Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts

Friday, December 28, 2012

The Woman who Could Not Swallow




Daniel introduced his wife as 'Baroness Cathleen de Varennes'.

"Where do we go?" she demanded.

I led her, with Daniel, down the hall. "Do you want breakfast? You must be starved. Perhaps you are tired and want to see your bedroom."

I had been told she was a young woman, but she looked ancient. The bones of her skull loomed beneath a sickly parchment.

Daniel threw her bag at the foot of the bed, then headed back to the drawing room to use the phone.  The Baroness kept talking.

"I can't swallow. The last time I actually swallowed a piece of food was in 1979. Solid food doesn't go down. My esophagus is almost closed shut."

I stood there.

"It is equally very difficult for me to swallow liquids. That's why I like them hot. Very, very hot. And sweet. You can put the entire box of sugar in my coffee if you like. It helps it to go down. Of course if I have liquids too hot, too often, that's not good either. It cooks my throat, or can start a cancer.

"The muscle to my stomach is, how do you say, lame? It can't close. The juices from my stomach come up and starts all sorts of problems.

"If I had a lame leg I would knock on it and comment on how well it is carved. It is no problem for me. Yes, I lost quite a bit of weight. I was eating ice cream and sugar and butter in an effort to keep my weight up but eventually my stomach wouldn't process it anymore and my heartbeat became slow with all the cholesterol."

The Baroness' hair lies in patchy strands on a bald scalp. The long strands are so carefully curled over her temples. There are no curves to her, though it is possible to see that she was once attractive. Her front teeth seem at first so perfect, until one notices they are exactly alike, the same color and shape, gums all of a piece. All are false.

Daniel is a young man. I know him to be the same age as Bailey, though he has put on a lot of weight. I asked him about work.

"Well, I haven't been indicted," he said, referring to the recent crackdowns on investment bankers for insider trading.

"Those SEC boys are damn clever. The crooks get away by spilling  beans on the others. The accomplices, those that provide information, have the book thrown at them. It's awful."

I wondered if Daniel saw himself as an accomplice or a crook. He's a survivor, he married the Baroness. How long before he was alone with her title, and family land back in Hungary.

"We have a party this evening we have to go to," Daniel lamented.

Something they had to do to keep up appearances, to please the Baroness. Possibly it was a gathering he anticipated, but made seem like a kind of duty..

"That little party", Bailey said, was a do, at Maxim's. Bailey was miffed. He hadn't been invited.

I agreed, it is poor form not to invite one's host.

I didn't need to see the inside of Maxim's. I had visited once, paid for by a lavish Arab who was entertaining Miss India. I got bored, ate, drank too much, then walked home.

The Baroness foraged in her bag, then brought out a bottle of Pálinka, a distilled liqour from the steppes of Hungary. "This is for Monsieur Bailey."

It had a peculiar royal crest on it, one with a bent cross at the tip. Maybe she called the bottle Slivovitz, no matter. She'll give it to Bailey. Then he'll put it on his silver tray next to the Gran Marnier and Cherry Herring.


Saturday, May 19, 2012

Return to Mott Street



October 10, 1983 - I returned to New York, drove the car, terrified, down the East Side Drive, careening, looming, lunging, steering loose, tires bald, headlights barely shining, motor about to quit, to a near stop at Houston Street and Avenue D. Where the junk starts, through that zone around Avenue B, trash dope, the streets menacing, ugly, doors locked, past 2nd Avenue to Mott Street, hardly a refuge, back home after fourteen months. Home sweet home.

I opened the door. An explosion of dirt, mold, depravity and un-exorcised spirits.

Piles of ash, rolling papers, and match heads. Ashtrays laden with needles rubber bands, razor blades, candle stubs, wax drippings, torn besotted issues of Rolling Stone had supplied paper for all sorts of demonic operations.

A nasty black wig that Joe, my subtenant, left on top of my refrigerator. It did not seem like a wig for a woman, but rather a wig meant to dress a man like a woman! Joe, I never knew! The whole place stunk. Cockroaches everywhere, dead cockroaches on their backs, plastered against the wall by their guts where Joe, had presumably whacked them flat with a magazine. In the crevices of the floor, live cockroaches laid cockroach eggs amongst cockroach corpses.

A really great pair of Sheffield steel scissors! The Mad Hatter would have been proud to carry them. What did Joe need these for? Was he taking up tailoring? I didn't imagine Joe on Saville Row for a living. Joe was a Brit, a black haired, well bred lad, exploring New York and all its craziness. Many Euros come to NYC these days, to eat up the scene. A would-be drummer. Up all night, he sleeps till late afternoon.

Hey, no complaints, he paid the rent up front.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Return from Paris




Back in New York City with an awful headache. Air thick with soot and humid. Perhaps this evening it will storm.

These are my first hours in America - I have been gone ten months. While all is clear I'll write my thoughts. Perhaps then I'll sleep, and the pain in my head will go away.

Last moments in Paris:

I made cheese omelettes for a last lunch with France-Aimee at my place on Rue Milton.

I was packed and ready to go when she came over at eight. All I had to do was fix the dinner. With the omelettes we had a tomato salad, afterwards some oranges and cherries. She insisted on seeing all the drawings that I made at Gare Austerlitz, so I showed them to her.

She was not wild about them. However when I showed her one of the watercolors I made in India she really responded. "I see genius," she said. To me this sounded like a silly stylization, like Pound who said, "Genius? I specialize in it." Somehow it was not flattering because it was not true, not the way she said it.

Earlier in the day I said goodbye to B____, watched his bald head go down into the Metro. He was on his way out to Maillet to visit his cousin Perrine, after eating lunch at his local hangout near Pont Neuf. That restauranteur took a great interest in my sketchbook after B____ opened it up to show him some of the drawings. B____ has a way of making a public demonstration about any piece of art that happens to be around, and I think he gets a sort of masochistic pleasure out of embarrassing the owner. He plays the role of professor saying, "This is quite good, but this one you see just doesn't work as well. Perhaps you should work it up again in color." I know B____ well, as a friend. His faults fascinate me, and over the years I'm able to see into their causes.

Then France-Aimee drove me to Gare du Nord, parked her car and went to look for a hand cart while I stood by my luggage. Typewriter, sketchbooks, sculptures, I stowed them on the train. As we had some time we walked together to the end of the platform. I felt a sudden longing to be there a few more days so that I could study and draw this place. The new Paris railroad stations had been a favorite of the Impressionists. Monet's famous canvas of Gare St. Lazarre was of a brilliant glass-roofed structure, filled with billowing smoke and steam from the new locomotives. Today at Gare du Nord, that giant hulk was nearly opaque, stained by years of grime and debris and bird droppings. Manet lived nearby, and patrolled these platforms often, the station bars serving beer, the bustle of women in their long dresses and gentlemen in their tall hats, strolling the boulevards of Baron Haussmann nearby.

The sun was just setting. An orange hue cloaked the high row of low-cost houses that overlooked the station yard. The ties between the tracks took on a deep blue-black. I imagined my father squinting at the source of light, to distill it's color, before jabbing his brush into the paint.

The towers and bridges were were a severe inky jet, in profile. More bridges crossed the tracks here than at Gare Austerlitz. These are realms where steel industry pushed an iron artery deep into the heart of the city. Yet Gare du Nord has an intimate setting. The blue metro trains were rumbling periodically over their steel constructions. I felt the pulse of the city as never before, precisely because it was quiet and forlorn.

