Disorganized as any line can be,
Faceless hands draw up half hazelnut,
Some reach for sleeves; the sugar bowl the rut,
But look aside and secret lines you’ll see;
Chaos vanishes for dance, for rows
Of half-awakened dim zombie thought
Shadows; enlivened from the scent we’ve bought-
Out from your hood, out juts the aft, your nose.
My navigating head now takes the wheel
Deftly, as if it were my idea for
You to grasp a stirrer, showing more
Of that bright deck- the cream you spill I steal.
For on the surface half and half like dew
Exchanges all of me for half of you.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
THERE IS NO POINT
in unfolding an argument
that proves itself with each word,
proves by the fact of its words,
and that comes to the conclusion
that conclusion is a myth.
And that is the point.
that proves itself with each word,
proves by the fact of its words,
and that comes to the conclusion
that conclusion is a myth.
And that is the point.
BYE BYE SNOW
Second Snow Song
The snow it harms you.
Before you have made it even half of the way
to self-evaluative frenzy,
the rotten door will begin to sway
from the pistol unloading ghosts
that were vanquished to the cellar
last Leap day.
You had Olympics, elections which both struggle
to manifest equally now.
Evenly,
with swift dark quiver, motionless
under the lack of lightning,
the procession unravels—
a cork, marching on the carpet,
an envelope, pale and sweet,
a cleaver, fresh from the market,
and an ice-cream cone topped with ground meat.
The snow it harms you.
Before you have made it even half of the way
to self-evaluative frenzy,
the rotten door will begin to sway
from the pistol unloading ghosts
that were vanquished to the cellar
last Leap day.
You had Olympics, elections which both struggle
to manifest equally now.
Evenly,
with swift dark quiver, motionless
under the lack of lightning,
the procession unravels—
a cork, marching on the carpet,
an envelope, pale and sweet,
a cleaver, fresh from the market,
and an ice-cream cone topped with ground meat.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Your Father the Kidnapper the Criminal
Suburban small-town deli, furnished with white plastic lawn furniture—tables and chairs—for daily regulars. A nineteen year-old boy and an aging man named Tommy Greenberg sit, eating Bacon-Egg-Cheese sandwiches, no salt. The table has an empty umbrella hole at its center.
Tommy Greenberg:
I gotta tell you a story about your father. You probably don’t know much about your father when he was a kid but let me tell you…
Trails off. Looks up. Looks down.
I was fifteen and your daddy was sixteen and he’d just gotten his license. He drove this navy blue Econoline van to school and he’d always have five six people in the back—just bouncing around and everything. Now there were no seats back there and in the beginning your dad drove like he had pythons crawling up his pant legs so when he swung into the parking lot at school,—usually four five minutes late—got out, and opened the back door, a bunch of goons would all come stumbling down off the bumper, the straps from their book-bags all tied in with their shoelaces or something else equally as unruly. They’d run across the parking lot to the double doors for class, all disheveled and crooked-looking and tired already, and your daddy would walk in behind them smiling and laughing, carrying nothing, asking his shaken and stunned little brother Billy what he planned on doing with all them books.
Whaddaya plan on doin with all them books?
Well one Friday morning about 6:45 I stood at the bus stop waiting and hugging myself, cold with the shivers. My tooth was hurting and I was blowing into my hands to keep them warm when your father pulled up next to me in the big van. The exhaust growled and snarled and there was banging from the rear and Mott the Hoople blared from the cab. Your father sticks his head out the driver window and tells me to get in. Now I knew my mother was watching me out the window and I didn’t want her to see so I shook him off and off the van went with a big puff of smoke coughing and wheezing from the exhaust.
A couple minutes later the bus still wasn’t there but your daddy came around again. He asked me what I was waiting for and handed me a muffin. He says, “Breakfast?” Then he tells me he’s gonna kick my ass if I’m not at the bathroom window on the east wing of the first floor during second period. Your dad was always big, and I was scared, even though I knew he liked me. He and my brother had been friends a couple years. I remember it like it was this morning. “Eight-oh-eight” he said to me.
I really didn’t want to cut school and I was sort of scared of what we might be doing. Now I had a dentist appointment after school at 4:30 and I knew my mother would kill me if I didn’t make it back in time. My mom was crazy about dentist appointments. Still is, right ma?
