gosh whatwith all the excitement and finals and everything it sure is hard to fill those teacher/class surveys out with any kind of insight or perspective on how you might improve things next time you’re faced with another batch of utterly burnt out seniors but I was the one who gave you all a’s. your grading system is bewilderingly inconsistent, and your teaching methods are self-serving, egocentric and less and less entertaining every semester, so I figured i’d treat you like you treat the students that don’t even show up to your class — with begrudging genorosity. how a guy that refuses to even try and get through the sight singing portion of the final, misses more classes than he attends, and bitches regarding the application of your drills anytime he does show up to class ends up with the same letter grade as I, who have struggled to keep from spitting in your face for three straight years of at least steady work and notable improvement is of no concern, because I’m an adult, I did not receive a grade which will prohibit me from moving on into grad. school out of, say, sheer escapism, and i’m sure at some point you sat that kid down and at the very least made a miserably hungover morning of his a whole lot worse. fair is fair. and to continue on the “what I should’ve saids” of teacher evaluations, which you’re so concerned that we burnt out seniors take seriously, I have to say that I appreciate the struggle you’re faced with, keeping up the disciplinary element of academic music instruction, in a “contemporary music program,” which provides nearly endless loop-holes for those students who are really just letting their mommies and daddies pay for an extended camp experience. so there you have my, “what I liked about this class” comment.

on the negative side, you should know that as far as I’m concerned, there is never any place for sneering conceit in teaching; and no matter how deeply rooted is the tradition of talking down to students mechanically, treating original ideas which hadn’t occured to you the teacher with contempt, habitually, and lacing nearly every compliment you hand out with some sort of venomous disclaimer, your continuing in this tradition makes you a complete fucking asshole in my book.

I guess based on your grading curve, that puts you at a couple points below my usual grade in your class: B-.

Personally, I couldn’t give a rats-ass whether Beethoven was a heady composer or an intuitive one, or more than likely some combination thereof. He spoke of the “Spirit” moving him and was supposedly called an asshole among the musical elite for handing the concept of form to the audience, which had been kept a secret for so long.

In his first symphony, third movement, which I”ve studied to the point where it may never sound like music to me again — the argument is that he’s decided that the theme is going to be the modulation to Db from C Major. It’s a shaky C major at best in the first place, though eventually establishes itself as such in a definite way. Since I don’t think this simple point got the attention it deserves I’m going to say it loud and clear on this quiet little website — as for the most dominant voice of the first phrase, the melodic voice, the first violin, what it pronounces loud and clear is a G MAJOR SCALE. everyone get that? never heard a theory from anyone as to why he started the piece that way. no-one knows how to put that tidbit in line with any neat pile of theories.

So I’ve looked at this thing to where my instructor admits that I know it well — never minding that he thinks my argument is way off base. My argument — what was my argument? — probably that Beethoven was working more intuitively than intellectually. Or perhaps as intuitively as intellectually.

Picking these pieces apart and denying anything spontaneous in them is a crock of shit — maybe that’s what I was saying, not really sure but he lost interest as soon as I suggested that the dynamic markings were exaggerations of the human body’s natural response to the insane melody he had created. Some people do write melodies before they write harmonies you realize. And that the forte was a natural progression given the ascending line, rather than a crescendo which cleverly lands on the flat 2 — marked as a C# in this case — strikes me as completely ridiculous. He wasn’t going for a quick build in volume, which is certainly what comes through the speakers, given the recording we have — what Beethoven wanted, according to my teacher, was to make sure musicologists for centuries could use this piece to drill through students foreheads, and then feel smug by noting that the forte of a few bars worth of crescendo happens to land on the flat two — that’s right — this fast moving piece hits a tiny bit harder on the C# than it did on the C so Beethoven could tell the musical elite that “HEY — AREN’T I JUST THE CLEVEREST LITTLE SOUR-KRAUT you ever did hear? I put a little tiny extra bit of punch on the flat two in the middle of a six note, mostly chromatic run, and GET THIS — I’m going to modulate to the flat two later in this same PIECE!!!!! Aren’t I just the cutest little neat freak that ever let his own excrement pile up in his flat for weeks at a time?”

