The Last Ghost

Before he goes, he turns

around, surveying things

one final time, making

sure that his memories

will all be found neatly

arranged by the new boy.

A model Corsair and a Zero

square-off on a doily

beneath a ceramic lamp

his mother painted. While,

overhead, an Enterprise,

his father’s handiwork,

slowly revolves in the dark

bedroom. Sightless eyes,

belonging to the stuffed

frogs he will leaving,

look up in silence at

the orbiting starship,

lost in whatever thoughts

their cotton brains contain,

unaware of what they are

to him: his family.

 

He taps his rocker and

it rocks, predictably,

keeping perfect time.

Part metronome, part throne,

it coordinates the headlights

careening along the wall

into his mirror. Those

lightning flashes at night

will not be missed. He’s glad

that dresser isn’t coming,

really. He has outgrown

the child inside. He flips

one of the handles up,

then flicks it down again,

to hear how it collides

against a plate of brass,

letting go of the past.

The noise it makes is nice.

So he lifts it up again,

so he can hear it crash

again, a kamikaze,

ending something grand.

Drama...

The curtain rises on our stage. Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the twentieth century. Our family purchased their property in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, you will see a victory garden. It is less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nonetheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants, all sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. They were always attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this,

 “If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran of anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese Checkers, and the vinyl chloride vats of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.)

It is possible that—in revenge for the rolling pin—my grandfather broke my grandmother’s nose at the time of The Cuban Missile Crisis: the fatal day when Florence snuck up, leaned over Francis’ silent figure, and she shouted, “Boo!” as he was dozing on the davenport.

I don’t think any malice was intended. From the way my grandmother rolled her eyes when he told the story, I gathered that he accidently struck her in the face with his fist when she frightened him out of his wits.

Violence would have been completely out of character for him, if not for my grandmother. She was a different sort of person. Florence once threw a croquet mallet at my mother as she ran out of the happy home they inhabited during the Eisenhower years.

When I asked her why anyone would want to throw a croquet mallet at her, my mother looked up from the jaws of the ceramic shark she was painting (a bank, a future Christmas present for me, it turns out) and she said that she didn’t know. She said that she was a perfect child. She invited me to ask my grandmother about the incident.

I stomped out of the kitchen and ran across the yard. I rang the bell (which I never did) and my grandmother answered the door. She was pickling beets. Her hands were red. She led me up the back stairs.

“Why did you ring the bell?”

“Why did you throw a croquet mallet at my mother?”

She turned and bent and squinted and looked me straight in the eye and she said very solemnly,

“Because she deserved it.”

Having been spanked with a wooden spoon by my mother on more than one occasion, I could accept that. I sat down on the steel and rubber step stool my grandmother used to reach the upper shelves in her pantry —where she kept mason jars—as she decanted a can of Spicy Hot V-8 into an orange juice glass. She gave it to me and went back to stirring her cauldron.

My grandmother might have made a spectacular witch, if this were a fairy tale. Too bad this is Niagara County. We have no witches here, as far as I know. Or fairies.

No, my grandmother was just a terrible shot and she had no sense of timing: the mallet crashed through a pane of glass in their old screen door instead of hitting my mother. (I also adore Spicy Hot V-8 juice and did as a child.)

My grandmother will die of a stroke in church. My grandfather will succumb to cancer twenty years earlier, while I am holding his hand.

With that same hand—on a rickety gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used for transferring her plants to larger pots—he would habitually place a chipped ashtray decorated with tiny, indeterminate flowers. On the reverse side, the glaze bore the legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’

This was the one ashtray that my Uncle John refused to use. He preferred another one, one that my grandfather generally reserved for his butterscotch candy wrappers.

For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he had a reputation for being more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in my grandparents’ house was Uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. I loved him for that. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

As you can imagine, the day Uncle John died was something of a disaster.

After dinner, I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I followed the fluttering apron tail of the comet my grandmother formed as she whizzed by me—as she tripped, running up the stairs, shouting,

“Dad, Dad!”

When she was forced to complete her climb by crawling on her knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen an adult behave like a child before.

I thought my grandfather might have agreed. I am not sure that he did. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck T-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

He lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it only took a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her head together sufficiently to blurt out,

“Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.”

I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me—even worse than death.

I dropped the chain of multicolored plastic monkeys I had painstakingly connected on the carpet and was about to dispose of in their home—a brown plastic barrel.

Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

I had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family had ever died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

Once my grandfather had inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door.

