Water

Nothing in our house leaks except for me.

Even these occasional effusions are only improvisations. I only admit to leakage publicly because there are actual photographs of me leaking and I feel that it is best to get these things all out in the open so as to forestall any scandal.

In one pornographic sequence of stills—safely sealed behind a sticky plastic sheet in the otherwise innocent pages of our family album—my mother catches me smiling. She sneaks up on me while she is holding a thin silver Kodak 110 instamatic with a flashcube situated on the top of a rotating black pillar like a lamp on a lighthouse.

I am a ship in distress. I am in a corner of the dining room trying not to make a nuisance of myself, as is my habit even today at parties. I stand in front of a long-necked orange glass vase that I desperately hope will be voluminous enough to contain the bubbly contents of my bursting bladder.

We are having another in that endless series of birthday celebrations for Kyle, it seems. The upstairs and downstairs bathrooms are both occupied by elderly relatives—who shall remain nameless, if not blameless.

These are the thoughts swimming through my head as I lie on our old olive carpet with my mouth turned toward the common wall, conversing with my grandmother on the other side.

My body trails down the stairs toward an oak and glass door, through its 12 panes, down a step, across the pink and maroon brick pattern linoleum lining the foyer, past an identical oak door in the open position, through a flimsy white aluminum nothing with a screen, down two cement stairs, past a penny on the walk, out the gate, and on into Eternity: the trunk of a golden Chevy Chevelle where my father is presently stowing 3 blue suitcases that ordinarily nest inside each other like a family of matryoshka dolls.

We are about to take an exciting trip to Letourneau Christian Camp on Canandaigua Lake—where I will almost drown.

My grandmother kneels in her dungarees dusting the baseboards with a chamois that I glimpse as a swirling shadow as it passes across her vent.

“Have you packed your bathing suit?”

“Yes.”

Hiss.

Burst of lemons.

“Did you pack Dolly?”

“No.”

Dolly will not be coming. Dolly is a small red monstrosity with an indestructible duck bill smile. She pretends she loves Spaghetti Os. I suspect she secretly shares mom’s belief that they smell like puke, but she is too polite to complain.

Dolly’s stomach was originally stuffed with shredded rags by a pair of small hands in South Korea. She has recently received a transfusion of synthetic cotton from my mother’s sewing basket. A triangular iron-on medical plaster (patch) covers her chest.

Dolly—like Vladimir Nabokov’s little heroine—has a few holes in her, where love has rubbed her raw. She would sink instantaneously if she tried to swim in Lake Canandaigua. She would be completely useless at a Christian Camp as a lifeguard. She is staying at home to guard the house.

My grandmother dissolves into her favorite hymn (‘We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the...’) when she moves off to scrub and disinfect the commode.

As much as I enjoy art and music for their own sake, if they do not attempt to communicate something beyond the walls of a concert hall or a museum, I see no point in the continued existence either one. Even at 5, I am sure that I felt the same way about writers.

I turn away from the vent, listening to her fading refrain.

Evidently she has closed the bathroom door.

I can barely make out ‘We shall come rejoicing…’ let alone the misty whisk of her toilet brush. I study the blankness of our ceiling for a moment, as if it were the Sistine Chapel redone with a fluffy peach colored roller soaked in mid-20th century gloom by Mark Rothko.

Luckily, I am disturbed in my contemplative reverie by the cheerful sound of a distinctly muted but full-throated flush. The door is opened. The singing resumes. Though at a greater distance than ever.

She must be in the bedroom, checking on Kyle.

With nobody to talk to, I refuse to defy gravity any longer and I slide down the stairs—bumpety-bumpety-bumpety, bump—stand up—and jump into a pair of my father’s favorite church shoes—white loafers—with little ornamental brass buckles set off to one side.

Is he still out there, I wonder?

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

Yes.

He seems to be finished packing the car.

Slam.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

“Fine, a penny: stick it up.”

When I squat for that lost coin, I eclipse an ant war that is bleeding into the grass.