So I went to school, to homeroom and to first period and come 8:07 I asked my history teacher Mrs. Schuster if I could be excused for the bathroom and out I went down the hallway. I almost fell over when I walked into the bathroom and right out the window stealthy as a damn spaceship that big Econoline grumbled like it was the center of the world, the center of everything, and right where the busses normally pulled up. Then, and kid, this is crazy—your daddy must have seen me or something because out swings the driver door and he comes running across the field right in front of the lawnmower guy and starts screaming through the window, waving his arms and yelling come on come on. He pushed up the window from the outside and told me to jump out. Now I was scared to friggin death. And I had a dentist appointment at 4:30.
He was halfway into the window when I decided to just submit to it, to go and have a good time. I think when you’re a kid that’s probably the only thing you really want anyways. Anything else you do out of fear. A little of that was mixed in too. So I jumped out the window.
Running across the lawn I realized I didn’t have my books. I started to turn around but your father kind of just grabbed me and threw me in the back like I was dumb and durable cargo. I came to myself and I saw Jonah Foster pumping a keg. In the back of the van. Sue Lynch and Meredith McGarreth sat with their backs against the shell of the truck, laughing at me with cups in their hands and beer spilling over the sides and running down their fingers. They had on these real short shorts that were coming into style and I remember thinking among other things that they must have been cold. Then a death pain shot through my mouth and I started looking for a way out even though there obviously wasn’t any. Over his shoulder your dad says to us, “Hold on to your seats, boys, we’re going to Jersey!” and Jonah keeps pumping that piston again and again, pumping, pumping and the girls are giggling and talking about how Dave Everheart puked yesterday 9th period and Jonah just keeps pumping.
“Shit...all foam,” he says, “the fucker.”
The talk about school relieved me slightly from the feeling that I was a child surrounded by people who weren’t children. They weren’t adults exactly and we were sort of peers, but it was more like they were my older siblings or something. Sue I didn’t really know well—I’d never hung out with her—but Meredith had been to my house a couple times when my older brother was dating her. One time, she bent down and talked to me like I was a toddler, and I took it even though we were close in age, just on the opposite sides of pubescence, because looking down her shirt gave me a strange feeling. You feeling ok?
I’d seen these girls in school of course but school was big and there were a lot of people I didn’t really talk to and I was especially quiet around girls. The friends I had, except for your father, didn’t go out much or get themselves into trouble, so I didn’t really have a social life except the one I shared with my dog Sandy in the woods behind the bleachery.
So anyway Jonah hands me a cup and it’s all white foam. The van had no windows in the back, but from what I could make out from my view of the windshield, we were on a highway somewhere, which meant your daddy wasn’t bluffing. I didn’t think he was, but now it was confirmed. We were going to Jersey. I started to ask if we’d make it back by 4:30 but stopped. It was a stupid question. I looked down at the cup I held. I looked at how I held it. The dentist appointment was a goner. I took a sip, all foam. It tasted horrible—I fought with everything I had to keep from spitting—and as I dropped the glass from my lips, I felt some moisture on my nose. The girls laughed and pointed. I remember noticing they had their fingernails cut short and they wore no nail polish. My embarrassment raised the temperature a couple notches.
Jonah’s brown hair danced like a hippie on his head and he looked like a nutcase pumping that keg, balancing himself against the van with his forearm and spilling foam everywhere. “Let me show you a trick,” he says to me. “Here’s how you get rid of that foam.” He rubbed the tip of his pointer finger across where his nostril met the rest of his face with a scooping motion like he was trying to get the last bit of ice cream out of a container. “You see,” he says, “it’s the oil.” Then he stuck the finger in my cup and swirled around a few times. I was a little apprehensive of Jonah’s oil being in my drink, but it worked and the foam began to dissolve in the places where he’d put his finger and the rest followed until I held a three-quarters empty cup of beer. I took a big sip. I was relieved. It tasted better without the foam, but it still wasn’t that great. Jonah was busy pouring another beer. He handed that one up to your father.
You want anything? Anything to drink? No? I won’t put my greasy finger in. No? Ok.
Then Suzy asks me, “You like to party, Jonah?” Her eyes squinted like my grandma’s cat and I had the feeling she saw right through me.
“Yeah, I guess,” I says to her.
“How many times you been drunk?”
