself unless she was clobbering space to Flashdance. Reduced to regular speed she was timid and anxious to please.

How cunningly they plotted. They met for lunch; they hid in the office, in the salesroom, in the pumpkin patch and, once, behind a bin of Blue Hubbard squash. He stayed out late and told Mother he feared for frost.

Our mother was neither hysterical nor stoic. She saw herself not as a woman wronged, but, rather, as a woman propitiously granted free daycare. When he did not come home for lunch, she threw his tomato sandwiches in the trash. We ate food full of the spices he could not digest: ham with hot mustard, curried potato salad, pickled hot peppers.

Taking cues from our mother, my brothers and I remained calm. We did not hate the aerobics instructor. Nonetheless, we matter-of-factly decided, as children will, that she must die. Karl wanted to kill Father as well, but we were concerned that he might yet retain some sentimental value for Mother.

Duncan and Thom wanted to inculcate her spandex with a neurotoxin absorbed through the skin, I favored lethal injection, and Karl, machine gun fire. We were American children, remember. We trusted all these options would be locally available.

In the end murder was blessedly unnecessary. Our father tired of his jumpy lover. He got bored. We read it in his face: to tell the truth, with all due humility, when it came right down to it, to the brass tacks, she just wasn’t good enough for him. Despite her muscular thighs, her green pumpkin buttocks, she was an idiot, like all the idiots who tormented our father, that savant.

And so, his tomato sandwiches reinstated, Father returned to lunch at home. A new lecture series was inaugurated on the necessity of self-restraint. We boys should expect to be visited by temptation. And we oughtn’t feel ashamed--it had happened to him too, when he was a boy. Were we listening? We nodded reverentially to our father, the Pumpkin King. When we felt, uh, you know, overwhelmed by urges, we ought to substitute some wholesome activity, such as swimming, especially in very cold water.

MOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

My mother was an extremely unusual person. She lived in reality. Lord knows how she ever got a taste for it. Obviously not from my father. Sometimes I worry she must have been lonely, all day in reality, by herself. But then the loneliness was also real, and so she must have liked it.

If anyone tried to commiserate with her about our lunatic father, she would cheerfully announce that soon they would both be dead and therefore why not be nice to him? Spilt milk, fine lines, nocturnal emissions, shattered glass, all gave her a particular satisfaction. Here was reality, behaving as it should.

There was a time, I admit, when I thought her cold*. Other children’s mothers waited afternoons on the doorstep for the bus to arrive. I saw other children scooped up and praised. Even my father, when delusion was going well, would wax rapturous about his four sons, though generally he forgot which of us was good at what.

My mother, on the other hand, did not praise or condemn. She was only interested. Honors in Social Studies, failures in geometry, got much the same reception. She’d nod, ask a few questions and that would be it.

We worried about her. She was awfully isolated, wasn’t she? We thought she must be depressed. My father lectured her on the importance of being involved in the community. He himself was terribly involved, to the despair of many. He built bicycle paths as commanded by God in Heaven, who did not recognize that land could be held by private individuals.

Our mother, he decided, should likewise become involved. She ought to help out at school. All her children agreed. We wanted her to be one of the shiny, enthusiastic mothers of the Parent Teacher Association.

How difficult it must have been to balance sometimes, even for one anchored in reality: on one side, love, and, on the other, sanity. She joined. She attended meeting and field trips, saved popsicle sticks and soup labels.

It wasn’t long before the rumors reached our ears. The other mothers told the other children and they reported to us: our mother was a sociopath. She was incapable of being shocked by budget cuts, enraged by Phys Ed teachers, or delighted by art involving macaroni. She had no passion for bake sales. She cooperated but, still, she was unnerving. It was delicately suggested she stay home.

“I was told I am not a team player,” she explained.

The other mothers looked upon us with sympathy forever after: our mother was a PTA apostate.