Then into the scene burst a new train, one I had never seen before. It was orange and white and had two levels, two rows of windows and was built very high, even higher than the double decker buses. It seemed like a row of modern houses on the move, as if Manet's old boulevard of freshly cut sandstone had suddenly taken wheels.

France-Aimee told me she was very much amused by my love of industrial places, train yards and factories. We walked back to the head of the platform arm in arm. I confessed to her that I had wanted to walk arm in arm often before. She even said she would have wanted it too. We talked about the other night when I left. I had dinner with her on the boat, and she said she had not wanted me to leave. I asked her if I could kiss her on the lips and she said 'No' but I kissed her anyway. A little kiss.

She was smiling. "I have lots to tell you," she said.

"Well start now."

"No, not now"

"Then when?"

She's planned a trip to the US in August. Perhaps because I have so few expectations I anticipate seeing her again so much. I enjoy her company. I liked the feeling of her little arm crooked in mine as we walked.

We said goodbye without much emotion, except we had to tear ourselves away a little. We were more entangled than we realized. It kind of spun us both around, and cracked smiles on both our faces when we parted. She went walking off.

Immediately, almost nervously, upon getting on the train, my lingering attraction for France-Aimee transferred itself to a young girl sitting opposite me in my compartment. There were six passengers, all strange to one another. Her legs touched both of mine, and a long period of eye contact ensued that had me convinced that a great erotic train journey had finally come to me. She is a ballerina for the Paris Opera, and is only twenty-one years old. Some quality arose from her that was so needing physical contact that we indulged staring into each other's eyes, smiling and letting our faces become drawn with emotion. But only an hour after the train left Paris it stopped in Longueau and she got off. We both agreed it was a shame. Her parents live in Amiens, which is nearby.

I slept for the rest of the train journey, two of the other passengers, both schoolteachers, one from Tallahassee Florida who teaches college students, the other Irish, who teaches French to young children, argued their points of view about television, and home entertainment. The American boasted of the television sets he had in the house, the video tape recorders and all the tapes he has of old movies, which he likes to be able to watch whenever he wants. The Irish fellow said, "Who needs all that stuff? Doesn't it weigh you down?"

Stevo was in London as promised. We shared some coffee and danish, then he ran off to a meeting but before he left he gave me the key to his New York apartment and made me take twenty pounds.

It was one of the strangest meetings with a person so close to me, my own nearest brother. Such a short piece of time. Yet our bond was still there. Brotherhood, in Victoria Terminal, London, just as if it was in our little hometown of Woodbury, Connecticut when we were children.

For the remainder of the morning I marveled at the strangeness of life, and tried to pry loose its secrets as I recognized old London haunts from the bus window on the way to Heathrow airport. It was all there, the work, the long hours, the misery cashing those difficult checks of Ismail's, the walks on the weekends up and through the maze of city streets. My nights with Anna and hours spent bringing her to climax, and then our beautiful breakfasts after in her Chelsea flat. And the feeling of liberation that inevitably resulted, when she 'threw me out'. It was her cycle. She was a tigress who bites afterwards.

I beheld the detail in the bricks that I recognized I wondered if they are the same bricks, my bricks, my London, the same place where I was at so many other times in my life. It seems miraculous that a place can be so well remembered, and so much of it, when seen after a long absence.

I watched the movie during the flight home without sound. I had ideas, took notes, and slept. When I awoke all the stewardesses stood around smiling at me. They were laughing and smiling, asking me over and over, did I want some lunch? This made me wonder what I had been saying during my sleep, or what I had been doing. So I asked them and they said "Nothing at all!". I must have looked different after awaking, like some confused kitten. I never could explain it. For the remainder of the flight they hardly paid me the same attention. One of the girls was quite pretty, a blonde, with a short streak of grey hair near her forehead.

New York water is softer, more difficult to rinse soap off with, has a silky feeling, but smells strongly of chlorine. It's true what they say, the milk here is thin and tasteless.

What a city! I noticed most of all, the skyscrapers, a population of glass and metal giants, an island cluttered with towers. What made these New Yorkers into a race of tower-builders? I saw on one side of the road that lead towards Manhattan, rows of gravestones, on the other, miles and miles of factory buildings, industrial suburbs.

Technological life, physical death. The forces of matter and mind meet in New York, glass and steel and flesh, all collided, governed by some unworldly idea, hatched beyond the vision of any human being.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

I meet the Producer in a Bar

"Pull up a seat. Get this man a drink"

"Waiter, make that a coffee, I want to be sober when moneybags here tells me what he's got."

"Get him the bourbon, a double. He'll need it."

"Jesus you are serious. Tell me."

"I need to see you with that drink in your hand first."

"Fine, fine. One day before shooting you pull a stunt like this. I was sleeping. I've got a four-thirty call."

"No you don't. Not any more."

"What the hell's happened? Didn't you get the advance from Tripod?"

"Oh we got it. . . and it's going back. All two mill. The show's not happening. You're going home tomorrow. We've already bought your ticket. Unless you want to pay for it yourself."

"WhaT THE F . . ?"

"Exactly. Now let me see if you can guess why this show's not going to happen."

"Marcy quit."

"Wrong. She's here. In her hotel sleeping, like you a moment ago. As soon as you walk out, I'm waking her up too."

"The state legislature revoked our permit?"

"Wrong again. In fact they gave us a financial incentive to shoot all the scenes here. They love us. But we can't use it."

"So are you going to tell me or what?"

"Sure thing. Crag quit, won't play the part. Says he looks too good. We've lost our villain."

"Find a new one."

"Can't. Villains are harder to find than heroes. You get the money, but they determine what gets shot and when. Without a baddie YOU are nothing more than this miserable napkin. Hell I have a hundred replacements for you, but none for Crag. Now beat it, and don't make me drink more than I have to."

"You know there's a cancellation fee for me. My agent will be in touch."

"We know we know. You good guys are always cheap. But the show depends on having someone who is BAD . . not on having someone who is GOOD. If you want to go where the future is I'd invest in a transplant of some bad skin, or a hat that looks foreign, or a nasty accent. Now beat it."

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The King of Room 179 is Dead




The King of Room 179, of the Super 8 Motel, in Jacksonville, Florida died suddenly last night, when the heel of a giant stepped on him in the middle of the night causing severe trauma to the upper thorax, and immediate loss of his internal organs. The King died swiftly. It is possible his Highness reared onto his hind quarters and was preparing to battle with his killer’s vulnerable heel, however the mismatch in size made the King’s chitinous pincers useless against the beach hardened epidermis of the killer.

Authorities were not notified of his death, though the King's absence will surely be noticed by hotel cleaning staff.

The King’s opponent, a giant of another order, smashed through the King’s skull, sending him to Hades to join all creatures of the night. Asked to comment on the contest, Miami Raider’s defensive-end Wade Williams simply smashed a potato chip with his fist, and later commented that the Astrodome itself would have had more of a chance against an incoming asteroid. The crackle of the King’s chitin shield, forged in the protein workshops by his underground Vulcan, was audible above the triumphant cries of his murderer.

We spoke briefly with the King’s killer as he bathed luxuriantly in the cheap fiberglass shower that he is accustomed to when traveling for battle. We saw with our own-eyes those titanic Roach-killing hands and feet. We shook with wonder and fear as he sung of his fallen enemies:

    “Some called him soldier, some called him thug.
      No warrior was ever bolder, than this vanquished waterbug.”

