A nervous wiry woman

A wiry nervous woman in a long purple jacket paces outside on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. She hold the cigarette with long outstretched fingers which gives her the look of performing a very delicate procedure. She wears a large black hat with the short brim turned up in the front and the back. The hat has a deep bucket shape and reminds me a hat that a woman in the late 1910s would wear. The front of the hat sits so low on her head that it sits perched on her glasses. The glasses--in turn--sit slipped down on her nose, forcing her to peer downwards in order to see anything. She turns her head roundly on her neck, peering down through the glasses to look around. The lenses look cloudy and smudged by careless fingers so carefully smoking. She doesn't seem to have any eyes just a thin pale mouth. She is a all hat, most, and nervous rigid fingers.

With her long sharp nose that protrudes from her face and her tendency to see the world with a stooped head, the woman looks like a mole. Only she is a mole who is too nervous to dip down in the ground again. Instead she sits above ground in the dim light of a rainy afternoon biting at her fingernails. Her right knee is propped up on the left one and bobs up and down relentlessly. She stares at the table, sips her coffee, bobs her knee, looks up, then tilts her head back in a desperate gulping action, as if she still has dirt caught in her throat from her last reluctant underground foray.

She talks to herself outside when she smokes. She cuts the air in half with a stiff arm that sweeps downwards and stops in front of her. It is a decisive gesture. An emphatic stopgap against some plea to go back underground. She holds the hand there. Mutters something. The cigarette smoke becoming air around her. The point is made. The rigid fingers return to butt end of the cigarette to her mouth.

With her large hat and nervous manner, she reminds me of a suffragette, ready to blow up a mailbox for her cause. Only this woman is possessed by demons who gurgle up from underground and take on an ambiguous shade of concrete. They are so unseen and no amount of staring will see them out. And she will not go back underground. She's been choking on clods ever since. Now she has blown down the block; though I see her pause making one last emphatic gesture before the voices pull her underground again against her will.

Smoking Room

We called it the smoking room and filled it up with the smoke of cigarettes burning from end to end in an endless succession. The room was sealed off from the coffeshop by a hollow door and a large portrait window. Someone had tried to paint the smoking room black then red. For some months the walls were covered in a hideous white and black fur. I waited day after day for the white of that fur to turn brown. I would lean into the wall, purse my lips and blow a trail of smoke into its wild nap.

The floor was bare concrete. There were mismatched formica topped tables but my obsession with those tables didn’t begin there. There was a raised platform at the back of the room with an old coach that was collapsing in on itself like a blackhole. I never sat on that couch unless I was squeezed out of a spot on a cold, snowy, wet day that had brought people indoors to puff away at their smokes.

The smoking room looked out onto the street. There were tall floor to ceiling windows and a glass door, split in the middle. We would open the top portion of the window sometimes to let the air in or talk to people on the street. It was absurd, yes, leaning on the half-door puffing away at a cigarette, confined in the fifty cubic feet or so of space. But there were hippies and transients and rabid college students on those streets. It was much saner to stand there in a fishbowl staring out than to be out there swimming in the current of all that.

Danny Reinhardt once said that everyone who walked up and down that street was mad, insane, under the influence of the magnetic fields that ran under that patch of earth. He said something about the old nuclear weapons facility some twenty miles away or so. Danny Reinhardt had cut off his left index finger and knew obscure programming languages. He was a wine drunk and claimed that port was the only thing to get drunk on. I swear some weekends his teeth gleemed an insane red color.

Most of all though Danny Reinhardt was a transient mystic who studied Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. He had studied these esoteric Russians and was convinced of their doctrines. He often performed a parlor trick in the smoking room (even a prophet has to have stupid tricks to entertain those around him) where he would hold your wallet or purse up to his check, close his eyes, tilt his head upwards and reveal things about you to yourself. I never felt entirely comfortable with the fact that Danny felt that wallets were the thing with which to contact one's true essence behind that hid behind the screen.

Danny always wanted to reveal things about you to yourself. I remember him telling me that I was vain, ruled by vanity. I am haunted by this to this day. So for some time I looked out of those windows at the world the way that Danny Reinhardt did.

The history of buildings...

If I'm a blasted bundle of buildings, then I'm put back together in the image of a street. From the salvage yard of brick and the carrion field of steel, I'm fit for the frills of storefront canopies. They've hung signs on me. I'm mottled and reflect the sun in every time of day. I'm an old theater, a department store, and a pharmacy reconstructed and converted. But from what vantage point, what remote place, can I see myself as this something more than a teetering teem of hodge podge? From the air where the rooflines blend like tributaries to a a greater elevation? From underground where the septic hiss is a dark dank stream? If I'm blasted buildings and bundles of bricks then the impact of that rent, that tear, is concealed in the embrace of the limbs of time that support the renovated thrust of my precarious evolutionary thunk.

