encyclopedia of the second hand: hair

      Dad's hair.

    

     Dad's hair is always short, as short as he can get it.  Mom cuts it.  Mom has barber's scissors, a whole set of them, which she keeps in a brown leather pouch in her drawer in the bathroom.  There are short fingernail clippers and there are some funny looking toothed scissors ‑ both blades of the part that swings open being provided with fine metal teeth for more precise, one at a time hair cutting. Then there are two different sized plain blade scissors. All of these scissors are fit snugly into little loops of leather that line the pouch.  Mom also has an old fashioned kind of barber's clippers.  The clippers is a machine about as big as a telephone receiver.  It is black and has a switch on the side, and two serrated metal strips attached to the front of it. The electric cord runs out of the back of it, and right now she has that plugged in.  When she turns the little switch to on the clippers vibrate.  They make an electric gnashing sound.  The two metal strips make micro‑motions too fast to clearly distinguish.  When she puts the clippers to the side of your head, around your ear, or in back of your head, at your neck, you can smell a spark smell ‑ a smell of electric current and metal.  Your head buzzes with the vibration of the clippers. Curls of your hair are sheered off and fall at your feet. Sometimes hair trickles down where your shirt is open at the back, getting in your shirt, and for an hour afterward you will be shaking out hair.  Just when you think you have got it all

shaken out, you will feel another itch.  It is funny how dry and scratchy locks of hair can be.

     Dad sits there, a towel around his neck.  Mom says Jack, I don't like your hair so short.  Can't we wait on this?

     She knows the answer.

     I don't want to look like one of those singers Street listens to, Dad says, and he looks at you.  What do you think, son, he says.   I have a better singing voice than most of your rock n roll buddies. Hell, the Sherman s dog has a better voice than that Led Balloons group you listen to.  That is probably a minus, but I bet if I sang and gargled at the same time I could make a sound pretty similar to your buddy Dylan.

     You are sitting there at the dinner table.  There is a book in front of you.  You look down at the book, and then you grin and look back up.

     Those singers make millions of dollars, you say, lightly taunting the old man.  We don't make millions of dollars.  So I think this proves that if you have long hair and a hippie attitude, you can make tons of money. And you all seem to think more of money than of God, so that ought to be proof that you should let me grow my hair out to where I want it.

     Street, Mom says, poised with her clippers over Dad's neck, I don't want to hear you talk like that.

     If there are fools like you around to spend the money, Dad says, they'll be fools to make it.  But a funny thing, son.  A funny thing about economic history, here.  Just when the fools

who are making their money from the fools who are giving it away think that they can just sit back and let the money roll in,  the fools who are giving it away decide to give it away somewhere else.  You ought to read up on the Great Depression, then you'd know what I'm talking about. This country might be going down that road again for all I can tell.

    

     Death and hair.

     Hair and nails grow on the dead, but hair and nails aren't really alive.  They are the deader parts of the body.   They are lessons in what is alive and what is dead.  The oldest idea is that the whole universe is alive.  All that blackness in eternal drift and torn flight, all those interstellar hollows, all that dust and ash, litter of the this fast crematorium of flaring stars ‑ it is all ultimately bound up with a colossus, a vital, human‑like creature, striding with his own purposes through infinity. Hair and nails are like the bits of seemingly dead nature that are really attached to and function because of some living creature.

     The newer idea is that the universe is dead.  The parts that are alive are novel forms of death, masks of the mineral grin beneath it all.  And this is just a way of saying that hair and nails rule ‑ forever and ever one stumbles through hair and nails. They grow, dead things, on a corpse ‑ a dead colossus tumbling through fretful emptiness.

   

     Beards

     In the seventh grade the boys, for a joke, liked to stroke their chins, as if they had hair growing there. Few did.  You think it would be neat to have a beard.  Dad, though, hates beards.  He doesn t like it that Brian, Dita s boyfriend, has a beard.  It is one of those very dense beards, like some phenomena of the insect world ‑ all closely packed cells of dark hair.  The beard goes down to the first button of his shirt.  Dad always asks, when Brian comes to the house: so, Brian when are you losing the growth?  And Mom, in the kitchen, says to Dita that she can t understand why a young man with a nice looking face would want to ruin it like that.  I could understand, she said, if he had a scar, or a weak chin.

     I like his beard, Dita says.  I think it is sexy.

