Tag short story

Poet in a box

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About a decade before he passed away, my father, the celebrated poet, called me home to his summer place in the Hamptons for a visit. This was an unusual event as he preferred, we meet in the city, once a year, near the holidays. Asking for the reason, he told me, in that ponderous voice of his that we were gathering to talk about his will.  As his only child, I found this an intriguing proposition. By this time in his career, he had ascended to those rare heights in the American pantheon of cultural elite. He was esteemed enough to secure a wife, 40 years his junior, and with looks and appeal three standard deviations from his on scale of attractiveness. He had surrounded himself with willing accomplices, men and women of some renown, many teaching at fine universities, editing small but prestigious books of poetry for first class presses. This cadre blurbed his books and wrote complementary reviews. Some, I am certain read his poetry, but others simply joined the team. They couldn’t discern whether the poet has clothes or not; they were satisfied that someone more learned, someone in higher position on this bespoke hierarchy thought that he did. 

At this meeting which lasted less than an hour, we stood facing each other in a pretty room that overlooked a marsh. I don’t know that he sailed; he never spoke it and it never appeared in any of his poems. The room has been decorated elegantly by Tiffany, that recently acquired wife in that sparse modern décor, uncomfortable for humans but exceptional for long shots featured in Design magazines. I don’t recall his asking me to sit down or to stay for lunch. Tiffany seemed rattled by my visit when she answered the door that morning. In that short conversation, I tried to convey that none of my father’s wives held places of treasure or contempt for me. She had nothing to fear from me. I smiled and asked a few appropriate questions; I have a talent for that. She left shortly to sit on the dock, just at the edge, wearing a sun dress, her ankles in the water.  

During our meeting, my father, in his oblique way, told that he was writing his will and wanted me to know that I would be taken care of, as is due the son of an important poet. I quickly thanked him and told him that I was fine, I was making my way through the world and appreciated his thinking of me. Unlike the rest of my relationships, I must say that I have always been most obsequious with my father. My friends and partner would hardly recognize me in these exchanges. I still call him, Sir, as if he were members of the landed gentry in generations ago Great Britain. 

Still, he persisted and said that he was designating something very special for me. Once again, I thanked him. “That’s very kind”. 

He quoted one of his favorite non-poets Warren Buffett who had said that he was leaving his children money in his will to do some things, but not enough to do nothing. I smiled and replied, that seemed wise counsel. We talked no further of the will. He asked about my career and quickly changed the conversation to an upcoming collection of his poems soon to be published. Perhaps, I could attend the party to be held later in the year. I could have told him I was out of the country or made some other excuse but I said something like “wouldn’t miss it for the world” when in fact, I’d give anything in the world not to go.

 I left in early afternoon in my rented car, advising myself against obsessing about the conversation and parsing it. I vowed to file it away as another encounter with my father that I would never completely understand. I call upon my sketchy knowledge of Buddhism to leave it, to let it be.

The truth was that I spent the next ten years reviewing that conversation and imagining myself re-writing scene after scene and re-casting our characters as if I was working a script for an off-Broadway run. I never did reach an agreeable version, I couldn’t write him into the role where he emerged fully formed and multi-dimensional. And to tell the truth, I couldn’t do much better for my own character. At my age, it seems a lack of will and denial to be still wanting more from a father. I have wondered what kind of son would be happily matched with such a father. My imagination failed me. 

After his death in August 2018, we met with his lawyer to review the will. Tiffany got the money, the house, the other house, and a whole series of complicated but beautifully drawn rights to his intellectual property. I write beautifully here to refer to the genius of highly paid attorneys whose moral compass has wealth and the preservation of it as its North Star.

In his will, my father misquoted John Paul Getty[1] who he claimed wrote that nothing of value could be found in money. (Actually, Getty wrote, My formula for success is rise early, work late, strike oil.) So, inspired by Getty, he was giving his only son the treasure of his words, in the hopes that I would follow his path and his direction. There were bookshelves full of journals and notebooks and file cabinets with drafts of poems just waiting to be born.  I would become the next great Poet, the Celebrated Poet Junior. However, it should be clear that in all aspects of my life I have tried to be my father’s antithesis. Our taste in art, in women, our clothing, our social status, our values, our sense of our selves – all of it. Were it not for therapy, I could have foolishly made his work my work. 

