Chorus (yoU)
...All night
You want the young American
Young american, young American,
you want the young American
All right
You want the young American...
,,,You ain't a pimp and you ain't a hustler
A pimp's got a Cadi and a lady a Chrysler
Black's got respect, and white's got his soul train
Mama's got cramps, and look at your hands ache
(I heard the News today, oh boy)
I got a suite and you got defeat
Ain't there a man you can say no more?
And ain't there a woman i can sock on the jaw?
And, ain't there a child I can hold without judging?
Ain't there a pen that will write before they die?
Ain't you proud that you've got faces?
Ain't there one damn song that can make me
Break down and cry?
---David Bowie, Young Americans
To be sure, my mothr's judiaism came in fits and starts. Every year she introduced some new facet of this heritage into our lives without explanation, without preface, with out context. The example i remember best since witnessed as an adult, approaching her middle years, and surprised me. Here, she stood at the kitchen counter, returned from the shopping at the supermarket, and she put everything away but for some pastries. i return from sunday five mile run, hot and gasping for coffee, when i spy hot cross buns.
i think: "Of course, Easter".
i say: "Why'd you get hot cross buns, mom? i don't really care for them".
she replies: "Well, i'm glad to hear you don't," pointing to the yellow crosses on the sticky pastry.
i ate them anyway, grumbling to myself that i would not have to look at them, if they no longer exist.
This will be the Easter my great-sunt, my mother, and i make a stand. After my great-aunt's not-jewish husband dies of cancer, she sells the hogs, and makes a general statement:
"if anyone's looking for bacon and sausage for breakfast, or pork chops for dinner, they've come to the wrong the kitchen".
For Easter dinner, my mother's favorite brother brings a ham he smoked. The three of us, my mother, my great-aunt, and i sit at one end of the diningroom table, and eat as little as etiquette will allow which is surprisingly very little, a morsel, really, no more than a bite, thank you, and we do not have seconds.
Following this, my mother begins to observe Shabbot, staying at home, not doing any housework, not even cooking, nor spending money, listening to, Car Talk, and What do you know on PRI. It will take me the seven years of her absence before i can realize that her non-contextual clues which come in some many ways, like those already mentioned, and like her move to Sacramento for the second time, changing the 'o' in her name to an 'a' so that Morrie becomes Marrie, begins to unravel a mystery of destruction and distress, informing my mother's love of what she was, on the one hand, and, on the other, a fear for its safety.
To endure this attention to coming circumstances, these memories grown strong and restored to a place in my story, which of themselves tell of the spirit, facing these dangers with remnants of confidence, a sort of beggar's self-possession and whore's resolution, i find i cannot grow, with any comfort, into my body.
To be sure, the years between the two rapes have not sustained the smalles particle of detail, save for physical and emotional surge of upset which comes to settle on me, imposing its narrow and specific limits to later manifest themselves in sudden, distasteful, and disagreeable outbursts of rae, so vigorous they add a fistula of confusion to the daily body of our lives.
i submerge myself in college work. While at Chabot College, i practice writing reams of poetic conventions, irritating the paper with the small, annoying scratches of verbs, adjectives, nouns, forming metaphors and similies and images, and i work to creat the dream of writing poetry, going to poetry readings, participating poetry readings, entering poetry contests, working as a contributing editor for the literary magazine, reading and reading and reading shelves of books--literatures, philosophies, histories, sciences; i have a small job in the college library, and i satisfy my cravings for the creative life with unaccountable bouts of anorexia, and, following the gospel of Dylan Thomas, alcoholic binges. i alternate between swelling my small successes as a large fish in a big pond to descending into the shallow disintegration of my ill-favored life.
At nineteen, i would abandon my terror to alcohol, going to a friend's apartment to drink sixteen ounce greyhounds, concocted from store brand vodka, drinking at least four of these, passing out, throwing up, then, the entire contents of my stomach into the toilet, rectching and gagging with my head in same. Coming to myself to some degree, i get into the car and drive myself back to our house in Castro Valley, getting up at 6:30 a.m. in order to catch the bus in time for 8:00 classes, then 8:00 a.m. finals; at the end of the quarter, and, before i return to my summer job at the cannery, i will drop from 120 pounds to ninety, then down to eighty-seve; i contemplate the excessive severity in the solitude of suicide. One day, my mother has me over dinner, preparing my favorite meal of a T-bone steak with all of the trimminmgs. i sit in the breakfast nook, watching on the the five inch portable, occupying the head of the table,The Mike Douglas Show. The show that day devotes itself to the burgeoning threat of teenage alcoholims, and, while i watch, my mother brings out pamphlets from Kaiser Hospital. I read them, listening and realizing that i have a drinking problem even though i tell mom, "i don't have a problem".