     But you wonder about something else.  Brian s beard is just the tip of the iceberg as far as hair is concerned.  His chest is matted with a mattress of dark hair, his back and legs crawl with hair.  He is a hair machine, except that hs is growing bald.  His hairline is definitely receding.  It seems so funny that anybody with so much hair can t get a little to grow where everybody else has hair. You think that maybe it is because the beard and all took the vigor out of the hair on top of his head.  The hair gene just got exhausted from all that production.  

  

  Girl s hair

     Jan s hair, for instance.  Jan s hair is reddish colored, long and tangled.  But  reddish  colored is only a conventional name for the real color, which, at its base, is a certain ruddy gold.  Strand by strand, that was the color of Jan s hair, and even then, breaking it down, the strands individually varied in tint along their length, from darker near the root to lighter at the tip. This made more difference in Jan s case because her hair was so long.  Sometimes you would find a strand of it floating around somewhere that would measure a good two feet.  It was only as the hair combined and gained, as they say on shampoo bottles,  body , that it exhibited an overall redness.

     In the dark, Jan s hair was a mane, all spread out on the pillow, smelling slightly of oil and another faint odor vaguely reminiscent of wet clay.  Individual filaments of her hair would get in your mouth sometimes.  You d wake up next to her on the one weekend a month when Bob was away at a hospital in Baton Rouge and there s a long string of hair, slick with your saliva.  Sometimes you d pull the hair out in an exhibitory fashion and say: your hair. As though accusing her of losing the hair on purpose.

     You would watch the variety of things Jan would do to her hair.

     One thing she would do had a certain swan‑like grandeur. She would lift her pale arms above her shoulders and with both hands grab her hair, and twist it, a thick coil, above her head, lifting it in one gathering yank almost as far as her arms could

stretch.  She would, doing this, unconsciously jut out her chest, as though to compensate one movement with another within a certain image she possessed of the balance of her body.  You would watch while she twisted the hair playing with the rope she made of it, a distant daughter of Rapunzel.  Her neck would look so undefended.  She would do this while you were eating with her in a restaurant, or while you were with her at a party.  The gesture seemed curiously intimate, it seemed to be the kind of thing that not many people other than yourself should be privileged to see.  Jan, at such moments, would become too obviously attractive, so that she even seemed to slightly levitate among us like one of Chagall's lovers.

     At other times Jan would do astonishingly dumb things to her hair.  For instance: you would go with her to a concert.  You would walk over to her house on Audubon from where you lived on Calhoun.  Her husband, Bob, hated any music that was written before nineteen sixty about, or that didn t have guitars in it.  Consequently he was just as glad that you were taking Jan to the symphony.  You would talk with Bob, sitting with him on the glassed in porch, sharing a joint.  Then Jan would come in, and you and Bob would rise from your chairs.  She d be wearing a black sheath gown.  And she would have wound her hair up into a bobbin on top of her head.  As if there were something superchic about looking like a slightly dented unicorn.

     However, the very dumbness of her hair at this moment would illuminate her face with a blanched, childish beauty.  Her nose

would be blunter, more puppet‑like.  Her smile would be charmingly hesitant, the upper lip so slightly rimpled just above her front teeth, she would look at you and Bob as if there was a question she would like to ask. Actually there was and she would ask it later on in the evening. What were you and Bob talking about?

     Nothing, you'd say.

     Ah, she seemed so easy to undermine as she stood there with her hair done up like that, one beautifully gloved hand clutching her expensive little white purse.  The first impulse of your heart was to protect her from everything, including yourself.  The second impulse was to fuck her with such greed, fluttering about her with great thumping falcon wings of sheets in the hotel room you all usually went to in the Quarter that the bun would fall apart, and ringlets string about her ears, and all the king's horses and all Bob' s drugs wouldn t be able to put your cousin Jan back together again ‑ not as she was, not as she was.

Dad's hair (con't)

     Dad's hair comes out in wiry tufts.  It is a charcoal color and as he gets older  and there gets to be gray among the black hairs the gray reminds you of the ash forming on the edge of charcoal briquettes after they have been burning for a while in a grill. The hair makes tight curls as it gets longer so that Dad is right to have it closely cut, since his only other choice would be to have a sort of Afro, a sort of jerry‑curl nimbus.  This isn't what you think he should look like.  One of the effects of the seventies on Dad was that he began to discretely let his sideburns grow.  Not to tuft out, but to grow in length.  He used to have Mom cut the sideburns back so that there weren't any.  She would simply buzz off all the hair around his ears, letting them simply stick out, thick, fleshy.  Around 1978, when you went to school, he was letting the hair get a bit thicker, and he started using Grecian Formula to combat the gray. This you know not so much from the sudden uniformity of his hair as from seeing a bottle of Grecian Formula in the medicine cabinet.  You were looking for Mom's sleeping pills.