But this was nothing, really, compared to the trouble she got in at church. We all thought it would be lovely to have a mother who went to church. We hoped she might learn, as the other church mothers had, to bake Black Forest cupcakes and smile with sweet resignation. She seemed amenable to God and even to the afterlife, though whenever we asked her about it she looked at us as if we’d phrased our questions slightly wrong.

If, in her presence, anyone became pushy about theological or metaphysical matters she would leave to the table and stir whatever was on the stove, remarking, half to herself, “Consciousness has many interesting properties.”

For a number of weeks she dutifully attended Bible Study, the Pastoral Search Committee, and Lady Lamplighters. On Sunday morning we accompanied her proudly to church and paid no notice of anyone but her, in her good but practical denim skirt, her gentle milk white face, and the sterling silver owl she wore everywhere. We did not bother trying to understand the sermon. This was her department: Mother was in charge of God.

I admit I don’t know exactly what happened. There was an extraordinary amount of tumult at church to which Mother was somehow connected. For example, the very nice man who directed the choir, and the very nice man who played organ, suddenly moved in together and gave birth to a beautiful Vietnamese girl whom they named Claire, after our mother.

Other people were not so appreciative. Bible Study took a violent turn. The Lady Lamplighters turned militant, and the church as a whole seemed headed for schism. A big meeting was held in the high school auditorium where it was decided -- if I may summarize -- that the church must either reinvestigate its deeply held beliefs, question its assumptions, revamp its politics, rethink its role in the community, or kindly request that my mother choose some other denomination.

Thereafter my mother stayed home. One of the few times I saw her show irritation was when a visitor pressed her to explain exactly what had occurred.

“All I did,” she insisted “was ask a few very obvious questions.”

* My mother’s predilection for reality was not, alas, inherited by me. I take after my father.

GRANDMOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Suicide is a tradition in my family. Of course it is not required. Nonetheless we pretty much abide by it. My father’s mother killed herself on Leap Year Day. (We also possess a doomed fondness for theatrics.) Unfortunately she was caught in the Leap Year Effect, still little understood in 1964, and got persephone’d into the situation she’s in now, three-quarters dead, or nine months of the year. The other three months she spends with us.

March 1st she appears at the door, fresh from death, in her gray cloak smelling like the wet sheep of the afterlife, and her pockets full of candy skulls. My darlings, she says, and one by one picks us up and enfolds us in her cloak so that we will not be so afraid when death comes for us.

Grandmother seems very much to enjoy her time with us. All day she sits in the same corner, humming a song I can never remember when she’s not around.

My father remains formal; he’s never gotten used to having his mother around. The gunshot had seemed so irreparable. Now she only has a small scar on her temple, though she gets headaches sometimes and my mother makes chamomile tea. Apparently suicide is not something you just get over, especially not when it’s your own.

Grandmother doesn’t often speak about death. She spends enough time there as it is. Sometimes she admits it is dreary. Of course it is different for her--she’s still commuting. She’d like to move to a different neighborhood, but first she must finish here.

“There are things that need looking after,” she says and smiles upon her four grandsons: the one who cares only for books, the one who loves dirty pictures, the one who only does right and resents it, and the one who is always drunk, as she was, in her first life.

She admits she is not sure what comes after death. Death is all she’s seen so far. But nonetheless she expects we’ll visit her, not in the dreary suburb of death where she is now, but in the life after. “I intend to race camels,” she said. All of us laughed; she wasn’t kidding.

“You are so lovable,” she says “And at the same time full of poison.” She claps her hands. “Come sit with Granny, my dears. I am the anti-venom.”

To one grandson she says, “Forgive” and, to another “Buckle up!” How stern she looks when she orders me, “Do not remain on the periphery of life!”

There is no question that my drunk brother is her favorite. I remember him as he was then, a boy, his forest full of birds still visible, the forest he would clear-cut and then tar over.

In her chair in the corner, she holds him, rubs his back and coos to him until he begins quietly to vomit. In her white tea cup she catches this and cheerfully she drinks it.

