Bathing Chickens
It isn't like trying to get Miss Thing into a corner so you can
whisper in her ear that she's got lice. There are days when you yourself feel
flat-bodied and wingless, sucking on dry hair.
It's your problem too is what Miss Thing would say. It
isn't like chasing a toy dog into its own shadow, just to hear Miss Thing
laugh. Her eyes still reflect miles of Ohio grasslands, a childhood hoed by
bony fingers, turned on empty smiles, lulled by insects chirping under the bed.
In those years of false bras, Southern Ohio was slow in gravity. Later, a man
appeared in her life with nine fingers. He never gave a satisfactory
explanation, only that he killed chickens for a living. She left him out of
fear; he never said much. But she still gives you goose bumps, those jitter
critters under the skinny that makes you want to mate. Or squawk in your wire
cage. You will soak the chicken you caught today with warm salty water. You'll
remove any trace of slime, mucous. But because you suspect this chicken is
sick, shot through with all kinds of antibiotics, you let it go. In the late
afternoon, while your dad is buying pipe tobacco at a Quick-Check too far down
the road, you spot the same chicken pressing one side of its head against the
screen window. Maybe it wants to warn you. Maybe it's just plain nosy. And you
and Miss Thing are busy making all kinds of wingless love. She calls it lice,
spending entire lifetimes in the space, shaped like Ohio, where you and she
intersect. In the night, after she's left, you sink in your own space, your
resistance shattered.
Interview with Blue Boy
He spoke in subdued tones of gray mixed with cool. I had nothing
sweet to offer him. He kept staring at a bowl of plastic fruit. Not real, I
finally offered. He shook his head politely. Unable to resist my own leanings,
I paraphrased Hamlet's Existential question--to live or to be still? In the
silence, I thought about all the places or items I associated him with:
cocktail coasters,
N.Y. Times fashion advertisements, scaled down copies adorning
an abandoned room in a house. I remembered how his image stopped one show as
the tableaux vivant back in'86. His eyes now focused downward, as if
trapping some thought in their blue-tunnel gaze. I thought about patches of
sea-green melancholy. A background mist. A young girl named Pinkie. There was
something about him that was so intrinsically lonely.
Hydro-matic
This is not your father's Oldsmobile, the one with a
transmission called a Hydro-matic. That car could travel. This is only a photo,
a still of appearances, shades of grey. Time doesn't lie. But it doesn't tell
the truth either. For only one freeze-frame of time, did you remotely resemble,
Liz Taylor in National Velvet. This is you back when you wanted to be. Desire
was perfect in itself. While your father was trying to polarize a 6-volt
regulator, you imagined your heart with four terminals. You even labeled each
one with letters. You pictured your father connecting each jumper wire,
alligator clip, to the correct terminal. He could do it blindfolded. You had a
weak heart. He said in time, it would need a mechanic. What? you said. He meant
the car. The first boy who broke your heart picked you up in a white four-door
bustle-back, Deluxe trim. This is not a picture of your father's first
Oldsmobile or the one belonging to that tow-headed fast-pitching kid. This is
about what remains after wrong wire to Terminal F. This is about what happens
when you fall for a boy who doesn't give a darn about moving pictures. You're
lucky there's still a spark.
Usufruct
I and Princess Marushka are standing near the rare record shop
on Bleecker. She says she's not doing trade-ins anymore because all their stuff
is scratched and anyway they don't have anything by The Ju Jus, a 60's garage
band that is on the verge of being re-discovered. According to her. People pass
us by in fast streams that diverge on side streets or gain momentum up ahead.
I'm not sure who is in real time, them or us. I'm not sure who is watching
Leonardo DiCaprio on their i-Pads. Princess is dressed in the army fatigues of
her very late husband who left this world with an honorable discharge. He was
fighting underground czars disguised as cabbies, but his left leg went numb
after he spoke of a vision of Christ singing Hey Jude. It wasn't long after
that.
I met him when he was still a boy, says Princess, and
he gave me the sun. But now he's gone and the sun is poison. So each day, I
take a knife, a wish, a prayer in Cyrillic, and try to bleed it a little. When
it's cleansed, it will be winter, and we will start cold. A white sun.
Later that night, after failing to score a hundred faces with names that never
stick, or finding excuses for drowned deals, I meet Princess in a building
claimed by squatters. It's somewhere in The Bowery. The squatters are mostly
crusty Punks, or victims of nuclear runaway families. You can only see their
eyes, the rest is dark. You imagine a few of them cuddling for warmth, or
they're already dead. It's nice to die in pairs. In a third floor room, where
fall out is more than likely, we exchange paper rain for paper sun. When it's
done, at least one of us has been ripped off. The other is still warm.