encyclopedia of the second hand: dicks

            You all are lined up outside the dressing area, after the flurry of stripping and changing in the locker room.

At first this was the oddest part of high school for self, the hardest thing to get used to. The first day Coach Sick gave you all a talk and told you not to use each other’s towels and to get a jock strap. He emphasized hygiene, saying that there was nothing worse than getting a fungus in a certain unmentionable place.  Jurgen raised his hand and asked where that was, and we all laughed.  Coach Sick said settle down.

Jock straps are instruments that seem to parody your testicles the way brassieres parody breasts. That is why both brassieres and jock straps are funny; just saying bra or jock strap will make some people laugh. But not self, who has the idea that wit is more than some crass allusion to a natural fact.

Maybe you are ridiculously sensitive about having these balls, suddenly. But that would make sense - balls are things that are notoriously sensitive.  If you are hit in the balls, it hurts like hell.  Everybody says racked.  A tennis ball hits self in the crotch and he crumbles to the ground.  God, he cries.

There go the family jewels, Dad says.

But jewels and balls are hard, and the strange thing about the testicles is that most of the time they are sort of slinky.  Not hard at all.  If they are like balls, they are like balls that haven’t been entirely inflated.  You can stretch the skin on your balls like you can’t, for instance, stretch the skin of your hand.  On most of your body the skin pretty much adheres to the interior form, to bone or hard muscle. But your scrotum just hangs there, in the center of your body, a little shapeless, like an old hat.  It is funny that at the crux of your body there is this soft spot.  But when you think about it, you can understand the engineering side.  For instance, you are sitting in a chair and you cross your legs and your balls, very slightly, yield. You need something a little padded between your legs, some tampon to absorb the friction between your legs.

You stand in a shower stall and your balls are like two disquieting fruits.  Nuts. Nuts is a word that fits, since the hair on them gives them the look of some part of the vegetable kingdom. But nut also implies a hard shell.

Yes, the difficult thing about balls is that every analogy ends up mixing you up about how delicate they are, how yielding, how unevolved they are, like they just crawled out of the sea.

You went out with Mom and got your gym shorts at a local sporting goods shop. The store had trophies in the window, little bronze figures clutching bats or tennis rackets or footballs on top of little pedestals of polished purplish wood or fake marble.  The figures look almost somnambulistic, cast as they are in solitary postures of concentration absurd to consider outside of all of that context of fields and hoops and nets,  contexts which render purposive those otherwise mysterious stances. Perhaps this is why you always notice the little dents, more or less shaped, that stand for eyes on these figures, which seem to have been pressed into the face as afterthoughts. Eyeless, or with the mere hint of eyes, these figures are inexplicably sad.

The store sold Gladstone High shirts, as well as the green and gold shorts you have to have.  Green and gold - school colors. Mom bought four shirts and two pairs of shorts and an economy pack of white socks. Then she brought her purchases up to the man at the cash register.  This man, A. Clancy, happened to be the owner of the store, too.  He and Mom knew each other from church.

Mom said some things about how much it cost to raise kids these days.

Mr. Clancy said he knew what she was talking about.  He said he had a son at Avondale High.

Well, I guess we are rivals! Mom said brightly.  Then Mr. Clancy and Mom looked at you, as if you were going to do something.             You shrugged.  Then, blushing, you said Mom, you forgot the jock strap.

Self rides in the back seat on the long car drive up to Washington, D.C.  Dad drives, Mom sleeps.  It is frosty outside; Dad said that it was likely that they’d run into snow, and he has the radio on low so that he can keep in touch with the latest meteorological developments.  Self looks out at the dark sky, at the host of stars.  The sky gives no sign of dawn - dawn is hours off.  The car makes a smooth sound over the highway, and self will soon be lulled back to the deep current of sleep, watery sleep, from which he was wrenched at two o’clock this morning by Dad coming in and turning on the light in his bedroom and saying wake up, we have to go.  Dad likes to start long trips at absurd hours, like two o’clock in the morning, like he is going to get in ahead of everybody. As if it were a race, and thousands of motorists were going to be jamming the highway with Aunt May’s house as their goal.

And there was a host of angels... Maybe there was just a bunch of stars.  Self doesn’t say anything to Mom and Dad, but he thinks Christmas is bullshit. He’s been convinced of this for a year, and at school everybody knows it, but at home he keeps mum.  He knows that this is a sensitive point with Mom, and he doesn’t want to argue with her.  Jesus, he thinks, is just a myth.  He has been reading up on myth in The Golden Bough, which he checked out the abridged version of from the Decatur Library. Basically, people used to view autumn as the time when the sun itself was dying, and spring as when it came alive again.  Jesus is obviously a form of the sun myth, like the phoenix, or Apollo. Self feels he could be extremely erudite about the whole subject if called upon. 

Self has tried praying to the sun, but it was a hollow gesture.  The pattern of that pagan sanctity has been irretrievably broken for people like me, self thinks.  But self takes comfort in thinking that maybe he will create a new pattern through his art.      Self has decided that he’s going to be an artist.

Meanwhile, in his pants self is dealing with a hard on.  His dick is a little log of warmth stuck uncomfortably in the constriction of his underwear, and he has to shift around on his seat. Once he sort of adjusted his pants so that his dick had some room. It likes to stand up at some embarrassing times.  Oh well.   He will wake up in the morning recently and there is this marvelous heat, a honey like flow of heat that travels from his dick to his stomach and into his chest. He will loll in bed, and his dick lolls too.  Lolling is somehow erotic. These hard ons are symbols for a completely different lifestyle.  A lifestyle of laziness. No, make that languor, which is a better sounding word. It almost sounds French.  Dad is always complaining that people on welfare just sit around and make babies.  Self understands why: in self’s fantasies he is always on some tropical island like Tahiti where nobody wears clothes or works, and inevitably two or three women (who will focus as variations of this picture of a Tahitian woman he cut out of the National Geographic) will want to fuck him. This fantasy, like all his fantasies, dissolves or gets out of focus at some crucial points, unfortunately; usually when he tries to fit Waylann’s face over one of the Tahitian faces.  But the part that makes him feel that lascivious spread of warmth under his skin is the idea of being so mindlessly, beautifully idle, of lying around and stretching and yawning and watching his dick slowly awaken, a homunculus imitating its host and patron. The real choice, self thinks, is between working and fucking.  Hedonism, in other words, paganism, art.  The splendor of sunlight on the beach in Southern France - where he hasn’t been yet, but is planning on going.  

Dad keeps telling self that he ought to be a lawyer.

At home there is a whole ecology of doors opening and closing, determined by putting on and taking off clothes, so it makes self feel a little alienated to have a real member to stuff in his underwear at  last and at the same time have to  strip to his underwear with the other boys on cold, public mornings in school.

Everybody talks about dicks or fits the word dick into conversation in the locker room, it is a big topic, you all are interested in one way.   But the interest has shifted from what it was last year, in the seventh grade.  Back then it wasn't uncommon to pull your underwear off, or have it pulled off, at a slumber party and compare your growth with the other boys. Once, staying over at Mark's, he came up with a magazine that he stole from his older brother with pictures of nude women in it.  The centerfold was a blond chick, naked, leaning back on a vague decor of fur.  Mark took the head of his dick  and traced a line from her thatch of pubic hair up through her belly button, around each breast, and to her mouth. The interesting part was how he was using his dick like it was some kind of sexual magic marker. In the eighth grade self would never be in that situation, he would avoid it. He knows that you aren't supposed to look too closely at the other boy's dicks.

