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Things we do to our children.
“Your child has an unusual sense of the absurd” the therapist said of the one year old boy seated before her. With distaste she looked over at the father who had a shoe upon his head.
“We like to put things on our head.” the mother explained.
Madness According to Larry Brown
Back home in Nicaragua, in a town what got one of dem big crazy houses with a big grassy yard for the crazy people, my nephew and me, we see this one standing on the grass by a pile of stones. He was throwing them stones up at a mango tree on the edge of the yard.
We was waiting for my nephew’s fada to leave off work from the factory. We watch the man throw stone for a long time. Nephew ask me what make one man crazy and the next one sane.
Then the man, he get upset. He go over to the tree. He climb the crazy house fence and jump into its branches. He climb out on a branch what got a big cluster of mango. He look at the mango with one eye. He dust off the mango with his breath. He take a loose leaf out the cluster of mango. Then he climb down the branches and jump from the tree.
He go back to his pile of stones and start to throw dem again at the mango tree.
‘See’ I tell my nephew, ‘Now dat muthafucka is crazy!’
I have a friend who always said he wanted to lose his virginity to “Kind of Blue.” No words, no bassoon (but still classy), it was the perfect record. I think he envisioned the experience passionately building until the final trumpet burst. Oh Miles. Then she would sigh into his arms as they both listened to the familiar click of the record. They would be so tired asleep then.
When he finally did it, it was with the wrong girl. She wouldn’t let him fuck her doggy-style even though her ass was her best feature. They ended up using three condoms because he couldn’t keep it up and all the time there was playing that damn “Kind of Blue.” He couldn’t get it out of his head for a week. He later found out she was on the pill and was mad about the condoms. He now has a fetish for damaged girls. I can only assume some of these things are related.
We promised each other we’d never do the Ernest Hemingway thing, but when you call someone a faggot in print, it seems to me that you’re asking for it. I know one day he will, so we might as well get it over with now. Your move John.
COKE STASHED IN DOCTORED PEPPER
By LARRY CELONA
Posted: 2:55 am
March 9, 2009
Three people bought peppers at a Queens store last night and found them even hotter than they expected – all of them had bags of cocaine inside, police sources said.
The peppers were sold at a store on Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park to three separate purchasers, none of whom apparently had any idea of what they were buying.
Store owners told authorities that the peppers had been imported from South America. Police notified the health department and cops were searching the store with K-9 units.
A Year’s Economy
(Notes for Professor Latour)
Christmas, obligations paid. An orange and a rose. Cotton, money coming. It’s your birthday. A present and an apology— Angel, bad news travels fast.
January, a new year. Guests coming, unfounded fear. Have faith. Dice–don’t speculate. Cards–act on facts. A new year. Winter counterfeit. Fur: suppressed desire.
February. Undress. A foolish mistake– Ribs, shared pleasure. Hunting a lost article. Beauty: relief from routine. Feather: relief from pressure.
March. A funereal, news of marriage. An accordion wedding.
April, Easter coming. Ghost-fond memories, Sabbath guilt. By the river, a wish comes true. Wading: an avoidable accident.
May: Take a vacation, pay insurance. Embarking! New freedom. Earrings, an exotic excursion. (Wheels: variety in life. Jumping: routine variance.) Golf? a vain search.
June, July and August. Engine, new sensation. Water-lily revelation. Pastures. Love is possible. Grass. Worries go by. Worms, a vulgar contract. Wreaths, domestic bliss.
Fall. Sewing at home. Harvest time. Take inventory. Buttons: affection near. Handkerchief: a flirtation. Needle: mixed emotion. Trousers: guard valuables. Kerchief: a jealous spouse. Trade–cash loss is possible. Ugliness. Avoid folly. (Satan=reckless spending). Do laundry.
Washboard: unavoidable absence.
Dirt: beware of strangers.
