Nothing To Remember Pt. II

He used to say it sometimes at parties. He’d stare at his scuffy boots and scratch at the greasy hair behind his ear and say it. Or, he’d tug at that stupid thrift store t-shirt and look over your shoulder as he said it. Alyson had watched him do this once a week, every week, for 8 months and now she watched him do it again in that fucking basement. He snapped the folded-down beer can tab with the nail of his forefinger and looked up at the ceiling and said it.


“I don’t know… you know? It’s like, when you make art – when I write – and you do it in public like that, you’re just free. And anonymous. In front of everyone. “

The skinny red-headed girl, that girl that everyone thought was overdressed in her asymmetrical dress and asymmetrical haircut and teetering, perilous heels, nodded solemnly with her eyes closed and her head down, like an acolyte at prayer. He went on. Alyson, on the mildewed basement sofa, stopped smiling.

“It’s like, because everyone is there and sees you, it's like you matter. But you don’t have to explain to anyone why and no one could say for sure why, but everyone knows that this guy, with his typewriter…”

He touched the little, freckled thing on the hip with the tips of his fingers of his non-beer hand.

“or this girl with her sketch pad, or whatever. They know that you matter.”

He shrugged and pressed the sweaty beer can against his forehead and the little red-headed girl bit her lip, blushing behind all her adorable goddamn freckles.

Allyson stood and smoothed her sweater, swaying a little. Leaving that half-full beer can on the coffee table she’d carved their names into in the Spring, she climbed the stairs out of the heat and the sweat and the noise of the basement. The rest of the house was cool and all you could hear was traffic outside and the muted thump of the music downstairs. She tried a few cupboards and finally found the glasses and selected the biggest, cleanest one. At the sink she let the water run and and stared at her reflection in the window out on the alley between disheveled bungalows.

She knew she was pretty. Delicate featured, with fair skin and a great mass of healthy dark hair. It wasn't just her looks he didn't talk to anymore. It was her, in all the invisible ways.

Alyson dipped a finger into the water coming from the faucet and it was that shocking mid-winter cold. She filled her glass and lit a cigarette at the stove. Ducking outside, she sat in the late-march cold with her water and chain-smoked, shivering. And not crying.


She'd left her coat down there on the couch and couldn't decide if it was worth retrieving.

Nothing To Remember Pt. I

“Everyone knows that girl,” this other girl exclaimed, “is a liar.”

That girl sat at the end of a basement sofa balancing a can of beer on her knees pulled to her chest, heels of her flats on the ratty cushions. Her fingers tapped rhythms on her cantilevered soles. Her jacket was folded beside her and in it were three loose cigarettes. She smiled while the room performed for her benign spectatorship and, eavesdropping, she sometimes laughed. Before the end of the night, her cigarettes would be ash and filter in the street.


There, across the grey institutional carpet was the only thing that undid the smile in her eyes, if not her mouth. His boots were just too big and never tied, as though he’d been in some kind of hurry to get to this chair in this room and not talk to her.

Alive. Alone. Alight.

The boy sat all bold angles and subtle curves in the belly of the cast iron tub. Soap bubbles had collected at the edge of the water ringed in filthy grey and the ripples of that way little boys are never still. His head was lathered in a great frothy white wig of shampoo so that he looked cast in a pageant. The man’s hands moved deftly and quickly through the froth, so that when the time came, he cupped an inverted hand over the boy’s brow and ladled bathwater with the other. When he was finished, the man swept the boy’s bangs out of his eyes and kissed his slippery forehead. The boy wiped at his eyes with fingers that seemed longer every day to the man.

“Do moms sometimes give sons baths?” the little boy asked while the man ruffled him briskly about the shoulders with a towel.

“They do, mostly when they’re little boys.” Said the man. The boy stepped into the underpants the man held sprawled between his hands.

“And then do they brush their teeth together and floss and shave together?”

“Well, Mom’s don’t shave their faces the way dads do, but yeah, then they brush their teeth.”

“And read together before bed?”

“The best moms do, yes.”

“My mom was one of the best, right?”