But nevertheless he has an outlet for his interest in dicks.  He sits on the toilet and with a real magic marker he draws a dick and balls. Then he draws a tongue, and for effect he draws a drop.  He puts little lines around the drop and the tongue, so it is like the tongue is licking the dick. Maybe this drop is sperm, maybe it is saliva.  Then he flushes.  Then he quickly sketches long hair, eyes, a line for the chin, two for the neck, and one circle, two circles, dot, and dot for tits.

           

The only comparable episode in his pre-eighth grade experience to all the locker room business is stripping in the boy’s area of the Verona Park Swimming Pool.  That goes along with the clammy feel of wet concrete under his bare feet, and the smell of chlorine and a sort of old aquarium smell, as if there were algae growing in the corner near the decrepit urinals. Self would loosen the wet pullstrings of his bathing suit and wiggle his hips out of the suit and towel off, his dick curled up like the cotyledon inside a pea. He always felt this should be done very quickly. Yes, he always felt a little conspicuous, even though he was just one naked boy, and there were fat naked grown up men bustling about soaping themselves and showering and talking, like fabulous mammals of another species, chests hairy, chins pendulous, balls swishing about like punching bags.  They are walruses, bulls, minotaurs, and you don’t know if this is what you want to grow into.

            

encyclopedia of the second hand: cold

                               COLD

            Driving at night, one night, one of many, many, all black pearls strung together, all death instinct skies.  Julia, sitting in the passenger seat beside self, is not liking any of it, she doesn't want to know. I said I don’t want to talk about it, she said.  A while back. She is leaving, she is tightlipped, she looks out her window at the black masses we are passing with a gaze that endows the general landscape with the malediction of her present anger and unhappiness.  Self has been drinking, self, in fact, is drinking,  - he holds a Fosters oil can with one hand, he holds the wheel with the other.  He'd had several scotches with his pasta and clams, he'd revved himself up to a pitch of jollity as Julia sipped her white wine,  lingered on her one glass, become, before self’s very eyes, what with his newfound ability to see the very pith of the human soul,  colder and colder, crystal and crystalline.

You're the ice queen, he says once, to state a fact. Let’s not forget that, he says. Let’s not forget who’s forgotten, uh, how to have fun. 

The drunkenness, lately, has had a cosmological aspect - really, it has! The drinks segue into the road, the darkness, the speed, the music,  motion and the space a certain black throb he can wring out of the radio when it is late and the DJ can play what he wants to, going out to nobody, homeless listeners out there, in their cars, the congregation,  or out of all of his old tapes, which he keeps in a brown paper sack in the back seat and roots through, one hand still on the wheel.  Surprise me, he says outloud.   And before his eyes he sees ... he sees the road uncoil, alive.  The road, a creature dry and dead by day, a sloughed skin, twitches now, come back from its mock death, which of course self, magus that he is becoming, sees through anyway. The road is hostile, prepared to do battle, self has felt this through miles of asphalt and on up through the engine and the steering column and the spinal column and through the neck bone and through the medulla oblongata and the pineal gland, where he is connected to the divine, he has felt it in his palms, he gets in a sweat about it; his idea is that the hostility is so specifically, personally directed like a ray at him because he knows, having been witness many times in the past couple of weeks to that moment after sunset when the road  gets up on its hind legs for a second and gazes around with its own viperish purposes out of eyes all black, pixellated pupil.  It is then that he feels the road working on his car - taking the lining out of his brakes, putting a tiny hole of rust in his radiator, its weevil, evil consciousness fucking with his machinery.    The road’s eyes and his have met, and for a moment he’ll be ... nothing at all. The car ploughs between mountains, the road twitches, and the car soars, an invisible man at the wheel. Wreck the ship, scuttle the barnacled, the oh so corrupted soul here! And then the ancient mariner returns. Yes, then self rematerializes, the moment passes. And self is like a lovely bottle on these nights, tonight too, filled up with a golden liquid.  In fact, coming out of the restaurant self ran into a table and the contact resulted in a thick, glassy clink. He distinctly heard it, he would have pointed it out but, but what’s the point of that? They have spiritually castrated themselves, they refuse the evidence of their senses.  He’s a sailor of glass, a vase Popeye, and  if the road leaps upon him, he will shatter. Julia doesn’t see the poetry in this, and self likes to think that he doesn’t tell her things, why worry her, but sometimes things get out of the gate, sometimes he doesn’t even realize it, she’ll repeat to him later come crucial bit of esoteric wisdom self has cultivated for his lonesome  and he’ll think damn, why’d I tell her that. These lyrical nights, these white nights, the white the other side of black, how his body  becomes a  fractaled line holding to the pattern of a former transparent cohesiveness by  thousands of thin, icy filaments - an image self has carried away from junk yards where cars, twisted and crushed hulks from accidents, will have webs of blind broken glass hanging low over dashboards where the windshields once were. Classical, isn’t it?  Michaelangelo finds the body of the mangod in the raw block of marble, Street Early finds the wreck in the windshield. The golden liquid in self's mind splashes out into the cold night, splashes headlong out over the hood of the car, and freezes into tiny pearls as it drops.

     Once you ‑ now we have to imagine you as a little fellow, a tyke, a Mommy's helper, a little man, the train that could, Pooh, Street‑come‑here! ‑ once you were locked outside the house on a very cold winter's evening.  It was snowing, and you had been thrust into your clumsy mittens, your furry hat with the button on the band to make the visor stiffer or (unbuttoned) looser, your heavy blue coat with black checks like a checker board, your clunky boots which made diamond patterns in the snow or the mud, and kicked outside by Dita, shoved out the door, told to play.

     Play!

     Dita loves snow, she loves making snowballs and bombarding her friends with them and being bombarded in shrieking turn by them and smooshing one down your collar (you darting away I'll‑tell‑Mom), Dita says she loves the hills covered with snow, isn't it pretty, Dita says her favorite picture  (it is up in her room, over her bed) is a Winter Wonderland, which shows a country landscape, a sleigh pulled by horses (arrested, here, in mid prance, the bells on the harnesses in mid jingle) passing through it, and the snow, in easy drifts, extending way back through some pine trees and one deciduous tree radiating woeful, leafless dignity to a house, curls of smoke cosily rising over its chimney from a cherry red fire you can just imagine crackling in the fireplace, Dita loves warm breath becoming smoke in the cold air, she loves coming in and saying see how cold it is and without any more warning than that putting her cold hand on your warm cheek, she likes igloos and Eskimos and says when I'm eighteen, I'm  going to move to Canada, she likes ice skating, she likes to whiz around on the Robbins' pond which freezes up at the end of December, she likes saying I can't wait until winter when it is autumn (you like autumn),  Dita likes to trudge home over a snowy path around six o'clock, unabashed by the winter darkness, not to be swallowed up in the big open jaws of winter, not she (unlike you, who are too small, who have to hurry behind Dita, worried that like Pinocchio and Jonah you too might be a mouthful for some giant creature, wait‑up‑Dita‑wait‑up), Dita likes to go over to the Laramies who own horses, four of them, on December days and creep into the stable with Sarah Laramie where when you shut the rickety wooden door it is shadowy and the light only comes in through the narrow, transom windows up overhead and there is a smell of sour, mildewing straw and horsepiss and the cold is fleeced through only by the warmth that comes out of the  grill of the electric floor heater glowing angry orange in a corner, and Sarah and she like to pat the horses, Dita likes to roll in the snow and make snow angels, Dita likes coming home and taking a warm bath, leaving a puddle of skirt socks and boots on the bathroom floor like the dregs of a body left by some angel risen to heaven, and she likes to come to the table in dry clothes with her long blond hair wet.