It was not at all as one may’ve expected: if arriving not by invitation the scene would be misread, misunderstood. As happened many times, by my imagination, at least, some loose, shoeless Man was drawn by the comfort of the form of that unexpected structure, half-hidden by thicket scrub, believing it to be a house, a really real house, a small home and not some plastic faux plasterboard. They would try the handle, turning easy (I used to make myself believe that they all had to force the lock (having spent so long staring at that splintered jamb, not knowing where or how to start), but I lie to myself less now, I hope) and, upon the breach, tentatively stepping in, unwittingly drowning any hope of being whole again. (I do feel lucky, mind, to have escaped with my life (for all that’s worth), although I was not, by means, left whole. They used to write on skin, you know) The Man would find, in this one room that looked like a real room that made this nothouse, a doll – functionally lifesized (by a child’s eye) and deathly accurate. Its eyes, burn’d umber behind stove-glass, would follow Him in all His movements, this programmed action misconstrued as praise, until He was lulled to the faint that this was not, for fact, a dollhouse, and that familiar shape (not yet notchild) lying naked over the bedquilt was, for fact, not hollow and twine but unmade and solid and flesh and safe and, if not honest, read-able and wanted. I hate that Man. I used to hate than Man, those Men. I would plan their deaths, hear the whisper hiss of canvas against skin, blade against rib, thinking of how the door must shut itself silently behind them, knowing the hunger on approach to the notyou, a doll so delicately detailed, carved to one end. You told me it was mine. The key to that bruised door you delivered to my pocket, you told me it was the only one; the pins and wafers would accept knowingly and with grace and never was I to doubt. Silly, silly me. Still I couldn’t help but half glance at the corners for Man or Men or Brother or eyeshine in the dark before telling myself that I was alone, alone with doll, with notyou; a masterpiece of clockwork that some one or thing crept in to update (for the lip I split, that slit in which I dropped a stitch, still looked yours) even though you never showed, and now I know or think I know. And my escape was final, for most of me, still kinder than the cut delivered to the Man, the Men. They left missing something more, some certain internal structure, some humour-producing gland that, missing, ruined them – while I, having distrusted that self-same, yankee organ of my own, had hidden it away in a knothole, surrounded by fermented damp, and escaped you by losing only an arm. (Yet) This loss has changed me. I see it in the faces of others and my own, when I dare; the stranger stares longer; the children laugh at my passing. I cannot feel it as a loss, as such, when remembering what it was when I was whole, attached: it is as if I am remembering a past life, a story read and reread in childhood, that now I have been changed by such degrees that I am no longer the same animal, no longer a man nor man missing an arm but now a onearmedman.
Miriam stares down at the shoes in her doorway. It takes 48 seconds for her to recognize they are her own. The pair she has been wearing everyday for the last 7 months. She sits down on the cool shining linoleum and mouths her own name to hear it out loud. It sounds funny. Like air escaping from an empty jar.
He smells like sun welted lettuce tucked into the back corner of a rabbit’s cage. His shirtfront is soaked with his own saliva. He leans in too close; his eyes squinted, his tongue stabbing wildly at his crusted lips, his rancid breath rustles your bangs as he hisses questions into your face. But you can’t help him because you have no idea how to get to the D train from there. You scurry away. You hate yourself a little more today.
Daddy always brings carnations; a bright pink one for you, a robin’s blue one for baby brother and two canary yellow ones for mother who hates carnations and hates yellow even more.
Bill scheduled his first job interview for two p.m. this past Monday. The weather was nice so he decided to walk to the interview through Central Park. At one-thirty he looked at his watch and sat down on a bench near the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and watched people pass him, raising a finger on his right hand when they ran, on his left when they walked.
“What am I supposed to do when I’ve run out of fingers?”
“That’s what your toes are for.”
“I guess I’m glad I ate a big lunch.”
I prefer a small, simple lunch: a cheese sandwich on Wonder bread with a glass of water. One day, I was eating when a coworker who I’ve worked with for two years asked if I had accidently swapped my lunch with my kid’s. Instead of correcting her mistake, I continued eating my sandwich and told her a story about my friend Bill.
When he was little Wayne never thought he would grow up to be fat. Standing in front of the mirror he watches painful little earthquakes as his fingers prod his stomach. When he jacks off it is like an avalanche.
The snow is not a good place to have sex, he decides, rubbing his freezing blue ass. She has already left him to take a hot shower. Their print in the snow looks more like the state of Texas than a snow angel.
In Spain, the men like John Wayne and the boys ride motorcycles. Do you know cowboys, they ask my father, and do you sleep with beautiful women? As we walk away down the stone road I pretend we are on horseback and I turn around to wave goodbye.
I had a lover once, with blank eyes, a vacant smile, and a distinct absence of sexuality. Really, he was no better than the cat who was pushed aside to make room in the bed for this larger, slightly cooler lump. In fact, he may possibly have been worse, for at least the cat did not snore, did not roll and kick at 3am, did not wake me up with limpid kisses before going to work. At least the cat looked up at me sometimes and let me know that I was the only one, before depositing a dead mouse on my pillow or a hairball beneath the bathroom sink. If the cat had gone missing, I would have noticed the lack of a writing companion, tail flicking at each misspelled word, and the smell of the uneaten tuna in the dish by the refrigerator. As it is, when my lover left there was only the soft click of the closing door and a warm cat’s body curled to fill up the space.