     For years Dad had covered the business beat for the Atlanta evening paper.  Now the business section on weekdays mostly meant the stock market, positioned on the hind side of the sports section, after the fishing part of it; on the weekends it meant the auto section and the house section and a bit more business analysis, mostly wire service.  Dad's work mainly came out on the weekends.

   

At this time he parted his hair to the left.  The hair was so short and the individual strands so closely interwoven one with the other that it was a bit hard to tell that there was a part, and a wave of hair over one way.  He never spent a lot of time combing it.  You'd see him (you in your pyjamas, getting out of bed and wanting crankily to go back, and Daddy already up and his coffee half drunk, his egg half tasted, his toast half eaten, in the bathroom, the door open as you pass by) take a comb and perfunctorily style the hair with a little water, or a little green lotion in a bottle that smelled spicy. After school sometimes you'd take a bit of this lotion and some toothpaste and one of Mom's creams and make a chemical experiment, hoping for an explosion, like in the movies.  A little curl of hairs would sometimes creep out on Dad’s forehead, right there where the left wave of the hair crested, by the time he he came home at the end of the day.  Sometimes he would come home, change into his yard clothes, and spend the rest of the afternoon in the yard.  He'd come back into the house when Mom sent you out there to get him.  Tell Jack dinner's ready.  He'd be hot and sweaty, he'd smell like grass and gasoline ‑ from the lawnmower or the weedeater .  Little blades of grass would sometimes be in his hair, or sticking to his arms, which glistened with sweat.  He would stick his head under the faucet in the kitchen and pour cold water on himself.  Then, dripping, he sould walk over to the fridge and get a beer.

Towards the end of the seventies there is a trend in newspapers to give the business section more play, which in Dad's case meant that the paper had a special Business section on Wednesdays.  Dad was raised to editor, and he got a raise.  The salary wasn't near what Jim Mince, the sports columnist, got.  Also Jim Mince, as Dad liked to point out, was an illiterate drunk, whose assistants straightened out his copy.  But Jim Mince was a personality, and he earned extra by going out to things like the opening of sports bars and making a speech.  Or making a fool of himself ‑ in Dad's view.

     Jim Mince burned Dad up.

     Well Dad quit.  What happened is that he is talking to this man who teaches economics at Georgia State, Vince Abfondel.  Vince says look, Jack, if you are going to make some money in this life you are going to have to move pretty soon, because you are almost at the end of your real wealth‑making period. Why don't you come in on this newsletter with me?

     Vince Abfondel published a newsletter for investors in the bondmarket.  It was called: The Southern Bond Investor's Watch.

     This is 1979, and the country is going into a real tailspin, with a big upswing in inflation and bankrupcies.  Interest has gone crazy.

     Newsletters like Abfondel's were taking off in other parts of the country.  It was a little unique in the South.

     Dad renamed it Sunbelt Investor's Times.  He added some features.  Abfondel kept his column, but Dad added information about businesses in Georgia and Florida and South and North Carolina. 

     So the thing takes off.  Dad benefits from that, but also from the advice Abfondel gives him on investments.  Soon Dad's inflow is uncharacteristically wealthy.  He tells you on the phone, son, we are going to be in the upper fifth quartile this year.

     All these years Dad has been dying to be rich.  Just to be rich before he died.

   

You are uncertain about how this is happening and what it is doing to Mom and Dad.  This is because you are away.  You are going to college, supposedly.  One year you do, one year you just  pretend to.  Then, in Easter of what is really your second, but to your parent's your third, year you come home. 

     It is a new, much bigger home.  There are two guest bedrooms.  You stay in one of them.

     Dad's hair is longer than you have ever seen it.  The sideburns are gray, and the rest of it is peppper and salt.  The hair comes down over his collar in back, which is an innovation upon which you cast a troubled eye. But the eye looks truly askance at the way suddenly Dad’s hair arises in a wave in the front and sweeps back,  getting choppy and then eddying out about halfway. Somehow the hair is less kinky - Dad’s been getting it treated in some way to make it softer. So this is his look for being in the late fifties. It is a style favored by Mafiosi and Politburo members, and now by Dad.