"That's the first sign you do".
Scrubbing the potatoes for baking, she announces this diagnosis in the "matter-of-fact" Advice Nurse tone.
Subsequently, returning home from binging, i go, dutifully to see the doctor, Dr. Steinberger, my mother's friend and mentor, and he prescribes the routine, in the 1970's, for someone suffering from an ulcerated colon: Belladonna for the pain which causes me to double up and sink to the floor, and Valium for nerves. Not big on drugs, and beginning to come to terms with my extreme fondness for alcohol, i become scruplous in my daily doses, cutting the Valium tablets in half, switching from vodka to scotch, so i can dilute it with milk.
Eventually, i give it up altogether. Not before, however, i indulge the adolescent proclivity for self-destruction which skims the peculiar interest in annihilation, flows of the misery of neglect, abandonnment, and/or abuse--emotional, mental, and/or sexual. These become the accompanying demons of a second rape, releasing the intentional disregard of the earlier shame, becoming my field of Mars to lead me to come face-to-face with the devil with my back to the deep blue sea.
Time drigts into an atmosphere, depleting any influence through corruption's obscure smoke. Distinguishing those who reach out to me from those who would see my death, seems a luxury.
"You'll need to get some insurance for yourself. I'm not going to pay to bury you".
"For all I care, they can put me in the gournd in a pauper's grave".
The disaffected father and his morbidly defiant eldest have come to a brutal parting of their mutual ways. Having been able to withstand the accidental death of her beloved dog, but not the absence of apology, they retire to their corners for the first round in a very long match. Many years later, she will come to recognize that her father taught that people will take from one what one's cherish most, without explanation, without apology, the point being not to allow this to collapse oneself in their grief but to keep moving with life, taking one's grief along. In Chan Buddhism, the sages caution: "do not take gain and loss to heart".
i think: "Why should i want to take anything from a man who walks up tme, and says, "I gave you your life, and I can take it"?
i say: "Did i write you a letter? i don't remember writing a letter, requesting permission to come here. Did you get a letter from me?"
He looks at me absent feeling--neither cold, nor hot--no feeling, and turns and heads away from me.
Two weeks later, he comes to my room, the door open, and delivers his tiresome news, "you're on your own from this point forward, and you will go to college, and get a degree, or I will take your name. Try me, and see if I don't".
i stand on trembling ground, here, not out of fear, for there have been two occasions in my life, once at thirteen and once at thirty-eight, when i clench my fists at him, so angry does he make me, but this does not happen to be one those times. No, i stand the ground as it trembles because i cannot remember if he can, in point of fact, take my name, legally. i keep my mouth shut.
Several months later, my mother has two men over in very dark suits. My mother takes out a life insurance policy on me, against my wishes, with Met Life.
to be continued...
Many times i will cuddle my decay as the only revelant part of my existence. The madness of not knowing what influences the rootless dissolution of this human spirit, grinds me further into the dust of self-loathing.
i have moved out of my family's house, going to school, praying for acceptance to San Francisco State University, working my little job in the college in the library at night, i share a two bedroom duplex with a friend, the daughter of a Jewish mother and Mormon father.
"I want you to meet mom and dad".
"i would be pleased and honored to meet them".
"You're the only friend i've wanted to introduce to them".
"Then, i will, and, Rachel, thank you for wanting me to meet your parents. Youd don't how it makes me feel".
In the parking lot of a liquor store, in the hinterlands between Emeryville and Oakland, at 10:00 p.m., on a Friday night, something of the urgency of a conversation which has not got through, cannot get through, does. What two Jewish women are doing this parking lot, at this time on a Friday night, one alone, the other in a heated discussion, with a very large, as in tall and wide, not fat, African-American has to be anybody's guess. i recognize Rachel, first.
"Rachel? Rachel is that you?"
"la schel? hi".
"Are you alright?"
"I'm okay. This is nothing I can't handle. Rodney, this is la schel, an old friend of mine".
"How're your mom and dad?"
"Good. They're real good, and your mom, how's your mom?"
"Good. Remarried, seems happy, living in Sacramento".
i glance at Rodney, standing and gawking at me. Something of my appearance has him tongue tied.
"You sure you're alright, then? i gotta find something to eat".
"Yeah, we go through this at least once a month. We need to find something to eat, too, eh, Rodney?"
"Well, it was good seeing ya, again. Do tell your mom and dad "hi" for me".