If I ever listen to this thing again after I conduct it against my will, I hope I hear what I heard in the first place — a maniac on piano dreaming up a mockery of the minuet form, nothing else. HE WAS REALLY REALLY GOOD AT PLAYING PIANO. HE DID SO WITH THE ORCHESTRA IN MIND. If he laid out a strategy on where the heavy hits were going to happen based on the harmonic form of his piece, that is his own personal, and I think rather embarrassing business, ’cause writing to the likes of people such as my fearless leader in conducting is no better than writing to the John Cage fans clotting up our programs with the ideas that you don’t have to learn to play an instrument to be a musician.

AM/PM is the Californian answer to Albuquerque’s Circle K, and Northern New Mexico’s All Sups. (7/11 is a white trash wet dream category all its own). At 5:30 am I woke up with an exaggerated version of the splitting headache I had somehow gone to bed with. Thankfully I only remember a couple of the times I woke up between going to bed and 5:30 am, or I might’ve felt even more desperate than I did.

I called Sarah for some reason. I guess I was half hoping that she’d come home early and I could ask her to pick something up on the way, and maybe more just because she was the only person I could call and I was so miserable that I felt someone in the world should know about it. She of course wasn’t coming home from her night shift early so when I got back from All Sups I called her again with a slightly larger capacity for rational thinking at my disposal, this time to inform her that I would be knocking myself out with a Tylenol PM, and she ought to leave some indication of when I would be picking her son up before she left the house again.

Anyway, as for the package of PM pain killers, I immediately regretted purchasing it because the doses were designed for a full night’s rest, and I would only have a few hours before I had to get up and pick the boy up from a half day at school. This left me with a difficult decision — to invade my coming day with rubbery drowsiness, or cheat myself out of a little bit of the pain killing element of the substance, which was mostly why I had scraped my fucking windshield off (which had no fucking business being frosty, this many weeks into spring) in the first fucking place.

I took half a dose, one pill. It took too fucking long to kick in, granted, but did knock me out and when the alarm went off I had no head-ache, a minor case of the rubberies and was able to carry on as full a conversation about Zac’s school day as he can ever tolerate anyway.

Modern life makes 24 hour stores seem increasingly necessary. Now just imagine what kind of headache I might’ve been facing if I were working at a 24 hour store.

Ba Dum Bum.

The End.

It’s March 6th. Do you know where my children are?

The coffee on my left is all I see. The guitar leaning against my left leg below is all I feel. I like the sound of the birds outside, and the warmth of the New Mexico sun come early this year, telling of a nice spring and a nasty, even deadly summer, given the fire hazards and general intelligence of our Fourth of July enthusiasts.

I like the simplicity of this contract which only seems to have won me over to writing in this style again: I am to put at least three posts up on this site, and my band gets a link. You see how nicely things can go when there are no tickets of elusive value and ominous background to be exchanged in the process. Not that the tickets themselves have anything wrong with them — I’m not going to get into all this right now — but simplicity in contract is a happy phenomenon to my overwhelmed mind.

Self-inflicted piano practice is slow going, but will help me to become the composer some of my so-called mentors seem not to think I’ll ever be. My sentence structure is damaged, but speaks of the state of my mind and thoughts — damaged in a good way for the time being, because the damage is what keeps me thinking simply.

Thinking simply is a luxury from my point of view — a happy, self-indulgent, sometimes dangerous luxury.

Have you ever thought simply of what might happen if the ghetto were to become organized? I’ll save this simple, dangerous thought for a piece of fiction which will be the only fiction I’ve written since my book, “The Ghost of Romanticism.” It’ll be a monologue, I think, spoken by the only surviving main character of the book — Castro Perez.

But this is all the simple thought my luxurious life will allow for the time being — thanks, and good-night.

PS — Hey Ash — it wouldn’t hurt my feelings any if you offered to post the link to my book on this thing for say double the original price (totaling six additional posts here). But don’t feel like you’ve gotta get back to me right away.

This always reminded me of Orion, so here it is.

i don’t believe you
size doesn’t matter
when you’re madder than a hatter
’cause i’m fucking phatter
than your pinche cookie batter.
                                                      –0.04 14.12.95

Hello fellow collegians!! I have been a senior citizen of returning student status for sometime, and thought I might enjoy letting you in on a point of view based on my life experience mixed with funny politics ad nauseum. Specifically, I wish to use our current system of trade in the U S of A, which many of you take for granted to be a legitimate system, in order to shed light upon your position as members of an institution known as Western Higher Education or what-have-you. You shall be taken on a short journey down the path of your own non-resistance, should you choose to read past my introduction, which is so deliberately “tooth on tongue,” or “cheek by cheek” grammatically speaking.

