Good riddance, alcohol.
Good riddance mary-jane.
Good riddance hashish and uppers and downers.
Good riddance Timothy Leary … we hardly knew ye.
Good riddance to
those bottles of quenching cold ice-cold cottonmouth-inducing beer & ale
and those steins of on-tap room-temp Guinness stout
— it’s good for you the billboard said and the billboard wouldn’t fib.
Henry Baker sat in his wheelchair outside the Caring Hearts assisted living facility in Mañana under the shade of a tree that he reckoned might be almost as old as him. Then again, maybe not. He was eighty-five and the home was built in the early 1950s, so unless the tree was already here, it may be only about seventy years old. He remembered when the building went up.
At twenty-three, Marion Jennings (née Gustavson) is too old to be homesick.
Or so her mother says during their once-a-month, long-distance chat.
“There’s no time for wallowing, Marion Louise. You have a husband and a new baby to care for,” she tells her. “Instead of crying about living in paradise, you should be attending to your husband’s career.”
This is not what Marion wants to hear.
It was good weather for May. People were lying in the park, wearing short-sleeved tops against all odds and calling it summer. You walk outside with a jacket out of habit and regret it twenty minutes later. You’ll sunbathe but you won’t wear sun cream because somehow it feels like the sun can’t hurt you. If you’re so inclined, you start thinking those romantic springtime thoughts, where you wonder what summer might be like and whether you will be happy because happiness seems a right when so many people are smiling in front of you.
That couldn’t be my father on the phone. Forty years had gone by without a single card or message from him, and for all I knew he was dead. No, my elderly neighbor was teasing me.
“Pete dear, I’ve got a client on the other line,” I said.
“Mary Edwina, please listen.”
I listened. Pete could not have known my horrid middle name.
“I’m Edward Keller. I’m your father.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
It was Friday in Madrid. Hot. Humid. Noisy. The streets of the Centro were crowded with tourists foreign and domestic. By eleven A.M. it was almost impossible to move through the Prado for the crowds. Tour guides drilled pathways through the mobs with their colored pennants. Echoing off the marble walls and high ceilings, the din was as loud as the inside of a railway station at rush hour. The air dripped with garlic and stale breath.
From this distance, he’s not easy to see. Not with the naked eye. He’s old. I know that’s true. How old, I don’t know. He sits there on a beat-up couch on the porch, a big porch that wraps around part of the house and has screens on the sides to keep the bugs out. But it can’t do that too well if it’s just on the sides. I see him use his hand to swat away the eye gnats. They can be irritating late on a warm desert evening.
At times it seems that just when life seems to be going your way, every little thing you could possibly imagine goes wrong. Everything you take for granted comes into view. The simple mornings, the perfect nights, the sleepy smiles, the warm dinners, the last hug you gave someone, the last words you said to another becomes permanent, fossilized in their memory, trapped in the coffin we call a body.
Amanda, our hospice nurse, answered the door when I rang the doorbell, showed me where to leave my shoes and escorted me into the den, where I found Faiz’s mother, Haima, sitting on the floor. Haima apologized that the air conditioner was out again, for the second time in a week. Within minutes, my slacks and blouse stuck to my skin, and the air in the den felt heavy despite a frantic fan and the open window in the breakfast room.
When Rómulo and Julissa met at the Salsodromo, not knowing that was the moment when the past and the future were forever riven asunder, they both blatantly lied to each other, knowing there was nothing else to do. Each of them had an inadmissible secret. Rómulo could not tell Julissa he was a lieutenant in the Peruvian military. The Shining Path had “a thousand eyes and ears,” and if he disclosed he was a soldier, his life would be in mortal danger.
A little time before I’d see my sweet wife Ellamae at death’s door, trapped in our burning house surrounded by leaping flames and black smoke, this bluesman they call Ol’ Boy walked into Joogee’s wielding a guitar. Joogee’s is a small juke joint way back in the woods. It’s just an old shack. Bullet holes here and there. Blood stains smeared across the floor. The smell of liquor oozing from the walls. You’d miss it if you didn’t know where to find it. But Joogee’s got the best damn blues in all of Mississippi.
