from Tell on You

IV Lady 1. Through misery and pain, sang the mirror, and the blossoming freshness of the extent of things, the way things are, and nature, which includes you too, and wants to hold in your hands that spiky little brush you lengthen your eyelashes with, the powdery chalks you draw across your cheek, and nibble through the spectra of—and here the mirror paused, then resumed—crayons the consistency of Philadelphia Cream Cheese that you stroke your lips with:  you have allowed nature to imagine these things too, you have let her understand what her endless wanderings were for:  look how she wants to color your hair, sang the mirror when you were in the shower. 2. The body with its CVS of free radicals and antioxidants, the body filled with homelessness and blood and crips, the four humors wearing puffy sleeves embroidered with stags chased by archers in waistcoats holding crossbows, lab-coated genes peering into a test tube through thick eyeglasses, the body with its yachty skin, its crystal CD eyes and its Oprah mouth, the maw’s shell waiting on the strangely bleached sand, vaulted Sienna fat and vomitorium, poop malls and Tenderloin districts, the Romeo prick and the Juliet crease, the hangman’s throat, the Internet tongue, tennis court hands and Coney Island aquarium lungs, the German Lieder brook spotting your whitest pair of new cotton panties, and your Irish Spring boxer shorts. 3. It’s hard laughing up the hanging sleeve of the extent of things pointing past you—this time—to the person in the seat behind you, yes, you ma’am, would you mind coming up on stage, never to be seen again through the encouraging, relieved applause.  You feel like Joey Bishop. His face was the grave of the joke he was about to tell, cheerless as an approach to the Van Wyck Expressway, a blankness I think older Jews in Brighton Beach “got” but moved past to Buddy Hackett and Shecky Green, even Norm Crosby.  They had “an act” that could at least reach into the straw-filled wind and pull down a bolus of veal or chicken to chew on through the first show of the stripping, mob-owned night. 4. One can drift in ignorance with a kind of rebar sturdiness, yet a lightness and a lyricism—at least for a while.  You have to be quick when you’re young and ignorant.  So it was not surprising that one took to professional fighting as one might, in a different setting, take to dance or poetry, or, in this setting, how some took to heroin, which was just beginning to come into this Brooklyn Irish neighborhood like a dog hunting on the scent of a wounded animal, in this case families already mortally wounded by alcohol.  These were “the way”—fighting, drinking, heroin—to strip down and be seen and wondered at and feared and to effect some sort of end by having to struggle through or within in front of others attending to the only spectacle that is ever worth watching:  one’s mindless fight against being alive. 5. We were prepositions hanging on, modifying, slightly, the larger sentence.  Engraved on a plaque in front of the church near the gym were the psalmist’s words:  “God is in the midst of the city,” and I figured it meant, here in this church, the way “Liquors” showed where you bought Schaeffer beer or “Drugs” on Doc’s meant here is where you got prescriptions filled.  “Be still, and know that I am God,” a knowledge we get by listening to the psalmist tell the desolation visited upon his enemies.  But that only raised the question, what was the need for wasting a bunch of us nobodies in a marginal part of the city which belonged more to the ocean than to the city streets which we walked barefoot on in summer and in winter waited for a car to stop at the light so we could crouch down behind it and grab its rear bumper and let it pull us in our Thom McAnn’s sliding through the snow?  Whose enemies were we except our own?  Two young men, one already with a budding cauliflower ear, contesting nothing personal with his opponent in victory or defeat:  the one we called The Lady putting a hundred down on the bar to take drinks out of, a small-time fighter’s big money purse, which sounds feminine outside the world of the ring—black patent leather with two straps, or a small beaded bag your cut man hands you stepping out of the locker room, pissing blood all day tomorrow. 6. The way things are, consequent and necessary, never and always sufficient, waves slapping up the side of a lapstreak hull like applause.  The world as expectation and desire wants you in more than your apprehension of it, it wants you in how you express it more than it can represent itself:  remanded forms that also are the case.  Then it lets go of you, tells on you just when you’d like to float anonymously a little bit below the surface billowing up around you; or tells on you like weathering, the salt air and the salt water peeling back thin curls of varnish from a deck like tasty apple strudel flaking on the plate plunked down in front of you.  The unknowable struggle alive:  why they could accept who he was and then not accept who he was, an inconsequential, unique life like everybody else’s, light of foot and catchy as a show tune, dark as any psalmist’s. 7. The Lady is not able, like the boat he shipped out on, to connive with strangeness and nature.  He cannot return successfully.  He cannot work as a greeter in Vegas, someone a little bit larger than life—a boxer and a merchant marine—to make you feel special when you walk in.  He has no stories to tell.  No one feels saltiness in his handshake.  The ocean does not bell out to the wheelhouse stars, the desert shrinks to the canvas inside the ring. 8. My boxing gloves, which we kept in a hat box tied together with string on the top shelf of the closet, looked like two big eggplants with thumbs, and I’d sink my tiny fists down into them and turn, eager, to my father who was going to give me a lesson, and he’d lace them up along my forearms and I’d punch them together two times to show they were on tight, but I’d leave out the part a professional fighter did then, holding his gloved fists together in an inverted V level with his heart, spreading apart his shiny robe, the Lady’s hooded face turned to the side in neither disbelief or wonder or fear or acceptance:  This is what you do.  This is how you do it.  This is happening now.  This is what I will do.  This is what I think.  This is how it is done.  This is how you do it.  “Face the color of a plum when his brother found him hanging” said Dave the launchman, who knew everything about everyone. And I was surprised they had an open casket, or surprised the funeral director could get the face back which looked all squunched down on the shoulders of the Lady’s new blue suit, a neck filled with junk and broken shells.  And the world as expectation and desire and the part which relates to action as the result of everything else:  permanence and passing no more belong to us than we to them, and the illusion that separates us. 9. But seriously, as the biblical Jewish comic “I see before me” might say—a blend of Rickles and Lewis, Norm Crosby, Joey Bishop and Isaiah, none of them ever really that far from the dog-tongue waves of Brighton Beach that just want to lick your longed-for face—seriously I kid with the spilkes in the gnechtigazoid, with the love and the telling and pretty l-a-d-y!  And the desert sands, transfixed by the immutable sun, enjoyed a drink on the house in the old days’ young nights, its legs dusted with stars showering down the cool Sahara dunes.