Seriously, though, students, let’s take a look at where we stand on the food chain right now. Let’s assume that all over the country, the power structures we know of as employer to employee, etc, are fair. Let’s say that once one comes into the position of having enough money to employ other people, this person should be able to make decisions on behalf of these employees, regarding the way they schedule their lives, how they dress, conduct themselves, etc, if only while at work, which given the current state of economic affairs, I need not argue tends to be for a larger and larger percentage of time as time goes on.

If we look at it another way, it is pretty well assumed in this country that when one agrees to take on a salary, one becomes to a lessor or greater degree, the employers BITCH. To what degree is not up to the employee — but for his or her choice to move on to another employer — but the employER, and certainly there are good and bad bosses to be found, no question. Still if at some point, the man or woman in charge of payroll decides that things are going to be run a little differently, etc, it may very well be the case, no matter how those getting paid by the same may feel on the matter.

Let’s just say that’s fair.

NOW — this is the real bite in the crotch — you, as students, are paying the administration, the bookstore, the teachers, the president, the organizers, etc. etc, a salary. And you, as students, are cheerfully accepting of the fact that the power structure in your institution is to have YOU behaving as an employee. It doesn’t matter if you’re borrowing money — have any businesses, successful, or unsuccessful, been built off of borrowed money? And in the time it took for the successful ones to pay that money back, was the power structure any different?

You kiss ass, you show up to class, you do as you’re told, you drop a suggestion every once in a while, mostly when it’s asked of you, but all in all, you are paying the salary, and acting like a BITCH.

Don’t let your school keep pimping you and taking your money.

Start a riot or burn your book store down or something, fuck if I care, but don’t keep getting pimped out like that.

I had a mind to write an entire list of things that I don’t like about waking up early — but the truth is I hate the night before more than the actual morning in most cases.

I am becoming aware again of the absurd, yet less able to manipulate it for art. I am far too sober. Not as far as drinking and such is concerned, though I’d love to blame the fact of it on my lack thereof, but it’s grown obvious to me that the world is in a ridiculous state, and quickly people in day to day life are refelcting it to the only people it occurs to them to take it out on — those at hand.

Here are some soberly streams of my suffering consciousness with regard to my awareness of the absurd: approximately 1990 — Public Enemy, a resounding voice for black frustration and arguably the most artistically sound political poetry I’ve ever seen signed on with Warner Brothers, (now Time Warner).

I am studying music. I went to school hoping to become a composer, as opposed to remaining a “mere” songwriter. That means learning to read and write music, applying my aesthetics, and coming to understand what it means to write music with no words — that’s what it meant to me anyway. Learning to read and write music at the age of 36 is an example of an old dog taking on new tricks. It can be done, however requires time — the kind of time that, to borrow my composition teacher’s analogy, is comparable to having root canals on every tooth in one’s mouth. Long story short, now that I’m fairly literate this way none of my teachers at this school in question offers me the slightest bit of encouragement in my composing- I’ve been sidestepped at best, and blantantly discouraged at worst — this discouragement was particularly layed on thick by the man I paid 260 dollars last semester (this on top of a bold tuition figure) as a private teacher on the subject of composition. Hey at least I got an “A.”

You’re waiting for the absurd part of this story? It’s that I still feel surprised by it, stunned even.

What else, what else? The Art Institutes are a chain of tech. schools, nothing more. This and the Public Enemy flash above makes me think of “The One Dimensional Man,” a Marcuse book with a chapter on art that had me feeling more suicidal than I’ve felt in at least a full year.

7 a.m. – 9:30 a.m

1.

Highly primed educators have gathered at the X to attend a No Child Left Behind Conference. I know how excited—even anxious—this news makes you feel. The President of the United States of America has sanctioned and paid for this gathering. Think of the flitters and jitters that will enter your nerves upon learning that the Hiram and Myra Katz swimming pool and gym facility are available to you after 4 p.m.

2.

Millie Myers sits to my left, Jeff Ham to my right. Millie talks at excited, nearly breathless length about color-coding themes when writing sample compositions. Jeff, a math teacher from Gallup, a man with a big smashed-in lout’s nose, a sunblasted neck, a slow drawling manner, a 13 th century pageboy-in-a-tunic haircut—this Jeff drinks no less than 12 cups of coffee in 2 hours. He nods as Millie talks of the fun she had coloring in title pages with preschoolers. He nods. He nods. He nods.