     Mom no longer cuts Dad's hair.  A cheap haircut, he says, is a quick turnoff, business‑wise.  You have to speak through your image, son. Half the battle is lost for the fellow who is trying to speak around his image. Dad talks a lot about image, and in this tone.  Partly this is because he is a little crazy, which is what you note detail by detail staying with him and Mom.  Partly this is because he is trying to write a book with Abfondel about business management.  The book will be full of advice about image.  The tentative title of it is: Too many chiefs, or not enough indians?

  

Dad's face is a little flushed.  He has on a gray suit with a flower in the buttonhole.  Dad is at that point in his bodyhistory where skinniness, that starved dog look of those early years of the marriage, is a memory startlingly recorded on old photographs in the family album but not otherwise accessible.  He is a short man, and he is chunky.  Not fat, but broad, in that tough way that cops and vice principals have.  You and he have the same kind of face: one reflecting a certain wariness.  Both of your chins are sharp, and you both characteristically frown when you aren't thinking about it.  A slight frown, but definitely there.  Sitting there in the living room with Dad, both of you reading newspapers, you glanced up the other day and were surprised how much your faces resembled each other in the mirror that hangs on the wall opposite the sofa.

You are in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, which you have liberally laced with Dad’s vodka.  You weren’t expecting him home so early. You have been standing there for fifteen minutes, looking out the kitchen window at a plum tree in full flower, around which bees are buzzing.  The blooms are so white that they seem to send out little waves upon the sunlit air, and the bees to ride the waves.  You have a Van Gogh feeling about that tree.  Then you hear steps, turn around, and there’s Dad. He wants to know if you want to go with him to the barber’s. 

You laugh.

Why would I want to go with you to the barber’s?  My hair is  shorter now than yours is.

To watch, Dad says.

     Okay, you say, what is the joke? I am not exactly extremely thrilled by the idea of watching you get your hair cut.

You’ll get a shampoo, he says.  We are going to Off the Top.  Okay.  A little treat, on your old papa. Come on, let's get going if you're going, I don't want to be late.

     You got in the car.  He got in on the driver's side and started the car.  The radio came on in a sudden blare, and he turned it off. 

     I would have thought you would have heard of Off the Top, Street, Dad says.  They’ve been on one of those talk shows and I don’t know what all.  People, Playboy.  But I forget, you don't like tv.  Too middle class for your refined tastes, I bet.

     Well I don't have one. I didn’t know my tastes were so refined. Now what is the deal with this barber shop.  What, they got some hot little tootsie assistants to the barber? What?

     Not an assistant.  No, this whole place, this Off the Top place, which I am just surprised you haven’t heard of even back there in Austin, this place is a unique gimmick, a  topless barber shop. I kid you not, topless and in the back room, where they have a bar you can adjourn to after being fixed up, bottomless too.  It is another one of those screwy laws which says for some reason the girls can’t go bottomless when they cut hair, God knows. Like a safety regulation but, yeah I know it’s funny, and as if wit the little they wear on the bottom it makes a whole hell of a lot of difference.  And they set it up right, I mean they have women in there you rub your eyes over, you say where did they get these gorgeous, gorgeous... these girls. If they wanted to any one of them could be in the movies, except it is better than the movies because it is completely live.  I go there on Thursdays for a shave from Sherri, my regular girl, she makes Raquel Welsh look like nothing, canned goods. I mean to tell you she is a stunningly put together young lady, what they call a well stacked young ... lady.

     Oh, you say.

            Yeah, I started going there because of this business acquaintance who is a bank president.  I'm in there in his office once and he says to me, let's go get shampoos at Off the Top.  Well, I think he's gone nuts, just like you the way you looked at me.  You thought the old man has gone nuts.  So Darrel, Darrel Pickering from the National Coastal bank is who it was, Darrel says to me what, you haven't heard of Off the Top?  Well we went and I mean I was a little hesitant.  I wasn't totally comfortable. You know I come from a different generation about all this, it takes me  a while to get used to certain things.  I mean I am not a prude, but to see these naked girls like that, and the things they do.  But it isn't like you are going to get away with anything, for one thing.  And for another, this is the eighties.  What people thought about certain things in the past, nobody cares about anymore. I don’t think they ought to be open all over the place but if it is a consenting adults proposition... So anyway I have started going there.  And let me tell you, Street, when you are leaning your head back, those creamy jugs in your face, well it beats old fashioned barbering all over the place. Your mother never gave me a cut like that. They lather you up and I don't know. I get so I have to keep a magazine in my lap.  But they do a good job too. Dad laughed a little nervously, and you did too. 

     You reached out and turned on the radio again.