He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—
I stood with my father on the BART platform of San Francisco, our luggage in hand and three plane tickets tucked tightly away in my pocket. We had spent the previous week with my older brother and his girlfriend to celebrate my nephew’s second birthday. The walkway was damp and covered with puddles that had formed during the rainy night. The day was humid, carrying with it the soft heat of a Bay Area July. A weird aroma of cinnamon mixed with the sewer steam of the city wafted through the breeze. Little light crept in the sunny afternoon day from above the stairwell.
A slash ripped open the night sky, like a great sleeping black eye had blinked open. A gust of wind blew out and rippled around the globe, then as if the black hole was inhaling, the wind blew backwards off the earth sucking anything not grounded into the tear in space.
Colossal lenticular fingers appeared on the top and bottom of the void lifting the eye open wider. Out stepped garnished Mycelia, illuminated by brilliant quasar beams.
Benny was at the window again, watching the new family across the street crawling around the property like wild animals. Not literally crawling. Just… everywhere. He looked on, annoyed, as an indeterminate number of children occupied themselves with balls, bats, jump ropes, skateboards, trikes and bikes, and even small cars. One was Pepto Bismol pink and branded after the ever-popular Barbie, and a red one was painted in a fire engine theme. Horrible.
A good deal happened after the fire devoured half the mountainside. People whose homes were now ash and rubble fought with their insurance companies over replacement or hired lawyers to litigate on their behalf. I had my own ideas about how these professionals operated: quietly evaluating how much each house was worth, talking in four-syllable words they thought their client wouldn’t understand, which they mostly didn’t, and throwing in some Latin.
Snow, but not yet. Clouds built across the sky, ahead of a raw east wind like smoke from encroaching fires. Pavements and walls, brick and stone, scornful of fragile bodies. He moved quickly, thinking a day ahead when streets would freeze, when snow would lay and, bound with anxiety, each careless step invited damage.
He walked opposite to the way home. South across Euston Road, by the spot where the hospital Christmas tree stood just a week ago. A few decorations still pinned in the emergency room. A half-deflated balloon. He cut through the muffled crowd at Warren Street station. Cut across their flow, fixed straight ahead, walking fast to make people falter. A small pleasure.
I now see everything through the prism of my own destruction. As I lie here in the hospital room without my recently amputated leg, I realize that my life will also be amputated in a similar macabre manner. The past and the future are forever riven asunder by a simple and irrefutable fact: my body is now incomplete, and my soul is soon to follow. I write because the circumstances require my sincerity even if it pains you.
The netherworld’s sordid secrets, disclosed,
brook no remorse for the dead nor regard for
those barely alive. Brutal eruptions
punctuate detention’s boredom. Nor does night’s
darkened cell ease despair. With 6000 not 3000
confined to have a cell is rare.
Romancing your looking glass reflection
northern lights pierce fractured windowpanes
frame my mirrors with supercharged
atoms displaying rhythmic finesse
each particle a proficient flamingo soloist
in step with a blinking star metronome
The jury found you guilty
in just an hour and fourteen minutes.
Long enough for bathroom breaks
and a single show of hands.
Your public defender
advised you to cop a plea,
but mom borrowed a suit and black shoes
and dressed you as an innocent man.
That swagger-daddy On the Red Line el
asks the auntie if she’s Spanish
she’s Italian he requests a sex act:
poor lady won’t muster insult or outrage
and we roll our eyes on her behalf.
I decide to get out of the house while I can.
Before I can consciously articulate my heading, I’ve arrived at the beach by the lighthouse. Here, in the imprints of ebbing tides, is where I like to treasure hunt. Caws of herring gulls reverberate off grayscale skies as I begin my search.
It doesn’t take long for me to lose the sense of time passing. Minutes or hours later, I’m surprised to see another hand reach for the same piece of sea glass I’ve spotted, cobalt poking out between shards of tumbled rock. A jolt runs through me when our fingers touch.
Song, take these rhymes and carry them abroad.
Lift your little wings and beat and beat
like in some Disney film. The Greeks had gods,
the Christians, Christ. We moderns have the heat
of giants booming from the screen. Our stars
take close-up orbits, Venus kissing Mars.