A million soldiers look up. The insects cannot help but notice I am wearing a pair of cut off jeans—hot pants, really—with a happy Choo-Choo chugging to the right across the left cheek of my caboose.

The Generals shake their antenna and conclude that I am an ant, too, but I am out of uniform and I am too big to be shot. I will only get bigger, too. It is best not to make an enemy of one so young.

Fighting resumes when I stand and the sun returns to the sky.

At the curb, dad extracts a steel, vinyl and foam cage designed for the use of children by a committee of concerned sadists.

“Why are you taking out the car seat?”

“Your brother isn’t coming to camp with us, babe. He’s too little.”

“I get the whole back to myself?”

Visions of oriental luxury. The Nile. Camels crawling along the distant ridge of a dune. Pillows stuffed with flamingo eiderdown. I step back and look at our Chevelle again. Cleopatra’s barge.

“No. You have to share the back seat.”

A German torpedo strikes the Lusitania.

“Who with?”

Tense violins.

“The new lifeguard. Brad.”

Brad, it turns out, is the man who saves me from drowning. He goes to another church, dad says. Lutheran. He is not a Baptist. He is a dirty blond.

Brad grabs my ankle. He throws his long arm around my chest, lifting me out of the lake. I am coughing and choking. The smooth stones I had been collecting with care all afternoon pour out of my pockets.

I had been so absorbed in looking for more purplish ones—the granite ones that turn chalky red when dry—I had walked out too far and fallen off a submerged ledge—into a sort of ditch—like the poet Dante.

Dante is dead, I am afraid. He may be in Heaven. He may be in Hell. I do not care where he is. There is no salvation for me or for anyone in Dante. Dante is useless as Dolly in these situations. The difference between Dante and Dolly is that she knows this—she knows her limitations. That is why I set her up with a shotgun to guard the house.

So much for poetry. So much for art.

What do we have left?

Well, Brad is here, certainly. And I am glad my dad is here, shaking a bit, paler than Brad, who seems to be a man made of ageless bronze. The water is a little shallower where my father shivers, but it is still deep enough to swim in. Dad couldn’t quite make it. Brad hands me over to him.

Mom is also here—somewhere.

She seems to be playing hide-and-seek along the horizon, behind all of those faces.

I am getting closer to her though.

I can hear her cry.

Performance Piece

As you might have noticed, I am writing a sort of autobiographical novella called, A Child’s Encyclopedia, in real time. I say “sort of” because I cannot completely vouch for the veracity of all of the events depicted here. Some may have been tinted by time. The story is about the house I grew up in North Tonawanda, NY and how I came to lose it.

Now and then disconnected sentences or paragraphs from it pop-up on Facebook. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I have no personal research materials (no interviews, no photos, no diaries, no letters, no newspaper clippings, no scrapbooks, no et ceteras) from which to reconstruct the first few years of my life. Everyone depicted is dead in one way or another. Including me. In a way. I am relying entirely on my own memories and occasional trips to Google to research obituary dates.

Why am I doing this? For fun, mostly. I am sure you have heard of those peculiar people (mostly men) who memorize baseball statistics and who are able to reconstruct whole games in their heads based entirely on numbers. I like to do something similar with images in my life: remembering a helicopter seed whirling down from a maple during a solar eclipse in 1973, the amount of force I used to crush a cigarette during a tense telephone conversation, the cloudy gray binding of a translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils I happened to glance over and see—spread open like a dead moth the floor—just at the point of climax one delirious afternoon in Harlem. This is how I waste my time waiting for trains.

But since it seems a tragedy to let all of this imaginative exercise go to waste, I thought I would start writing these things down.

What I noticed when I began to jot them down is that these odd images began to tell a story that I had not noticed at the time I was living through the events themselves, only in retrospect. I then asked myself the question: was I imposing some kind of order on the past or was the past imposing some kind of order on me? What actually was going on in my surroundings during that eclipse? How come I didn’t close my eyes in Harlem and lose myself utterly in the experience? Is there any coherent explanation for what is going on?

Yes and no.