We asked the bug-killer why no warriors came to the aid of the King during his duel with the Titan:

    “From a nether city the King ascended
      And rose that his domain might be well defended.
      He took up arms, to protect his palace
      Alas to Death I consign him, without shame or malice.

Asked to comment further on what fight the King put up before dying the bug killer spoke again:

     “Leave now this hallowed place,
      Else your grave will soon be dug.
      Journalistic eyes have no grace,
      Beside this Waterbug.”

We perused the entrance to the palace, through a half inch hole in the floor. Beneath this entrance, we are told, laid a vast network of tunnels and rooms, exquisitely furnished.

The King was often in the habit of sunbathing beneath the florescent lamps on the cool tile floor outside his palace.

Famous for his colossal size the King often strolled the stucco walls and ceilings of his city. His subjects certainly miss him dearly. Many will remember him crawling over their bed in the evening, or across their toiletry accoutrements during the day.

The king preferred the hot musty climate of Room 179 whilst the air conditioning was turned off. Cold air made him sluggish, and probably contributed to his death. The visiting giant had left the AC on, and the king probably fell asleep amidst one of his mid-morning strolls. It was to be his last.

The hotel staff has yet to acknowledge the King’s demise though they will most certainly morn his passing, as he lies in state atop the watery surface of his beloved toilet bowl and favorite eating place.

Quipped the King-killer:

     "Circle there for Hades’ boat,
      In Loo of Styx, you're set afloat.
      Outside your fortress, beyond ramparts,
      No match for my force, or martial arts."

The Titan who executed the king by stepping on him with his bare feet, decided that a water bug would prefer interment in water. However as the King stubbornly refused to sink, and would not descend into the bowels of the Great Water, so the giant let his body remain in state, afloat so that others could take note of his passing.

Most giants are unaware that the King, and his insect kind, are largely hollow. They do not possess lungs. They respire through passageways in their exoskeletons called aveoli. This, combined with the lightweight chitin of their exoskeleton, makes them light in weight despite their large appearance.

The King left many offspring, some of whom no doubt will take up the continuing fight against other less noble Titans. The King fought in the insecticide wars of 1999, and lately the bug wars of 2008 conducted by the corporation Bug-Off, when the state conferred ownership of the King’s domain to a Mr. Vijay Patel. The King survived that battle. Most of the King’s relatives died in that conflagration.

The King’s friends during old age were Maria, a Cuban refugee of 72, who works by lying about her age, and Trish, a part-time worker who chain smokes, has no teeth, and cusses the management during her spare time. Trish smoked so much in Room 179 that she and the king became good friends, despite the fact that Room 179 was a non-smoking room.

It is not certain what sustained the King during his old age, but conjecture has it that his diet consisted of bits of fecal matter, tobacco residue, or the odd nasal hair tweezed from a visiting giant, as well as other such delectables left by loyal friends.

Room 179, was territory of issue to pre-paid guests of price-line dot com, who thus pay far less than the regular rate. The King may have been employed by the owner, Mr. Vijay Patel, to exact revenge upon these low-paying guests, as he was powerless to impose an additional tariff.

Aside from these duties of showing himself to his visitors, and causing them to vacate the premises, the King lived a leisurely life, attended by an underground staff of numerous queens who groomed him, and regurgitated refreshments of the King’s preference. He was noted for his profligate life style with the ladies and was said to be considering a TV series starring himself, modeled after that of the Titan of “My Antonio”, which played often on the TV in Room 179, thought it is believed the King has long outlived his own mother.

As far as the cigarette smoke exhaled by Trish, the King enjoyed it. Smoke has an inhibitory soporific effect on insects, particularly large ones. Native American giants used to prepare ground for burial, eating and sleeping, by burning a ‘smudge’ composed of white sage, cedar, or other aromatics. The slight decrease of the oxygen content in the air caused by smoke is enough to put most insects to sleep, or at very least in a daze. The size of insect growth is severely limited by this equation. Without moveable lungs with which to respire, insects cannot become again the giants they were during the great age of plants.

Despite this the King was a giant of his own kind, and will be remembered as such.
His passing leaves a rent in the dream-time of Jacksonville, as great as the loss of the Cummer live-oak, were it ever to be torn from its roots by a passing tornado.

There will be no service, only a memorial burned in the collective unconscious of all living creatures, whereupon this eulogy is inscribed:

    “Every cursed thing's a king, 
      Every appalling being a slave,
      In the universe you are seeing, 
      every crawling thing’s a knave!”

Monday, January 31, 2011

Three Farmers and a Dog

King, Judson's coon-hound King, eats loaves of Wonder bread, nothing else. I watched the old dog squatting in the manure. Judson says King is in excellent health, but when I went to the farm with him one afternoon I saw King hardly had enough energy to snap away flies.

Judson's son uses King to run down coons.

"Rest of the time he just sits around, doin' nothin'!"


-:-

Judson had his other leg amputated recently. In spite of this hardship, he turned down one hundred thousand dollars that was offered for the choicest seventy-five acres of his land. His sons all wait. When he dies, they will all be rich.

"They are whittling me away, they are." Judson uses a rope to pull himself up into his tractor where he goes to sit, although it no longer works. The house is failing. The tractor tires rot on rusted rims. King eats Wonder bread, and the last of Judson's cows hang, slaughtered and sold for meat.

"I can't imagine eating those cows of his," Dad told me.

Judson eats woodchucks, wild cats, squirrels, and geese that have decided to winter on the icy pond.

"Ever eat cat? It's terrible!" says Judson.

Who has time to wait for a diabetic alcoholic old farmer with no legs to die?

-:-

Frank Johnson, the Swede, who lives closer to us than the Judsons, remembers one of the times he went to New York.

It was before they had parking meters. He brought his father in to get him a wooden leg from a guy in New York who sold wooden legs and arms and feet from an office in a building on Broadway near 64th St.

Frank said it was incredibly easy to park the truck. No meter, you just parked and got out. He carried him upstairs and then they picked out a leg. The old man strapped it on and then they walked down to the car.

"Hell of a place to sell wooden legs," Frank said.

-:-

Later that same day I ran into Eddie Lizauskas, our first selectman, another dairyman left in the area. He was operating a backhoe, at the town dump.

"I've known Frank a long time," said Eddie. "He's always worked that farm alone. Frank's just a dumb old Swede."

Eddie returned to his work. All the roads in our town were maintained by his crews. His farm was a profit center. Two milk trucks a day roared up and left full. The milk check got bigger. The manure pile outside was as tall as a mountain. The piles of corn silage covered with black plastic weighted down by old tires were even higher.

Eddie ran for first selectman and won.



Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Voice


January 21, 1989

A loud voice spoke to me in my sleep. It woke me up, and interrupted my dreams. It spoke slowly and clearly, in a single burst of speech. Some of the words held double meanings but the sense, and the images they conveyed, were exceedingly strong:

"According to Lucifer, the Sun (the Son) represents the intellectual back of the world. It is upheld by him (created by Him) (merely) as a discipline, (though contrary to his own will, as a test). For him, Faith (his Face) is in the Earth."

I remember hearing the words as if spoken, other meanings hung like ragged evidence around a proclamation.

Here is a fragment of the dream prior to this event, which also woke me up:

I was working at a sort of desk job, in an office, on 6th Avenue in New York. Inside the boardroom, an important meeting was taking place. I was not allowed inside, but I greeted each of the men who arrived to attend it, and noticed them just before they went in and closed the door.

