Jerusalem Bells

You’ve got one good quality: you appreciate good things in other people. In that way, people would say you have good taste.

You may be a festering pit yourself, but you’ve got this capacity for knowing the potential in others. If you could shed your baggage, you might make a good teacher. But who would take you as you are? You’re too judgmental. That’s the other thing: you’re judgmental, so the good people must be REALLY good. It’s a shame you don’t like art. You’d make a great critic.

You’re a lousy partner in a relationship, but you pick great partners to be with. You’re like the guy who picks the girl in the movies who desperately needs a makeover. You watched a movie once that spoofed that. The girl takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and suddenly she’s seriously hot shit. To you it’s not so different in real life. You wonder how other people don’t get it to let this girl fall through the cracks and into your hands. When you’re done molding her–when she’s discovered that she’s great at sex and sexy and only needs to let her hair down and take her glasses off–she’ll move on. But until then, you’ve got months of satisfaction before she realizes how much better she could do with someone of substance. You’re a great critic, but you’ve never created anything of your own.

It’s not so different with your friends. You’re a facilitator. You have good taste, and other people see that in you, and somehow they see the veneer and extrapolate too much, and you’re a “nice guy.” A funny guy. You’re a facilitator because you see the good in them and want to emulate it. And then the thing they had in them all along begins to blossom, and the good qualities they thought they saw in you, they borrow. After a while, they embody. Believe. They form a code based on a version of you that is better than you and impossible to attain. Not so long in the future, they abandon you, because the part of you they “borrowed”–the bullshit detector–alerts them to your scuminess. Until then, you borrow memories from them of times you had when you were similar, in the overlap between their growth and your good image. This sustains you until you find someone else who latches on to something you said that had promise. Maybe they’ll have the strength to finish your thought. Maybe they’ll grow.

You wonder how it will end for you. In the back of your mind you think that you have never seriously imagined yourself old. To do so would be depressing. You know that you’re incapable of growth. At this young age you feel retarded. Imagine 50. Your friends would have outpaced you in every conceivable way. They would have had major successes; houses; children. You see yourself in an apartment with debt. You don’t have promise. You lack potential. Potential is a thing for young men. When you reach a certain age, it’s squandered; and squandered potential is like an oil field burned out of spite. When you burn it you decide you want to be smiling, so at least you give the impression of wanting to be destroyed. Really you just want to be loved. But who would love you as you are?

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.