mommy

It turns out I may have mommy issues.

–

He fingered its edges, rounded and bored to a clean economic aesthetic. His mother had hidden it from him, because of its connection to the past and to his father, and he had never seen it until that morning when his mother died and he cleaned out her closet and bedroom. It had rested at the top of the closet next to a circular box that held an old phonograph. It couldn’t have been that old; it wasn’t any older than his mother, and his mother had died prematurely of cancer, sixty-four. She had quit smoking at his behest when he was thirteen.

When she was fat and flustered, she would point at him and the color would rise in her cheeks, and she would say—her face an exaggerated kind of caricature of angry, her anger disproportionate to whatever he did—“I quit for you. I gained thirty pounds and you never thanked me.” He was never inclined to thank her in those moments. He knew she didn’t like to betray those pieces of herself.

Before she died she lost the thirty pounds and then some. Her slight jowls deflated, and the skin that was no longer weighted down hung limply. The whole time he didn’t grieve.

True that he felt for her, but mostly she didn’t talk about the pain, and he rarely found himself compelled to ask. The chemo was difficult. Her movement was stilted as it never had been, not in sixty-four years of wear and tear, nor fifty of real labor at the nursing home. He didn’t think on it, and he didn’t see the point in grieving. They were a unit, and he wasn’t ready to be separated from her. He had resolved to follow her.

He gazed at it and it seemed his father gazed at him in his reflection, dad who had only been around for the first four formative years of his childhood. He had struggled not to lose those memories, but his memory was poor, and his great tragedy was that he didn’t know where he came from, and his mother never said. When he gazed at it he felt like a part of a family. Nevermind that his mother was gone, and his father had never been. Without her help, he had no memory, and he had never created any memories for himself.

She was so proud of him, and she made no excuses for that, or for staying home with him for the first four formative years of his childhood, and they could have had a babysitter but they didn’t. She was not ashamed of working at the nursing home, even though she could have done anything. He was her greatest achievement.

–

unfinished.

100 words: the stupidest person you know (real or imagined)

You wonder what energizes these people, and then you see the crowd, and it all makes sense in that “REALLY?” way you have of asking questions you don’t want the answer to. You think, “It’s the people.” And it’s then that you stop wondering what she’s thinking but what THEY’RE thinking, and all sorts of questions emerge, like things involving accomplices and who really killed whom? You’ve got to wonder which is the bigger sin. You’ve got to wonder what they’re thinking.

Is it the spectacle that turns them on, or is it the fags they hate that drive them ever harder?

You’ll never know.

the difference is all the difference

She isn’t a smart Midwestern woman. Those are the best, he thinks. They’re not prudish, because they’ve seen their drunk uncles’ dicks, but they’re still a little modest. They tend to brandish their sexuality less than the ones on the East Coast, who use it as a currency, a stepping stone to the corporate ladder or a vault into the splendors of the marriage bed, whose furnishings are discarded expensive robes and blouses. Midwestern girls just like to fuck, because they know they shouldn’t be ashamed. East Coast girls bite it down to get what they want, and for that they are brave.

This girl isn’t East Coast, either. She’s a dumbshit Midwestern girl, the kind who thinks they know everything for the cost of nothing. She struts mightily, and most of the girls she spends time with are impressed with her bravado, and can’t think to say anything about how full of shit she is. It’s only when she gets too big for her strained sweatpants that the girls think it isn’t right and tell her so, and then she’s nothing, just a small deflated version of her old fat self. Without her friends there to agree with her, she has nothing but herself. When that happens, she’s faced with two options: either scurrying away and finding another group to infect with her substance-less sputum, or sucking up her pride for the moment when they’ll take her back, and then slowly ingratiating herself on them again, slowly gaining confidence, slowly talking shit.

This is one of her favorite stories: “So I says to her, I says, ‘Dawn, that’s bullshit. Lois gets away with doing half the work of the rest of us, all because she’s on slight disability. And that’s bullshit too. Everyone knows Lois only got it because her husband’s on the board decides those things.”

She’s so pissed off and drunk she’s forgetting every second breath, and the words come out as gasping. “This job has done its toll on my body just as much as it has on hers. I told her, ‘Dawn, I’m getting fucked on my insurance, and my body—lifting these bodies off and onto hospital beds—it’s all a bunch of bullshit.’”

So Dawn says to her she’d better back down or she’s going to get fired, and Jennifer hauls back and slaps her in her face.

No. She doesn’t. She really would have liked to. That’s what she says when her friends ask, “Did you really?” Jennifer sometimes mixes up the facts and their supplements, those things she would have rather done than listened and not done shit.

She’s proud of the number of citations she’s gotten. Otherwise, she wouldn’t talk about them so much. When she does (and it’s almost everyday), there’s that dignified and heated tone, the words tumbling out too fast to be anything but self-righteous, and the love she has for her foolish self is most apparent when she talks about her butting heads with her superiors.

midwestern girls know how to fuck

The beginnings of something?:

She isn’t a smart Midwestern woman. Those are the best, he thinks. They’re not prudish, because they’ve seen their drunk uncles’ dicks, but they’re still a little modest. They tend to brandish their sexuality less than the ones on the East Coast, who use it as a currency, a stepping stone to the corporate ladder or a vault into the splendors of the marriage bed, whose furnishings are discarded expensive robes and blouses. Midwestern girls just like to fuck, because they know they shouldn’t be ashamed. East Coast girls bite it down to get what they want, and for that they are brave.