I think the fundamental problem here is one of perspective—how events appear in isolation and broadly and collectively over time. What we mistake for the foreground in one era dissolves into the background of another. Comedy and Tragedy can occupy the exactly the same place in space and time, it seems to me, without the fabric of reality being torn apart in a gigantic anti-matter explosion.

The only variable I can perceive is the lighting. Some days are grainier and rainier than others. We are always in different places when the Sun and Earth collide. Comedy and Tragedy are not. They are wherever we are. In a way, I think that it is in the eyes of a child that we can see reality reflected the best. Not for sentimental reasons, of course—not because childhood is some golden land of innocence and opportunity—it isn’t for most us—only because childhood is the period in our lives least structured by experience. Everything seems so vivid and fresh.

For evolutionary reasons relating to survival, memories are laid down on multiple tracks in the brain at this time: skinned knees hurt more, the movement of slugs is mesmerizing and moss is a million times more emerald than emeralds. We do not yet know how to discriminate what is useful knowledge and what is not. Sometimes I am not sure I ever really learned to discriminate. Everything seems pretty important to me even at 43. Though paler. A scintilla more ghostly.

So, I have decided to compress my entire life—the most intense extremes of color and experience I have ever known—into the narrow space of a few years and test my theory about Comedy and Tragedy, space and time.

I intend to revel in my metaphorical isolation and reach out with prose simultaneously. I want to do something different in this book. I am writing it for a little girl who just recently turned 5. Right now the words I write are meaningless to her. A rainbow pair of socks made in China means more to her, I suspect, than the collective works of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare combined. As they should. Forever may they do so.

I will not always be here to send her pairs of socks and discuss the inhabitants, flora and fauna of Mars, unfortunately. She may have to settle for Shakespeare eventually. Or some good-hearted but misguided astronomer like Percival Lowell, the man who mapped the extensive network of non-existent canals on Mars. She may do something unexpected entirely. One could do worse, I suppose, than wake up a dreamer. We all learn to make do.

Even now, she is beginning to doubt that Santa has transferred his operations to Mars from the North Pole. She has been talking up Saturn, which worries me enormously. Eventually, I fear, Santa will move out of the solar system completely and effectively cease to exist. As will her crazy uncle. These things happen.

But the socks will remain, I trust, for a year or so, until they wear out. Memories of the texture of their threads will intertwine with this book. How she looks at those socks and how she reads my face later, she will compare to the younger person she talked to on Skype, the hat she tried on at a diner, a vacation we will take with her parents. I will look different, she will look different, the socks will fit differently, everything will be different. In fact, you might say that everything is already in flux and has been since I picked up my pen. Everything is already happening right now: the past is becoming the future the future the past with every word I write. That is the funny thing about time.

When I am finished, I am going to copy everything out in long hand in a Moleskine notebook (probably two) and give it to her as a present, with another pair of mismatched socks. I hope to do this in time for her 6th birthday, next year.

The book will still be unreadable, of course. Mismatched socks may well be out of fashion by next year. She may make a face at my gift. If she does, I will make a face back at her: because I know for a fact that those socks are going to be popular again. I have seen it happen over and over in the fashion industry. Things always come back into into style, even if only for a season. There is no reason for it. These things just happen.

Some are very lovely.

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.

Amphibians

My first exposure to this class of animalia came in the form of an ancient iron bullfrog with a maroon rubber gasket and an orange hole installed in his posterior.

After screwing the shiny brass end of a long green garden hose into his sphincter, my grandmother carried him around the corner of the house, and dumped him about 10 yards from her bed of white-purple-pink pansies on the front lawn. Then she returned to the spigot. My brother and I sweated expectantly on our naked haunches—ready to spring on her sprinkler at a moment’s notice. I noticed my brother’s back was striped with shadows. To the vultures on the telephone wires, we must have looked like tigers crouching in the grass.

Heaven only knows what the frog was thinking. He stared straight ahead, as if he had other, more pressing matters than tigers on his mind: namely, the location of my grandmother. Instead of blasting his entrails across the street—as an inept poet would do—leaving frog intestines hanging from the audience’s unfortunate faces—with one vigorous twist of her fist, my grandmother forced this fossil of the 1950s to cough up his rusty guts and resume spitting rainbows across creation.