“Oh, a lot,” I says. “I always get drunk.” I says I says, “I go into the woods and get drunk with my….friends all the time.” I pictured Sandy, God rest her labrador soul, whirling the foam with her paw.
I was so drunk by the time we got to Jersey that when we pulled into the grocery store parking lot to pick up some things, I puked all over a lamppost. Your father just said, “good, good,” and walked on but the girls helped me back into the van and laid me down on some blankets. My head was spinning it was hot and I was thinking about my dentist appointment, feeling the acidity stuck to my teeth. I think that’s around when I passed out.
I woke some time later—it was getting dark now—and we were all in this room that was lit by these dim dusty old lamps. Everything was old. The dust on the molding looked permanent, like you couldn’t get it out of there if you had a chisel and a hammer. Little boxes filled with starfish and fake goldfish and nets and buoys hung on the wall across from the couch I was laying on and my. Head. Was. Burning. but your father was getting everyone riled up in the kitchen, so I had to pull myself together. The pressure to party was worse once they realized I was awake. “Tommy!” “Feeling better Tommyboy?” They were all drunk yelling. I saw the keg and smelled the beer, felt it in my stomach, and almost let loose again all over the sofa.
Before I knew it they had me by the feet, holding me upside down, and let me tell you Johnny, I thought I’d had enough, but that beer was flowing into my mouth and they started counting, shouting, “TWO—THREE—FOUR” and I’ll be damned if they didn’t count to twenty-three. And you gotta remember, I’d never even really gotten drunk before, and here I was, hundreds of miles from home, doing my first keg stand. I’d say your father had me doing things against my will, but it was like I had no will whatsoever. It didn’t exist.
They let me down and I stumbled against the wall and got caught up in one of those nets and almost tore it off the wall. The girls giggled all silly like they thought it was cute or something how messed up I was. I was turning red, but I wasn’t complaining.
Then they broke out the pot. Jonah had been working on this contraption in the bathtub all afternoon. He ran out at one point and grabbed some aluminum foil and went back in and slammed the door behind him. Your dad said something about him wiping his ass with it. I had no idea what he was doing, but when I went to use the bathroom he was in there with the tub full of water, and when he let me in to pee there was an empty two-liter cut in half floating like a dead sparrow. Rubber bands were scattered around. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
A few minutes later I was sitting on the couch with my head in my hands dizzy as a top and the girls came out of one of the bedrooms, giggling and laughing and carrying on and coughing with their eyes all red and squinty. I felt like hell, kid, but I really wanted to hang out. I did. I really wanted to, so I dared myself to be game for whatever, even though my face felt like it got slugged a couple times by Floyd Patterson and hell my brain too.
Dumb idea. Jonah yelled, and before I could even look up your dad had me in a headlock and was dragging me down the hallway toward the bathroom from where I could hear the girls’ laughter and the splashing water echoing against the tiles.
This thing they had. This thing. The inventor of this thing should be jailed. It was the marijuana equivalent to the keg stand, and your dad had me briefed on its operation and hooked up to it in microseconds. Mic,ro,seconds. What you do is you pack the weed in the cap, which comes off, but first you put it down in the water and pull up while you light it, which creates a suction and the whole bottle fills up with this thick dense smoke, then you take the cap off and push down as you inhale, and it shoots the smoke into your lungs like it’s coming out of a fire hydrant.
I hit this thing and I’m done. I remember feeling really faint and hot and then I hurled again, right into the bathtub water. Meredith cackled—I can still hear her wild laughter as we speak—but after she helped me too. While everybody else was pissed about the water she told them to give me a break—she reminded them that they’d kidnapped me in the first place. How easy it was for them to forget.
I sat on the cold bathroom tiles and looked up, slowly coming to, and not feeling all that bad, considering. I felt like I’d just unloaded a bad piece of cargo, and the pot started reeling through my head and I looked up and your dad was blowing out this incredible puff of smoke, like the wind God blows into sails in cartoons, coughing and chuckling at the end when Jonah cracked a joke. He told me to get off the floor, so I did. I went back into the living room and sat there. Your dad followed and slugged a couple of beers and offered me one but I had to refuse at this point. I was having just enough fun where I was.
