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.

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.

Photographs

I seldom see anything
worth preserving which I can’t
imagine when I close my eyes:

the infinitely tender way
the wind ruffles lakes to the texture
of aluminum foil—how

I would smooth the foil
left over from my baloney
sandwich—flatten it

with my fist, then fold it in
a silver square. How I’d forget it,
until mom forced me to yank

my pockets inside out—
looking for forgotten pens—
on Laundry Day.