scribbles

mostly Poetry
Life goes on,
progression
what Happened
in the Garden of Eden
Green mountain boys
You said you wanted to know.
In Celebration

life goes on,

What Happened

His mother had been an english professor and volunteer for the census and the homeless shelter, so she had ingrained in him all the rules of grammar, punctuation, and community service since his birth. Before his birth, really; they had used a make-your-child-smart program, in which classical composers and authors of various types are played from a tape recorder next to the mother's swollen abdomen. His parents had chosen the extended Altruistic Child option, which included Voltaire, Marx and Steinem. He had a huge vocabulary, but no talent for the violin.

He was born in a cab on the way to the hospital, and though it was an exceptional August day and the air smelled like the hot tar of the road, he did not cry. The labor was very short, only about seven hours; his mother had already had three children. She had not expected it to be so quick, and when traffic on the expressway slowed to look at the burning truck, she was already dilated to ten centimeters. The cab driver's name was Rudolf. He gave the newborn the fuzzy green dice from his mirror, and a blessing: "This boy, he be important, help many people. I know. God, he tell me." The boy's mystified parents misunderstood Rudolf's heavily accented words, but they promised to hang the fuzzy dice over the crib. They did not tip the driver, but the dice hung in the redone baby room and then in the Star Wars boy room and then in the teen angst room and then in the college dorm and then in the cheap apartment, and the driver somehow knew and was satisfied.

By the time he was a year old he could walk easily and quickly, but he had not yet spoken a word. His sister understood him, and she interpreted his squeaks and baby laughs for the others. His two brothers, nine and seven, ignored him, as they had already grown up enough to think that they were boys and could not therefore like babies. The sister thought he was the cutest, most precious thing imaginable, and spent every moment she could cuddling and feeding him. He did not need to speak or cry.

His parents did not hear him speak until they came home early one night from a business dinner. The others were in bed already, but he was in the kitchen with the babysitter, having a conversation about the president of the country. "I don't think he should lie," he said, "even if we are on the verge of war." His parents were very surprised; it was not the sort of thing that they had expected to first hear. They looked at each other, questioning their sanity and sobriety, and walked into the kitchen, slowly, and he did not hear them but kept talking. "I need a role model," he said. The babysitter looked behind him at his parents, expecting that they knew he spoke in complete sentences about complex moral and sociopolitical issues and that they were very proud, and they looked back in astonishment.

When he was five years old his parents took him to a hospital to visit an uncle, who had had surgery. It was like Siddhartha Gautama exiting the castle for the first time: never had he seen so many sick, so many dying, so many old. He stared at a woman lying on one of the carts lined up along the corridor wall. "Come over here, boy," she said. "I am very old," she said. "I am going to die soon. Then, I will see my daughter, and my husband, and my mommy and daddy, and my grandparents, and my dog, and it makes me very happy because I have not seen any of them in a very long time." He wondered how long, but he could not ask, because his father called him into the room to greet the uncle, and the uncle gave him a stuffed rabbit and a chocolate bar, and the woman was forgotten, banished to recurring dreams.

The two boys across the street built a tree house during the summer after second grade, and he helped. It was a gorgeous tree house. It had three walls and a roof, and two windows, and a rug on the floor and a child-size lawn chair. You had to climb a rope to get up to it, because it was in a pine tree and the trunk was very sticky and prickly and ropes were more fun anyway. The three of them were inseparable until school started again, and they went back to the private Catholic school across the river and he rode the bus to the public elementary. The two boys were, from then on, considered troublemakers in the Catholic school because they asked the Sisters of Mercy all of the questions that he had asked them, like "What happened to Jesus before he got famous?" The Sisters of Mercy tried to answer, but they did not know what to say, so instead they gave the boys lunchtime detention for a week.

In junior high he was avoided. He liked the other kids fine, but he sat alone at lunch because he was prone to discuss such topics as the morality of teacher-student relationships and the possibility of the lunch-ladies being mothers and aunts and normal people who did normal things. He wasn't good at sports, or girls, or jokes, or anything else that makes kids like you. He didn't work at grades and got mediocre reports. His locker was next to that of the only black girl in Riverdale. They greeted each other when they passed in the halls, and once when someone vandalized her locker he walked with her to a home improvement store to get paint thinner. She smoothed out the words with a Kleenex, and he banged the locker door back into shape so that it would fit back in the narrow frame. After that, he kept to himself by his own choice.

On his eighteenth birthday his father took him to the best strip club in Manhattan. He had never been able to get in before, even though his father was a member; his face was smooth and innocent. But he flashed his driver's license and was waved in, and inside it was like nothing he had seen. The walls were painted, not just posters but real paintings, and the women and activities pictured were beautiful and lewd and disgusting and arousing, and as he walked farther into the club the paintings became more explicit but no less beautiful. The artist had been very talented, but her favorite subject matter was rather too risqu� for the general populace and so had been kept within the closedest doors around. Inside the club were the most expensive rooms, where women danced for men one at a time, and the rented group rooms, with tables and poles for bachelor parties, and the big show rooms with waitresses and drinks and pianos. He and his father went to a show room where a teenaged Indian girl was belly dancing, and they sat and caught her veils as she threw them one by one, and when she had no more veils and was finished dancing she took all their money, because they gave it to her.