Then everybody left except your dad. Meredith and Jonah and Sue, they all left and your dad put on some music and we talked and I relaxed a little. Speaking of which I took the opportunity to ask him when the hell he planned on taking me home and to warn him that my mother was gonna serve him up for dinner. He didn’t seem too worried, so I says “Look. You don’t know my mother, I’m just letting you know beforehand…” and nothing. He tried to get me to play this drinking game with him but I refused. I mean, I was so high I couldn’t concentrate on anything for too long, I couldn’t even make sentences when we were talking, but your dad did fine, and he drank the whole time. He played the game by himself, something with cards or quarters, I can’t remember. We listened to Sabbath, that I remember.
Then Jonah comes back with a couple guys who say they’re vaqueros and they break out all this coke on the table as soon as they come in, right in front of me. I’d never seen anything remotely like it. They both looked like vaqueros too, plaid shirts, the boots, the hat, the blow, you know, the whole getup. They asked me about a key and I said no and I noticed how they spoke good English, natural. Then Jonah and your dad and them were doing lines and talking about Nixon, Watergate, the scabs building the strip mall down the road, their ages (the vaqueros were twenty-eight and twenty-nine and stalled when your dad announced ours all proud, but only for a second), Sabbath, Ozzy, Zeppelin, et cetera. I have a clear memory of your dad’s head lifting from the table and all the stuff being gone and the vaqueros sort of gasping.
After that the girls fell in the screen door, Sue’s halter-top hanging on by a thread, ooh-la-la, followed by two no three no four no five more girls, all of them smoking hot and smoking cigs, Budweiser cans in their hands. My jaw dropped. I was amazed. I thought I’d walked into a movie and that I was destined to lose my virginity that night. The dentist was long gone. Before I could blink the vaqueros had out more coke and they were all doing it in the kitchen and in the living room where I was. One girl mentioned the bars and then a bunch of them left and it was your dad still drinking from the keg with three of the girls and me on the couch. One of the girls came over to me and started asking me questions about my age and what grade I was in and how I ended up there. I told her and she looked up at your dad kind of lovingly. She kept talking to me and she was very nice, kept me calm, you know? As for the other two girls, your dad leaned against the kitchen counter and had an arm around each one. They were the prettiest ones there by far and they were melting all over your dad. Let me know if I go too far for you.
Boy:
You have gone too far.
Tommy Greenberg:
Ok. Tell your daddy I say hi.
Boy:
Will do.
Tommy Greenberg:
I gotta tell you a story about your father. You probably don’t know much about your father when he was a kid but let me tell you…
Trails off. Looks up. Looks down.
I was fifteen and your daddy was sixteen and he’d just gotten his license. He drove this navy blue Econoline van to school and he’d always have five six people in the back—just bouncing around and everything. Now there were no seats back there and in the beginning your dad drove like he had pythons crawling up his pant legs so when he swung into the parking lot at school,—usually four five minutes late—got out, and opened the back door, a bunch of goons would all come stumbling down off the bumper, the straps from their book-bags all tied in with their shoelaces or something else equally as unruly. They’d run across the parking lot to the double doors for class, all disheveled and crooked-looking and tired already, and your daddy would walk in behind them smiling and laughing, carrying nothing, asking his shaken and stunned little brother Billy what he planned on doing with all them books.
Whaddaya plan on doin with all them books?
Well one Friday morning about 6:45 I stood at the bus stop waiting and hugging myself, cold with the shivers. My tooth was hurting and I was blowing into my hands to keep them warm when your father pulled up next to me in the big van. The exhaust growled and snarled and there was banging from the rear and Mott the Hoople blared from the cab. Your father sticks his head out the driver window and tells me to get in. Now I knew my mother was watching me out the window and I didn’t want her to see so I shook him off and off the van went with a big puff of smoke coughing and wheezing from the exhaust.
A couple minutes later the bus still wasn’t there but your daddy came around again. He asked me what I was waiting for and handed me a muffin. He says, “Breakfast?” Then he tells me he’s gonna kick my ass if I’m not at the bathroom window on the east wing of the first floor during second period. Your dad was always big, and I was scared, even though I knew he liked me. He and my brother had been friends a couple years. I remember it like it was this morning. “Eight-oh-eight” he said to me.
I really didn’t want to cut school and I was sort of scared of what we might be doing. Now I had a dentist appointment after school at 4:30 and I knew my mother would kill me if I didn’t make it back in time. My mom was crazy about dentist appointments. Still is, right ma?