Trees, fruits, veggies, and boats

In the back yard of the house where I grew up were two trees of particular importance. One was the tree that my parents planted when I was born. I always wonder if I will feel a twinge of pain when someone cuts it down even though I am hundreds of miles from it. For all I know, though, it is still standing. It was one of the first trees that I learned how to climb. Though in the summer I had to learn to avoid stinging caterpillars. They would lumber and curl along the branches, their spiny spikes wobbling back and forth. Usually when you stepped on them they would curl up and leave a ring of black specks on your foot. I don’t remember the pain being terrible but there was something shocking about it. Of course, being little I squished a fair share of them when I wore shoes (which was either childish heroism or mature cowardice). They bled brilliant green and yellow guts.

Worms, slugs, caterpillars, cockroaches. These were the strange creatures that I grew up with, learning a kind of measured co-existence with them. I really did detest cockroaches. My dad would usually kill them with the worn soft padded bottom of his house shoes.

The other tree of importance was the pear tree. It didn’t grow delicious sweet pears shaped like pretty women. It grew round hard acidic pears (I won't say whether there are women like this or not). My mom always called them “baking pears,” trying to be excessively polite about them. There were always a horde of old women, white and black, any color but always old, who would bring their Winn-Dixie grocery sacks and troll our yard for these abominations. For as far as I was concerned what good was something that came from the bosom of nature if you couldn’t eat it hand to mouth in the passion of the moment. These pears required a kind of tolerance, patience, and foresight that I could neither comprehend nor value at the time.

But these old women knew secrets about this strange fruit. They knew how to boil the hard pears with sugar and can them. I guess they had had to eat worse things at some point in their lives (and in the South where most things are touched with pig fat the guess is a good one). I can look back on it now and see something almost profound, even melancholy in these old women half-stooped collecting this fruit. There was a time when that kind of hand to mouth existence would see you through slim times, when a woman’s resourcefulness was all that kept you from teetering into the void.

I had to pick up the rotten fruit that was left over, turning over wounded faces from the grass, plucking them up, and dropping in a mass grave at the bottom of a grocery sack. Summer after summer I was sent into the yard to deal with those pears that had fallen only to pass from this world.

More recently, I recall the pecans from the neighbor’s pecan tree that I used to eat. I worry that I have told more than one person this story more than once. The lesson learned from the years of biting into rotten bitter pecans only to be rewarded by the most gorgeous flavor you can imagine from the ripe ones is an instructive one.

I always envied (and still do envy) people whose yards contain flourishing fruit trees or vegetable gardens. I am afraid that I am a terrible bore to take to a botanical garden. Ask my wife. I will spend hours strolling through the velvety growths of flowers with a perfectly non-plussed look on my face only to light up at the sight of the vegetable gardens. I always want to see the largest specimens of cauliflower, pumpkins, and so on. I enjoy the sight of well ordered apple and orange trees thrown into a disorderly riot by the heavy burden of sweet fruit.

The envy that I feel towards people who have such flourishing resources at their disposal resembles the envy that I feel towards people who own boats. These possessions mark these people as living apart from the world that I knew. The people with their fruits and veggies were imminently resourceful and prodigiously natural. The people with their boats knew something very profound about leisure and enjoyment. Here we have the two basic poles of existence, the pure struggle of life. Yet each pole always seemed like the lucky tendency of other families that I came in contact with outside of the terrain I grew up in, and only touched in a moment to see left behind in fading light.

Alone in a cafe...

The rain has let up enough that people have taken to the plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk outside the cafe. That leaves me as the only patron inside, perched by one of the large windows that let in more light than can even fill a Starbuck's venti sized cup. But by being the only person in the cafe comes an enormous burden the size of which can only be measured accoustically by the empty echo of jazz overhead. Passerbys on the sidewalk peer into the empty shop, expecting to see life, evidence of that "third place in American life" that is neither work nor home (ignoring the fact that I am here to work and that you find so many people with their faces pressed close to the slateboard screens of their laptops in places like this).