     Self finds a parking place, everything is fine, Goddamn fine, I got you here in one piece didn’t I? and Julia, who can’t put her life in his hands (isn’t that the only thing that counts - putting your life in somebody’s hands?) taking her suitcase out of the back, her eyes blazing up (the beauty of which does not, even in the slightly disordered state of mind self finds himself in, go either unnoticed or unappreciated) I don’t want to talk about it now, and self, doggedly, wait, going over to a pillar what is it, ten o clock? and pulling down his zipper, the stream of piss God it is nippy tonight sending up smoke in the air, wait, turning at the smart rap of Julia’s heels on the concrete among the pillars  one side burdened down with her suitcase, wait, and he turns back, go faster, jiggling his pizzle, then zipping and rushing to catch up with her, echoes in the cold vaulted air, then out into the street between parking lot and the glass doors of the lobby, I got you here in one piece Goddamn it, knowing that this is a stupid thing to say, let me help you with that, hand on the handle and her hand not loosening its grip, Julia still blazing even here (where  the wind is tackling a potato chip bag and tackling it again all the way down to where the street curves under the cone of light from a streetlamp) turning don’t touch me, I don’t want your help, for God’s sake Street if you don’t give a damn about yourself I don’t at least want you killing some innocent driver, don’t drive back to Santa Fe tonight!

     Around her mouth there are lines.  Lately self has noticed that she has started to frown in her sleep ‑ a deep, painful frown.

     You stand there, immobile, wondering what you did.  I‑didn't‑do‑anything, filling the phrase with a tearful indignation and astonishment that is natural, because you really didn't do anything.  I‑didn't‑do‑anything is sometimes filled with hollower tears because you really did do something and you know you really did do something and the I‑didn't‑do‑anything is a way of calling on an organic depth of essential innocence that will wipe away the verbal level, where you really did this thing, for instance did‑you‑kick‑your‑sister‑Street, or did‑you‑throw‑a‑rock‑at‑the‑Laramies ‑truck.  No, this time what were you doing, you were sitting there placidly, minding your own business, watching the last cartoon show of the day, which is right before the news. The next thing you know you are descended upon by a lot of wraps and scooted outside and the door shuts.  You hear the lock click.  Dita‑Dita, you say, and try to turn the doorknob.  The knob doesn't budge, your hand in its mitten slides around it, Dita through the door says play.

     Well, with who?  Looking around, you notice lights in the other houses on the street.  This stabs you right in the heart (under the coat, the shirt, the undershirt), because you know in each of these houses people are sitting down to dinner in their warm dining rooms.  Some of them are watching tv.  If Mom and Dad were here, this is exactly what you would be doing.  Mom and Dad, though, have gone out, so you had macaroni and cheese, which Dita made.  Now, suddenly, you are out in this terrible weather.  When it gets too cold in the house, there's a sound, like a metal hiccup, then there's the sound of air coming out of the vents, and it gets warm again.   But outside it gets colder and  colder, that's all.  So probably, like the little matchstick girl, this is it.  The little matchstick girl, at least, had matches.  You, on the other hand, are going to die without a chance. Like a match soaked in water before it's had a chance to be lit and burn its fool head off. 

     It is hopeless.

     This is such a sad thought that you have to cry.  Crying makes a blur out of the snow and the house.  The blur gets interrupted when you slip on the icy front porch stairs.  You barely catch

yourself on the handrail. Then, still crying, you head out into the snowdrifts in the yard.  Then you fall, plop, right into a snowdrift that is pretty deep.  Snow gets inside your boots, your mittens, and paws down your back.  You swing your arms around, kick your legs, Dita‑Dita‑please. The echo of your total innocence bounces around inside you like the bouncing ball in those cartoons where they say follow the bouncing ball and this little ball bounces from one word to another of a song, so you know which word to sing.

     Self has a bad night.

     He decides Julia's right, why make that drive?  It isn't just Santa Fe, then it's twenty five more miles to the Glorieta exit, and ten more miles from there, up an unpaved mountain road, used to be a lumber road, which can flip a Cherokee Rover like that. He's seen it happen. That is, once he passed a Jeep that was upside down by the side of the road.  It had started to snow when he left Glorieta this morning.  Best find a hotel.  Best go to Jack's and have a few drinks.  Best explain the mountain road, explain his artistic vision, politics, language, peculiarities of women, to Freddy.  Freddy and self swap drinks.  Sweeping gestures sweep a Busch and a tumbler of scotch off the bar and into Freddy's lap.  Freddy rises, the bartender comes over, I'm cutting you off.  Inexplicable, the likes and dislikes of bartenders.  Self puts down his money, I want one more, one more for my buddy, and the bartender just looks at him.

     I want one more, one more for my buddy.

     I said, the bartender says slowly, that I'm cutting you off.  Get out of here.

     There's a Mexican guy in a stained white apron behind self's chair.  He just appears there.  He doesn't say anything.  Freddy and self go out to the parking lot.  Self is screaming, he's been screaming since he got off his bar stool.  Sometimes self wants to murder everybody.  Sometimes he has rage fantasies.  The last six months he's had more rage fantasies than sex fantasies.  He will be up in a tower with a rifle, his targets in Brownian motion below him, dots he is disconnecting from the picture.  Or he will have a rifle, make that an AK‑47, an Uzi, and numerous explosives, and he's walking down the street tossing fizzing sticks of dynamite in open doorways of shops and houses.  He has a picture of this in his mind, slabs of conflicting perspective and cartoon colors showing houses in flames ‑three orangish spikes‑ bodies of men and women and children falling through the air, lying dismembered in the street or hanging out of windows like limp dolls, dots of red everywhere.  He will run berserk with a butcher knife, gouging, cutting through to the spinal cord, crack, feeling in his hand and arm the momentum of the blade meeting the bone, crack, and with maniacal strength plunging the knife into and out of bodies, getting through the fatty outer layers to the unnameable inner gore.  These fantasies pass, they are over in a second, but sometimes self is vaguely shaken that he entertains them so much.  He has elaborated the imagery of them for his own amusement, but what if this is how it starts? No, he knows himself, this can't be serious, right?

     Freddy seems to know self too.  He seems to think that swapping beers gives him the right.  What the fuck is this?  Maybe it does, but Freddy doesn't know self.  Self finds himself making the point.  You don't know me, man, you think you know me but you don't.  Self has given up the idea of a brick through the window.  The Mexican guy is standing there at the door with his arms crossed, first of all, second of all, where is he going to find a brick?  And if he is going to murder everybody he is going to have to concentrate, go down the line.  Freddy, for instance, his erstwhile ally, would be there.  Freddy just materialized there in the barseat next to him and now, out in the parking lot, Freddy thinks this gives him the right to boss self around.  Cool it, man, he keeps saying.  Freddy doesn't get it.  Self says, I didn't do anything, I didn't fucking do anything. So self slams off to his own car and he's out on the road again, which is bad.  He goes past the University, there are stop lights in this part of town every two blocks, and a huge lid keeps shutting down on everything.  Self is attached to that huge lid, a fluttering appendage.  Self's idea is that Julia is right, best not go home with that huge lid falling and blotting everything out, but he never remembers how to get around Albuquerque, he has a tendency to get on roads that start going exactly opposite of where he wants to go and that won't let him off, he has to go ten, fifteen miles before he finds an exit to take him to the highway going the other way, which means he makes big circles.  He thinks go east, and he thinks is this east? Because sometimes the world turns around on self, it is a subtle thing, the directions out there in the world get misaligned with his deep intuitions about space.  There's a glitch in the inner radar.  Maybe he has gotten too dizzy too often in his life.  Count up the forms of dizziness:  Pot, Rimbaud, painting, alcohol, sex, Jan, Bella, Julia, go way on back and its glue, go up money, success, failure, go on and on and he begins to get dizzy counting up.