My father leaves the room and all the grandsons cry and only my mother remains at the stove. My sad-eyed grandmother continues calmly to sip her teacup of vomited poison. The scar on her temple, her elderly throat, turn blue as a late summer evening.

She does not allow the cup to be pried from her hand. She says, “I am your granny from death, my dears, and this is what I am here for.”

HOUSEKEEPING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Our farmhouse had a number of staircases, between three and five, and twelve rooms, or three times as many, depending on whether you were scouting beds for relatives, renting out, dusting, hunting for Easter eggs or searching for your car keys at the last possible moment.

The critic in the corner -- see him there, he holds his hand over his mouth because his breath is bad -- he says, “Here we are indulging in magical realism.”

Magical realism my ass*. Anyone who has ever tried to clean such a house will know that I am only telling the truth in the simplest way. And, if I am over-sensitive, it is only because this is how my excellent mother met her end -- at least I think she did -- cleaning this impossible house.

It it conceivable there may have been, in my mother’s vast and comprehensive sanity, a small gap marked ‘housekeeping’. She believed even lunch ought to be accompanied by appetizer and dessert; she regarded the accumulation of dust as a personal failure. She never once allowed herself beans from a can, a jar of sauerkraut.

‘She makes everything herself.’ we say, to praise our mother. But this is a sentence which ought to be reserved for goddesses. Instead we shackle mortal women with it. Little wonder they get tired.

Our mother moved endlessly through the house, sweeping, dusting, washing up, trying to reach every corner, trying to finish before it was time to begin again. A reasonable woman, she expected a reasonable house. But the house, please remember, was from my father’s side of the family and thus prone to fits and manias and, most of all, to frequent self-inflation. Just when she was catching up, the house would sprout another corner, another closet, or even an entire bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a unique perspective on the Civil War.

When we got up, when we went to bed, Mother was cleaning, on her hands and knees, or up on a ladder, straining to reach into the corner and vanquish the last bit of dust. But, like a flock of pigeons, the dust only left one place to land on another, surrounding her always, an inch from the tip of her feather duster. I believe the dust loved her, in keeping with the habit it had learned when it was skin of ours.

Meanwhile the roof leaked, a little here and a little there; the horsehair beneath the carpets got wet and stank like a stable. Lustful knick-knacks fucked and gave birth. The pineapples she’d stenciled fell off the vine and rotted sweetly in corners. The daisies in her wallpaper all died.
To every setback she responded with more energy, more bleach, more lemon-scented polish. My father’s helpfulness can be predicted. One day he insisted the drawer went: forks, knives and spoons. The next day, as any idiot knows, it’s knives, forks and spoons. Most of the time he was the kind of guy who’d leave around coffee cans full of his urine but suddenly he’d want to know--why aren’t the spices alphabetized?

My mother remained proud throughout her battles with our mad implacable house, but perhaps the family madness touched her then, through the gap marked ‘housekeeping’. Who makes their own sauerkraut? What’s wrong with store-bought bread?

One night we arrived home to find a note on the table: Dinner in freezer. Scrubbing North Wing guest bath. Back later.

In the freezer our meals were neatly labeled. In the pantry were three pies: a pumpkin, a pecan, a cherry with a lattice crust.

I am ashamed to say we ate for nearly a week before Duncan asked, “What part is the North Wing anyway?”

Karl slammed his glass on the table. “Don’t you get it? She’s gone.”

Father said, “Your mother has never had a sense of direction. She doesn’t mean ‘North’, she means ‘South‘.”

First in teams, then one by one, we searched the house but none of us were able to find her. Really it is astonishing, it is astronomical, how many rooms a house has when your mother is gone.

At the base of the attic stairs we found her silver owl necklace, her wedding ring, a rag and a can of extra-strength Comet. We assumed she’d chosen to end her life and deposit her body in one of the trunks in the attic. A number of our ancestors have done this**.