Not long after the will was read, I received three crates in the mail along with a beat-up wooden filing cabinet from his lawyer. Enclosed was a carefully organizing archival box with notes in his hand, written on fine paper, along with well-worn dictionaries, a complete collection of the positive reviews of his work, titles of books of poetry I might use, a list of themes to explore. In this box, he also left a letter, a sort of map to the contents. “There is much work to do here”, he urged.

There was no suggestion here that I might want to consider being my own poet. Instead, this was more like a business plan, something that a son might seek from his father – throwing down the challenge to continue his legacy, fulfilling my birthright as his son. When the family business is poetry, what’s a father to do?  Along with the box, he outlined everything he thought I needed to know about writing poetry.  On a set of ten index cards, he outlined his guiding principles. What a gift.       

Don’t use all the words at once; be measured.

Be manly about poetry.

Order matters; coherence doesn’t

Clever trumps authentic or vice versa sometimes.

Plant tricks in your poetry. The critics love these. (Make certain they can’t all be found.)

Be not too careful with grooming, especially when you are young.

Write for people dumber than you.

Powerful people like to have poets to drink with.

Launch early, then glide.

Develop your poetry reading voice; this will be the most important key to your success.

Those acolytes of my father are delighted by his gift to me, smug and superior, that I will waste it. And I am most certain that I will in every way. Sons seldom are that acorn that doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially when that tree casts such a shadow that there is no room for light. Still, Poet in a Box. Maybe, I can talk to my marketing manager about the possibilities. 

[1]Getty actually wrote, “My formula for success is rise early, work late and strike oil.”

Sunday Drives

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I remember only the vaguest of details about the episode. My older sister, Janet, who keeps threatening to write a memoir revealing our family secrets tells it at nearly every family occasion. My brother, Carl, the baby of our family, swears the whole thing never happened. None of it; not a minute. 

It is generally agreed that parents and their children recount their family time together as differently as those blind men pawing over that elephant in the child’s tale. The stories that siblings bring back from their childhoods may reflect more about who they are as adults than what happened in their childhoods. Sometimes, it feels like we didn’t share much of our childhood together at all. Instead, we were more like boarders in a house with little interest in the other occupants. 

This episode supposedly happened two years before our father died in a fatal car crash. Janet uses this undisputable fact to shore up her accounting of this day.  We were on our Sunday drive in a rundown twenty-year-old Studebaker which my father maintained with his minimal mechanical skills. Bald tires. Engine burning motor oil. Failed emergency brake. Body rot. Unsafe for him to drive, but dangerous especially for my mother, a new driver, usually with a carful of kids.

We children were in the back seat on our way home after a long summer day at a public beach. My father was driving, with one hand on the steering wheel and his other arm stretched across the back of the front seat. My father’s family organized these gatherings and with plenty of cousins and lots of food we were dazed from the sun and sand, eager to get home and out of our swimsuits. The adults were full of booze, especially my Dad and his brothers. Janet says they were feeling “no pain.”  

As she tells the story, Carl and I slouched over each other ready to fall asleep. It was getting dark and the traffic was crawling along the state highway.  She was sitting at the edge of the back seat, pretending to read her book but was really hoping to hear what my parents were talking about.  To her it sounded like they were having an argument. Mom was asking him if he was OK to drive. 

Daddy said, ‘Of course, I am.’” He smiled and reminded her that he was a great driver.  Janet says that that my father was in a very good mood on that drive home. And she added “because he’d been drinking.” 