     But the main question now, before the lid shuts entirely, is: does dizziness have a form?  Interesting question, but now self is pondering a sign.  If the letters on the sign were all lit up, they'd say Happy Trails Hotel.  The R is out, though.  For some reason pulling in to the parking lot self thought this was funny.  Now he is outside the car, shivering, and snow is sifting down.  Self has on a big black coat which smells.  He'd left it on the porch a couple of nights ago and when he came out in the morning, some creature had pissed on it.  Self looks at that sign, and all the snow coming down from the dreary sky, and he thinks why not here?  Although he knows the answer to that question, he isn't capable of putting together such things as answers and questions.  He's part of a different grammatical tribe.  Right, in this tribe, see, you can't pick out any bit of speech and say: here's a question.  There are only statements that point to something and sort of broken statements, which don't point to anything.

     Walking across the parking lot, self is trying to figure out if that makes sense.

     The lobby of the hotel is the size of a bathroom, and it smells like one too, acrid odor of a debauched sea. A seaman, a peeman. He does have to take another leak.  They have a greasy green felt carpet on the floor, and a counter to divide the small space into two even smaller ones, and a man behind the counter who is fat and bored and doesn't check self's identification. He asks for twenty dollars, which self fishes out of his wallet, and then he just gives self his keys and goes back to watching his television show.  There is a cardboard sign up that says in magic marker there are no, absolutely no, refunds for rooms.  There is another cardboard sign up that says you can rent a video in another room in the back, and there's an arrow to point you back there.  Self goes back there and it is all x rated films.  Hm, self is not feeling physically up to an x rated film, the rub his poker until he gets something out of it, that would completely drain him, cerebral sex diminishing his lobal capacities for normal genital stimulation and response, for load and launch, for rooting and tooting,  as the good doctor says, but he takes a look at the boxes. Amazing how the colors of these pictures seem to be keyed by the color of dick on a bad day for dick  ‑ it is exactly that dull frumpy pink and flesh and slightly purplish grayish color. The shadow of dick is on every picture, on the paneling of the walls, on the face of the man who, it turns out, has two counters he stands at, one in the lobby and one back here. The shadow of dick is not happy tonight, self feels it seeping into himself. Self gives the guy a ghastly smile, so long. Then he takes his key and walks out of the lobby into a burst of cold, cold wind, and goes the wrong way twice around the building which hides room 20B, his coat flapping madly in the wind.  The smell of the coat bothers him more and more.

     You are in bed now letting your hands hang down.  They are so heavy, like they are made of concrete, and they keep growing.  They are almost as big as you are, how are you going to hold them up?  So you scream, you want Mom to make them stop growing.  But Mom comes in and claims that they aren’t growing, and then she takes your temperature.  The tip of the thermometer feels funny under your tongue, it runs into a thing under the tongue and makes it feel like you are choking.

     One thing at least is that you don’t have to go to school.  You have to go to Doctor Schrapper, though, which is alright.  You understand, you are green‑around‑the‑gills.  Dad says that about gills, it means that somebody is sick.  If you really had gills, you d have a big problem.  You ve proved this experimentally. Once you had a goldfish and you took it out of the bowl to have a look at it.  Then you put it on the carpet, you were going to do something.  But for some reason you had to leave for a while, go to another room.  Something you had to do.  Anyway, when you came back it looked like the goldfish had run away, because it wasn’t there anymore.  The next day Mom was vacuuming and she found it in a corner. She said it must have jumped out of its bowl, and you said, slyly, that you didn’t know that fish could jump that far. This was one of those times when you had to forget something fast.  You had to remember something, too ‑ putting the goldfish back in the bowl.  When you pictured yourself putting the goldfish back in the bowl, that meant the fish could only get out by jumping, which is how it died in the corner.  Mom said that was what the fishs’ gills were all about ‑ we have lungs, so we can’t breath underwater, but water is like air to fishes.  You told yourself that maybe when you were sleepwalking you put the fish back into the bowl.  You were fascinated with sleepwalking, thinking that people did things when they were sleepwalking that they didn’t remember.  So maybe you had a whole other life sleepwalking, which you would never know about.  In any case, you got the pictue in your mind of putting the goldfish back in the bowl instead of losing it on the carpet, and this made you feel better.

     In Doctor Schrapper’s office you spotted a jigsaw puzzle box and started putting the puzzle together.  Mom was sniffling.  She had a feeling about you the way felt about the goldfish, namely if you hadn t had to do something in another room and left the goldfish alone, the goldfish would never have gotten lost and died. Not that you cried about it, but Mom cried about things.  In your opinion, since your hands had shrunk back to normal size and you didn’t have to go to school, things were in pretty good shape.  What you really wish is that you were going to Doctor Schrapper’s office with a bullet in your arm.  Then, through clenched teeth, you’d say take‑it‑out‑Doc, and he d give you a shot of whiskey.  This might hurt a bit, Kid, he d say, and roll up his sleeves.  Then he d take some hot pliers looking things and he d pull the bullet out.  You’d scream: AHHHHHHHHH!

     But Doctor Schrapper isn’t about to give you whiskey.  Instead, he brings you into a cold room and asks you to take off your shirt and undershirt, and your pants. Doctor Schrapper is a

balding old man with nose hair and gray hair on his arms, and he makes you lay down on a reclining chair which, for some reason, is covered with a  white sheet of paper. Then he sticks a stick in your mouth and he takes a little flashlight and he peers into your mouth and up your nose and in your ear, like he s looking for a quarter that he lost inside your head. Then he kneads your chest and he makes you cough.  He goes out then, and leaves you there to contemplate your underwear.  You have on the pair that has  bears printed on it. Then he comes back with Mom.  He says our little boy here has pneumonia.

     Self finds his room, finally, and the first thing he notices is the door’s splintered on the bottom.  Closing it he kneels on creaky joints and sees that it is more than splintered, there is a hole kicked in it.  A violent moment in some booted scene. He relates, probably he could find a scene not unlike it in one of the films they’re renting in the main office. He is too tired, he gets up and sheds his coat, passing by a battered dresser with a tv on it and a dusty, cracked mirror, some dim vampire back there, baby, not me, and hurries into the bathroom, where he is suddenly looking down into a copious evacuation settled in the very maw of the toilet.  Great, he thinks, getting, now, an answer to a question asked a while back, the answer being because it is a  shithole! And there is another question, too, not fully formed but now answered in the bright indecent glare of the bathroom’s light ‑ so this is why there are no refunds. The handle produces a drizzle in which the coils of excrement are sucked reluctantly down, and he pisses, starting to wake up to his surroundings.  It is cold in here with the hole in the door letting in the wind.  He goes over and turns the faucet on.  The cold water handle comes off in his hand. The hot water comes out cold, and he stoops and tries to suck some of it into his mouth.  The water tastes like rust, and it runs down his chin.  He gargles and spits the water out, then checks out the shower.  The shower stall has mud, or maybe a more dubious substance on the floor of it. Self says outloud they must have been renting this place to escaping cons or something.  To have orgies in. He turns the water on in the shower, checks it with his hand.  It comes out cold, so he decides to check out his room again while it heats up. By that time, too, the water will have washed away the dirt, he’s decided it’s dirt, on the stall floor.