The passerbys, however, quickly turn away from the windows in disappointment. I'm just not lively enough. All they get from me is a stupid stare back, the vain longing of a person indoors wishing to be outdoors. What a disappointment I am to these people! I am a sorry advertisement for sociability, leisure, even productivity. I'm just sitting here mute and still, painfully aware that I am not filling up the space of the empty cafe enough to captivate any wayward looker. I'm not even shouldering the financial burden that affords the little bit of space that I am taking up, having only ordered a modest cup of coffee for a dollar-forty and having only let a lone quarter bang the tip jar.

As I try to hatch wild plans to make myself some kind of spectacle for the sake of business and look up, people begin filing in from the sidewalk, setting their things down at tables, and taking up the task of setting aside a few minutes of the day in a place that is neither work nor home. Chairs scrape. Bodies bend over tables. Sipping slurps sound from coffee cups. A throat is cleared. The cash register jingles and snaps. Perhaps my efforts have not been in vain.

Rehashing

I came across this little bit going through my "Writing' folder on my computer. I wrote this the summer before my last semester at CU and in Boulder. Allison was planning her departure to Chicago and the buildings all seemed to forecast the emptying of space that would manifest in many different ways in the coming year. At that time, many shops were still closing down in the downtown of Boulder. Some had sat empty at least since late 2000. This bit is over two years old but the sense of "moving to the peripherary of life" is very relvevant to my present context....

The thought comes today of being left behind somehow. Being left behind but also being rooted, perhaps too rooted. It is strange to think that something concerning my experiences during the last two years has changed. I will go back to school a ghost. Perhaps it is telling that I want to write stories about empty buildings and storefronts, thatI gaze down into the deep tears in the ground that the backhoes make along Broadway. There must be some part of myself already in those uncovered dark spaces, those insubstantial, fleeting places. Times like that, where you see a sliver of yourself standing like a ghost in the middle of an empty shop floor, are times that require intense concentration on who you are about to become, because it is uncertain. For me, the very idea of transformation is also loaded with a concept of value. Transformation is charged with the possibility of it all going to shit in an instance. Really, of course, this is the present writing itself into the future, trying to lodge some kind of reality of itself there. This is the present saying I am permanent and real, not just a doorjamb between past and future. But really it is nothing but an opening, but again this opening seems like the real thing, the thing that we will be soon.

But the fleeting, left behind feeling, is really just regret, right? Aren’t I concerned that all of the past will mean nothing very shortly? It seems that way. I am beginning to feel irrelevant and replaced in the throbbing center of the idea of what is important to me. It seems somehow that the future, that adult life, such as it is, is about moving to the periphery and maintaining a graceless pose there. It seems like hoisting your leg into a ray of light to watch it be refracted away, broken at the kneecap by illusion.

Boys in the pond

The weather has warmed up here. The shallow pond by the lake, looking like a Victorian relic is filled with a glassy catalog of reflections. Seed pods and leaves (and other detritus that has weathered the winter) drift by on that longitudinal surface, not swept but kindly secreted away.

The young boys come out from the school yards fascinated by the prospect of subduing the shallows of the pond with the tread of their bikes and the soles of their shoes. But has mastery ever taken such an inconsistent form? The boys peddle in endless iterations of the same circle. They go around and around, as if amazed that the water isn't lacerated and lying open but dares to close up the wounds. There are only the slight ripples on the surface to suggest that the boys ever rode there.

So, they subject the water's surface to all of the tests ever devised by philosophy to test reality including anarchic splashing and rough stomping. They lob rocks from the grassy banks around the pond (some of them sail right over my head) and the rocks thunk in the water. They ride, stand, and apprise. Watching them conduct their tests is both exhilarating, frightening, and tragic. Watching them I am reminded of the desire that seems to tear through childhood--boys and girls alike--with a ghoulish desire to kill the child and birth and man (or woman). The ghouls wants to grapple with the solid things of this world. At times it grasps so tightly that it strangles and mutilates.

That ghoul, that ghastly ghoul, lurks, lusting to split flesh. I see it in the contempt that the older boys have from the younger boy who craps in his pants. They quickly dispatch him to mother for further tending. There will no more testing for the little one today, just the memory of shame and thus a breach will open up for the ghoul.

I see the ghoul in the fat boy--the fat ones always seem prematurely old--who gleefully eggs on another boy to run over the ducks in the pond. There is a blank, automatism in the boy who follows this command. He cycles on but his whole being seems devoid of passion; there is none of the lust in him that will send him down to the basement to the rafters with a lamp cord and suspend himself over the beyond in five years.

Watching the boys perform their tests, I cannot decide if I am watching monsters or poets being born. Soulless killers or impassioned experimenters. And yes, the pond's glassy surface refuses to admit any in between.