This kind of thing drives my brother and me crazy.  His drinking infects all her stories about him, even the ones about a very happy Christmas morning when he was awake earlier than usual, making us special Santa-shaped pancakes.  He was even more excited than we were about opening presents. That lovely childhood enthusiasm about him made him a great playmate and sometimes an unreliable parent but not on this magical morning. He was completely ours to enjoy. She insists he was up early drinking. That is why he was so much fun; Carl and I tell she’s crazy. This story always makes my brother storm out of the room, no matter how often she tells it and how often he pleaded, Please, not again. 

According to her, on that Sunday afternoon, there was an accident just ahead and the rescue crews were arriving. My father grew impatient and as quickly as he could, he swerved the car over to a back road. She reminds us of how much he hated traffic. I remembered that he knew every major highway, side street, and gravel road in the state. His job as an appliance repair man required him to know how to navigate anywhere; he also seemed to have magical sense of direction, the way some people do. So, on these Sunday drives, we could find ourselves in places he’d discovered during the week — abandoned mines, old houses he could fix up, farms he wanted to buy – all adventures and dreams.  This backroad would likely be a shortcut that took us a longer time to get home but it didn’t matter, he just hated traffic. 

Janet says that once we turned down backroad, things got serious. My father started driving faster; my mother sat up straight in her seat. Janet says my mother tried to catch my father’s attention by staring at him, by throwing one of her “stop it now” looks but it didn’t work. My father was smiling, enjoying the drive, one hand on the steering wheel and the other now on the shift.  She put her hand on his to get his attention and he smiled. 

Our mother asked him to slow down because he was driving too fast.

Janet says, he just smiled and sped up a little. The back road was not well paved so the car was bumping along. I do seem to remember that part of the story, being jostled out of sleep for a minute.

Janet says, “She asked him to slow down again, ‘Please, John. You’re scaring me’.” 

Daddy said, “Nothing to worry about, honey. We need to get these kids home.” Smiling again. 

Janet says, “I must have gasped or something because Mommy and Daddy heard me and noticed I was listening in to their conversation. I felt like I was in the middle of one of their arguments but I didn’t want to be. So, I leaned back in my seat. I just wanted Daddy to stop driving so crazy.”

She says that she settled in between my brother and me. Soon, the car started weaving.  Janet says, “Daddy was jerking the wheel back and forth and the car is rocking, speeding down the road. He’s driving like he’s a stupid teenager.”

 “Mommy screamed and she said to Daddy, ‘John, you’re going to kill us all’.  And she looks back at me, and says, ‘You’re scaring Janet.’  Mom took her hand away from his and put them on the front of the glove compartment, bracing herself in the case the car crashed.

“Daddy looked in the rearview mirror and motioned me to come forward. I leaned into his side of the car and put my hands on the back seat. I was almost crying but I tried not to. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.” 

“Daddy asked me, ‘You’re not scared are you, Janet? We’re just having a little bit of fun. Mommy just don’t understand’. I looked at him and I could feel myself biting my lip, scared but maybe thinking he knew what he was doing. Maybe, we were all really OK. But then I looked at Mommy and knew that she was right. He was driving crazy. I was scared.”

Janet always slows down her story at this point to look hard at my brother.

“And I told Daddy, ‘I am scared. At least at little bit. I think you might be scaring Baby Carl, too. I think he’s crying.’  She adds, as if she is sharing inside information “That was a lie. I said you were crying because you were always his favorite, Carl. Maybe, that would make him stop but really were both fast asleep. I had to do something.”

“Daddy just nodded his head and slowed down and straightened out the car.  Mommy put her hand back on his and I sat back and tried to relax. Some Sunday drive! We could have died that day. I was so happy to finally get home. Daddy carried you both in the house and put you to bed. I grabbed a Coke and went to my room.” 

Soon after this event, Janet stopped coming on Sunday outings. She played the teenager card — too busy with friends, had homework, got a boyfriend, blah blah blah. So, our little family continued our Sunday drives, exploring the backroads and looking at houses we couldn’t afford, schools we couldn’t attend and visiting dangerous neighborhoods we had no business being in. Until he died. 