     Self goes back and takes as sturdy a look around as he is capable of.  His magus powers are definitely low watt tonight. The hole in the door, he now sees, was not kicked in, but kicked out.  Interesting, not something he wants to think about. There is a television and a VCR, both coin operated, on a stand in one corner.  There is the bed. 

     Self squeemishly settles his hams on the bed.  The mattress is soft.  The cover is thin and red, and dotted over with cigarette burn marks.  Self stands up and lifts the cover and gazes at the sheet underneath.  The sheet is covered with yellowish stains. Self puts back down the cover.

     Then self goes back into the bathroom.  His clothes drop.  He tears a sheet of toilet paper off the roll, lays it on the counter, and blink, drops a contact, and blink, drops the other. Then he barreled into the shower.  The water is lukewarm, and as he lets himself get soaked ‑ oh for the water of life! ‑ it turns, with a malice expressive of the whole world’s resistance to him tonight, cold.  He turns off the shower and comes out and he sees that he made a mistake not to look around for the towels. There is only one cloth in the bathroom, which is a washrag.  He mops himself with that.  Then he takes the toilet paper roll and winds a skein around his hand.  He tries to dry himself with the toilet paper. The paper keeps breaking off and sticking to him.  He is starting to shiver.  Oh shit, he says outloud. Oh fucking shit.

     Finally he dries himself with his pants and shirt.

     He is shivering violently now.  At first he sort of likes it.  When self was a kid he liked to play with trembling.  He’d let his hands tremble and he’d let his voice tremble and he’d be an old man. He’d watch his hands do this thing, holding them up, the hands shaking.  It was as if he’d opened up his chest and was watching his heart pump ‑ the sensation he got was of that same irretrievable objectness of the body engaged in a blind, autonomous rhythm upon which the consciousness could only settle as a supervenient irritant, a sort of mosquito on the very skin of being.  All the same, from another angle these were his hands.  He and his body, at these times, formed a peculiar, totemic bond, like the bond between a player and his marker on the Monopoly board, or between a chess player and the piece he just touched. Go up twenty‑three years or so and here self is, again, fascinated with the tremble running over his body, half willing it.  A moment later, though, he regrets having been complicit with the shaking, because he can’t stop it.  Even his teeth are chattering.

     He strides naked into the bedroom.  There must be a heater in this place.  He goes over to what looks like the heat, a box with a grill and a panel that hangs under the window, and he opens the panel.  Yes.  He turns on the heat, but nothing happens.

     If only he could murder somebody right now.

     Instead, he essays the vain gesture of gnashing his chattering teeth, and thinks why do the heathen rage?  I can tell you. He sees  himself standing there naked, drunk and freezing.  He ll either die of exposure or use the bed.  He retrieves his coat from the floor and shakes it out, letting it settle full length on the bed.  The coat is heavy and damp and seems to smell more and more.  The smell kills him.  What is it, wool?  Some wet wool smell and some animal trace.  Disgusting.  He turns out the lights, then lays himself gingerly down on the coat and wraps the blanket around him.  It is as if he were lying on a cliff over an abyss.  As if he would be injured if he crawled beneath the cover.  Well, now, who knows just what is crawling beneath the cover.  His legs are shaking and he feels light, and there is enough alcohol in his body that, closing his eyes, he falls headward in the unbalanced dark for years.

     Self wakes up and the room is dark and his feeling is that it is still dark outside.

     Self is in a panic.  He is freezing. The shakes seem to spring awake all at once along with self, and he can't stop them.  He has a minor problem with where he is.  He doesn't know where he is.

     However, self has made a big decision.  It came to him in the aimless interval of sleep, from which he is emerging all charged up with fear, as if sleep had suddenly shaped itself to this purpose and shook him awake.  All he has to do is wait for the shakes to subside.

     He waits for a couple of minutes.  It is cold, but he is paniced to the point where he is actually sweating.  He thinks maybe he will go back to sleep and wake up tomorrow and from whereever he is he will depart, with calmness and dignity.  But even though he closes his eyes, it doesn't help.

     He's awake, and now is now.

     Now is now, he says to himself, getting out of bed and turning on the lights.  What I need is a knife, he thinks.  He looks in the drawers of the dresser.  In one of the drawers there is a mousetrap with a fuzzy thing in it; maybe the thing used to be a mouse.  There is a candy bar wrapper in another drawer.

     The dresser is useless.

     If only he'd packed a razor. Packed, he thinks, as if I came here with anything packed at all.

     There is nothing sharp in the bathroom, either.  There's only a large puddle of water in there.  Self bangs around the one drawer in the commode, he pulls it out and flings it down.  It makes an amazingly loud sound.  He kicks it.  AHHHH! he's broken his fucking foot.  No, it doesn't matter.  He goes back in the bedroom and takes the drawers out of the dresser in there and flings them around.  The mousetrap and the thing that is in it fly out, landing somewhere on the floor. Probably I'll step on that thing, he thinks.  It would be just like my life to do a thing like that.

     Self stood there, and then he thought my keys.  He went into the bathroom and searched in his pants and came up with his keys.  Maybe this will work.  He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, next to one of the overturned drawers.  He looked at each key.  The car key.  No good.  The mailbox key.  No good.  The back door key.  Now the backdoor key was new, he'd had it made about two weeks ago.  He ran a finger over the teeth and decided to try. 

     He took the key off the ring and held his left arm out stiffly.  He waited to see if the arm would shake.  It didn't shake.  Taking a firm grip of the key with his right hand, he went to work, sawing at the wrist of his left arm.

     After a couple of minutes he stopped and looked at the marks on his wrist.  His skin was pink and abraded, but it didn't look serious.

     Self thought has anybody ever slit his wrists with a key?  Surely somebody.  Mayakovsky ‑ how did he die?  Stepped on the throat of his own song, or something, but probably not with a key.  Who was it, Cicero?  Seneca?  Slit his wrists.  Probably used an obsidian blade.  One thing this room isn't going to yield up, obsidian blades.  Perhaps he should have asked in the video place.  Got any obsidian blades, buddy?

     No this is ridiculous, nobody in history ever slit his wrists with a key.  Self looks around the room wildly.  His wrist hurt a little from all the friction, and there was a tiny track of small red beads where he'd been sawing, but you'd have to wait years to bleed to death this way.  Well, what if I eat my own shit, he thinks.  Self considers this, then thinks about all he knows about E coli.  He doesn't know anything about E. Coli.  Gives you the trots or something.  Die on the john like Elvis Presley.  Then he considers the bed.  What if I ate that disgusting sheet?  There was probably new mega sexually transmitted diseases all over that sheet, ones they've been breeding in prisons, from shower rape to shower rape, for years.  Self does his old‑miner‑come‑to‑town cackle.  There's gold in them thar sheets! he says aloud.  But the idea of eating the sheets might be considered insane.  Really, the super AIDS virus lurking in the sheets, even if it really were lurking in the sheets, would have to be a true monster to knock him off all at once.  Probably he'd have a decade to wither and weather in.  And by his reckoning, even doing nothing he surely wasn't going to last a whole decade.  He'd die, in other words, before his suicide was finished, which would give God a problem.  And God has such a bureaucracy set up it probably wouldn't even do that, self thought, probably the devil has merely to fill out a change order form, one prematurely dead suicide. 