We lived as best we could, our mad father and his four sons. We grieved and persevered and sometimes, without warning, one of us would stumble upon a room that was absolutely perfectly clean.

Duncan said, “It’s a big old house. Maybe we’re just missing her.” He was already drinking then or else he never would have said something so ludicrous.

Still, there were questions none of us were willing to ask as we sat together at the kitchen table, waiting for Father to scrape another omelet out of the pan. Not one of us, for example, ever asked, “If all of us are sitting here, who is moving furniture and slamming doors upstairs?” We did not question. We sat silently and we ate in tears.


* We ought to mount an anti-discrimination campaign, don’t you think, to call to task those for whom the world is flat and mute, who must therefore look enviously upon our world and call it “magical”. Imagine what we could accomplish, if every levitating aunt just once spoke up?

** This also explains why, despite many stated intentions, no one ever gets around to cleaning the attic.

BROTHERS.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Is it true other people have childhoods and then become different and are called adults? This progression was never observed in my family. Obviously my father was never an adult--unless the word be synonym for madness. By the age of 8, probably sooner, my brothers and I were pretty much as we are now--bookish, drunk, horny, resentful. The first grudge, beer, novel, dirty picture we recognized as if it were the 10,000th. We did not begin; we continued.

WHAT I MEAN.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Do you know? This thing. Waiting sometimes on the stairs, curled up in the mailbox, or in the eyes of strangers walking toward me. Mostly it’s inside which is, I suppose, why it’s so difficult. A constriction in the throat, an ache in the gut. The usual words: feeling, mood are hopelessly insufficient, even misleading. You might as well call the Emperor mister. Yes, and uranium’s that spunky stuff. This edgy anxiety underlying everything, yes, this anxious ineffable tortoise. For me, that tortoise is a dull gray cloud. At its very worst I can almost see it: it has rusty spots the color of dried blood and coils around my head like barbed wire.

The anxious ineffable tortoise, which is also an evil blood-stained cloud, has two voices. Both speak at once. An urgent whisper: something must be done, time’s running out, something must be done at once. The other voice pleads But what? But what? And never pauses for an answer to the question. Both voice hammer down at once, the panic and the confusion together. (The playing of two songs at once has been known to reduce me to hysteria.) The voices don’t stop, my gut turns to stone, my voice, if it can be heard at all, sounds like a castrato three hills away.

In the morning sometimes I am left alone, but in the afternoon it is almost always there, that demon tortoise, that cloud of panicked confusion. In the evening, well, there are books. There’s beer.

Do you know what I mean? You do, don’t you? Some people say they know, they had it once at 3am. Some people say, “You can get a prescription for that.” Some people say, “Everybody knows that.” Some people switch to another chair. Some people say they don’t know but from the way they clutch their G&T it’s obvious they do.

All four sons have got it, my brothers and I. Our father says it’s genetic. He says he got it from his mother and passed it down. My mother says “it’s always the obvious that nobody notices” and says we ought to get to know it.

We do not. What we have instead are strategies.

THE SAME WORD FOR PENIS AND PROBLEM.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

About my brother Thom it is best to say as little as possible. Almost anything that can be said about Thom is obscene. And why talk about him, when he talks so much about himself? Oh no, my brother Thom is not shy, not even when we wish he would be, when anyone else would be at least discreet, but not our Thom, not even at the dinner table or near surveillance cameras, not on the Sabbath, not even on his dates in court.

No, Thom always has to pipe up and insist that the panicked tortoise does takes off, the anxious cloud evaporates, whenever he’s in the middle of an orgy.

Thom! Not any orgy, of course. It has to be first-rate, inclusive of all orifices, not neglecting the nipples, with him doing everything and everything being done to him, with no fewer than 5 people in all genders and everyone has to be hot or well-hung or there has to be something about them anyway--then, Thom says, that tortoise entirely vanishes.