They seemed to be in advertising, and film, and business. In the middle of the meeting, my producer Ismail Merchant, materialized and announced that his contract was off, and because of this I could no longer work there. I was disappointed, but in some way Ismail had a claim on my position at the company, so I went around the place bowing politely, Japanese style.

A small Chinese man came out of a hallway and bowed to me, and took note of my dilemma. I asked him about my last paycheck. He told me it was being drawn up within the boardroom, and that I should look in there. Meanwhile, Ismail, as a force, and not as a material being, urged me to leave instantly, and not to bother about the money. I looked into the boardroom and saw the sun high in the sky. At that moment I heard the voice speak.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

How I am Married to a wonderful Woman

Sunday March 3, 1985     East 52nd Street, New York, NY

Friday all day I worked on the Mott Street apartment, rebuilding the falling masonry below my windows. Clouds of mortar mix and plaster once again settled all over everything, my papers, my bedclothes. Late in the day, as if some crisis were already in the brew, I went down the fire escape with a broom to sweep off Joe Terranova's landing, which had become covered with falling bits of mortar. He was after all, super of the building.

As I descended the steeply pitched staircase, my left leg fell through a hole where a step in the metal ironwork was missing. My shin slammed against the hard iron of the step below and I pitched the rest of the way down the scaffold to his landing, nearly breaking my neck. I bruised my shoulder and cut my hands which I put in front of me. Within seconds my leg was swollen to an awful size.

The whole experience is a repeat, almost exactly, of what happened to me nine years ago while I was a senior at Yale. There, I had succumbed to my youthful fantasy of invincibility one evening, and lept, on purpose, down one and a half flights of marble steps, so as not to wait behind a slow moving crowd that was exiting a theater. At that time I did not break my leg either, but I limped home. It swelled, and became septic. At around the same time, my love life changed. A young classmate named Donna, invited me to recuperate at her house in Greenwich. I still bless her for her generosity. Months later I was left with a hell of a scar at the front of my shin.

All this flashed before me.

I managed to get the leg under cold water to contain the swelling, showered quickly, to make myself somewhat presentable, changed, then in a bizarre feat of concentration, repaired the telephone which hadn't been working all day.

I contemplated trying to dress the wound myself. At one point I wrote a note to Ami, very clear-headed, telling her how I had gone to the hospital, then locked the apartment and went out onto the street. No cabs were to be had. The time when Ami would leave the Journal and head up here to Ruth's apartment was soon approaching. I decided to go back up, and place the call. I even washed some clothes. Finally I called her at work, she said was leaving work immediately and to stay put.

When she arrived we took first a bus then a cab to St. Vincent's Hospital Emergency Room. Between the time of the accident, and Ami's arrival, I had gone into serious shock. I know this now because the initial pain of the accident, while excruciating, quickly became almost painless, and I was doing non-sensical thing like getting dressed without covering the wound, and repairing telephones.

They didn't keep me waiting long at the hospital. The emergency room doctors were interns, brand-new, and suited green straight out of medical school. They were students, my age. The young woman that tended to me cleaned my wound with an iodine sponge, piled it high with an icepack, then sent me downstairs for some X-rays. Most of the time at the hospital was spent waiting, for X-rays, or for someone else to check things out. Later, the same intern showed me the x-ray photographs, all the bones were fine and okay. Before bandaging me up she attempted to clean my wound again, then started picking at it with her fingers! I suggested that she get another iodine sponge and clean it out again, not that I should win any awards for self-care. Later I saw her go to work on a tiny cut at the back of a man's head with a suture kit and gloves, a clean shallow cut, with no swelling underneath. Yet she picked at my enormous contusion, a veritable golf-ball sized blood clot, with poor circulation, with her fingers!

I began to think that some of the most elementary lessons in medicine might not be getting through to today's students. Perhaps the ideas of Louis Pasteur are not being transmitted in the same way as they used to. Perhaps the attraction these day is all drama and revolutionary the operating room theater, with all it's lights and mythos. Artificial hearts, hip replacements, bone-marrow transplants, etc. What will all the advanced technology of medicine be worth if the ideas of Pasteur, protecting the body from infection, or the simple rules of nutrition passed generation to generation, are forgotten?

Myths blind. They take over, and blot out memory. They rule, and so they rule us.

I spent all day yesterday here at Ruth Jhabvala's apartment with Ami, my feet up on the end of the couch. Ami made a trip out to buy more gauze bandages, and adhesive tape, and iodine to keep the wound clean. She also went to my Mott St. apartment and picked up an extra shirt, jeans, and my typewriter, albeit, covered with cement dust.

Monday March 4, 1985                                                   East 52nd Street, New York, NY

Leg much better, swelling is down, though it still looks ugly. Black and blue spots of blood clot turning yellow below the surface of unbroken skin. The wound itself is starting to close over. I'm afraid I'll have a larger scar.

Yesterday, all day, with Ami, here. Bright sunlight flooded into the windows and the songs of all types of birds, and a mourning dove which I never imagined lived in the city. We opened the doors onto Ruth's little balcony and put the mattress in front where all the sun would stream on top of us and lay there and made love, and slept for hours on end. Our conversations are fuller. We talk about everything, and without being conscious of it, as we were for so long a time. She told me a little story how, when as a little school girl in Ahmedabad, she went on a field trip with her school, and got a load of lice in her hair. She was so embarrassed and felt so defiled that she wouldn't step through the garden gate when she got home. She stood outside on the street and shouted and cried for her mother. I thought it was fascinating, that caste, and notions of cleanliness were so strong even in her family, which is so separated from those ideas, that a child feels contaminated and doesn't want to bring disease into the home. In other cultures, Japan particularly, dishonor was the dreaded contamination. A clan member who conducted himself dishonorably, brought that dishonor to the whole clan and family. Most often he preferred to excommunicate himself rather than return home, or if he was a samurai he purified his blood and name through ritual seppuku. As it turned out Ami's mother came running out and brought Ami inside, and made a shampoo of a special soap mixed with kerosine, and washed her hair in it.

In the spring, at her school, everyone gathered on a plot of empty barren ground, and planted a seedling tree. The youngest child in the school was made "Spring King" or "Spring Queen", and wore a special costume. All the children wore traditional dress for this occasion.

There was dancing, games, and music.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Mexico City Fragments

Mexico City, Thursday February 25, 1993

It is no wonder that the myth of the Northerner should be so structured around technology, and that of the Southern inhabitant around agriculture. Metals, atoms, molecules, subatomic particles, fuel and energy, these are the Gods of the North. The human being of the South worships corn, the sun, the moon, tides, the soil, and rain. The Northerner with his weapons, and computers, becomes warlike, and uses technology to dominate, but in domination, ends up dissipating his warlike force. The masculine energy of technological cultures is expended, and absorbed by the earth. The former is weakened, and retreats, absorbed into the womb of more fertile zones. It feels as if the earth itself divides energy, like a charge between two poles, a magnetic field to distribute behavior amongst its children.

-:-

[a circular on a bulletin board at the School of Agriculture, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México]

Amaranth - Spanish amarato used in soups, cereals, crepes, tostadas, tortillas. Pueblos in the U.S. used amaranth as a dye. Red pigments used in ritual ceremonies by the Zuni, and the Hopi, Rio Bravo indigenas. Relative biological value of the protein of different foodstuffs:

Maize/Corn 44
Trigo 60
Soya/Soybean 68
Cows Milk 72
Amaranth 75

Amaranth contains between 14.5 and 16.0 percent protein.