I plopped down on the stairs where my grandmother had collapsed. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later, clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt, and a sea-gray acrylic cardigan with a black Greek meander design dancing up both sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my aunt’s. My grandfather tied Kyle’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

 He shepherded us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, Aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra set of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner with my grandparents, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash that my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

I was confused. What did the death of Uncle John mean for the blackberry bushes that grew next to his garage? Would Aunt Midge allow me to continue to pick them? Would the owners dim the pink and blue neon bowling ball at Rojek’s, two doors down the street from the chilly house with the lemon trim where Uncle John had lived? Would Principal Baker order the flag at Grant Elementary School to flap at half-staff for a few days? Would President Ford address the nation? What kind of future did I have to look forward to? Would there be nuclear war?

I wanted answers. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a windmill cookie instead. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was carefully backing down the driveway, trying to avoid the swing set he had once almost demolished with his Buick. In other words, we didn’t have any windmills in our house. Or answers.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. It rolled to the edge, paused, and then rolled back to the middle, glittering at the center of the Cosmos like a gilded turd.

I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00 p.m., anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

The next afternoon, a whisper in the funeral home informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away peacefully on his porch, napping beneath the North Tonawanda News, after eating a basket of fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

Mom did her best to console us. Out of the air, she plucked a pen that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to a pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Edwin, Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led us to Uncle John’s casket.

Dad was at work. Mom said that he would be dropping by to add his name to the book later.

1968

Consider the following hypothetical.

If, one winter day in 1975, for instance, we were trapped inside Bryant Street by a murderous blizzard, if all of the roads and schools and businesses in Buffalo were closed, if we were keeping the heat low to conserve oil, if we were playing tic-tac-toe with polka-dot bean bags, and if my father and I were the Xs, and if my mother and Kyle were the Os, and if my father’s final throw slid across the frozen surface of the tic-tac-toe set and he accidentally tipped an O over, and if we lost, I cannot say that I felt unhappy.

Yes, I could try to weep and wail and gnash my teeth, if that would make people more comfortable. I could put on a gown of grief, pick up a microphone and perform the typical song of desolation. I daresay, I could conjure up all sorts of emotions in the breasts of barren old women. This is one of the first lessons one learns as a child: how to extort love and money with tears. But why should I do that? Since it is just the two of us here, and we are both children, why should I lie about my actual feelings? Especially when the truth is so much more poignant and bizarre.

I was delighted that we lost. I leapt across the living room with joy. I smiled as I turned the Xs and Os back over to blankness. I threw all of the bean bags back at my dad with such comical fury that everyone erupted into laughter.

I was pleased because, for a moment, I had all the ammunition. I had everyone pinned down, trapped in the living room, while I was in the frigid sun porch, where the game was actually set up.

I somersaulted back while dad passed half of the bean bags to mom. It was time to switch sides and start another game—my father pairing up with my brother—me with my mother—a much more lethal combination.

I was happy because the loss I suffered with my father confirmed in my mind something that I had long suspected: dad had also missed the My Lai Massacre in 1968.

Edwin stumbled into existence during the siege of Stalingrad in 1943. Too young for World War II, too young for Korea, and taunted for being too quiet, my father enlisted in the Marines in 1962 and spent a dull tour of duty setting up tents in Taiwan and motorcycling around Japan. He returned from Tokyo in 1966 with a tailor-made tuxedo, but no tattoos. He is more like my flat-footed grandfather than my uncles who invaded Guam.

The Vietnam War could not compete with the charms of North Tonawanda and my mother. He did not re-enlist.

In 1968, he earns his journeyman’s papers, working the late shift at Columbus-McKinnon, a manufacturer of cranes. This is the first year of their marriage. Dad does delicate operations with a drill press, peering through flexible green-tinted safety goggles at a block of something shiny. I see him blowing tiny steel corkscrews away.

I wish I could see him watching Star Trek in its original run on NBC, as we did later, both in the living room on Bryant Street and in his little trailer on River Road, when the show was in syndication.

Many conflicting visions of the future appeared on TV during that turbulent year. But, for me, and probably for me alone, nothing reflected on the screens of 1968 appears quite so strangely compelling as that vision of love my parents presented to the world in January. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was born in September. Even 44 years later, I am sure my mother could tell you exactly what was on television when I was conceived—without consulting a single issue of TV Guide.

The Roman Empire

Geographically, the left is almost identical to the right, except that there are paint chips in the flowerbeds, and, on the whole, life on the left seems slightly less civilized than next door. My home is a work in progress. Or maybe the word is regress. If you think of Rome in the 4th century—increasingly Christian, increasingly crumbly—you get the idea.