     I'm sure they do, you said.

You know what Sherri wants me to do?  She wants me to grow a moustache.  She says it would come out gray, and gray moustaches are cute.

Don’t grow a moustache, Dad, you say.  If you do I am not going to go out with you in public.

    

          

encyclopedia of the second hand: evocation

EVOCATION                          

     Let's say door.

     A poor enough object.  Not a thing you are inclined  to

study  with too much attention.  I can imagine missing  this

room someday, but not the door to this room.

     So  in the sense of not being overloaded with  meaning,

the door is the thing.

     Because  this  is how it is, this is what I  am  doing. 

I've  tried  to explain the project to people and a  lot  of

them  don't  see  it, so I feel like  damn  it,  this  isn't

incomprehensible.  There is a method here and I can  explain

it.

     I  go through this routine.  I write a word down, or  I

daydream and I think of a thing. For instance, I look up and

I see the door of my room and I think, door.  Then I let the

image, or the word - and at this point these things are very

close  together  - act as an agent of evocation.  I  let  my

mind wander through a list of doors, remembered doors.

     In  one  way, this is a simple  procedure  embodied  in

other  aspects  of my life.  For instance, when  I  want  to

define a term to somebody who doesn't know it, I often  find

myself  running  through  a list.  It might  be  a  list  of

examples,  or it might be a list of synonyms.   Usually  the

person I am talking to will get it, the way a person gets  a

joke.   The  getting  of  it will  be  the  moment  of  that

transformation  which  happens in the world  when  the   the

unfamiliar becomes, suddenly, familiar - which includes such

situations  as recognizing a street as well  as  recognizing

that something is funny.  And what the person gets, and what

I  have  been  trying to get at, is that  there  is  a  list

principle, something that holds together my list of examples

or  synonyms and makes them relevant. The relevance of  each

item  on  the list is the voucher that  each  item  silently

holds that makes them eligible to be on the list, and it  is

with  reference to that voucher that I would know if one  of

the items shouldn't be on the list.

     But there is a difference between the grocery list  you

took  to the store with you and the grocery sack you  unload

in  the kitchen.  You don't peer into the sack and say,  ah,

I've bought the list.  No, the list is to help you  remember

to buy milk, butter, eggs, bread, etc.  The question is, are

the  memory  images  that you call up  when  you  decide  to

remember  doors the type of things that are more like  items

on  a list, or are they the type of things that lists  refer

to.

     Insofar as the things I am remembering are like  things

on a list, they are like terms.  Now terms usually  function

in  syntactic structures to give meaning.  They are part  of

statements  and  questions,  they are  parts  of  linguistic

structures which say things about the world.  My  comparison

of  memory  images  of such things as doors  to  terms  does

extend, actually, beyond the fact that both terms and images

function   in  syntactically  simple  lists  to  include   a

similarity  in  the  way in which  they  function  within  a

semantic  ecology, an environment of references. The  memory

of this door or that door refers to something outside of the

memory, namely the door.

encyclopedia of the second hand: dog

                              1.

    You are in the garage, the morning of your life, how old

are you about five and you are racing around in a circle  on

the  concrete floor on your tricycle with two  friends  also

racing  around  on  their  tricycles  and  the  concrete  is

circling around furiously  and the thing is you are  Indians

circling  the covered wagons so you are pedalling  furiously

so that if you relax the pedal by the force of your previous

pedalling  will lift your leg up and make it go  around  and

that is a wierd feeling the shift from a thing you will to a

thing in which you are willed, even though they are the same

thing  in  terms of what somebody on the outside  sees  when

your  leg  is rapidly lifted up and gone  around  with  like

that.  What  it is like it is like ghosts are doing  it,  or

like your leg is a ghost, because it is like after you  have

already  died and the things that happen aren't things  that

you tell your body to do. Eddy screams and Scott screams and

you  scream but not any of you the way a scream  would  come

out  if  it was a pain scream someone hitting  you  or  some

sharp corner you'd run into or falling off your tricycle and

scraping your knee, these  are war whoops that come out of a

certain rhythm stop and start from deep in your throat  like

the  way when you drink milk real fast glug stop glug  stop. 

To  go with being an Indian you went and drew lines on  your

face with Mom's lipstick. The lipstick feels grainy on  your

skin, and the red of it is also on your hands and shirt. One

of  you  darts in and rams Kofax.  Kofax is  your  dog,  the

beagle, and Kofax is the covered wagons, and Kofax  responds

to this furious activity by leaping and biting and  yelping. 

