the persistence of memory, Salvador Dali

mapping

The marks on a body are the marks on a map. They tell you

where you have been, and how to get home again so that you can stop

going round inside yourself. Look down at the map. Look up at the 

sky. Where is the sun? Now walk. Make a new pathway, walk out of the

forest...

               land of horror and sweetness...

                                                  Ann-Marie MacDonald, Adult Onset

when the forest is a map you failed to learn

and those distended days of whining roses

surreal in the constructed vase of time

melting into fey insatiate poses

geographies of countries primed for peace

for worlds where war is served up daily

while  flowers weight doves down from burning skies 

high as bulletproof kites when windfall fails to cease

petals as the love me love me not of bald desire

desert sands as grainy trees of cookied fortune

lust as monstrous notion peeking into fire

Narcissus as the lisp lined friend you fail to notice

recognizing love as something blighted

constructed raw from shell’s exploded bliss

as multi-gendered lies we build on fading beaches

unnaming that of us then we then they then this

navigating scars that bleed through stitches

finding other routes from there to here

queering broken heart’s grotesque predictions

a dream of sleep beyond the braying ditch

what when the with of why begins to wear

thin remains of fabrics worn to dirt

what hurt of how and who and when to witness

where will the whence of wanton make you cry

on high as bulletproof kites where windfall fails to cease

petals pushing doves from burning skies 

word weary war torn smorgasbords of verbs served daily

syntactic maps of hungry buried bodies

look up look down

the grimy sky’s been primed for peace

while heaven’s false promise hides in sunny paths

the cloudy frown of hope smiles through the laugh lined crease

transitory

The onanist picked up a transfer that was lying on the floor of the streetcar. Pressing it between his thumb and forefinger, he began to think of the last time he had spilled his seed. There had been an anti-climax but the events leading up to the end were quite provocative.

After pondering the limp ending for a few moments he remembered another story, one that his mother had narrated, of a young man who would not do as his father had told him, and he went blind. It frightened him as a child, and then later, as a teenager, he worked in a movie theatre as an usher. It was 1974 and a British comedy came to town called If You Don't Stop It You'll Go Blind. He saw the film several times, standing at the back of the theatre. It was filled with sketch comedy scenes of old ladies espousing profane activities, gay cowboys entangled in compromising acts, and competitive sex contests filled with horny blokes and well-endowed beauty queens - among other things.

He was twenty at the time and a late bloomer. A late bloomer who had found himself in a variety of compromising positions. Once he stood at the urinal in the men’s washroom of the Odeon Theatre, where he worked for a year just before his father died, and he saw a man playing with himself and looking straight down into the porcelain altar. He went back to his post at the back of the theatre and reminisced briefly about the size of the stranger’s assertive member.  

             

A few years later the film was followed by a sequel, Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses? He never saw that one, and didn’t need glasses himself until he was in his late forties. By the time he reached his mid-fifties he was buying cheap reading glasses at the dollar store. When he was fifty-eight he had graduated from a two hundred lens to three hundred and fifty. When he watched porn on his laptop he left his glasses on. But when he actually took part in auto-erotic acts without the support of moving images his spectacles were left on the bedside table.

As the sleek twenty-first-century streetcar sailed along with seamless agility, so unlike the rattling old streetcars he first rode in the nineteen seventies, he pressed the filthy transfer softly between his fingers and started to become self-conscious about the filth and germs that must be all over the little slip of grey’ish paper. So he dropped it back on the floor, and as he did so a stranger glared at him and shouted “don’t litter.” He considered a variety of responses, but luckily the streetcar was at his stop, so he just ignored the stranger’s indignant outcry and made his way to the exit. The stranger kept shouting long after he had left. But that was neither here nor there.

When he entered the lobby of the hospital he went straight to the hygiene station near the entrance and squeezed a bloated dollop on to both palms, vigorously pressing the alcohol based liquid into his skin. There were light abrasions at the end of his fingertips that stung a little as the substance was absorbed. The abrasions had been the result of a failed attempt to get crazy glue off his skin with sandpaper. Instead of removing the irritating substance the sandpaper just left little cuts between the dried hard puddles of toxic adhesive. He hated crazy glue and tried not to use it often. But there were times when it seemed to be the only solution for the re-invention of a beloved broken object.            

And then he walked to the west end of the main floor of the hospital, took a sharp left, went up the escalator to the second floor, and walked straight down the hall to the elevators, where he stood and waited for one to take him to the ninth floor. After waiting ten minutes for the doctor to retrieve him from the depressing little windowless waiting room, he walked over to the receptionist’s office and asked an employee to let the doctor know that he had arrived. And then he went back to the waiting room and saw his doctor standing there looking around. They saw each other, smiled, and then went to the office together.

When he put his pants back on the doctor was standing by the window, gazing out at the downtown skyline.

“Hey Doc, I heard a joke the other day that reminded me of you. You wanna hear it?”

“No, I don’t think so. Our session is over. I’ll see you next week.”

“Aw, come on. It’s funny, and very short.”

“Okay. Tell me, quickly.”

Just as he was about to start telling the joke the doctor’s phone rang. After a few words the doctor put the phone down and told him that his next patient had just cancelled, so he could take a little more time telling the joke. They both sat down on the couch.

“So this guy went to see his doctor and his doctor told him that he had to stop masturbating. And the guy said, but why doc, why do I have to stop. And the doctor said, because it makes it difficult to examine you.”