The man put his hand on the little boy’s chest, flat and broad like he was giving compressions to keep the child alive until help arrived. He looked at the wallpaper and all its little swoops and textures. He felt his heartbeat 7 times round and then spun the boy to face the sink. They brushed their teeth. They flossed their teeth. They spread shaving cream about their faces and wiped it away from their chins and cheeks and upper lips, the boy with a plastic razor, the man with the real deal.

“You want batman or superman tonight?”

“I want to be spiderman.”

“Spiderman’s dirty, pal. Tomorrow night.”

“Okay. Okay, batman.”


The man started to help the boy into his pajamas, but he didn’t need it. The man leaned against the doorframe to the room she had painted with care. It was only barely just dark out on account of the summer and he could see the boundaries of their world together, him and the boy. That afternoon, he’d sat with his thoughts and his iced tea on the steps to the kitchen door and watched a pale warrior make-believe a victory at the edge of the lawn. The sun had made the man tired and the boy wanted him to come and fight at his side. He could have and maybe should have. With the cinematic memory that rested in sepia tones through his thoughts now, he was glad he didn’t.


The boy was dressed for bed and they read a story of turtle’s stacked to the sky that one might reach the moon, like some inversion of the Hindu foundations of the world.

The man awoke on the floor of his bedroom, all those photos spread around him and the glass on its side having been earlier drained. The boy was crying, frantic. When the man stepped to the door of the child’s room, still bright from the moon and being painted white save for the clouds stenciled about the ceiling, he heard the boy but didn’t see him. And then there he was, folded into a pile just inside the door by the wall, his eyes wide with terror and drenched in grief.

“What is it, pal?”

“It was a bad dream… a bad dream.”

“Oh, no… You know you’re okay now, okay?”

“I just – yeah, I know, I just – it was so scary and-- so scary.”

“Do you want to tell me about it, pal?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”



The boy trembled with sobs and his breath rippled the room like frothy bath water.

“It was all of us on the bridge, but it wasn’t the bridge,” the boy let tumble out.

“All of us?”

“You and me and mr. mittens and mommy and we were on the bridge but it wasn’t the bridge.”

“How did you know it wasn’t the bridge?”

“Because it was real high. It was so real high up and mommy was out front while we crossed it and and then…” The boy’s voice broke. “ but and then she fell and you couldn’t catch her.”

“You knew it was your mom?”

“Yeah and she fell and you reached and couldn’t catch her and you were holding mr. mittens and we all began to slip. We slipped and we fell too.”

“And then you woke up?”

“I woke up and I was crying and then I tried to find you but I was scared. I was scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared and I’m always going to come find you.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“And that’s okay too. Just look for me, okay?”

“I wish you played with me today. I wanted you to.”

“Sometimes dads have to let their little boys play by themselves. It’s good for us. For both of us.”

“Okay.”

The man held his boy in that empty house and well within the boundaries of their world. The boy was asleep soon and the man soon after. In the morning, they made pancakes and they laughed in the sunlight that found its way onto their faces through trees and windows.

Just The Briefest...

I'm home in California for the weekend and running around with my sister and some friends. I've got some really awesome photos cued up, as always and I'll try to post some stuff later this week.

Side note: if you run into the girl above while you're galavanting about Paris, tell her that there's a young man in America who will keep her in coffee and baked goods for all of eternity.

Noble Lies & The Things Implied

Cigarettes were, for him, always the triumph of context over reason. He never smoked them in America, but on the Continent, the air smelled wrong without the hint of acrid tobacco smoke about his clothes. Except now, he’d been in Europe so long he was always cold. He spent most of his mornings rubbing his hands together and trying to get the fluid slowly gripping his lungs to settle for the day's work. European editors were used to phlegmatic writers. American editors couldn’t be bothered to get up early enough to call in the morning. If his daughter called, she would have worried.

Still, she never called.


He wrote the same six pages every day. In those pages, she walked from the kitchen and collected a basket with blankets and pads of paper and brushes and paints. He would describe, everyday, that same dress, that same gold ribbon in her hair. And she would walk through the back woods to the clearing and his words would describe what her brushes would portray. Then, in his description and even in the room a bit, the air would take a chill and the light would go gray. Day after day, twilight would be creeping around her enclave, her clearing.