-:-


Mexico City, Saturday February 27, 1993

An artist lives in Hell, but must have known Heaven, and is thus attempting to work his way back again. He seeks to re-achieve what he has lost, through artistry and inspiration. Heaven slams him down, again and again, each time he is furnished with a taste of love-lost, and so renewed goes back to work to regain it.

I met three young girls dressed in red uniforms yesterday in the zócalo. They were busy handing out leaflets promoting the sale of some leather goods, that was going on at one of the nearby hotels. One of the girls spoke English fairly well, so I offered to buy them all a coffee after work.

When four o'clock rolled around, and I had finished with all my touring and exploring of the ancient pyramids just off the corner of the cathedral, I met them as we had arranged. We walked to a lunchtime spot that had turned its tables to an end of the day trade, tea (for foreigners), coffee, and donuts.

Marisol, the one who spoke English, brought a friend, a vivacious girl with red hair, and a third woman, who was herself the beauty of the threesome, pale thin and quiet, and confused by all this foreign language. Her name was Erica.

Jennifer, the one that spoke the best English, needed to go to the market to exchange some shoes that she had bought the previous day. We stood around in a street crowded with stalls, and people buying everything, dish wares, tacos, and clothes, while Jennifer fitted and tugged at different styles for her pudgy little feet.

Erika, turned suddenly, and blurted out that she’d gotten a phone-call from her grandmother. Her father had died. I didn’t know how to properly say I was sorry in Spanish, for something big like this. I looked on, as the girls exchanged hugs. Marisol looked sad and perplexed.

They all agreed to accompany me to Coyoacán, a ways south of the city center.

There we sat at a cafe table. Each of the girls politely ordered two tacos and a soda and we exchanged all sorts of banal Spanish and English with simplistic bits of "how do you say . . . " mixed in with a lot of giggles. Erika went to the ladies room and was gone a very long time. She returned pale and shaking, and began to cry. The others told me she lived alone with her grandmother.

When we reached the Metro, Jennifer and Marisol said good-night, and we made the usual silly exchange of telephone numbers. I stayed with Erika to walk around Coyoacán a little bit.

The friend that was supposed to take her home never showed up. We talked for about three hours, sitting on an embankment, overlooking the busy avenues. She helped me translate some of the tougher bits of an old Aztec poem that I had gathered at the museum, and she told me a bit of her life story:

Her name is Erika Lancaster, her mother is American, and her father Mexican. She has taken her mother's English name, but both parents deserted her when she was young, first her mother, then her father, but not after he had molested her a great deal. She showed me scars, knife wounds, where he had cut her arms in different places. I was horrified, but was also caught in a suspicious state of disbelief, as if she were lying about something. Perhaps she had done this to herself.

I noticed she was thin, and extremely fragile in build. I sensed anger, fear, dependence and a very complicated love-hatred feeling about men. Her cute actress’s face froze into a grimace as she told me all this. It made her cold and she started to shake. She had lightweight sweater which she pulled out of her purse and put on.

She told me her abuela, her grandmother, had become her mother, and how this woman was everything to her. She would not leave Mexico, even though she had a U.S. passport, as long as her grandmother lived. By the end of the evening, because she had shared so much about her life, she was much attached, and hung off my arm like we were like father and daughter, or husband and wife, or lovers, but really we were just strangers.

We walked past Frida Kahlo’s house. The streets were dark, the purple-blue walls where Frida made so many great works of art, were a black mass of vines. In another life, at another time, Erika might have even been a friend of Frida's. All I have now are vague recollections of things she said, her Spanish was very hard for me to understand. All else was perfectly clear, as clear as one of Frida's paintings.

The heat from her arm, I understood. We were warm-blooded creatures, walking through a dark city at night.

We really didn’t look at each other much. At  another time I might have tried to give her a kiss.

I wondered what her father's death was doing to her. Did it make her feel guilty? She’s now alone, dealing with what he did, responsible for it in some way. Maybe she cut herself, not him, because of things at home, though he may have driven her to it, and maybe now she lies about her scars to hide that. I felt guilty myself for thinking this way. Everywhere there was pain, over everything like the sky. Yet strength was there. I felt a load of it, hanging like a warm precious parcel from my arm.

We scrambled over the hill and down the bank, leaving the cool of Coyoacán for the glare of highways and subway overpasses, that reverberated a dull city roar from vehicles we couldn't see.

She made me promise to call her. Grasping my hand, she led me like a child to the proper train. I wondered what she would do after this. She seemed desperate to place me on the right line, headed for the center of the city.

There was this closing moment. Something electric happened. We embraced but it could have been done at a distance of a mile. All that was needed was some signal, some synchronous pulse to time it. A surge of electricity passed. It was not erotic, but something else, much deeper, much more powerful. I felt like it picked me up and set me down. Right after, she was twenty feet away and moving through the platform crowd and I was sitting in the train and the doors were closing.

I did call, and got her once. In faltering Spanish we arranged to meet at a museum. She never showed. I thought I perhaps had got the day wrong.

Some weeks later while I was off exploring the mountains around Oaxaca, she deposited a note at my hotel in Mexico city, entreating me to get in touch, and apologized for not meeting me at the museum.

I called, spoke briefly with her grandmother, but with one day left in Mexico, was unable to phone again.


. . .

I’m listening to a man who runs a small vegetarian restaurant at the edge of the zócalo where I've just eaten lunch.

Vegetables are plentiful here, but vegetarian food, cooked away from the presence of meat, isn't common in Mexico. One would imagine a greater demand, yet the place is quite empty. The owner is good-natured enough. He has a big mustache, just like the waiters in the places that serve big steaks.

I'm drinking a cup of coffee, and writing down what he says. It sounds like a poem:

I worked for a family down by San Angel,
Cared for their gardens I watered their trees.
Every so often I chipped down some of the iron,
Put on red lead and then a coat of black paint
I made good work.
Pointed up some of the stones.
Kept the bougainvillea under control,
Tightened the wires on the TV aerial.
And fixed whatever it was that broke.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Dad

Thursday December 6, 1995 - The mad business grows. My brother Steve, a sales machine, keeps bringing in the search work, we are doubling our size every six months. First taste of success today, I managed to sublet part of the new space at 565 5th Avenue. Construction has started there, I attend on Tuesday mornings coffee meetings with the builders and architect. A variety of sweet rolls sit on top of a banged and dented Knack Box. On one side of the vast open space a contractor's draughtsman in overalls sketches layouts and designs for the HVAC (High Volume Air Conditioning) on an large slanted worktable. Steve B and I survey the red and blue lines chalked onto the floor and ceiling facing each other in textured perfection, the broad open views down 5th Avenue to the Empire State Building, West towards 6th Avenue, East to the Pan Am and buildings around Grand Central. The views are silent and still and magnificent, the architecture at this height concealing all traces of the life form that created this. Like a magnificent coral reef the huge city is built by the tiniest animals, whose lives are integrally entwined with its architecture. We are builders. Like coral, we exist by building societies much larger than our individual selves. Perhaps this is the reason that the lives of tigers so fascinate us; they are by contrast, creatures that do not build, who live alone, whose contact with its own kind is minimal.