Greedy children that we were, I suppose you could say that Kyle and I wrestled for the sky that day, dividing the rainbows between us, sousing each other with laughter. We left our grandmother’s thirsty flowers safely unmolested: behind the shallow ditches that marked their borders—their beds—immersed in nutritious mud.

It was an ingenious lesson in pleasure—one that I never forgot—and one that I will deliver to a few spaced-out friends in the dungeon of a sexclub in the Meat-Packing District in the not-so-distant future: where pansies are still almost entirely dependent on hoses and the kindness of a few quirky old ladies for care.

Telescope

Our source of illumination resides in a suburban side street of an obscure galaxy. You will notice it over there—next to Andromeda. The local star—or, Sun, as the system’s inhabitants call it—sits at the center of a swirling conspiracy of clouds, approximately 93 million miles from a mysterious embryo presently coalescing from comets, hydrocarbons, gas and dust, iron and silicon, and other odds and ends left over from The Big Bang.

It may take of eons of patient fiddling, but once I have adjusted my knobs to the proper celestial coordinates, you should be able to see a few plucky photons colliding with a surprisingly lovely little planet, the home world of the human race: a gorgeous globe, completely unique in my experience—green with plants, gray with clouds, and blue with water.

Vivid as it appears to us today, due to the extreme distances involved and the lugubrious speed of light, there is every chance that what we see before us has already evaporated into the void: every tear has fallen, every smile has been erased, the seven seas, once crowded with mackerel, have boiled off into oblivion. There is every possibility that nothing now remains of the Earth except for cinders.

Until the light catches up with facts on the ground, we cannot know for sure. Until then, the Earth will remain as exactly as we see it now, silently spinning, shimmering with magnificence in every atomic detail: from dusk to dawn—across the lawn—to a tree almost eclipsed by the sunset—a trunk almost the exact size and shape and texture of a particular tree I always tried but failed to embrace as a boy.

Perhaps you have seen it yourself, while passing through Buffalo, looking for a good time. One more slight adjustment and a walnut is plainly 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 15° above the western horizon.

That is me—lifting a filthy screen and poking my face out of the frame, so I can get a closer look at the leaves. I should introduce myself. I am your telescope. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events because my field of view is so narrow.

As you can see, the world in question still revolves around me and I am having trouble sleeping. When I get bored with watching the stars come out through the leaves—they all look the same nowadays—I go downstairs to my parents and complain.

They are sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Mod Squad or something. I do see people running through some sort of tunnel. Maybe they are photons. Whatever they are, I don’t really care. I am the star here, so I step in front of the TV. My three-year-old brother is whimpering again after his surgery. (Glittering scalpel, lazy blue eyeball.) He has been whining for the last hour. I ask if I can go next door and spend the night.

My mother says nothing, but quickly unfolds her legs and goes upstairs to check on Kyle. My father sighs. He stands. He turns me upside down in front of the Zenith, stashes me under his arm, and marches through the living room into another—even dimmer—room, where he sets me down gently and presses a black pasteboard button. Another button pops out of the wall and lux fiat.

In a flash, I am straddling two worlds—the orange carpet in the kitchen and the olive one in the dining room—Hell and Heaven—Heaven and Hell—the difference can be hard to tell without a look at the thermometer. 75°. Fahrenheit or Celsius? Let’s have another look. The thermostat doesn’t say. All I do know for certain is that it is hot, I am almost 5 and I am looking up at my father with awe while he lifts the telephone receiver from its cradle and starts dialing.

The next morning, around 8:30—aroused by the distant squeak of a mattress spring, followed by tip-toes, flushing, tip-toes, silence, and then some inexplicable giggles—the nosy scent of coffee nudges a door open to see if I am up to no good. I am not. I am sitting Indian-style in my grandmother’s pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 26 volume set of books—A Child’s Encyclopedia—that once belonged to my mother.

You might say that this is Volume T. T is my middle initial. T is where we discover ourselves today.