He laughed but the doctor just smiled.

They had a free hour, after the joke, so they just stayed there, in the office, with the door locked. When he put his pants back on his patient was standing by the window gazing out at the downtown skyline, thinking to himself -

“I’m glad I dropped that filthy transfer and sanitized my hands before coming up here. My father always warned me about proper hygiene, and even though his stories frightened me as a child, they sure come in handy now that I’m all grown up.”

age & innocence

age & innocence

I've got this added tenderness. I never talk about it.

It only sneaks up on me every two or three years. It 

sounds strange but feels so natural. I know it'll get me 

into big trouble. I feel it for a certain kind of other man,

For any guy who's even clumsier than me, than "I."

Allan Gurganus 'Adult Art' 

(from White People; stories & novellas)

He didn’t know what shade of blue those loafers had been. All he remembered was that they were like no other colour he had ever seen before. All creamy and smooth and matching his American History teacher’s satiny tie. Maybe Robin’s egg blue, but not really. They lacked the brightness of robin’s egg, had a softer quality to them, with a little gold buckle across the arch of each foot - and just a glimpse of matching socks, just a shade lighter than the loafers.

Shakespeare                                                                                                          Beckett

His hair was grey and full, like his wife’s, the guidance counselor. She told him he could never be an interior decorator because his math was so bad he wouldn’t even be able to measure drapery material. There was a tone of indignation in her gruff matronly voice, even when she said the most absurd and discouraging things. She looked like her husband, in drag. They had no children and had met in teacher’s college. She had full grey hair too. But her fashion sense was not as good as his. He worked in make-up at the local theatre guild and she always talked about the plays he worked on. They both felt Beckett was too bleak and preferred Shakespeare’s comedies - never really wanting to see anyone die onstage.

It was the year Nixon was impeached and the American History teacher asked the whole class if they thought the President deserved this kind of treatment. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand any of it. Just sat there embarrassed that he understood so little about the world and barely passed from one grade to the other. They put him into the trades curriculum, and one boy awkwardly asked - with a hint of strained teenaged innocence mixed with an outrageous air of stupidity - he asked him if he had a sister who looked as pretty as him. He said no, and then went back to spoiling a perfectly good piece of wood on a treacherous lathe he had no idea how to use properly.

Richard Nixon

But he was always good in English Literature and they pushed him through  high school, only holding him back one year because he was so small and bashful, no one would ever notice, and maybe he would grow into himself, catch up to the others. But everyone knew it would never be possible.

Carey Mulligan (L) & Mia Farrow (R) as Daisy Buchanan

                                                                                                    

He was good in English though. They just called it English then, unapologetically, like it made perfect sense, as if the world only had one language and all great literature was based in it. His life was like a bad education system. Shutting out so many things that would become his biggest concerns as an adult. One teacher altered his whole degrading opinion of Daisy Buchanan when he spoke up one day in class, against the teacher’s belief that Daisy was just a superficial creature - and said softly, “She knew, she knew how awful the world was. So she wanted her daughter to be a beautiful little fool so she would never know just how terrible people could be, including herself.”

But then, in the mid seventies, it was a very small world in the midst of his blighted family life and the loss of a tormented parent. The second world war was barely two decades cold and the rest of that century’s war years were brewing in places he had never heard of. He watched his father’s wounds fester in the bottom of empty bottles and unfulfilled loins. And his mother. She was another short story waiting to be written, by him, over and over again.

F.Scott Fitzgerald                                                                                                                   Zelda Zayre Fitzgerald

 “Would you like to come to my house on Friday evening. We could chat. You’ve had a difficult time since your dad died. My wife will be out for the evening. We could just have a nice talk.”

Innocence was something he wore, like the tight light blue brushed denim bell bottomed trousers everyone stared at when he walked into the classroom. Many years later a teacher he had never studied with told him, at a local bar, “you were so small, and so beautiful then.” The things people say so long after. He was mildly disgusted by the nonchalance of so many of the latent thoughts that could never have been uttered at the right time. But there was a kind of delayed thrill, hearing how he had once been perceived.

He sat in his American History teacher’s den in a chair near the fireplace, and they chatted. The moment his innocence burst was when that great throbbing head of grey hair bobbed suddenly in his lap. He pulled quickly away and said “no” - nervously, with a subdued shock in his voice, and remembered his teacher’s words for years after - as he had quickly come toward him and knelt down, mid conversation - “Well now that I know why you’re here.”

But even then, and through all the years that passed, he never knew what it was that had been said to make his teacher initiate that sudden movement from small talk and into his lap. He was eighteen, very small for his age, innocence was like clothing to him. He just put it on and took it off, according to the time of day, and barely noticed the change. But he was always aware of the color coordinates. Blue was his favorite then.

“It’s my wife, isn’t it. If she wasn’t in the picture.” He nodded - not knowing why he was nodding - and his teacher went back to his chair. He drove him home soon after. They barely spoke, but there was a kind of clumsy comfort between them. They did know each other in a way that no one else dared to.

No one ever asked about the meeting. It was just - what appeared to be - a kindly teacher taking an interest in a student who had suffered sudden trauma in his young life. And what had he done wrong, really. Nothing. It just wasn’t in the cards. But there was something re-assuring in the innocent knowledge that the next time he went into the guidance counselor’s office she would appear very different to him. There would be no power lost and no power gained - for either one of them. They were both innocent, for a moment - then - and neither one of them would ever really know why.