rubber room of remembered childhood

On the movie screen children run and play in a pretty field on a sunny, spring day. So does this scene illuminate, like sheet lightening, the wizened faces of the dark audience of night.

The boy sleeps in the fetal position, his ear pressed to the pillow. For years he hears the monstrous, monotonous footfalls of something horrible approaching. One night he will realize that it is his own pulse, his own heart, he is hearing. Tonight the boy sleeps in the fetal position, in the shape of an enormous ear.

I remember the ghost-town road of my grandmother's dusty mantel, where the framed photographs of dead relatives (relatives I never knew) stood propped up like stage-set store-fronts for the shooting of some spaghetti western.

I was kneeling before my grandmother's fireplace, mesmerized by flames, when she told me of an uncle, whom I'd never met, who would sit for hours before his fire, carving human heads, watching them burn.

My earliest vivid memories are of a narrow little room, a playroom on the second floor of my grandmother's house in Brooklyn. In it the sun shines and I play in solitude.
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Then, later memories of her long front stoop of (10?) steps, against which I bounced a pink rubber ball; and the iron picket fence painted with white enamel, through which I and all passed.

Hunkered over a ladybug crawling across the linoleum’d living room of our sixth-floor Brooklyn apartment . . . how clear are the memories of when I focused on a tiny thing, a detail; how like a laser such a memory passes back through time-- how easily this very revelation tears through my writing of it like a cloud . . . I stand, spot another ladybug, her baby, smaller and without spots, a drop of blood born from a rivulet running from knee to ankle, beneath my pant leg.

From 6 to L on the elevator, right out of the building, right at the corner (where I at least once saw a man passed out in the corner doorway), across the street at the end of the block to school. Across the street and up one block, left at the corner, left into the apartment building (where the white-haired, bearded woman will be smoking her cigarettes), from L to 6.

My first labyrinth: Public School 104. For years I refused to walk the halls to the boy's room for fear of getting lost.

Prepubescent logic mistakes the scrotum for the bladder.

The aunt whom I hugged goodbye when I was ten, against whom I felt the floodgates of the fleshy pleasures in which I've been breast-stroking ever since.

My sixth-floor bedroom window directly overlooked the rooftop of a neighboring three-story building. With my elbows resting on the sill and my nose pressed against the iron window screen that gathered city soot and smelled like blood, I observed affections shared between two teenage lovers who snuck to the rooftop for privacy, and who no doubt felt above the voyeurs of the world.

Because there was no snow in Miami, because the open-air hallways of our school formed the perimeters of grassy courtyards, and because sudden, heavy rains caused an evacuation of earth by its worms-- wormball wars.

With an enthusiasm similar to the one which compels parents to record and date their child's first giggle, their child's first word, and perhaps even their child's first profanity, this child, in adulthood, should take it upon himself to record his first formulation of the absurd, the first time he senses his own mortality, and the date of his first maniacal cackle, which will inevitably follow.

Human being in winter: The self, huddled in the center of the bundled body, wonders through wide eyes at frost-encased branchlets.

Winter-thin trees . . . the moon ladling light into bird nests abandoned in their branches. . . .

Days when father cleared the car of snow, he sheared a sheep. Fleecy snow.

Hands snug in the pockets of your oldest coat, you trudge through the park, across the virgin, ankle-deep snow, in the bitter cold, becoming more and more conscious of your own core of warmth. You pant, see that you are alive by the sight of your own breath; you stumble more often in the soft snow with each new step . . . but without any fear of falling.

Noontime a man walks along the street; his shadow, well-defined, is the size of a child.