Young Derek A, our broker, has made another bid to become part of Highland. After a disastrous meeting with Jim P, (Jim dismissed him as a ‘lightweight’), Derek calls with a valuable piece of information. The entire trading department at Republic National Bank has walked out to join Credit Suisse. I inform Joe H and Georges H of this, Joe hops on it. Next thing I know Derek is at Highland, sitting in Jane E's desk, gathering the facts. He has pointed out a potentially very big fish. As I told him later, someone has to get that fish to bite, and then land it.

Chris M calls. We catch up. He’s still working at the AIDS center on Rivington Street, says a lot of people are dying now. A hundred and fifty since August. They come to the center, then they get sicker, then they die.

Have just discovered “Wired” magazine, amazed that I had not contacted its good journalism before this time. Insights into business, information age development. It very much is a networked magazine, a kind of information center.

I have noticed, merely by virtue of my being in charge of data and computing at Highland, that people report to me with interesting tidbits of information. As if all the wires that feed back to the servers in my little office, also fed to the great world outside, so socially I am at a data hub. I am tickled by the looks of surprise Stevo and his partners give me when I pass along one of these little goodies for them to make money with. They wonder “how did he get this ?”

Late afternoon meetings at dePolo Dunbar with Steve Brooks and Joe Lee. We’re on furniture selection now, but today we rushed through a change on the sublet space making it much better. The people from D'accord are renting it and are paying for the changes.

December 11, 1995 - Monday, weary after New York day at the office, the more difficult because of what happened on Saturday.




Friday December 9, 1995 - Mom calls Highland. She is cool, asks where Stevo is, I tell her he’s in a meeting, “How are you," I ask, how is Dad. “He’s terrible Markie”, then overcome, she sobs out “You better come home quickly your Dad is hanging on. He wanted Jock Lorrison to put him to sleep yesterday, but I told him to hang on till his kids got home.” She tells me on Thursday he felt energetic and loaded the car with junk from the garage. At night he ran a fever, had trouble breathing. Yesterday he could not get out of bed. “We’re loosing him Markie. You better hurry.”

Stevo and I rush to the limousine. Outside the Park Avenue building it is cold. Inside the car, I try to work on the computer. It is of no use, a pointless distraction. Stevo begins to talk about his plans for growing the business. Big money talk. That's his defense. I respond with mine, of kind, cold expressions. There are all types of mergers and acquisitions. What are we doing? I wonder.

Why can’t I write this?

Cottage Street is empty when I reach home, Ami and the children arrive a few minutes later. I quickly surrender my suit, Ami arranges for Maureen to look after the kids. I get the car from the garage, and after a few brief errands, (a Fedex of the Highland Payroll to Fidelity Investments, getting gas, etc.) we are on our way towards Woodbury.

This is the dying road. Twice before, for my grandfather, and grandmother, we have navigated these turns because one of our family was dying. I remember speeding in the car towards my grandfather's house the day he died. I lost control and spun up onto a bank. It was like one of those runaway truck ramps, a heaven-sent bit of landscaping that saved me. Today I wasn't driving.

At the house we dashed out of the car and across the lawn. The back door is open, but no one is downstairs. I climb the back stairs to a house that seems empty. How many times one does certain things, yet we usually have only one memory of it.

Jeff and Barbie, and Mom and Dad were all in Dad’s room. His breathing is heavy and regular and loud, and sounds like the regular wheezing of a machine. There is a machine too administering oxygen with a purring and gasping of its own through a tube tied about his bald head, and stuck into his nose.

“Marko! Stevo!” he gasps. “You look great. You look successful!”

“Where did you get that coat?”

“Be kind to the ones that love you, Marko. By the way Marko, I want you to take that ripoff of Picasso that I did and paint over it.”

I promise him I’ll do that, but that I’ll leave something of his underneath.

“Yes but you must sign it with your name Marko!”

“No Dad, its a collaborative effort”.

“And would you finish painting in that picture of Kon’s. I promised him I’d do it but just don’t think I going to get around to it. Would you mind?”

Over the next few hours he musters enough strength to have words with each of his children.

His breathing becomes tired and strained. He is drenched in sweat. His body is running full tilt to hold itself. He begs for morphine. We give it to him in small doses. Jock Lorrison, his doctor and neighbor arrives with more morphine and advice on how to administer a dose that will make death less painful. Andrew and I work out the milligrams per liter.

By evening he has no strength for talking. He has pulled into himself, into the cold desperate clammy self of the mind trying to hold its own against the onslaught of failing body, a loyal body of cells, now an army in disarray. The knight withdraws to his castle, the drawbridge is up, cut off from the world about, he abandons his horses, his armor, his arms, awaiting the outcome of the siege.

“Are you thinking Dad”, I ask him.

He nods.

“Good thoughts?”

He nods again.

I want to ask him if he is afraid, but I can tell that he is in spite of everything and so I don’t make him say it.

His hand is alternately warm and cold.

We cook a meal, and eat it, with wine, in bizarre celebration, downstairs with the fire burning. How hard it is hard to separate these moments from the other ones like it. Andrew occasionally laughs his explosive laugh. Barbie busies herself in the kitchen with the dishes and the wine and the deserts. It is a flawless production. All Mom’s family meals were like that, and they became more so over time.

I find myself wondering if it is appropriate to celebrate like this, to drink wine, or eat ham, and rich deserts. The living must go on. So I eat, like the others, and it tastes good.

We take turns, in shifts, by his side. Not much talking now, occasionally Mom asks if he needs anything. Then amazingly he wants to shit. Chuckles and sighs of relief. The old guy has energy still. Jeff and Mom help him out of his bed, “Everyone else out of the room, he’s embarrassed.”

But the old body can’t eliminate its poisons. He strains and heaves, and falls in exhaustion to the sheets. Mom asks Andy and I to direct her in giving a generous dose of morphine.

But we never had to administer the two syringes full that Doc Lorrison said would spare him the ultimate misery. Two cc’s and he is off into peaceful sleep breathing in a relaxed manner.

It is getting late, we divide up rooms and go to our beds. Ami and I climb into Andrew’s boyhood bed, and fall quickly asleep. It feels like Christmas night, such nights when all of a family gather into a small house and await a miracle. Steve and Jody bed down in Mom and Dad’s room, Jeff and Jennifer sleep in Barb’s old Bed, Punta and Dave make their digs on the living room floor. Mom decides to sleep with Dad. She climbs in the far side of his bed facing his back. He will not roll over much tonight.

Soon all the lights are out, and the only sounds are those of the house creaking and the world outside. Cars pass and their headlights sweep the white plaster. Everywhere there is an illusion of Christmas, of Santa Clause about to appear somewhere, or to hang a heavy stocking on the hammered metal latch of my door.

Such a night one wanted a God to appear, and to manifest himself in a ray of light, to shine out of the dark branches and snow and cold gloom of the frozen wintered earth, and enter the house of beings and give himself. I needed to remind myself, this night is different. Dad will probably die tonight I told myself.

By morning he was not dead at all.

“How is he”, I asked.

“He’s fine. He’s resting.” Mom whispered.

Jennifer had been downstairs making a pot coffee and had brought cup of it up to Mom. She propped herself in the bed, as she might of at any time. “Isn’t he beautiful”. She reminded me of her descriptions of a sleeping infant, those newborns whose face is ageless, and in the image of its creator, and bears no trace of human ways or cares. Mom was always calling attention to the complexions of the newborn infants. It was cliche yes, but true. Dad’s face was a pale and beautiful white.

Somehow the thought occurred that he might be recovering, that the fever was gone, and the hemorrhages in his lungs closed over. If he was resting he might rise up again and regain his health.