I have listen to Janet repeat this short story over and over again. I suppose I should thank her for saving our lives and maybe I would if I remembered more about that afternoon. But maybe not. I only remember being in that car on a hot summer afternoon asleep with Carl’s feel stretched over my lap. That is it.  In my mind, I don’t want these stories messing with the memory of my father. 

I wish Janet could gain some wisdom and grace in her retelling of her stories about him. There could be a space for our father not as a severely damaged man but instead as a someone with a serious problem caught up in a post-war culture that celebrated men’s drinking. He was a wonderful father I can’t excuse his drinking but I’ll never forgive her these stories. 

Homecoming

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In late December 1973, I returned to Chicago after a visit home to Rhode Island for the holidays — a twenty-seven-hour trip on an over-packed Greyhound bus without enough seats for the all the passengers. The Arab oil embargo put air travel out of reach of my budget so like many of my co-travelers, we packed into an overheated bus, dressed in winter coats, snowy boots, suitcases stowed in the luggage rack above the seats and under the bus.  I stood in the aisle, like a vulture, ready to pounce on an open seat. But I was young and there were older people, women with children, and others more worthy of a seat. I stood until we reached Sandusky, Ohio when a department passenger freed up the aisle seat. The very young woman next to me asked if I could hold her baby while she got something to eat at the next rest stop. The baby fell asleep in my arms for a few hours. Her steady breathing on my chest gave me a few hours of the best sleep I had had in a while. I felt unanchored when I gave the child back to her appreciative Mom who was also happy for a rest.

When I arrived at the Providence bus station, I saw the holiday lights in downtown and the Christmas tree in front of City Hall.  Last-minute shoppers, their arms full of bags and boxes, filled the street. From there, I took a local bus home. Familiar sites appeared as we drove through the streets and little towns on our way. The A&P, the Outlet Company, Frank’s Fruits and Bakery, the old police station, the elementary school I attended, my parish church. The bus stopped at the intersection of Main Street and Branch Lane where I got off, saying Happy Holidays to the driver and the few passengers that remained.  I walked the long steep hill to our house. There were white candles in the windows, and a Christmas tree in the middle window.  No other lights on in our house. I knocked softly and went to sleep on the couch. My mother was already asleep.

I spent less than three days at home. Not all of them happy. I felt empty and hollowed out, my mother less than receptive to my simmering depression. Nothing seemed to matter to me. I went upstairs to my closet to pack some warmer clothes for the Chicago winter. None of them fit. All two sizes too large. I had a lost a lot of weight during my short stay in the city. In truth, I was scared to back to Chicago. But I said not a word. When you know exactly how a conversation will go, it’s better to dispense with the actual exchange. In response to my expression of anxiety and fear, I could imagine my mother saying something like, “Well, you’ve made your bed. Now you must lie in it.” 

On my return to Chicago, the bus discharged its passengers at the center city terminal. The city was dark and quiet with a heavy wet snow. I walked north out of the busy downtown area toward a more residential area with less traffic and fewer streetlights.  The snow fell steadily as I walked ten long city blocks to my studio apartment on the north side. Sidewalks were full of slush and ice. It had snowed most of that winter –- the snowiest winter in a long time. I was carrying my mother’s old suitcase and a portable TV that she bought me for Christmas. I had tied some twine and looped it through a wire handle to make carrying the fifteen-pound television easier but in the snowstorm, I struggled to carry both packages. I stopped often to take a break, putting down the load to regain my strength, then switching the packages to the other hand for a bit until I had to stop again. 

I took a short cut through some back streets. This area was full of abandoned cars and vacant houses.  Dark alleyways punctuated this long block where men sold drugs and girls sold sex. The few streetlamps cast dim light, the snow dropping thickly like a waterfall. Garbage and mattresses sat on the edge of the sidewalks.  A golden glow shone through the second-floor window of a boarded-up apartment – the only light in the building. It smelled like wood smoke.  