So I went to school, to homeroom and to first period and come 8:07 I asked my history teacher Mrs. Schuster if I could be excused for the bathroom and out I went down the hallway. I almost fell over when I walked into the bathroom and right out the window stealthy as a damn spaceship that big Econoline grumbled like it was the center of the world, the center of everything, and right where the busses normally pulled up. Then, and kid, this is crazy—your daddy must have seen me or something because out swings the driver door and he comes running across the field right in front of the lawnmower guy and starts screaming through the window, waving his arms and yelling come on come on. He pushed up the window from the outside and told me to jump out. Now I was scared to friggin death. And I had a dentist appointment at 4:30.
He was halfway into the window when I decided to just submit to it, to go and have a good time. I think when you’re a kid that’s probably the only thing you really want anyways. Anything else you do out of fear. A little of that was mixed in too. So I jumped out the window.
Running across the lawn I realized I didn’t have my books. I started to turn around but your father kind of just grabbed me and threw me in the back like I was dumb and durable cargo. I came to myself and I saw Jonah Foster pumping a keg. In the back of the van. Sue Lynch and Meredith McGarreth sat with their backs against the shell of the truck, laughing at me with cups in their hands and beer spilling over the sides and running down their fingers. They had on these real short shorts that were coming into style and I remember thinking among other things that they must have been cold. Then a death pain shot through my mouth and I started looking for a way out even though there obviously wasn’t any. Over his shoulder your dad says to us, “Hold on to your seats, boys, we’re going to Jersey!” and Jonah keeps pumping that piston again and again, pumping, pumping and the girls are giggling and talking about how Dave Everheart puked yesterday 9th period and Jonah just keeps pumping.
“Shit...all foam,” he says, “the fucker.”
The talk about school relieved me slightly from the feeling that I was a child surrounded by people who weren’t children. They weren’t adults exactly and we were sort of peers, but it was more like they were my older siblings or something. Sue I didn’t really know well—I’d never hung out with her—but Meredith had been to my house a couple times when my older brother was dating her. One time, she bent down and talked to me like I was a toddler, and I took it even though we were close in age, just on the opposite sides of pubescence, because looking down her shirt gave me a strange feeling. You feeling ok?
I’d seen these girls in school of course but school was big and there were a lot of people I didn’t really talk to and I was especially quiet around girls. The friends I had, except for your father, didn’t go out much or get themselves into trouble, so I didn’t really have a social life except the one I shared with my dog Sandy in the woods behind the bleachery.
So anyway Jonah hands me a cup and it’s all white foam. The van had no windows in the back, but from what I could make out from my view of the windshield, we were on a highway somewhere, which meant your daddy wasn’t bluffing. I didn’t think he was, but now it was confirmed. We were going to Jersey. I started to ask if we’d make it back by 4:30 but stopped. It was a stupid question. I looked down at the cup I held. I looked at how I held it. The dentist appointment was a goner. I took a sip, all foam. It tasted horrible—I fought with everything I had to keep from spitting—and as I dropped the glass from my lips, I felt some moisture on my nose. The girls laughed and pointed. I remember noticing they had their fingernails cut short and they wore no nail polish. My embarrassment raised the temperature a couple notches.
Jonah’s brown hair danced like a hippie on his head and he looked like a nutcase pumping that keg, balancing himself against the van with his forearm and spilling foam everywhere. “Let me show you a trick,” he says to me. “Here’s how you get rid of that foam.” He rubbed the tip of his pointer finger across where his nostril met the rest of his face with a scooping motion like he was trying to get the last bit of ice cream out of a container. “You see,” he says, “it’s the oil.” Then he stuck the finger in my cup and swirled around a few times. I was a little apprehensive of Jonah’s oil being in my drink, but it worked and the foam began to dissolve in the places where he’d put his finger and the rest followed until I held a three-quarters empty cup of beer. I took a big sip. I was relieved. It tasted better without the foam, but it still wasn’t that great. Jonah was busy pouring another beer. He handed that one up to your father.
You want anything? Anything to drink? No? I won’t put my greasy finger in. No? Ok.
Then Suzy asks me, “You like to party, Jonah?” Her eyes squinted like my grandma’s cat and I had the feeling she saw right through me.