"I will. Oh, and la schel, tell your mother I still have her sterling silver service in a real safe place. It's in a safe deposit box. Let her know that will you?"
"Sure, she'll be very glad to know".
Walking back to my car, i take a last look at the large Rodney.
"You know her? I can see i have to treat you different".
"She's just like me, Rodney. like me".
to be continued...
Rachel's parents make an attractive couple, the kind of couple, i want imagine i can be in my forties. Rachel's father works for the state as an agent in the Agricultural Department. Also an artist, her mother teaches high school art. Their family closeness has a center which makes their lives perceptible. The center for in is love, and the love of the parents seems visited upon Rachel in a way which is unqualified in a society such as ours. Then, again, it may be just the way i relate to things in my incessant agitation. In this kitchen, at this stage of my decline, i feel the illusion of hope, more plainly, youth, than i shall at any other time fo my life; in this kitchen, even at this stage in my decline, all stands before, bearing down on me with possibilities.
Rachel works as a clerk in a grocery store in order to feed her art, drives a green Volkswagen bug, and thinks of David Bowie as somewhat of a deity. She has an imperturbable sidelong glance which she uses to communicated incredulity, or a warning of something seeming and not at all what it purports to be, holding a cigarette in her left hand, smoking sometimes through a filter, sometimes not, right arm perched on the back of the left hand, she watches hwith her large blue-green eyes as she nose sniffs the rampant shylock odor of humankind's cant, knowing the secret of humanity's perfeidy lies in the indulgence for celebrating the unsuspecting schumck.
Much there is to admire in this woman, and i do, attempting to emulate her style of dress, returning to the love my high school days, women's clothes from the theirties and forties. i stumble; i fall; i fall far short of the mark, sinning against my own sense of style, spinning on my own sense of shame and degradation, straining in an effor to achieve some sense of me outside of these unwanted semen stains.
Retreating home, one night, heavy dullness of body and spirit, quarter finals looming up ahead, and the responsibility for keeping my grade point average at its honors level, i suffer a loss of structural integrity, and, for the first time, i can articulate, "sometimes the will to live cannot overcome the need to die".
Rachel has not returned home from carrying her boyfriend, Eduardo, to his house on the other side of touwn, so i shower, and put on my pajamas, and go into the kitchen to survey the floor. There i discover that having a roommate as fastidious in housekeeping as i has merit above and beyond any reproach, and, so i take a pillow, which leaves the decor in the living room, duped "early junkie" by a mutual friend, looking like a sculpture event, depicting a romance of homelessness.
But never mind.
Carrying the pillow to the scrubbed and shiny gas oven, i drop it, not in front of the door but adjacent. i check to make sure the windows are closed, then return to my bedroom to pickup, Morgan, the second, my purple dog and constant companion and confidant, since the eighth grade, when my parents decided they would have to replace Morgan, my brown dog and constant companion and confidant from the second grade, having made the mistake of throwing him away befor ei was ready to sleep without him. i would sleep with Morgan, the secon, until i was twenty, and the he would occupy the place of honor atop my bed.
Morgan is in my arms and all is right with my little world. Turn out the lights, turn on the gas. i have taken an extra Stellazine, extra Belladonna, and Valium, and, now, i enter the moat: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday and Dinah Washington, Randall Jarrell, Jimi and Janis, and Bix and Charlie Christian, ah, the romance of death, spoils of degradation, here i come.
to be continued...
The light snaps on. Rachel wrestles my dead weight to my feet, and starts walking me around the living room.
"C'mon, move, move, on your feet. That's it. Keep moving. snap out of it ! One foot in front of the other. C'mon, move!"
Juggling, shigting, dragging, carrying, prodding, pulling, and pushing me a wake, Rachel exerts herself on my behalf, and i get up, feeling like an insect that has an unfavorable consequence on humans--a louse.
Rachel extends a cigarette to me, and i take, ulling the filter off, and taking a light from hers.
"Jesus, la schele, what the hell are you doing?'
Groggy from my indulgence of my obssession, i sit, staring past into the dim-lit room. The only light we have comes from the kitchen.
"Do you know what that did to me, seeing you like that? Don't you realize what that means, sticking your head in a gas oven? All the Jews that died from gas and burned in ovens? It really hurt me to see you like that".
"i'm sorry. Truly, i really am. i just kinda snapped. Nothing reall sem me up or joff, just couldn't take anymore," and my eyes cast around, "of my life".
Rachel stubs out her cigarette, going to kitchen to make us both a coup of tea. i hear the oven door shut, and i wonder--where is all of this going to end?