     It wouldn't do to eat the sheets.

     Suddenly self gets up.  Sometimes he cracks himself up.  He stands in front of the mirror and he closes his eyes.  Don't think.  He balls up his fist and swings with all his might at the mirror.  AHHHH! The impact hurts, and when he looks at his fist there's a cut running across the fingers.  It was bloody.  Finally, some blood.  Just a little stupid pain, get over it.

     He'd made a big crack in the mirror.  Hitting it again, same hand, real pain this time, he cracked a piece out of it.  He picked it up, don't think, don't think, sat down on the bed, don't think, don't think, and closed his eyes.  Raising the piece of mirror, he slashed down at his arm.

     The mirror made a jagged cut that slid down over his left arm and slid over his left thigh.  Seering pain, an assembly line bringing sheet after bonging sheet of pain up the nerves.  A charivari of pain banging after self who is up on his feet now, in the bathroom.  Shit, he can't believe it, head bent over arm, other hand with a broken faucet handle in it, shit, throwing it down and not even hearing it hit the floor, barging over to the shower.  Shit, sticking his arm out, the shock of the cold water nearly decimating him. Blood in earnest now, the comedy is over.  Self kneels in a puddle of water on the bathroom floor.  His blood, which he can't seem to stop, is dripping in the puddle, turning it red.  He is trying to whip the belt off his pants which are sopping wet, so that he can bind the arm. 

     The main thing is not to bleed to death.

     Which is how self came to emerge, oh vita nuova! pantless, wrapped in a bloody coat (smelling of wet wool and some animal trace) to greet a cold gust like all the bitterness in the world and the sun rising up above the taco place across the street on his thirty‑third birthday. 

     St. Nicholas Day, December sixth, 1993.

encyclopedia of the second hand: breathing (notes)

 When, like another Hans Christian Anderson, I imagine a stone's experience, I imagine a little person in the stone.  I populate the world with little persons, all of them breathing. If there were such a thing as a infant metaphysics, guess at the way the world would be. The world would be  filled with little peoples.  A crowd of atomic human figures.

 A stone’s experience of breath.

When I was in high school, I was on two teams. I was on tennis, and I was on cross country. I ran, for a while, every morning.  This was after I had been suspended from school for stealing a van. It was Mikey McCall’s father’s van, and since Mikey was in on it, Mikey’s father didn’t press charges. Still, it was a lot of trouble, and though I felt that stealing the van had definitely been worth it, since I got to see some country, hang out in Austin, which is where Wilburn, the other guy I stole the van with, wanted to go, and meet this girl, I felt like I better straighten up a little. Dad and Mom were both very pissed off. They kept telling me they couldn’t believe that I’d do something so stupid. I wanted to repeat a few of the stories Dad told me about his adolescence, what he and Uncle Henry did, but I didn’t, partly because that really hadn’t influenced me at all. I just wanted to do it, and I knew what the consequences were going to be. So I really tried to get into cross country as a sort of penance.  I’d been a halfassed runner before, missing practices and always coming in around the middle, but it was in cross country that I met Wilbern, who was an excellent runner, and I felt that, now that we’d had this van experience together, I ought to try to come up to his level on the running front, which was obviously how Wilbern was going to get through college. They had let Wilbern choose to get off suspension by doing school good citizen work. That way he didn’t have to miss any of the meets. I missed most of them.   I made it my goal that summer - I was seventeen - to come in at least fourth in one of the meets in the fall.    

 I felt good and military adhering to the discipline I’d outlined for myself. I felt like Mishima or something. That summer I read a biography of Mishima and Sun and Steel,  his essays, which I found a used paperback of in the Dekalb Junior College Bookstore, and I felt that here was a darkly attractive figure who understood balancing the death drive against the life drive, and how that required a regime of spiritual and bodily exercises. So ‘military’, which had always meant something bad to me - stupidity, blind obediance, repression- meant something different for me that summer.  It meant strength, purity, will.  I’d get up and get out around six, and I’d run my route. I went down from our court into Gladstone Drive, turned left on Verona Park and turned left on Shiloh Mill, ran a half mile down to the Shiloh Mill Baptist church, ran across the church grounds, jumped the creek that separated their property from the Salem Golf course, ran in the path that snaked among the pine trees around the course, hit Dial drive, then took Naman’s Way back to Verona Park, which I crossed and went back to my subdivision.  I concentrated, as Coach Fregee told us to, on breathing, the in and out, and I also tried to hold a certain balance within myself of energies, thinking that I was being very samurai.  I liked to hold back and hold back the moment when I finally had to mouth breath, as opposed to nose breath, then I’d coordinate my rhythm to the way my lungs felt, thinking of them as two living animals inside me.  My goal was to prolong nose breathing while I picked up my pace a little more each day, so I tried to cut off mouth breathing as soon as it occurred.  The first incident of mouth breathing, I’d change my pace, get back to nose breathing, then speed up. I concentrated just on these things, I tried to keep my mind from straying beyond the confines of my immediate body situation. This, too, I thought of as somehow very Zen. I would concentrate sometimes so much on my body I’d feel like I was going cross eyed.  

I’d chosen my course to give me a variety of landscape. Long ago, during a phase in the six grade when I went around with an almanac and was always pulling it out to mull over random and insignificant statistics, I learned that Atlanta was exactly 1,050 feet up in the air (although, admittedly, I wondered whether they had just averaged out heights and depths, or whether that was the highest point, or what, since obviously there were dips and rises all over the city). That meant that Gladstone, as a suburb,  was about that high or higher.   Coach Fregee, who came from Chicago, said that the times in Chicago were almost better on the average by a minute than the one’s in Atlanta, because of the altitude difference. So I was aware of that.  I turned left on Verona Park each morning because I wanted to hit the hill there as soon as possible, thinking that it was sort of a merit. I was really convinced that I gained virtue every day just by making my body do things that put stress upon it, that required will on my part. Although I knew enough to see that there was a paradox here - I asserted my will over my body in order, eventually, to submerge myself in a balance of energies. The threshold to that energy situation was shucking the idea of will, or of individuality, or of the possessive “my” , as in “my body”. There was only the balance, the weighing of light and darkness, the hard muscle, the readiness to use it. It was like I was going to become a gunslinger, instead of a mediocre cross country runner.

   I liked to compare, while I was running, the effort it took me to get up the hill to getting up it, as I had done hundreds of times, in the car. It was then that I discovered what I didn’t like about cars, what in fact I still don’t like. In the car, I was divorced from the power of the hill.  Now that power, I thought, was in the set and of the type of the power I wanted to feel in my body. When there is  nothing resistant about the hill, the power there is broken, but one’s body’s power is injured too. The car is never quite as germane to one’s  body’s issues as the hill, the valley, the stream, the meadow. It was a matter of  exposure, I thought. To put myself against the hill, to bend to it, to experience it and remember it in my legs and thighs and with my lungs, that seemed to me a human necessity. It was taken away by the car, you were stripped of your own  power, thinking that power was at your fingertips. Trading in muscle for speed.