The brown façade of our duplex has 8 windows on the first floor, divided by 2 doors: 4 for my grandparents and 4 for us. Above that, on the second floor, 4 more windows face the street: 2 for my room and 2 my grandfather’s. Below the cicadas in the tree branches, you can hear his air conditioner hum.

A slightly recessed peak crowns our house. It is not so much a garret as a newspaper hat on a madman. 2 blind eyes stare blankly at the sky. In lieu of a corpus callosum, a layer of lath and plaster divides the attic into two compartments: the conscious and subconscious mind. Each contains relics. Mine also contains aliens—silver invisibilities—gigantic garbage cans with serrated steel teeth. If you step on their feet, their mouths open up. They eat anything—including babies. If you listen very carefully, you can hear them crunching Christmas ornaments at night.

The residence of the soul remains a mystery. I have a feeling it lives in the walls we share—in the hot and cold whispers of air mixing in the conduits of our separate furnaces—our separate lives—in the grilles and grates through which we communicate—if it exists anywhere at all.

So much for my body and soul. The rule here is bilateral symmetry, as it is with most living things on planet Earth. The external line of division between the 2 dwellings is represented by a walkway, disfigured by the stumps of 2 melted crayons—a red and yellow cross—an orange nail in the middle—marking for future generations where my first experiments in light and color were performed.

Stepping over an abandoned magnifying glass and a gold and green box of Crayolas—still open, 2 crayons still missing—we walk with a man (a boy, really, from my present perspective) across the lawn. On the left, around the corner, I point out the gas and electric meter—a sort of octopus with numbers for eyes. When he squats to read our rates of consumption, I watch his t-shirt rise from his teal trousers, revealing a milky slit of skin: an arrow of peach fuzz points down to a new magnetic pole on my compass—one I have never quite noticed before.

When he is finished reading the figures, I ask him if he would take like to take a look at my furnace, too. He smiles. He says, no. He says that he only measures people’s electricity and gas. We have oil heat, he explains, leading me to a greasy fixture a little further along the foundation of the house. I will have to wait for the oilman and his pink hose, it seems. I thank him for coming by and we shake hands. I must have looked disappointed, because he turns around on the driveway and he waves goodbye with his clipboard.

Depressed by his departure—my brother is off having surgery, so I only have my shadow for company—I pick up a twig to sharpen and plant myself on the cold patio. I sit down rather hard and perhaps the faint impression my fanny made on the concrete is still visible. All I know for sure is that we have no chairs over here today. We have no picnic table. Worse, have no garden. Our decrepit garage takes up too much room. Only children grow here, apparently.

My bewildered brother celebrates his first birthday in this very spot in 1971, enthroned on the aluminum and vinyl highchair I have never quite outgrown. I do not remember being invited to his party, although I am sure that I was. It would have been foolish to hire a babysitter to sit with me in the house when everyone else was outside having such a disgusting blast: flinging cake, wallowing in ice cream and pouring out Pepsi. My birthday is scheduled for the following month—September—when I will turn 2—so I am not the star on this occasion. That is probably why I did not preserve the invitation.

I am sure that somebody took a picture of Kyle, which is why I recall the event today. For his sake, I hope the album containing it hasn’t been lost. If it has, these few paragraphs will have to suffice for a snapshot. In a way, I suppose I am like those imaginary aliens in the attic, with one important difference: I am not imaginary. If you step on my foot, even accidentally, I can assure you, I will scream. I might even bite you. It all depends on how big you are and how hungry I am for a spanking.

But if you lock me in a padded cell—a comfortable place like my apartment—if you let me lie down and close my eyes, I can block out the howling maniac in my head. I can hear a chorus singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ If you put a piece of paper on my face, I will blow it off, swing my feet off the bed, pick it up, and use whatever crayons I have stashed under my mattress to draw you a picture. I will begin with a pointed party hat decorated with tiny dancing zebras, rhinoceri, leopards, lions, apes, giraffes and other savage beasts—creatures of the Coliseum—all blowing frilly noisemakers.

My mother beams behind the new Emperor, adjusting his dunce cap for posterity. There is frosting on his face and a fine line of elastic running down his right ear. A drop of vanilla dimples his chin. I see an extinguished candle, too—white with turquoise edges—shaped like the number 1 in the foreground.

I have seen that number somewhere before: maybe in another picture, at another party, sprouting up from the remains of another birthday cake like some lonely column—left over from the temple of Castor and Pollux—in the Forum.

The marble rubble of my Imperium.

I snap the twig.

Back when I commanded the love and allegiance of home.