I observed his breathing, which was shallow, and took his pulse which was very weak but regular. His skin though was too cool. I realized there wasn’t long. No heat in the body, pale the skin, the forces of life retreat to a core. His face is pale but calm, but his skin does seem smoother more childlike. He is still there, gently, but barely.

I sat with him and held his hand and asked him a few questions. He was completely unconscious and unresponsive. Mom said something like “He’s resting now, ever so peacefully.” She got up and covered him over, and excused herself, and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

Dad took a short staggered breath then let out barely audible sigh. At first I thought nothing, but no breaths followed.

Ami was behind me. “Call Mom” I shouted. “He’s gone”.

Everyone gathered. Mom uttered a wail, a real cry of anguish. It was the one time I have heard my mother make an emotional sound that did not seem for effect. It was up from the young and early part of her, it felt to be from the heart of a teenage bride deprived of a young husband, the wail of a child for a downed father, of an old woman for her son. It was the kind of wail a Gypsy woman makes when her man has died, not the kind of sound I expected my mother to make.

Her arms went out to Dad, flailing, pleading, clawing, trying to draw him back. It was an instinctive movement, one that is only seen in bereavement. The elbows go apart and raise up, the wrists go out and fingers went straight like strings swept by a fierce wind. She seemed to be wanting to claw him back, as if she were losing grip of him off the deck of ship. There was a terrible row of noises, a clenching and wailing in everyone’s throat. Dad’s breath had indeed stopped.

We stood over Dad. I had the idea his being had gone above us and was looking down, so I turned and looked up at the ceiling. I did not see him, but I did see his perspective of things, a round of heads bent over a yellowed lifeless body, and one head turned up to the sky, fiercely making eye contact with a spirit on the way to being dispersed. I had the impression that Dad commented on this observation, and saw it almost as if it were a painting by Balthus. Some of us cried. Eventually there was nothing to do but leave the room. We drank coffee, ate some breakfast.

Occasionally I would run back upstairs.

We undressed him, washed him off, and put him in a clean nightshirt and turned him over so he lay on his back. His face had begun to turn yellowish, his skin was puffed, in death he was nearly unrecognizable.

I went to the studio and got some of his paper and pencils and went back and did two sketches of him. They were deathlike in appearance, that is they resembled their subject, but their subject did resemble my father at all. I inscribed them both and later gave one to my mother.

I drove Ami home to New Haven, and returned, on snowy roads. Near the intersection in Woodbury I braked and the car would not stop. It slid on the slick snow and made a slow lazy three hundred and sixty degree spin, narrowly missing another vehicle.

I returned to Woodbury shortly before two. At two-o'clock promptly two men and a woman from Munson Funeral home showed up in a black four-wheel drive vehicle. The woman had some paperwork for Mom to sign, and she wanted a check down payment as well. The two men, one young the other swarthy and appeared to be in his late forties, brought upstairs a red vinyl body bag supported by two poles. Stevo and Jeff helped them transfer Dad’s body to the bag. It required a lot of strength. At one point the nightshirt and the towel covering Dad’s genitals came off. Jeffrey hurriedly covered them over. It all would be ashes soon enough. That swollen thing of his, so large in death, always modest when we saw it while he was swimming. The thing that sowed each of us. Jeff bent over Dad and kissed him, a little like the prince who awakes sleeping Beauty. “Goodbye Dado” he said. It was silly but touching, and I respected Jeff for it. It was cliche, all of it was cliche, because cliches are all any of us has to deal with experiences like this that we are familiar with, but not first hand.

It took all of Steve and Jeff and the two of them from the funeral home to carry Dad downstairs. I watched from a distance, as if guiding by looking on. It was incredible -the struggle he seemed to give merely by being of sheer weight - they nearly lost him and fell down the front stairs. Once clear of the twists and turns around the front hall and dining room, they shouldered him through the kitchen and out the back door.

Barbie stood on the back steps as his vinyl wrapped body went down the walk. The exertions of Steve and Jeff had overcome their grief temporarily. Barbie uttered a muffled cry, like something repressed and caged, angry, “Goodbye Dado you miserable fuck-up,”. She sobbed, then wheeled and turned into the house. I heard her run up to her room.

The black four wheel drive vehicle slipped away. I heard the doors slam. Then I gazed out over the cornfields and saw it come into view again as it headed down Weekeepeemee Road. It braked at one point and the lights shone red. The sky was cloudy. The river was dark.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

White Shoes for a Cherokee Bride


I prayed for Rainbow in Buffalo Heart’s sweat lodge. He was a healer, and she needed healing. Buffalo Heart blew his flute, and I heard the shrill of it at the base of my neck. I was sure Rainbow heard it too.

Rainbow went back to Tulsa around the time her kid cousin killed herself with a heroine overdose. It had been a dark year. Rainbow called a few times and told me the Rainbow energy was just not what it used to be. “It’s all drugs and alcohol and unemployment,” she said. ”Who wants to live?” She asked me to use the company phone to conference a free call with her friend Eva in Germany, but that had not been possible, and I was feeling bad about that.

So when I returned from the weekend with Buffalo Heart, I called Rainbow’s new number. Incredibly, she answered.

“RBG this is MWP. Hey are you coming to New York?”

“Planning on it. Planning on it. Hey can you do me a favor?”

“What is it Darling?” I like calling Rainbow Darling, more importantly she likes it. She knows I love her, and that it’s up to her to direct those feelings of mine. It’s Father, with a bit of Eros thrown in. She likes the fact I’m still attracted to her.

“I need you to go to Canal Street to buy some white shoes. They’re the open ended flip flops made out of white netting with little white flowers attached to the front. I need a size eleven.”

“Size eleven, that’s enormous!”

“I told you this is the land of giants. They’re for a wedding.”

“Are they for you?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t wear an eleven, you should know that by now. They’re for the bride. I need them here in Tulsa by Friday. Can you do it?”

“I’ll try Darling. I’ll try”

I took the N train into Manhattan and got off at Canal. The weekend had set my head on fire. It felt like white light was pouring out of my forehead and neck. I wondered if I was sick. Bits of poison ivy began to break through at my ankles and wrists. The air was hot and rank and humid. It had been raining solidly for three days. Today the sun was trying to poke through but everything was wet.

I thought about Buffalo Heart’s last email. “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Thinking about all this gave me a headache. Clearly there was a link between events. Why was he being so difficult?

Buffalo Heart was part Cherokee by birth. Now two days later this assignment comes to go find some shoes for a Cherokee lady I don’t even know, from Rainbow, a Cherokee lady that I know well and love like my own family. The whole thing was cryptic.

I had just met Buffalo Heart over the weekend. He was running a sweat lodge at the festival in Pennsylvania. They had the lodge set up next to a beautiful piece of the river. It was cold water, that ran in pools, and on the other side were some high rocks, and hemlocks growing out of them.

Buffalo Heart grew up in Virginia, where a lot of the Cherokee had ended up after the Trail of Tears. He had Cherokee blood in him, he said, but really he was just a wild kid, from a not-so-good part of town, stealing stuff, and taxing everyone's patience. "I was in trouble, headed for worse trouble," he said.

He met a healer, an old Hopi man, who healed in various ways, one of them was by running sweat lodges.

It was the full ritual. A sacred sequence, walking around the fire, offerings made, tobacco smoked out through the pores by the steam of hot rocks thrown into the lodge. A swim in cold water between sweats. You did it four times. Inside, where it was dark, everyone sat in a circle looking at the large glowing stones tossed in by the assistant from the outside. We sang songs. Buffalo Heart and his helper sang songs themselves.