I was against it, at the time.

You know that when you go down this slope, you will be traveling at a sort of frightening speed. The wheels will whip around so fast that if you apply the brakes suddenly, the bike will probably flip over. Not that this has ever happened. Also, the pedals will go around so fast that it will be impossible for you to connect their motion with your will. Your bike is your horse, and sometimes horses are wild and you can't bridle them. What you will end up doing is taking your feet off the pedals, and you will scream. The scream will be like the scream of a brave: WOOOOOOOO.

The rush down the hill isn't just for fun, though, because you want the impetus of that speed to help you up the opposite slope. If you started from a dead stop at the bottom of the hill, you would never make it. The mass of the hill over your head is in itself enough to take the fiber out of you, enough to tire you, you just have to look at it and you will, as if defeated, dismount, as though the hill had almost toppled over on you. The thing to do, then, is not to look at the whole thing, but to stare at the space just before your front wheels, so that the hill is put together increment by increment in your consciousness. Soon you have slowed down to the point where you are only moving forward in laborious spurts. You have to put all your weight on the up pedal to force it down, you feel your leg as a lever, a primitive machine no different, except in its being flesh and a part of you, from the components of the bike itself. And your breath comes in pants, your breath, that immaterial thing, suddenly has weight and a rudimentary shape in your throat.  It is like you are having to swallow fistfuls of air, and having to breath out fistfuls of air. The image of the fist is appropriate because it is as if something was clenched in your throat, something was working against you. Near the top of the hill, your breath comes out punchily. You punch the air into the air, and the air hits back. At the top of the hill, you run out of air to punch with. You are out of breath. Being out of breath is sort of like being out of gas, which happened once when you were with Mom going someplace. The car suddenly lost its dreamy power, its seamless flow, and died, and Mom had to guide the thing, suddenly all dead metal and rubber, to the side of the road. When you run out of breath, you have to stop, you have to get over to the side of the road and breath heavily, in great pants, like a dog, your mouth open and your tongue flapping. 

Now you are in high school, and you are running because you are part of the cross country team.  You are running down a road that follows a railroad track, you are running, or at least this is your plan, as far as Stone Mountain, and then you are turning around and running back home. The street that follows the railroad track is undeveloped, so that older houses with big lawns line it, and it is shady and quiet.

You are trying to breath right.

You are trying to breath with a certain rhythm.  It is as if breath were a scarce commodity that you were doling out, like bread in a famine. You think okay, I'll take a breath now, and you take it.  You want to luxuriate on this air, you want to let it go deep into you, and then you want to breath out. Breath out now, you say., and you want, for a moment, to be balanced on the emptiness of your lungs, the vacuum within you, rippled only by the movements of your heart. Your legs, white, skinny grasshopper's legs, pump up and down, up and down, making a patter upon the surface of the road, and your ideal is that there will be a correspondence between the pace you achieve and the breaths that you take, that eventually you will find a magical balance, one that will allow you to run forever.  The point is to be able to notch up your speed, so that you can increase your pace until you are doing as well as, say, Wilbur, the star of your team, for long stretches of time. Of course you don't expect that you will keep up with him forever, he is the kind of athlete who, just when you are losing your grasp, or better, your gasp, finds that extra bit of speed. What keeps you back is that you lose the crucial link between breath and motion when you speed up too much. Your breathing goes to hell, it takes on a panic rhythm, it stampedes out of you, your heart and your lungs throb like stricken, epileptic creatures, like a cattle drive gone awry.  Really, you still have that bestiary way of thinking of parts of your body, as if your physical being were a zoo of different, separate creatures, the heart in it's cage, the lungs in the lung house, the legs roaming around in the leg area like gazelles, etc.

You speed up a little, you think you can comfortably pick up the pace this afternoon.

At a certain point, you couldn't speed up any more. When you make a dash, go go go, trying to push past your man from another high school the last one hundred yards, and you pass the finish line, your legs wobbly at this point, when it is over  and you stop, your heart will operate like a overworked pump. Imagine an abandoned pump in a sinking ship.  Maybe when you die, if you die of a heart attack, that is what it is like. You will lean over, put your hands on your knees, and try to reassemble your breath, try to steady your legs, try to come back to your throat and chest, try to cool down. Your face burns. Your breath scrapes out from your throat, the sound of it will be in your ears.  A little body of breath, a homunculus of air, climbs out of your body through your open mouth, and has to breath in, to fill itself with its blood element, and climb back into your body again.

You are on top of Julia . You look down on her face, you look into her eyes.  You lower your face, you hang there right above her nose, your face is a dirigible.  The you lower yourself and your lips graze her cheeks.  Your lips clasp her lips.

You are panting.  Julia is panting.  She rocks forward, she arches a bit, she brings you into her.  It is a question of magnitudes and proportions, of too little and too much, and in your panting delight you are thinking that your stuff is just the thing for her, for her thingness, for the thing between her thighs. Traditionally, a nothing, but this is another delusion. Another tricky, stupid construct. It is an inlet, an ocean, a freshet. The thing between her thighs is the crux between being in a thing and being, for a moment, out of a thing, the thing. You are emanating a honey-heavy power. You are in that portion of fucking, it is the power trip part of it, and when you look for a comparison what you imagine is that you are watching some heavy drop of rain dribble slowly down a window pane, and that its very sluggish, zigzagging path leaves a slightly glistening residue, and then you imagine that you are in the drop, that it is enormous, and that it trembles with power, the surface tension of it is the tight quivering coherence of your sex, and the moment of really dissolving, really falling, really following gravity and fate, is musically upon you, the culminating flourish.

You seem to have forgotten air.

No, it is in my mind, still. Air. Breathing, panting. I want to show you in  different situations in which air becomes a concrete concern.  How often, after all, do you breath during a day? Your traffic in air is continuous.  It isn't asthmatically impeded, and thank God, nothing is wrong with your lungs. It is a clear current running in and out of you, it is your invisible and intimate attachment to the world, you are part of this river, but unlike your bloodstream this river is not self contained, not solid state, but your connection to a larger system.

You pant, then, your mouth on Julia's shoulder.  You are half biting her, half drooling. Your body jerks, it shudders and you imagine a serpent, full of coils, rippling slowly out of them, showing itself in almost it's real length, an enormous, regal beast. And what else? Come now. The bluntness of skin and flesh, its final bumbling. If only your dick could think a little more interestingly, give you the last shred of information about its mission, its sensation.  That would be nice. You feel that everything was there, approximately, but that there should be more... more color. It should be an historically important thing, this fuck, like the veil in the temple being rent, but the moment passes in which it could be, and it isn't, it is just satisfaction. And then you become aware of your shared breathing.  You are both panting and gulping, and the first of the sensations that returns to you, after all that rumpus,  is how hot the breath is on your face, her breath, mixed with a sort of cooing sound she is making, a baby baby, oh yes sound, and how heavily you are panting yourself. Now this is surprising, or at least a bit surprising, because it isn't as if you were doing anything that required lifting or running, you weren't working, and yet you are both in a sweat, both out of breath. So what was it, exactly, that you were exercising?  What has been riding you, what in the world has gotten you to this point?

encyclopedia of the second hand: breakfast

1.