At the end of the street, I rested my packages on a staircase that led to an office building.  I took a deep breath, shaking the snow off my hat and brushing it off my shoulders. I tried to dry my wet face and my glasses on my scarf. At the corner, a car was parked, with the engine running, the driver at the wheel, cabin light on, and windshield wipers running. The driver lit a cigarette and turned his head to get a better look at me. He nodded to acknowledge that we saw each other. I nodded back, quickly picking up my bags and slipping backwards on the icy pavement. As the TV fell, my gloves followed into a slushy puddle. I stood up, wringing out the gloves, feeling a cold trickle down my back. I was shivering, my coat heavy, soaked with snow and smelling of cedar chests and wet wool. My boots full of snow.  I thought of abandoning the suitcase and TV. But I picked up the bags. One block to go.

In the middle of the block was a bodega, just about to close. I had shopped there often for fruits and vegetables. It was a small market managed by a family from Pakistan, always happy to see me. I peeked in the window to see if anyone was in the front of the store.  I would have gone in just to say I was back in town and wish them a good night. But no one was around.  

I climbed the icy stairs to my apartment building. I opened the heavy door and stepped into a lobby full of old newspapers and discarded food containers. I walked down the hallway to an alcove that held a large metal panel of one hundred mailboxes built into wall. There were no names on the mail slots just room numbers. Across from this panel was a small windowless parlor where four men sat in upholstered chairs. Most were smoking, some reading, some at tables playing solitaire or making a puzzle – all in complete silence. Even though the table lamps were all lit, the room had a sinister feeling, casting deep shadows onto the faces, hands, and clothing of the men. 

I had lived in this building for just a few months, in a studio apartment on the eighth floor. A Murphy bed faced a pull-out table on the opposite wall. A small refrigerator froze bottles of Tab, exploding them, usually in the middle of the night. Cockroaches scattered when the light came on but lingered. I seemed no threat to them at all. The radiators overheated the apartment, with a steady flow of hot steam, soaking the carpet. I never closed the windows, even in a two-day blizzard. Looking northward was a frozen Lake Michigan, blue and gray, stretching out forever like a tundra without relief.

Down a long dark corridor covered with faded floral wallpaper was a closet where we deposited our trash. Halfway down on the left, the door was always open. I could see a man him sitting on the couch, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt, surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines. As I passed, he got up quickly as I passed, hiding behind the door to his apartment. I made my way to the closet, sensing him in the hallway, watching me. As I walked back to my apartment, he passed by me in the corridor walking toward that closet. 

I entered my apartment nearly closing the door but not before seeing him return to his apartment with the bag of garbage I had just left. I sat on my bed, letting my imagination run away. I was thinking about what was in that bag. My name and address. A letter from home. An envelope from my employer. Empty prescription bottles. Regular trash. Feminine hygiene products. Who knows what else? I felt violated. I wanted to call my sister but there was no phone in the apartment. It was late at night and the only phone was in the lobby.  It had one of the folding doors and a little seat with an overhead light that went on when you closed the door. I needed a lot of change to make the long-distance call to Florida and what could she do so far away. 

 Instead, I wrote her a letter describing him, just in case something happened to me. Tall. Bald on the top of his head. Prominent cheekbones. No facial hair.  Wore shorts and undershirts in the winter. Black rimmed glasses with thick lenses. Maybe with a limp. Furtive. Unit 817. Brown hair. Fidgety. Hoarder. I called him, The Creep, but that really didn’t do him or me justice. He was much more than just a Creep to me. 

I grew frightened. I never saw him leave our building or talk with anyone.  When I saw him in the lobby, his eyes darted around and his gait was unsteady. He avoided human contact, sliding away when approached, giving others wide berth around him. There were a lot of men like this in building, remote and strange.  They never made eye contact, as if we were all threats to each other.  I tried to avoid being followed. I never took the elevator up the eighth floor. I would get off at a random floor and walk the rest of the way up or down. Or start at the stairs and then take the elevator. I walked up and down the dark corridors, leaving my garbage where my neighbor couldn’t find it.  I thought of getting a boyfriend or a dog, something to show this man that I wasn’t like him, somebody cared about me. But the longer I stayed in that apartment, the more like him I became, alone and abandoned.