Such occasions are difficult to arrange. (Forgive me when I tell you things you already know.) There are complications always. Conservative wives come home early. No, no, that’s not lubricant, that’s mousse! Gunshots are fired. Someone shouts Ride ‘em cowboy! and so-and-so, you know, cannot stop giggling. And what’s the chance a number of cocks will perform as required at once? Still, Thom swears it has been known to happen, that perfect orgy, and he swears that he was happy, then.

In between perfect orgies, Thom spends three to five years in chat-rooms, dead bored and buried in self-disgust, exaggerating the size of his prick by two inches at least.

I am sorry if I have said too much. My propriety’s been blasted by living too long with Thom. Our appalling Thom: obscenity for all occasions. I myself am perverse only by association.
Of course I have penis problems of my own. (Somewhere--don’t you think--there’s got to be a culture that uses one same word for penis and for problem.) Unlike Thom, whose penis only garners fines, doctor’s appointments and internet appearances, my penis makes me money. My penis has made me a rich man. Yes, I am living the American Dream.

Not the old American Dream. The new one.

I wanted to be a success. Of course I did. I wanted to strive, to achieve. Then I discovered I’d have to work. Forty hours a week or more. Which seems excessive. And wasteful. Is life so long that we can afford to spend so much time working? Especially those of us who like to read.
My life was over, I thought. No chance for it--I had to work. Then opportunity knocked. I needed a new doorknob, so I went to the local home goods store, which of course was bigger than Greenland on an old map. And I was trying to choose the best doorknob. Of the thirty-nine available doorknobs. I was tired and distracted. What do I know about doorknobs? What in my life has prepared me for choices of this magnitude?

It was then that I was visited by a very American miracle.

A miracle which was the marvelous and improbable conjunction of the stars above and certain events down below: a superstore, a speeding forklift, a selection of doorknobs, a clerk on Ativan, and tired, distracted, near-sighted me.

I went into HomePlus with five dollars. After seven weeks in the hospital I came out with a slight but persistent limp and a penis that does function, no matter how odd it looks, and 1.75 million dollars to support myself in idleness and non-achievement. America! Never mind blindness and amputation: there’s no jury in America that won’t approve a million dollars extra for a penis injury.

You may want to keep this in mind.

As I was saying, we all have our strategies. Let’s continue this discussion and I promise I won’t mention penises again for several pages.

SON OF THE PUMPKIN KING.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

Of the four brothers, only Karl took self-restraint as a serious option. (When the rest of us appeared restrained, we were just storing up.) Karl breathed deeply until the urge to do that thing passed, and calm was restored--or the next mad urge arrived. We heard him in the corner sometimes, breathing like a horse.

When dull anxiety arrived Karl didn’t drink or jack off. He didn’t even read tales of the Arctic. He just stayed there, remaining alert and uncomfortable, like a 12 hour guard at a summer festival in a polyester faux-fur gorilla suit. Incredible. Herculean, even. Naturally he was somewhat irritable. At night he wore teeth guards. His neck was not something he used. Anyone could see he was thinking, “I’m going to sit right here until the urge to do that thing passes.” And it did pass. But mostly it stayed.

* * *

Karl was actually Karl Jr., which is another thing which ought to be illegal. Everyone ought to receive a name of their own to use, to burnish or to soil, as they choose. Whereas Karl got a name our father was already using. Our father who had zero concept of sharing. No wonder they did not get along, those two big men with the same small name.

* * *

Karl’s voice was always kind and always soft, but the way he looked at me always made me feel like I reminded him of something terrible which, try as he might, he just couldn’t forget.

Karl never did anything wrong, as far as I know. He might even have been a saint, if a new variety of saint could be minted, one with zero forgiveness.