Then he would stop, light a cigarette and get to work.


Today, when he pulled his kerchief away from his mouth, it was streaked with red. Today, the phone would not ring, nor the day after. Today, in the six pages, she was grown and in a white dress and he didn’t follow her to the clearing. Today, he narrated as though wrapped in gauze and only half awake. And, in the distance, she sat on the swing he’d always meant to build in the woods and smiled.

Mildew & Rust. Moths & Blowing Dust

She preferred her dresses barely there and this one was no exception. It wasn’t so much that a dress should show vast expanses of pearly skin, though this one certainly did. After dashing across her front, just beneath her collarbones, the neck line traversed a scapular curve at a dire, hurtling angle, and swept back up over the other shoulder blade just as abruptly. This dress was barely there in that perfect way; it hung across her frame delicately and yet moved with her like an aura. Like a razor thin cloud of silvery ephemera. In candle-light, she glowed. In passing headlights, she shimmered.


And the best thing about this cad on her arm was that he never noticed. She could set her emerald irises in a field of smoky grays such that they suggested men would fight wars in her honor, and he would spend the whole evening behind a scotch and a cigar, content to kiss her cheek on every entrance and exit. She was, for him, much like his cuff links; dashing accoutrement that, if left at home, would be unfortunate but, after all, the night would go on. Tonight, she’d feign a yawn and tuck her fingers beneath the lapel of his coat.

“I’m tired,” she exhaled, brushing his ear with just the hint of her bottom lip. He produced some bills and she received them along with a last kiss for her cheek in all those masculine aromas.


And wherever the taxi took her, she had hours before the illusion required she was home. There were, of course, men who loved her. Probably one each in every surrounding postal code. Men who would have stolen her away to any number of warm, Catholic places for the rest of history. And she told them how she loved the sound of escape. And, in the mean time, she let them buy her things she had no place to wear. Every single one wondered why she never spent the night.

And every morning she woke up before him in that sprawling bed and thought with fear that she would always love the man who never called her by her name.

Beware Woeful Wisdom

I'll be back to write more in this soon. I'm sure I'll need a break from the paper I'm working on right now. It's about desire and capitalism and advertising and it's proving to have many unruly angles and I'm viewing it through a lens that is stuck at just-out-of-focus.

I haven't really done any school work in days. But if you've read this for very long or happen to actually know me, you'll realize that isn't really news.

In the mean time, here's a poem a Cafe-friend shared with me:

Unwise Purchases
by George Bilgere
They sit around the house
Not doing much of anything: the boxed set
Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:
The French-cut silk shirts
Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
And make me look exactly
Like the kind of middle-aged man
Who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:
The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
The mysteries of the heavens
But which I only used once or twice
To try to find something heavenly
In the window of the high-rise down the road,
And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
When it could be examining the Crab Nebula:
The 30-day course in Spanish
Whose text I never opened,
Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
Save for Tape One, where I never learned
Whether the suave American
Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
At a Madrid hotel about the possibility
Of obtaining a room,
Actually managed to check in.
I like to think
That one thing led to another between them
And that by Tape Six or so
They’re happily married
And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.
But I’ll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
For a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
There lives a woman with, say,
A fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
Near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
Drying in their tubes
On the table where the violin
She bought on a whim
Lies entombed in the permanent darkness
Of its locked case
Next to the abandoned chess set,
A woman who has always dreamed of becoming
The kind of woman the man I’ve always dreamed of becoming
Has always dreamed of meeting,
And while the two of them discuss star clusters
And Cézanne, while they fence delicately
In Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,
She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
Fixing up a little risotto,
Enjoying a modest cabernet,
While talking over a day so ordinary
As to seem miraculous.

Side note: I'm also working on a terribly long essay about empire and church and life and practice and... well, you know, "stuff." I'm worried it might inspire me to do something abundant. I mean, I have always wondered what it would be like...
Don't worry, I won't post it here.