“Yeah, I guess,” I says to her.
“How many times you been drunk?”
“Oh, a lot,” I says. “I always get drunk.” I says I says, “I go into the woods and get drunk with my….friends all the time.” I pictured Sandy, God rest her labrador soul, whirling the foam with her paw.
I was so drunk by the time we got to Jersey that when we pulled into the grocery store parking lot to pick up some things, I puked all over a lamppost. Your father just said, “good, good,” and walked on but the girls helped me back into the van and laid me down on some blankets. My head was spinning it was hot and I was thinking about my dentist appointment, feeling the acidity stuck to my teeth. I think that’s around when I passed out.
I woke some time later—it was getting dark now—and we were all in this room that was lit by these dim dusty old lamps. Everything was old. The dust on the molding looked permanent, like you couldn’t get it out of there if you had a chisel and a hammer. Little boxes filled with starfish and fake goldfish and nets and buoys hung on the wall across from the couch I was laying on and my. Head. Was. Burning. but your father was getting everyone riled up in the kitchen, so I had to pull myself together. The pressure to party was worse once they realized I was awake. “Tommy!” “Feeling better Tommyboy?” They were all drunk yelling. I saw the keg and smelled the beer, felt it in my stomach, and almost let loose again all over the sofa.
Before I knew it they had me by the feet, holding me upside down, and let me tell you Johnny, I thought I’d had enough, but that beer was flowing into my mouth and they started counting, shouting, “TWO—THREE—FOUR” and I’ll be damned if they didn’t count to twenty-three. And you gotta remember, I’d never even really gotten drunk before, and here I was, hundreds of miles from home, doing my first keg stand. I’d say your father had me doing things against my will, but it was like I had no will whatsoever. It didn’t exist.
They let me down and I stumbled against the wall and got caught up in one of those nets and almost tore it off the wall. The girls giggled all silly like they thought it was cute or something how messed up I was. I was turning red, but I wasn’t complaining.
Then they broke out the pot. Jonah had been working on this contraption in the bathtub all afternoon. He ran out at one point and grabbed some aluminum foil and went back in and slammed the door behind him. Your dad said something about him wiping his ass with it. I had no idea what he was doing, but when I went to use the bathroom he was in there with the tub full of water, and when he let me in to pee there was an empty two-liter cut in half floating like a dead sparrow. Rubber bands were scattered around. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
A few minutes later I was sitting on the couch with my head in my hands dizzy as a top and the girls came out of one of the bedrooms, giggling and laughing and carrying on and coughing with their eyes all red and squinty. I felt like hell, kid, but I really wanted to hang out. I did. I really wanted to, so I dared myself to be game for whatever, even though my face felt like it got slugged a couple times by Floyd Patterson and hell my brain too.
Dumb idea. Jonah yelled, and before I could even look up your dad had me in a headlock and was dragging me down the hallway toward the bathroom from where I could hear the girls’ laughter and the splashing water echoing against the tiles.
This thing they had. This thing. The inventor of this thing should be jailed. It was the marijuana equivalent to the keg stand, and your dad had me briefed on its operation and hooked up to it in microseconds. Mic,ro,seconds. What you do is you pack the weed in the cap, which comes off, but first you put it down in the water and pull up while you light it, which creates a suction and the whole bottle fills up with this thick dense smoke, then you take the cap off and push down as you inhale, and it shoots the smoke into your lungs like it’s coming out of a fire hydrant.
I hit this thing and I’m done. I remember feeling really faint and hot and then I hurled again, right into the bathtub water. Meredith cackled—I can still hear her wild laughter as we speak—but after she helped me too. While everybody else was pissed about the water she told them to give me a break—she reminded them that they’d kidnapped me in the first place. How easy it was for them to forget.
I sat on the cold bathroom tiles and looked up, slowly coming to, and not feeling all that bad, considering. I felt like I’d just unloaded a bad piece of cargo, and the pot started reeling through my head and I looked up and your dad was blowing out this incredible puff of smoke, like the wind God blows into sails in cartoons, coughing and chuckling at the end when Jonah cracked a joke. He told me to get off the floor, so I did. I went back into the living room and sat there. Your dad followed and slugged a couple of beers and offered me one but I had to refuse at this point. I was having just enough fun where I was.