I make him sound harsh. He did not mean to be. I suspect he was incapable of forgetting. His mind was like exceptional historical mud, which is found to carry the imprint of a woman fleeing, three-point-two million years ago and even her panic remains visible there, on the in-step. Likewise Karl could not forget the chocolate I refused to share with him but then left to mold, or Duncan’s attempt at hard cider which ended in such a comprehensive and sticky explosion, or Thom’s theft and humiliating exhibition of Karl’s entire soft porn collection, which really was downright virtuous, at least compared to what the rest of us were looking at. All this along with a lifetime’s worth of snide remarks, small incidents, hurts intended or un--, embarrassments, humiliations.

Still, none of these harms compared to the damage done by Karl’s principal madness, his crucial mistake: Father was real to him. The rest of us dismissed Father as mad and paid little notice of his manias and petty rages. Karl, however, was unable to do this: Father must be proven wrong, Father must be confronted, Father must be obeyed. Karl thus charted his days by the ever-shifting map of our father’s madness.

Father thought Karl ought to go to school for computers, that was where the money was. And Karl should improve his posture. And show more respect and more independence. And be more spontaneous!

Then, with the rest of us, Karl would discuss--was Father right or wrong, should he obey or disobey, or would it be better to compromise? But Karl never seemed to understand that Father was a loony as a cuckoo bird.

Needless to say, Karl’s respect and concern made Father drastically worse. He seldom had a good word to say about poor Karl, his troubled son. The rest of us generally spoke to Father as if he were a Black Labrador Retriever. We were kind but firm and when he was causing a problem we put him outside. Thom, especially, was not above swatting Father with a newspaper when he got out of hand and seemed liable to soil the furniture. Father respected this and ceased to criticize us: even our court dates were only evidence of ’high-spiritedness’. But Karl, who gave importance to our father’s every word, Karl was really a problem.

Father decided that Karl was uppity, going to school for computers. What was wrong with working with working on a pumpkin farm? Did he look down on his father’s honest labor, the sweat of his brow? Father thought Karl ought to quit school and come to work on the farm.
And Karl agreed, which caused even our placid Mother to turn pale.

Pumpkin farming is of course an outrageous bit of larceny which makes even Christmas tree plantations seem honorable in comparison. Untold numbers of city people are conned into believing that, because it is a holiday, it is reasonable to pay thirty-five dollars for a squash. The scribes of ancient scriptures would have added it to the list of prohibited occupations had they but known: the whores, the usurers, the arms-dealers, the pumpkin farmers.

Our father of course thought nothing in the world was finer than being a pumpkin farmer. Also, it was quite a low-impact profession. He paid high school boys to hoe; in the Fall he sat behind the money box.

Not that Karl could take it easy, oh no, Karl must make an effort. Suddenly the pumpkin flowers could not be pollinated without Karl’s help and every sprig of ragweed was a reflection of his bad attitude. Soon Karl was spending all day out in the field, twisting the pumpkins on their vines, making sure they ’ripened equally on both sides’. He seemed to believe it was all some rite of passage, after which he would, once and for all, gain Father’s respect.

Karl was so earnest and so easily hurt. We did not know how to tell him that, yes, it was a rite of passage, but only to being a loony cuckoo-bird.

The Blue Hubbard acquired a scaly fungus, the acorn squash grew lopsided. The pumpkins, unaccustomed to so much attention, became self-conscious, started making mistakes.

One brilliant afternoon in the Fall, we heard shouting and found Karl and Father in Field #3, heaving pumpkins at each other, the small sweet ones which are so good for pie. Pumpkin guts were everywhere and the air was full of the smell of freshly cracked pumpkin, which is so shamefully intimate.

Karl and Father declared they could not work together, which was the first sane thing we’d heard out of either one of them for months. Our mother gathered up the shards of busted pumpkin, skinned them, boiled them down. Karl moved out, then back in, then out again, as all of us did, continually, for so many years. Karl arrived for holidays on time, he brought flowers or wine, he never raised his voice, but we could see from how he looked at us that he had not forgotten, and that he did not forgive us, not for anything.