 Mom has to hurry in the morning, she has to make the coffee, get you up, slice the grapefruit, put the flakes from the silo-round oatmeal box in the boiling water, hunt up the milk, take down variegated boxes of cereal (the Captain Crunch, the Fruit Loops, the Rice Krispies) from the cabinet above the stove and set them on the table. She has to put the bread in the toaster, pour the coffee, set a place for Dad who comes into the kitchen smelling spicy from the white bottle of Old Spice. You’d rather he used the other kind where in the ad you slap it on, Slap! Slap!, and then all these girls in bikinis come out of everywhere, but how would Mom make that much breakfast at such short notice? Mom says Jack sit down when he peers into the refrigerator and says Liz, I’m going to clean this out for you tonight, holy Toledo. Mom says there is nothing the matter with it when Dad gets the orange juice in the plastic pitcher and lifts the top and smells it, sniff, how long have we had this orange juice. Then Dad says where’s Street?          

The cereal boxes are grouped in a sort of circle on the table.  The different colors remind you of birds in the bird book your Aunt May bought you for your eleventh birthday.  The blue of the Rice Krispies reminds you of the blue of the Indigo Bunting. The blue is background for the cartoon of the three baker elves, who you dislike because of their hair. That way they are depicted with their blond hair coming out from under their bakers hats in a bob and sweeping towards the right, it is really queer.  It was something they did to boys in the fifties, making them do that to their hair. Dennis the Menace has that same sweep of his hair.  You hate Dennis.  And the thirties, too, you’ve seen pictures of Dad when he was little, he looks queer, too, with long ringlets.  A Buster Brown. God.  Also you don’t like the way the Rice Krispies boys smile, their smiles are sort of monkeyish. The red of the Captain Crunch box (whose physiognomy, blue admiral’s cocked hat, drooping white moustaches, you do approve of) is like the red of the Scarlet Tanager. The Fruit Loops box already has a bird on it, a Toucan.  Although the bird looks to you like a Great Auk, which is extinct. Sometimes, though, they find animals they thought were extinct.  You plan on finding a surviving Great Auk someday when you are older and can go on expeditions to Labrador.

Somehow, in between all the things Mom is doing she is drinking a cup of coffee (last night’s coffee warmed up - Jack gets the first cup from the fresh pot) and listening to Paul Harvey’s Elmer Gantry tones on the radio. She  spoons out pink pithy bits from a half of a grapefruit as she goes back and forth from the table in the dining room to the kitchen, listening to this in from Los Angeles and missing the middle and ...the jury awarded her one million dollars... Her grapefruit gets all mined out until there are only a few seams of pink attached to the inner wall of the fruit.  There it sits on one of the butter plates next to a grapefruit spoon - which is a thin spoon, with a serrated scoop - in the sink, where Mom will discover it this evening and throw it into the garbage. 

Now it used to be that she would not finish the grapefruit until after she'd driven you to the busstop.  Then she'd make herself some more coffee, put another slice of bread in the toaster, ease into her day. You have a picture of what this looked like from when you were home sick. If you weren’t too sick, there was something slightly romantic about staying home and lying on the sofa in the living room in your pyjamas and spying on Mom. The house was slightly different, then, the atmosphere in the house was slightly unfamiliar, charged with an unsettling exoticism. You used to have a daydream that you would go into Dita’s room (which Dita only used when she was home from college) on a day like this and find it hung with tapestries and lounged around in by harem girls  wearing semi-diaphonous pantsuits. On those days you saw how Mom changed from the nightgown at around nine o'clock, it was when she would say to you time for me to get moving. She'd clean the kitchen, she'd say let's go out to eat lunch, what do you say, honey? She'd take a load of clothes out of the dryer and set up the ironing board, hey I found twenty-five cents in the wash, you boys (meaning Dad and you) never take the change out of your pockets and you know what that means, and you is it mine and she no it’s mine now, finders keepers.  She'd watch tv, ironing.  But she has a new routine, one that has been going on for four months, ever since you started sixth grade. Mom has to  be at work just like Jack, she says she's a working girl. So that means a blue dress and red high heels, a red dress and blue high heels, no the blue dress and the blue high heels,  that means into the bathroom (Jack saying this is getting like Grand Central Station!) and when you get in there not only is there the fecal smell and the aftershave smell, there’s the perfume smell and the hairspray smell, and all this with another cup of coffee, which maybe will be there next to the bathroom sink when you get home in the afternoon, a lipstick lip crescent on the lip of the cup, as you look down into it your eyes, blacker pools in that black, oily surface, (you love this, you love all the surfaces in which you, in whatever form of distortion, are mirrored - the scoops of spoons, the windows of parked cars, the lid of a pot)  reflected in the little remnant left there.  You edge into the bathroom  to brush your teeth, foam dripping out of your mirror-mouth in hideous smile, maybe you are dying of... of rabies, what would you do if you had rabies? (spit).  Well you’d race around and be afraid of water, whenever you saw or touched water (your hand out under the stream from the faucet) you’d immediately shudder, your hand jerking out and splashing water, Mom saying Street! I don’t have time for any of your nonsense this morning, you’ve dripped water on my... and out she goes, switching to and we have to get going soon, hurry up, we have to go go go.  You don’t have rabies yet.  If you ever do have rabies, and just now you notice a little caterpillar of toothpaste got onto your shirt and you take a towel and carefully get it off, it will be because of Norman’s dog, which bites. 

  

encyclopedia of the second hand: borrower

BORROWERS  Roger Gathman

                              1.

     The  idea that there is some directing  homunculus  in

your  brain  has  always struck me as  the  most  poetically

accurate  image of the mind.  Sherlock Holmes' gray  matter,

which competes with it, doesn't really capture the image  of

how  the  mental is a personality, a style. Gray  matter  is

sponge, really, fog, obscurity, dirt on the windshield,  the

mop's  residue  in a bucket of water.  When we  couple  gray

with  life  we imagine something tentacled and  viscous  and

probably  viscious, a squid gliding stealthily  through  sex

and  metaphysics,  or  perhaps through  the  obscure  London

streets,  stalking victims.  Does it matter that the  victim

be  a barmaid or the butcher of one?  No, it is gray  matter

engaged  with  gray  matter, squid  against  squid  at  some

unutterable depth, some breathless and amoral depth, and  we

can only see the dejecta of the loser as so much  pollution,

fit for the crematorium.  But not intended for any  glorious

resurrection, surely.  No, Christ never died for squids.

                              2.

    Dita tells you about borrowers.  Dita is seventeen, and

uapproachably  distant  sometimes,  a  hostile  tower  on  a

darkling  plain  bristling  with  archers.   You  will   say

something and zap, the shaft is unloosed and there you  are. 

Hey,  and  you  are only a kid, you  are  ten  years  almost

younger.   For  instance,  when she goes  to  her  room  and

listens  to her records, all you can do is sit  outside  her

door.  It is shut.  You listen to the music. Even though she

is  supposedly babysitting you.  Even though you  know  that

that  means  she is supposed to be there, like what  if  you

decided  to  plug  in the toaster and put  down  the  little

handle  thing  and stick a fork in one of the  slots.   What

then. Why, you'd be electrocuted right in the kitchen and it

would  be  Dita's  fault, since she  was  listening  to  her

records, right? Mom would come home and you'd be there,  her

son, looking like toast, black all over. Toast in the middle

of  the  floor!  Mom would say my son is  toast.   And  then

she'd  have to kick Dita out of the house for murdering  her

brother.