This was what he learned from the old man, indeed he was showing me now. The same sequence. The new-agers circled, listening as he blew his flute, and asked everyone to say a blessing.

The first time he sweated, the old shaman loaded a "pipe the size of a gourd, packed it with massive amounts of his most powerful tobacco, and other herbs, and lit it with a piece of burning branch from the fire, and handed to him with the command, "Inhale! Deeply!".

This he did, and apparently his heart raced like a crazed animal. Buffalo Heart said that if was anyone else they probably would have died. Buffalo Heart was a very big kid. The old guy knew what he was doing and Buffalo Heart was healed after that first sweat. He came to his senses about his own life. He came out and spent a very brief period of time learning from the old man, until, one evening at a tribal meeting, the old fellow stood up, said "This is Buffalo Heart, he's your healer now," and then dropped dead.

I think Buffalo Heart said that was the first time he ever heard his new name. Since then he's been doing sweat lodges all over the country. He practices a kind of healing that is very gentle, but very powerful, talking, observing, listening, encouraging.

I don’t look for causes. I’d been sent to listen for shoes. The river swims the fish, as much as the fish swims the river. Of course any fish with his ears on can hear a pebble thrown in the water.  I wasn’t hearing anything.

I walked Canal Street, up and down. One dealer had something like what Rainbow had described. But they were pink. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was looking for white half shoes with flowers on them. Aren’t more lady's shoes white than any other color? She’d already bought pairs for all the bridesmaids. They had to match. I had to do this by Friday. Couldn’t they just be nice white shoes? This was nuts. I was not qualified to do this task. I’ve never bought a gal shoes in my life, and now they have to match five other pairs perfectly and be there in less than thirty-six hours.

I was out of energy. I plopped down at a Chinese noodle house and ordered dumpling noodle soup. I flipped open my Blackberry and called Rainbow.

“RBG, I’m not having huge luck here. Need to get some direction.”

“I’m sure they’re there” she said. “Try the side street down from the Post Office.”

I ate the dumplings, then munched the bok-choy. There were only two other people in the place, as it was still way before lunch.

‘Imagine those shoes’ I told myself. ‘See them and they will exist.’

They could be anything, molded plastic, uni-body construction, sewn, stapled. What about the heels? Rainbow said nothing about the heels. She’d said they were made of netting? What kind of netting? Who makes shoes of netting?

The Chinese might. I poured in the dumpling sauce, then ate the noodles and last of all drank the liquid.

Buffalo Heart told me about his past learning from the old man, while he mixed me a big smoke. He laid rows of tobacco, and other herbs on top of each other. The first pile, about two inches wide and six inches long, was tobacco, then more tobaccos, then bearberry, and after that coltsfoot,  mugwort. The result was a small pyramid of plants of different colors - this helped him get the proportions right - it was also beautiful to watch.

"How many herbs do you mix in?"

"Depends what I feel like, what time of year it is. Who else is smoking."

He tamped the mixture into the end of his pipe, and handed it to me. He lit and I smoked.

The tobacco kicked like a mule. I felt my heart going nuts. I couldn't wait to get into the lodge to sweat.

"The tobacco carries out the poison. You'll be clean."

The sun was still trying to make it through. I saw how the street was divided into zones. Technology stores took the west. Stereo and Fan dealers the north. All the shoes seemed to be on the south side. The sound of RBG’s voice emanated from the hue and cry of the street. It led me to a small Asian shop oddly in the opposite direction of where she’d indicated, whose wares, mostly pocketbooks, gray goods, perfumes and cheap sandals, festooned the street from shelves and hangers.

From a distance I saw the little white half shoes of netting with flowers on the front. The shoes immediately took the place of Rainbow’s description. Reality and description literally flip-flopped. They were perfect for a well-dressed young lady. On anyone else they’d look gaudy, but on a bride in white they’d be perfect.

“Do you have these in a woman’s eleven?” I asked.

“I do,” said the man, and placed a larger set in my hands. “Three dollars.”

What shoes are three dollars anymore? It doesn’t matter. They only had to last a few hours.

Who was the girl getting married in three dollar sandals I wondered? I was already in love.

A Cherokee woman wearing a woman’s eleven probably was tall, with dark hair. I saw her with radiant skin. I imagined high cheekbones, a happy expression. I imagined her dress, all chiffon, and lace and though not expensive, exquisitely fitted to her figure, and to those of her friends. I imagined Rainbow insisting that in the hot weather only the simplest shoes were needed. They’d gone to Tulsa and bought pairs for all the girls, except the bride, she had feet that were too large. Where could she get a size eleven?

Elated and feeling the need to get this simple pair of shoes to Tulsa in the fastest way possible I walked up Broadway looking for a Federal Express. “There’s one at Kinko’s near Astor Place,” said a nice black lady at a bank on Broadway.

I thought of other things I could do. Perhaps I should get green and red markers and write or draw something on the inside of the sandals, best wishes to the bride and groom. A poem would be better but I didn’t have time. That kind of embellishment has to be thought out

Stay with the shoes. Stay with the shoes. Make sure they get there.

“Better check the zip code” I said to the lady behind the counter. The shoes fit nicely in a FedEx Pak, which was a little more expensive than a FedEx Letter. Thirty-seven bucks to send a pair of sandals halfway across the country.

The message was in the doing, in the finding, and getting to Tulsa in time for the wedding.

“You’re right there is an error.” The lady at the counter said. “She’s given you a nine, it should be a seven.”

”Did you check it against the address?”

‘Yes’ said the teller. ‘Everything else is right. The first number should be a seven.“

“Fine,” I said. “Change it on the ticket then. Thank you”

Getting through to someone is these days is the same as buying shoes.
It’s about sevens and nines and elevens. How did Buffalo Heart know? He blew his flute and something happened.

Rainbow was worrying about how the bride would look. Caring takes energy. Cooperation. Rainbow was making this wedding happen, I could tell.

I fantasized about the bride. Perhaps she’d be the kind of woman I’d like to marry. I’m already married but I was marrying her in my mind. She was someone I didn’t know, yet I could love her too? She was my wife, my daughter, my lover, my friend. She might be gorgeous, she might be homely.

What mattered was that she found happiness. That someone loved her.

I stopped at Starbucks for a cold coffee. Rainbow would call soon. “Mark, the zip is wrong, It’s 71495.”

“I caught it Rainbow. The shoes are on their way. Who’s the bride?”

“Do you remember Sandra? Her older brother is getting married. She’s a nurse. They were at the funeral.”

I thought of Rainbow’s cousin Winter, the one who overdosed. She was just a teenage kid. Rainbow flew back to Tulsa around the same time, but never did go to the service - she was having enough of a time just hanging on.

I remember Rainbow’s depression after it happened. She said she felt like taking heroine too. I shuddered when I thought of it.

“The wedding’s tomorrow. It’s by a lake. There’s a house there with sculptures and a beautiful beach. Gotta go. Thank you, thank you!”

I sipped my iced coffee. The shoes were needed. Shoes to Tulsa.

Suddenly I was sitting alone with the girl getting married. What was her name? I’ll have to kiss the bride, and thank her.

It was a lovely wedding.

Featured Post

Guide to Chaga Harvesting and Preparation

I've already posted on the positive benefits of Chaga for the health. Other sites on the web go into detail about this bounty of th...

Search This Blog