3.

The facilitators enter: Two middle-aged women in power suits—with lapels and everything. One has a pink-glitter-stone butterfly button affixed to the left lapel of her power suit. Both wear strongly died hair and have heavy masculine features smoothed somewhat with pancake makeup. Lots of makeup. Peacock eye-shadow. Hellfire Red lips. Carole and Marty. No child will be left behind.

4.

There are some 25 people in the dim, arid, paisley-beige wallpapered room. They are all very goofy. They are all 50 to 60 years old. The educator elite. Millie laughs through her nose—snorts and snorkles, really, like a feral hog. Yeehaw.

5.

Later, hours later, as our eyes droop and we all wish it were 4 p.m. and the end of the meeting called, Jeff calls Millie a ‘finality hound’. I spruce it up a bit and say she’s a ‘closure-freak’. We’re at ease and joking, you see.

6.

Millie wears a jacket with hunting dogs embroidered on it.

7.

Ambient sounds:

… ‘the published end time’…

… grab your coffee and Poptarts and post-it notes’ …

… ‘I come from Greensberg, Indiana’ …

… ‘If the factory was good enough for my dad, then it’s good enough for me.’ ….

8.

A ’salmon-red’ agenda sheet. Lunch is from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. I make these notes in the margins.

9.

The 4 A’s of Learning – with a diagram that cannot be represented here for lack of technological insight:

Awareness: the student is excited and enthusiastic

Automatic: this is where aware learning leads

Awkwardness: this is an educational moment that can lead to:

Avoidance

10.

My eyes admittedly glaze and are enclosed with a sluggish patina when Marty is talking about Level III Assessment and Analysis of the Classroom as a Learning System.

11.

‘The Baldridge Method’… ‘Affinity Diagrams’…. These are the hottest terms in the frontline trenches of Education.

12.

I was Tigerish in that den of teachers. I asked a lot of smart and concerned sounding questions. It was something of an accomplishment. I was always on the verge of snuffling.

13.

Ed had told me that these conferences and workshops were where all the money in education was to be found. A regular racket. That’s what he called it. But in a what must have been a chastened moment the following day, he said he thought I might pick up some useful tools.

9:30 a.m. – Lunch

1.

God, I wish the entire world could have been seated with me at the gray roundtable while Carole—silver buckles sounding on her boots—used the Dashboard of Your Car analogy (even drawing dials on a flipchart), as a means for us to gauge our progress in this workshop.

2.

Carole, all clad in pastels and rustling bristling skirts and high leather boots—her hair a shapeless snarling mass of bed-head locks barely combed down. She asks, ‘What are your expectations for deliverable outcomes?’

3.

Millie is wearing some kind of ivy-traced scarlet jacket underneath her hunting dog jacket. Millie wears glasses. Millie.

4.

We shuffle past the softly-lit consensograms taped to the foldable south wall. We place red-dot-stickers on the charts to indicate our levels of understanding. A scale between 10 and 100 quantifies our levels of understanding. I place all of my red dots on 10. Mischievous me. It’s because I know this is a mild racket. One chart reads: Your Understanding of the Impact of Alignment of Goals on the Classroom. 10. 10. 10.

5.

Marty, wrapped around in a charcoal and gray women’s power suit with black-lined lapels says, ‘Turn to page 50 in your red-dot book’. We’ve put red-dot-stickers on our workbooks too—in order to distinguish them from the blue-dot books.

6.

Maxine, having arrived late, panting in a very dignified way, joins our table. An elderly Navajo woman with blonde hair and a purple leisure suit. Her long, long nails are painted wickedly red. I find the whole thing to be devilish.

Lunch – Close

1.

The 25 or so teachers seated at round plastic gray tables are noticeably exhausted after lunch. Marty and Carole turn up the volume. They go into a whole barker at the carnival, preacher in the prayer tent kind of speech cadence. They could sell painted porcelain fawns on the shopping channel – such is the high mark of their enthusiasm. Their voices have become urgent and nasally, if you see what I’m saying.

2.

Marty, hands outreached, ‘You build a classroom culture through instilling core values and modeling good behavior.’

3.

During the Ritz cracker and Swiss cheese afternoon break, I draw a hat, a platter of freedom fried and a vagina using characters from the Hebrew alphabet that are written onto wall-hung paintings.

4.

There is no way I’ll be able to see you in London without eating you out from behind, making love to you every day, walking the canals and the old Roman oxcart lanes that lead to the River Thames.