Georgie.

I don’t know where this came from. I just started writing about Georgie, the figure of one of my earlier, weirder attempts at pseudopoetic form.

–

Georgie says to me to lean closer. When I do, he says, “Janet never knew anything about me.” He says it more tenderly than most old men say anything, unless they’re on their death bed, and then they’re suddenly devoid of masculinity, and the only thing that matters is that they’re touching a human hand, or feeding off of someone’s love embrace. Georgie is on his death bed.

He says to me, “Ronald, think about that. I knew her for thirty years, and the most we ever said was how pissed we were at one another. That was the common theme.”

To that I don’t answer. Georgie never seems to invite an answer. His words are proclamations. I think he thinks there are things to learn from his speech. I think he wants there to be. Instead, I stand stoically, and every so often I pat his hand, and when his grip becomes uncomfortably tight, I disentangle our hands and make a show of flicking the cord of his IV with my fingers, like they do on TV. For someone as bright as Georgie was in his day, I don’t know if he understands my discomfort, or if he is by now oblivious. Neither would surprise me; both speak to Georgie’s condition. In the former, he’s an ass, or just lonely; in the latter, he’s a little too numb to be alive.

“Ronald?”
“Yeah, Georgie?”
“Janet doesn’t clean my shit up anymore.”

Pause. Beat. Put your hand back in Georgie’s? Keep him from saying anything more…?

“She put me in this place so she wouldn’t have to clean up my shit. I read somewhere that true love is when the person you’ve been with forever is willing to clean up after you when you shit your pants. What does that say about us?”

I want to tell Georgie it means nothing. Cleaning up shit is dirty business. Not everyone is equipped for it. My own mother was a germaphobe; hated cleaning up after our messes. She made our father change our diapers. To this day I wonder how they had sex. Probably they used a condom, even after his vasectomy… Maybe we were adopted.

But that doesn’t wash with Janet. Janet was a nurse during the war. I don’t think there’s much that Janet hasn’t seen, and most of it had to have been worse than shit.

I think the simplest explanation is that Georgie slept around, and Janet always knew, and for a long time that was fine. She would wash his clothes, and listen to him bitch, and when he started to get sick, she would pick up his prescriptions at the pharmacy and agree with him when he thought the game show host on TV was sitting at the couch in their living room. But there was that demarcation line of disgusting things that Janet must have thought she didn’t have to deal with, and, in all fairness, probably shouldn’t have had to. Besides, the war’s long done.

To Georgie, that sort of thing shouldn’t offend. To Janet, it means everything. To Georgie, cleaning shit is love. To Janet, love is when your dick stays in your pants for more than five minutes. There’s a demarcation line.

I finger the IV bag for five minutes before I can think of anything to tell Georgie. He might be kind of an asshole, but he’s a dying man, and there’s going to be no real comfort in his remaining days. The progression of the illness means more than a loss of dignity: it means reckless, sweeping pain; the kind of pain that has no higher reason and survives as long as Georgie does. It’s the pain that worries Georgie most.

I tell him, “Dad,

…

(Unfinished)

Ode to a Dog.

This dog will die in winter. I suspect she knows.

She must, because she is lean again, and I can’t tell what from. She may be sick, or she may be suddenly vital, just one more time, to last the season. Whatever it is, it’s in her eyes. She’s wise, now, and it’s not the illusion of it like it may have always been before. It’s not in the markings that were bred there by the people who breed these dogs. It’s the knowing look of an aging sports icon, one year left…ready to defy everyone who said she was too washed up to play. Ready to say, “I got one left in me, one last dream.” Ready to be a darling for the doubters. Ready to vindicate anyone who dared to hope. This dog is an icon: a real American hero, never complaining about the stiffness in her bones or the way she can’t make it up the stairs anymore; never professing to be tired, even when it’s written on her face and in her movements, stilted and unbecoming of a legend whose existence is enough to make us smile every day in some kind of wonder.

We will tell each other stories about her, about when she was a puppy, and the “tag-of-war” and the bottle of Coke that we accidentally dropped on her head. We’ll talk about her mid-career, in her prime, chasing down a ball and low to the floor and seeming to swallow it with her entire breast, lunging…agile. And we’ll talk about the golden years, when everything went to shit but still she wagged her tail and caught balls in the air and played until the day she died, when we fed her her last meal and all cried like idiots, crying over a dog.

Until then, we joke about her big personality, about the possibility of her speaking and saying, “You fuckers better listen…I got things to say.” We joke about how cranky she’s become. We take her out to her “favorite haunt,” the woods she so rarely visits anymore and never really did much anyway. We have regrets. This is all in the nature of a death.