He got a job as an interim bells player in a church in Jersey, ringing them once every hour, and playing tunes on Sunday at eleven in the morning and five in the afternoon. It was decent pay, and the commute was easier than it could have been. He enjoyed continuing the tradition of calling the faithful to worship, though the denomination was not his own. The bells were beautiful even in his tunelessness, and they rang out every hour, on the hour, and told the whores when to come out and the donut shops when to open. The pastor noted that after he started playing the bells, more people came to mass every week, and so the search for someone with a talent for music was discontinued, and he was not fired, and the congregation learned his name. "No talent at all," they said, "but there's something about the way he plays, you know what I mean? He's got something else."

When he found the meaning of life, he decided not to tell anyone. It was a wise choice; it would have been disregarded as overly frivolous and he would have been ridiculed for it. Instead, he walked the streets of the city with a sandwich board and gave spare change to all the bums who asked him. "Lose the message, bub," said one of them. "I walked like that for six months and sure, people read it, but they just walk on by, they think you're a f*cking crackpot. For all they care you're just another hare krishna krishna hare." The bum wore a colorless woolen hat and unmatched mittens. The bum did not have either a brown paper sack or a shopping cart, but in an inner coat pocket a torn and battered copy of Walden. "I wrote it many years ago," said the bum, "when I was a man of better means. But the bastards laughed at me and put me in jail."

The congregation in the church continued to grow, and people began to sit outside on the steps to listen to the tuneless bells when he played, rather than going inside to listen to the sermon. He stayed in the bell tower more and more often because he was uncomfortable going out. When the people on the steps saw him, they cheered. The pastor had given credit where credit was due, and had said- and the people believed- that the word of God was being spoken from his hands. They were right, of course, but being singled out for it made him nervous.

His fame spread, as these things do, in the tabloids. The headlines were atrocious: 'I saw Jesus in the corner store!' 'Son of God working minimum wage, page 4!' 'Messiah drops 50 lbs. in weight-loss clinic!' The articles had elements of truth, but he never healed anyone by touching them. He did not go to health clinics, nor did he prophesy coming Judgement Days or walk on water; all the photos were faked. But when he tried to take the subway or buy a cheeseburger, people recognized him and asked him questions. Unlike the Catholic nuns, he did not attempt to answer their queries, but instead tried to ignore them. His reluctance to speak, such a contrast from his orations as a child, earned him followers. His eldest brother, hungry for a piece of the action, wrote an autobiography called "My Brother, the Trinity." (It was about his inferiority complex.) His sister went on talk shows.

The people who sat on the church steps formed a group. They called themselves the New Disciples, and they adopted a bell with a star on it as their symbol of fraternity- the bell from the bell tower, where they had all heard him play, and the star for his holiness. They formed a commune in a nearby abandoned building, and handed out pamphlets to passers by. A few of them went to other cities to play recordings of his playing, form communes, and recruit more people. He became the biggest fad since the Beatles, and then he became bigger than the Beatles. The time came when he could not go to the church because people would beg him for words of wisdom and rip off pieces of his clothing.

The New Disciples were also working hard to make the Pope recognize him as the Second Coming, and they succeeded in a way they would never have hoped for. The pastor who had first called him holy was murdered, and the church blown up, and the papers bested each other with comparisons to Irish and Russian mobs and guesses about which was telling the truth. None of them were, of course, but all wanted to be associated with the removal of this - this - blasphemer. The day after the news first hit the papers, the leader of the real group, a rainbow of orthodoxy and dogma, was in the Vatican being blessed by John Paul II himself. The United States government did not interfere, as it decided- after much debate- that separation of Church and State forbade them to help prosecute the terrorists, and that they were afraid of what could happen should the new cult be allowed to continue its existence and recruitment. That was when it stopped being official business.

Police departments continued their harassment of the New Disciples, as they disturbed the peace as happy people will. Unofficial policies to arrest anyone showing a bell on any charge were rumored. There were no official records, no cameras turned on at the beatings, not a breath to anyone not directly involved. The press was politically savvy enough not to notice, but rather to portray the New Disciples as being crazy, radical, and dangerous.

Restaurants owned by church-going citizens would not serve anyone wearing the bell symbol. A post office in Tennessee burned all the letters going to and from a commune.