5.

….Student, Stakeholder and Market Focus….

6.

….The Baldridge Method has led to more encouragement, support and reinforcement than any other self-guided educational system….

7.

Marty admits to being a recovering micromanager. Should I, in turn, confess to being an unrepentantly obsessive writer of micrographs? A writer of epic thumbnail novels? That kind of thing?

8.

I get ’sorted’ into the High School Focus Group. Now I’m at the front table—near enough to Marty to see that she has band-aids on her hand.

9.

Marty says, ‘These are non-negotiable requirements of the system.’

10.

I play Kamikaze—just to keep from nodding off. I ask a question, reminding everyone of my status as a Language Arts teacher and mentioning ’semantic ambiguities’ in the exercise we’ve completed. A real victory for humanity.

11.

….Standardized Design Project….

12.

I’m in a dullish stupor and it’s only 2:17 p.m. Interesting what behaviors we all agree should be compulsory. I’m not talking about Mosaic Law. I’m talking about attending No Child Left Behind conferences.

13.

….translate standards and benchmarks into student-friendly language…

14.

….daily appreciation announcements for teachers and students….

15.

‘Data’ and ‘rubric’ are also words gone all abuzz through the classrooms and administrative offices and education ministries throughout our purple-mountain-majesty land.

16.

….essential information…important information….nice to know….

17.

….Weekly quizzes on key concepts….

18.

What’s this? I’ve written something unintelligible on my agenda about ‘the intricacies of a folkloric goat’.

19.

To Jeff: ‘If your the Alpha, then I’m the Omega male…ha, ha, ha.’

20.

People all round are getting a rat-in-the-cage look. Carole says, ‘Is that a learning goal? No, that’s a process goal….’

21.

People are near to slumbering. Somnambulist Educators. Marty is doing a lot of shouting now—nasally Greenberg Indiana shouting. She runs her fingers through her hair and flips her bangs often. She writes, ‘School EPSS Goal: 100% of the 6 th Graders will achieve proficiency in reading scores.’ Then she asks the listless lot of us, ‘Now, what is the teacher’s part, the parent’s part, the administrator’s part, the student’s part and the custodian’s part in this number?’ And finally we are almost admonished. ‘You need to sell this goal! You need to publish and sell this goal!’

22.

….The way you practice is the way you play….

23.

S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Specific

Measurable

Aligned to Standards

Result-focused

Time-framed

Goals

24.

Should I tell them about Roland, whom I will be tutoring 6 hours a week, beginning in March? Roland, who wears a necklace of elks’ teeth and whose only completed assignment for me in two months of my knowing him has been a haiku poem in which ‘Bullets are my girfriend’. 14 year old Roland who is 2 inches taller than I, and who is given over to shouting in class?

25.

I’ll tell you about Roland. At his I.E.P. (individual education plan for those of you not current with educational acronyms) Roland looked at his hands and nodded his head in the negative for an hour. Cindy, the school psychologist told us—somehow—about how she worked as a bouncer for almost a year. ‘Yeah, in a bar for midgets,’ I said casually. Roland smiled at that at least.

25.

Roland’s grandmother, Agnes, was at that meeting. She had yellow smoker’s eyes, nicotine fingers, a smokers cough. She kept saying, ‘Thank you, dear,’ to me. She rasped and rheumed those words. She wore a high Spanish pompadour with little ringlets trailing along her weathered neck.

26.

Pollution in the pond! A sick and sagging frond! A drooping lily pad! Sharks and gators circle! Tins of meat on the gravelly bottom!

Epilogue

1.

I had an enchanted lunch with Roman who I haven’t seen from university days. Our eyes grew round to see one another in this room. He still is one of those Romeo-conquistador types, a big time Hispanic intellectual and a champion wrestler, but very soft-spoken and gentle. He’s moved to Grants New Mexico—to savor the cosmopolitan amenities, I joke. His headmistress is an extremely suave, middle-aged Navajo woman. We sit and eat spaghetti at the Tomato Cafe. Across from me is a woman who takes the oxygen tube out of her nose every time she drinks a glass of dry white wine. Rochelle, the waitress with a line of gold gloss down the bone of her nose, is instructed to bring out the driest. The woman across from me takes the oxygen tube out of her nose 3 times to drink as many glasses.

2.