Then everybody left except your dad. Meredith and Jonah and Sue, they all left and your dad put on some music and we talked and I relaxed a little. Speaking of which I took the opportunity to ask him when the hell he planned on taking me home and to warn him that my mother was gonna serve him up for dinner. He didn’t seem too worried, so I says “Look. You don’t know my mother, I’m just letting you know beforehand…” and nothing. He tried to get me to play this drinking game with him but I refused. I mean, I was so high I couldn’t concentrate on anything for too long, I couldn’t even make sentences when we were talking, but your dad did fine, and he drank the whole time. He played the game by himself, something with cards or quarters, I can’t remember. We listened to Sabbath, that I remember.
Then Jonah comes back with a couple guys who say they’re vaqueros and they break out all this coke on the table as soon as they come in, right in front of me. I’d never seen anything remotely like it. They both looked like vaqueros too, plaid shirts, the boots, the hat, the blow, you know, the whole getup. They asked me about a key and I said no and I noticed how they spoke good English, natural. Then Jonah and your dad and them were doing lines and talking about Nixon, Watergate, the scabs building the strip mall down the road, their ages (the vaqueros were twenty-eight and twenty-nine and stalled when your dad announced ours all proud, but only for a second), Sabbath, Ozzy, Zeppelin, et cetera. I have a clear memory of your dad’s head lifting from the table and all the stuff being gone and the vaqueros sort of gasping.
After that the girls fell in the screen door, Sue’s halter-top hanging on by a thread, ooh-la-la, followed by two no three no four no five more girls, all of them smoking hot and smoking cigs, Budweiser cans in their hands. My jaw dropped. I was amazed. I thought I’d walked into a movie and that I was destined to lose my virginity that night. The dentist was long gone. Before I could blink the vaqueros had out more coke and they were all doing it in the kitchen and in the living room where I was. One girl mentioned the bars and then a bunch of them left and it was your dad still drinking from the keg with three of the girls and me on the couch. One of the girls came over to me and started asking me questions about my age and what grade I was in and how I ended up there. I told her and she looked up at your dad kind of lovingly. She kept talking to me and she was very nice, kept me calm, you know? As for the other two girls, your dad leaned against the kitchen counter and had an arm around each one. They were the prettiest ones there by far and they were melting all over your dad. Let me know if I go too far for you.
Boy:
You have gone too far.
Tommy Greenberg:
Ok. Tell your daddy I say hi.
Boy:
Will do.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
A & E.
“Mmm. This is so good.”
“Oh yeah, this is it—paradise.”
“mMMMmm.”
“mmmMMMMMMmmmmm.”
“mmmmMMMAAAAAHHHHHHH.”
“Oh my —, I feel unbelievable. This is outrageously beyond any sensation I have ever experienced.”
“I’m soaring.”
“I’m floating in space, I’m beyond the spheres.”
“I’ve found my purpose in life.”
“I am eternal. Completely fulfilled, fulfilling, forever fulfilling.”
“My brain is an exploding swarm of ecstasy.”
“Mine’s dissolved into the shore. It is everything in its peace.”
“Feed me more. FEED ME.”
“OHHHH. UHHH.”
“AHHHHHHHHHH. Mmmmmm.”
“I never imagined anything could be so good. It’s amazing. I’m completely satisfied.”
“I could die in ten months.”
“I could die right now.”
“Thanks, little guy.”
“Why wasn’t this allowed again?”
“Oh yeah, this is it—paradise.”
“mMMMmm.”
“mmmMMMMMMmmmmm.”
“mmmmMMMAAAAAHHHHHHH.”
“Oh my —, I feel unbelievable. This is outrageously beyond any sensation I have ever experienced.”
“I’m soaring.”
“I’m floating in space, I’m beyond the spheres.”
“I’ve found my purpose in life.”
“I am eternal. Completely fulfilled, fulfilling, forever fulfilling.”
“My brain is an exploding swarm of ecstasy.”
“Mine’s dissolved into the shore. It is everything in its peace.”
“Feed me more. FEED ME.”
“OHHHH. UHHH.”
“AHHHHHHHHHH. Mmmmmm.”
“I never imagined anything could be so good. It’s amazing. I’m completely satisfied.”
“I could die in ten months.”
“I could die right now.”
“Thanks, little guy.”
“Why wasn’t this allowed again?”
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