He grew a beard so as not to be recognized, bought sunglasses and a one-way ticket to Australia. He was not seen getting out of the taxi, but once past the metal detectors he dropped his guard. A journalist just flying in from London noticed his now-familiar face, and stood behind him in a cafe line to catch a glimpse of his ticket. The journalist called St. Paul's. "Father, he's here," she said. "You know who I mean. Yes. He's going to Australia, the 7:35. Lufthansa. Thank you, Father." There was someone at the airport in under fifteen minutes. The plane never took off. Even three days later, there were no survivors.

On his hundredth birthday people danced in the streets and sang his name. The fact that they were arrested for it did not matter; the fire hose could not touch their jubilance.

back

In Celebration

His father's will stated that the immediate family was to empty the ashes over the lake; so, since he was the only one there, it was his to go out on the little sunfish he'd been left with the tin canister and open it and strew. He'd gotten almost everything, except for a few thousand dollars to charities, so it was fair. He went out the day before he was to return to work - they had given him a week off - and pulled up the orange and blue sail and it was a gorgeous fall day. Cold, but gorgeous: across the lake, in Canada, the leaves were farther along than on the New York shore. Some of the trees were bare already, others were green, and others flamed and sparked and mulled sullenly in shades of red and yellow and purple. It was windy: a perfect day for going out. His father would have appreciated it, and brought a little picnic out to one of the islands.
But John didn't bring a picnic. It would have been something to think of beforehand, rather than just to get the little tin can and go. On the boat, he found a Coleman cooler in one of the cabinets with wrinkled Ziplock bags inside, and was hungry. He stared at the trees and the blindingly spectacular sky, and tried not to think, and was unsuccessful.
He took out the canister and opened it, surprised again at how heavy it was. It was covered in blue velvet and silver ribbon, so he slid off the ribbons, which would have been too lavish for his father, and weighed it in one hand. It wouldn't be appropriate to just throw the thing out on the water; it had to be properly emptied. The velvet wasn't attached to the tin at all, but only closed around it; there was a little zipper that ran around the middle, which had been covered by a flap of fabric and one of the wider ribbons. He took off the velvet and inside it was a perfectly normal-looking tin can, albeit with a screw top.
His father was inside the stupid tin can. His father could fit inside the tin can and it was smaller than a soccer ball, maybe the size of a big cappuccino mug. An entire person, inside a cappuccino mug. The prenatals he saves in the emergency room aren't even that small. His father, his big, expansive, northern bear father, reduced to cholesterol and bone, and compressed into a stupid tin can. He'd be a tin can someday, unless there were more attractive options available by then. Hopefully taxidermy wouldn't become popular.
He opened the can slowly, carefully facing away from the wind, when suddenly the wind fell, and started up in the other direction. Ashes flew everywhere. They were so small and light and sticky - sticky because of the cholesterol. They flew onto his hands, his sweater, his face, even behind his glasses and into his eyes. He dropped the can, swearing, and it rolled and would have fallen over the side of the boat if the wind hadn't as inexplicably shifted back.
Wind wasn't supposed to do that, on the water; it was supposed to go one way, so you could predict it and you could sail. The principle that sailboats, including the little orange sunfish, were built on: a steady wind.
"Dammit, Dad," he said, wiping his eyes. The ashes were sticky and wouldn't wipe off his skin. He dipped his hand in the water to wash his face, and wiped the ashes off on his sleeves and pants. They made absolutely grey streaks: devoid of anything that once held a personality, that could have been unique. He wiped his father off on his khaki pants and knew that the ashes were too fine to wash out and would be permanently stuck in the fabric. It's almost funny how parents can do that. Stain like that.
He briefly considered jumping in the frigid water - it was the only way, now, to distribute his father's ashes even similarly to what he wanted. But it's October already, so he brought the little boat about and headed back towards the lakefront property that was unsurprisingly his. Sailing towards it, it looked much smaller than it used to, next to the largely windowed estates on either side. He could sell it to either neighbor for more than its worth, since they would appreciate the rapidly bulldozed space for an outdoor tennis court. Or - and this is what he wanted to do, since he didn't like either neighbor - he could sell it for far less than its worth to a family that needed a house, since they would appreciate having a house. One less problem for Jimmy Carter.
For now, though, he wiped off his father as best he could and took a shower in the master bedroom of the little brown house. He put on the brown corduroy bathrobe that smelled like childhood that now amazingly belonged to him and walked with his dirty clothes and towel to the water's edge. He had to try, even if the selfless particles were permanently embedded in the fibers. He owed that much: one final attempt to make his father happy, even if posthumous consciousness wasn't a compelling possibility. He dipped the clothes in, afraid of how cold the lake was, and then walked in up to his waist and disturbed all the mud and frogs. He rinsed the clothes again and again until he couldn't tell where there was ash and where there was mud and where there was only cold water-darkened fabric, long after his hands were blue and numb.

back

scribbles

life goes on,

Molly:

Ellen:

Jeremy:

Ellen:

Molly:

Jeremy:

What Happened

In Celebration