If I have any literary talent, it is for writing in an absurdist-aggrandizement style. I don’t want to be guilty of frivolous characterization. Marty and Carole are clearly caring and devoted teachers. So is everyone in the room, no matter the slackness of our jaws at 3:30 p.m. I like teachers a lot. Salt of the earth. Salt of the earth. $alt of the earth.

An early work of mine. Like all good writing, it benefited from a serious edit. It went from a trilogy of novels to a single work. The single volume lacked edge. So it went from novel to novella.

The novella was sharp but when I cut it down to a short story it was even more magnificent. At that point I realized the vanity of it and rewrote it in prose. It halved its length.

When I had been away from it long enough I noticed how pretentious it actually was. I wrote it into a 10 part poem. That gave way to tightening of redundancies and I realized structure was what was missing. It became a sonnet.

The formalization broke the emotional response though. I pulled it apart until it could be reassembled in four lines. The epiphany that it was a natural topic with a surprise ending led me to drop a line and make it a haiku.

In a sober moment this seemed corrupt and contrived and I realized only the title expressed the ennui, the tender pain, the depth and novelty of the experience.

Now, gentle readers, I share the title that remains: “Man Bites Dog.”

(Crossposted with QueryLog.)

Only animal nerves are articulated in war. I doubted my son would remember the exact words of advice I gave him, but I spoke hoping they might serve in some slight aural way. We were at the table when he began weeping unobtrusively into his breakfast cereal. It was a surprise—he was not an unhappy or weak boy at all. One of the many taut cords that upheld my posture was cut and my bowels flinched. What does one really say to a weeping child? I hesitated to put down my newspaper. The financial section was making me alternately nervous and amused. My wife was likely buying new curtains if she had already dropped off our youngest daughter at pre-school. We could afford new curtains, but we certainly didn’t need them. In war, our decisions are made by random electronic surges and we have only enough wit to call it reasoning. I folded my newspaper and put it slowly on the table, hoping not to embarrass my son further. Inez’s cats chased across the parquet floor making tacking sounds with their claws. The cats had been a point of contention when we’d bought the house. I knew they would ruin the floor, but I could only ever remain adamant with Inez for a few moments—half a day at the most. She showed me her faint smile-smirk and said that floors were meant to be scratched by cats and imprinted by crawling babies’ hands. She held my elbow for a moment and the matter of pets was decided. The cats were so intent and reckless in their play as to shift my son’s chair slightly when they bumped against its legs. The jolt made him weep more desperately—whether with conviction or abandon, I’m unsure. The cats fled into the living room snarling as though they remembered the time when they were lions. The sunlight coming through our large bay window made the mounds of fruit in a bowl between us seem cheerfully waxen. A cloud need only pass and the fruit would look dark and real again.
‘Jimmy,’ I wanted my voice to be both firm and filled with all of the unhinging love I felt for him. As ever, it was a voice that came from an alien larynx: a growling and pleading breeze that passed through dried cattails and reeds. What would I say now that his rainy mortified eyes and upturned mouth were aimed at me? I checked an impulse to rise and wipe the snot from his nose with a napkin from the table. ‘Jim, tell me what’s wrong.’ It would have to do. Inez had jumped atop me once after sex and laughingly said I would remain practical even when being drawn and quartered or having my fingernails ripped out. I forget what I’d said to inspire her. We were lying in our sweat, the lust-stained sheets scattered around us, looking at the ceiling and I must have mentioned a payment that needed to be made. Mason, our first born, was sleeping in his crib in the adjoining room. It reminds me that I should tell Inez of how much I like the word ‘crib’. It will make those supernatural eyes of hers flare. And that is something I need to see, now that she’s given the curves of her girlish body to birthing and nursing five children.
Jimmy had to catch his breath before answering. He was such an unnervingly honest child—he would not stall his own thoughts and tell me nothing was wrong. He only needed wait for his body to catch up with his mind. I looked at him while he sniveled and his breath hitched. He didn’t once lower his imploring fluid eyes. His ears stuck out from beneath his baseball cap. When I’d first met Inez, we’d smoked cannabis at her insistence and walked through the city until it was nearly dawn. I became entirely fixated on people’s ears. They seemed to give everyone a rodent aspect. I was horrified, but when I told Inez, she laughed as though I’d said something so revelatory as to be hilarious. She laughed and kissed my neck and broke away from me to get distance enough to look clearly at my face. I laughed too and said that her laughter sounded bluish. She opened her mouth into a delighted O, leapt onto me and straddled my midriff with her legs. The multitudes ignored us, walked around us as we kissed. Her legs still make me blush and make my prick brave. I was grateful, at least, that she was away on one of her frivolous domestic missions. I wasn’t sure why, but I wanted to be able to stand up for my son on my own.