It's a damn good thing Educardo had me take him to his parents instead of to his apartment; otherwise, i'd have come back here, and you'd be dead. Do you have any idea what that would have done to me?"
i wonder--how can i make this constant throbbing pain go away and not come back?
"Yeah, and Rachel thank you very much for coming back when you did".
Rachel turns to look at me, then brings my cup of tea. She comes with her cup, and we sit and listen to the cars in the night.
The next evening Rachel takes a delegation of my friends to visit my mother. This is all i know. It so happens that my mother has me home for dinner, and she tells me, "I think you should come home, don't you?"
Relieved, i say, "yes. And mom, i'm, sorry for all of the trouble i cause. i'll try to get my head on straight".
"I know. why don't you go downstairs and look in the dressing room".
Downstairs, in the master bedroom, no one uses anymore, in the dressing room, no one uses anymore, i find this note on the wall:
PLEASE COME HOME.
WE MISS HAVING YOU HERE.
One of my kid brothers had taken our two dogs, Nibs and Panda, and put their paw prints on the wall followed by:
SEE NIBS AND PANDA MISS YOU TOO.
i stand there, staring at the walls until i can no longer see them, not from tears, but from gratitude. A feeling i have only had one other time in my life, whe i had gone hungry and/or without food, and fearful i would be rejected, i applied for food stamps. When i had finally received them, i stood there, waiting for the light rail, and the tears came, this time, from the sheer gratitude of knowing i would have enough to eat that night.
Gratitude cannot be described. It occurs as one of those emotions which must be filled and felt in spirit. The closest definition i could find for this word in, The American Heritage Dictionary, lists 'comfort' as a secondary meaning. Looking up the word, i find, "to soothe in time of grief or fear; console". It lists 'solace' as a secondary meaning. Looking this up, i find, "comfort in sorrow, misfortune or distress; consolation", i go to the word, 'consolation', and i find, under console, "to comfort in time of grief, defeat, or trouble; solace [done that]". i look up defeat, and, under the third definition, i find, "coming to naught; frustration. i look the the end, and i find, {ME, defeten < defet, disfigured...]", nothing whatever to do with 'gratitude, seemingly, yet, all of these words infer a kind of disfigurement which needs of correction--not the kind of small adjustment of time upon the spirit, but a necessary rending asunder so that something new and wholesome might fill the old space. Standing in that room, in my old room, formerly my parent's room, and standing at the 65th Street light rail station, the indefinable becomes manifest as someone reaching out past the disfigurement which lends such disgrace to a way a person carries himself or herself. When someone can reach beyond this spiritual disfigurement, a seemingly effortless granting of immunity, a reprieve, even if only temporary, ushers one to a place of one's own humanity. The tired and mundane word, "overwhelm," becomes what gratitude does. If a single act of generosity can overwhelm, then the single response of gratitude will become overwhelming.
to be continued...
i owe Rachel $95, my half of the deposit. $95 means my total take-home pay from my work-study job at the library.
"i need to pay you the money i owe you. i don't have anything of value except my mother's sterling silver dinner service for eight".
My mother gave this to me when i left. i have never understood why she did. this does not count as an heirloom moment, leaving home as a young bride. It counts, though, as a fledging moment, seeing how far i can fly under my own speed, and like any fledged young, not very far, and still needing lessongs on how to fend for myself.
Rachel says, "i don't feel good about taking it. She might like back".
The sterling silver service my mother purchased as a young newlywed, working as a registered nurse at the hospital where she trained, she bought one place setting every pay period from the long defunct Capwell's, in Oakland. Made by Oneida, it had gardenias, threading up the front of the handles, and it must have been one of a kind, or the last of its kind, for i have never been able to find another even remotely like it. Every holiday meal, it would make its appearance, to be polished, and washed, then dried, and then arranged in prescribed manner of tasteful but correct table settings, according to the holy writ of Emily Post.
"i do not think my mother would mind--much--if she knows it is going to someone who'd appreciate it".
Rachel and i part company as roommates but not as friends. Home, my mother does not ask about the silverware, but i volunteer the information. Now, we eat with cutlery, not the silverware so much a part of the other joyous times.
"I'm so please you took such good care of my silverware". i have no clues to why she says this. One day at Rachel's house, her mother comes into the kitchen where i am waiting for Rachel. i will be driving my car, a 1966, Volvo PS 122, with four doors.
"i saw your mother's silve, and i told Rachel to go to the house that silver came from, and tell her mother you have it, so she will be able to rest, knowing it is in the best of hands".
The gratitude these words provide, carries me, to be sure, even now, across this chasm of yearning to make aments to a mother i love more i could show.