Relativity

The shadow of a spectacular sunset seems to be following me. Let us call this apparition a sliced mandarin—a cross section—the fruit of memory—an orange orb whose radial interior segments resemble a star—or—for the purposes of this disjointed memoir—Exhibit A.

From my perspective—my plane of reference—the sunset never occurs. The blade never falls. Although, of course, from where you sit, it does. It must. The frozen moment exists in a rectangular wooden frame, where past and future elide into the present—your decision to continue turning pages—to pull the rope and release the guillotine.

I hope you will continue reading. The end of this book will come as a tremendous relief: even the smallest stars can weigh quite heavily upon the shoulders. But whatever you decide to do, the scene I am describing will remain—for me, anyway—the last lovely thing I see: perpetually visible in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 20 degrees above the western horizon.

Our source of illumination resides at the center of an obscure planetary system approximately 93 million miles from the world I inhabit—hardly a bunny hop through the void—yet an incalculable distance from the walnut tree lit by those long fingertips of light caressing my face. What I cannot understand is why my green and gold friend should have been marked for execution. What kind of crimes against nature must a tree commit to be cut down—to be turned into poetry: pulp, toilet paper, trash—that worst of all possible worlds—Art?

I imagine that arboreal being produced nuts edible only to squirrels. I assume that the immense crowd of furry creatures which gathered beneath its boughs autumn—hypnotized by hunger—presented a menace to public health. So, in the dead of night, an ordinance was passed: that tree must die. I can only scratch my ass in wonder and move on.

Although I am sure a transcript exists on microfilm somewhere in Erie County—evil decisions are always reached and recorded in excruciating detail by The Authorities—I must confess that I was not privy to the deliberations of our City Fathers in 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, or 78—the last year I occupied the front bedroom I am presently haunting.

In other words, I am 5. I am a shadow of my former self. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events. I peer at them like Alice—through the looking glass—darkly. I cannot be called to testify in court—either for the prosecution or the defense. I take no sides in the dispute between The Town of North Tonawanda and the squirrels, my mother or my father, their divorce, up and down, forward and back, left and right.

I am sorry to be so evasive, but as you can see, this was an unusually hot summer. I couldn’t help tossing and turning. Since my three-year-old brother was constantly whimpering after his surgery (glittering scalpel, baby-blue eyeball,) I spent most nights perspiring in bed next door, wedged between my grandmother and the moon.

Each morning, the nosy scent of coffee would nudge a door open, and discover me sitting Indian-style in her pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 10 volume set of books, A Child’s Encyclopedia, that once belonged to my mother.

[Turning back a page.]

The spot of doom handed down by the Aldermen—in this case, Exhibit B—was in reality a dark blue circle spray-painted on thick rough bark. I know the circle was round and that it was blue because it looked like the bumpy steering wheel my grandfather’s soft hands gripped in his Buick while I sat next to him, spitting the pits of sour cherries into a glossy brown paper bag.

I know the bark was rough because it scratched my arms whenever I embraced the trunk as a child, seeing if could comprehend its entire texture. I never could. I was too small. I lacked the reach. Now that I am older—I am 43 as of this writing—I notice that my embrace is wider. I am tempted to try the walnut again today.

Nobody is here now, except us ghosts, so let’s see what happens.

Hold on.

Here goes.

We see from the street view on Google maps that the tree has disappeared. The squirrels have scattered. The new residents of Bryant Street have dipped my delicious chocolate house (there is no more tempting form of cocoa, in my experience, than those last few peeling flakes of lead paint) into a vat of hideous vanilla siding that tastes today—more or less—like total oblivion.

Which is all just my elliptical way of saying—apart from a pair of geographical coordinates—a general shape around the eyes—everything familiar about me is gone.

Dust

Moving is a bit like bombing an archeological site. You never quite know what will be tossed up into the air by the explosion or where it will land. This is why I always try to wear a tin hat when I am packing--to protect myself from the stones and bones and falling potsherds.

The following relic is a recently disinterred sonnet I wrote several years ago. I am not sure it really requires very much explanation. I transcribe it here today mainly because I have a friend who also works with birds...


Dusting


I still could live without the pewter owls,
Glass swans, or creepy cardinals in wax;
Although my crayons loved the orioles
Made in Occupied Japan. Our knick-knacks

Also included bottles. These troubled me.
They filtered light like prisms, but had no use
I could see. Corked, and clearly empty,
They never held Chanel or real chartreuse.

All they held was housework Saturday--
Dust--and lots of drama: ripping sheets
And underwear, like onion-skins, gray
T-shirts flecked with motor oil, or grease.

All of this rage spilled from one pillowcase,
With a worn complexion, like my mother's face.