Jimmy was near to speaking. I looked slightly away from him. Past his shoulder, I could see the cats seated and very still, leaning into one another on top of a bookshelf. They were hunters now—they must have seen the colors and shadows of distant savannahs in the tail feathers of Pavarotti, our parakeet. Pavarotti whistled obliviously in his cage. Jimmy had wanted the bird and then had wanted to free it. He realized, he’d told me, that there are two sides to every cage. He was only six at the time. He didn’t weep that day—he said it to me with the strange brave solemnity that only children have. The cats flicked their tails and motionlessly watched the bird’s trilling orange beak and riffling feathers.
Jimmy turned eleven three months ago. Something about the constancy and dumb enthusiasm of Pavarotti’s singing reminded me of his birthday, and I attached myself to the remembrance of his age with something like hope. What could be so troubling to an eleven year old boy? I had grown accustomed to surviving on lukewarm dishwater hope—I had a strong sense we would survive, Inez, Mason, Jimmy, Adonis, Lilly, Sapphire and even me. I tried for a moment to recall what made me anxious enough to weep when I was eleven. I nearly smiled at the sprawling collection of names Glenda had given our children. Jimmy put his slender fingers on the table and spoke.
‘Dad…I like my friends…I mean I like to go over to…to go to Parsons Woods with Emmanuel and stuff…’ He was breathing excitedly and his eyes were already changing now that the confession had begun. He would be unburdened soon. We would all survive. ‘…I really like him, Daddy, and shooting his BB-gun and stuff…but…I…I don’t want…I’m not like him so much because he wants to hunt birds and I just want to shoot bottles or even just at the trees….’ Jimmy had Inez’s eyes—that was why I favored him. It was an incomprehensibly strange thing to realize in that instant. I nearly swooned with relief. ‘…But the thing really, Dad, is that when we go to the rope swing out at the river…the one you know about cause you were there once…Emmanuel can swing on it and he flies out into the river, but I can’t hold on and I always drop straight into the water.’ Now he looked down in shame at the table cloth and his eyelashes looked as though they were painted with antimony. He looked up again, anguished and grimacing again, and said, ‘I can’t hold onto the rope.’
I have never felt so capable and ready and may never again in likelihood. My son was weeping because he was not as strong as Emmanuel. We would survive. Mason would be waking up soon, so I had to speak more quickly than I would have liked. Mason and Jimmy were almost always wildly affectionate with one another, but the younger, undyingly sensitive boy idolized his brother and could not allow himself to be seen so undone. It had not always been this way. Mason had just begun listening to death metal music. He would strut around the house all day howling inane lyrics in a manic falsetto. ‘The white light! The white light! The serpent dies tonight!’ Jimmy had picked up that chorus and they would sing it together if Mason were in an obliging mood towards his brother. Inez and I suspected Mason had discovered cannabis, and she was waiting for me to say something practical so that she could laugh at it. I was slyer than that and had remained mum, waiting for some undeniably wise phrase to turn toward the matter. I wondered how much longer I must wait.
Now I would to speak to Jimmy—but there was a very small eternity before Mason trudged down the stairs to begin telling us that he was going to get a biohazard symbol tattooed on his forehead. I wondered if I could speak without my voice trembling with the love I felt for Jimmy. And what would I say in particular? It would be snide and cruel and irrelevant to tell him that Emmanuel would someday be bagging his groceries—though that was the unlovely truth. He would understand me if I told him that we all have different strengths and that these blossom in strange and unpredictable ways—but the thought would not give him immediate comfort. I inhaled steeply through my nostrils. The cats were still frozen—all of their perfect predatory muscles straining into their glowing yellow-flecked marble eyes. I write prose poetry on little scraps of paper sometimes when the household is finally sleeping. Not even Inez knows of it. When insomnia makes my head so fuzzy I can’t imagine full phrases, I write lists of new colors for the objects of this world. Some are inglorious and necessary like ‘trauma-room green’, and others are hopelessly ardent, like ‘archetypal red’. What color would I invent for those cats’ eyes? I looked at my son, stood up and went towards him with my arms open. He rose from his chair to be embraced by me. I wished I could have held him as I did when he was a baby. I said, ‘Jimmy….’