The  yelps echo hollowly in the space of the  garage.  Kofax

runs  around  in  a circle, frantic, her body  all  one  big

wiggle of white and black spots, trying to break through and

find a place to hide.

    This is the pain that you provoke and see.  It is also a

game,  because  pain doesn't have to be serious, it  can  be

part  of a game, this is something you know and aren't  dumb

about. The pain is a gritty limit inside you and also inside

Kofax  as  if you were both strung on one chord  one  fierce

electric  wave two walkers on a tightrope in a  rhythm  each

connected to the other's footfall and caught balance.  There

is  someone  or something in pain, not self,  and  there  is

being  part of a pain, this is something you know and  right

now  you  don't have to explain it although  later  you  get

asked why did you do that by Mom or by Dad and what are  you

going to say you don't have words to put after that question

and  then the asking keeps on it keeps on running you  until

you  are  I  don't know why and  howling  gulping  for  air.  

So  these are the two perspectives on pain, except that  the

latter  is perspectivally somewhat ruined as the  pain  gets

greater and self is swallowed up in it. There's no distance,

then,  which  is what self has to have  for  a  perspective. 

Although there are always intervals of relief in most  pain,

most  pain is whole so that you can say that it is  pain  of

this or that or pain about this or that but the wholeness of

pain  is  discrete, it touches you or crushes you  and  then

analgesically  vanishes,  so  you feel it  again  and  again

coincident with each emergence of it from what it is  harder

and harder to feel as not it.                              

                              2.                             

    Kofax  is a fat beagle, been here from before  you  were

here,  and  the way she is there are nipples on  her  belly,

little reddish crests, which there are also nipples on  you,

your chest, strange interruptions of the way the rest of the

skin  is.   The hair stops and the belly is  leatherish  and

pink.  Her fur is closely matted, it never gets real  thick. 

She  has black spots or maybe white spots - the  colors  are

pretty  evenly distributed over her body so what spots  what

is a question. Her eyes are brown and watery and little eye-

liquid bits form in the corners of them, yellowish  brownish

things which you pick out carefully, holding the dog  still,

and then crunch between your thumb and your index finger and

mash up a little more and stare at it until it is gone, wipe

it  on your shirt. Her muzzle is white with a black spot  on

the  end,  and then there is her nose, which  is  black  and

resilient  and  not like the smooth black rubber nose  on  a

stuffed  dog which you can squeeze.  The way her nose  looks

is  interesting  when you compare it to the  way  your  nose

comes  out, the dog nose is made of some  different  seeming

material  to the rest of the face which you don't have  with

the nose but on your face it is the lips, which are like the

nipples,  lips are different from other parts of  the  skin,

reddish, differently pored, a little puckered and rubbery to

the  touch.  Now since you pet Kofax you have a pretty  good

idea  of  the  incongruity of surfaces to  the  hand  -  for

instance,  the pads of the feet feeling like those pads  Mom

uses  to clean pans with, or the silky feel of the ears,  or

the stiffness of the tail, or the naked feeling to the belly

and  the  nipples.  When you play blind  with  Jane  Scott's

sister you felt her lips, your eyes are closed although  you

cheat a little bit by unsqueezing the eyes a little bit  and

seeing  through  the quavering eyelashes your hands  on  her

lips and down your hands on her neck and down your hands  on

her  nipples and down your hands on her belly  button.   You

turn the beagle over, exposing the belly, and you stroke it.

You rub it rapidly, and the dog frantically waves its  legs,

trying to right itself, this is a thing animals do, you roll

a beetle for instance over on its back and it waves its legs

around too but the waving around is thinner and more frantic

like its going to die and you poke it with a piece of straw. 

You  put  your fingers around Kofax's neck,  which  is  thin

enough that you can almost encircle it.  And with that  hold

on  her you vigorously shake her head.  Her front legs  come

up  and dig at your hand, trying to get it to  release  her.

The  movement  of her muzzle is impeded by your  hand  being

there  on  the neck.  And then your other  hand  comes  into

play, like a dive bomber.  Your hand is dive bombing, it  is

a plane.  Bam it comes in for a crash and goes up again  and

bam it comes in again.   

    Kofax  has short ears, and they flop.  They don't  stand

up, like a rabbit's ears.  But you can do that.  So you hold

her  ears up. On the other side of the ear the skin  becomes

bare  and pinkish, and it goes down into her head where  the

there is wax. Sometimes Dad or Dita has to put drops from an

eyedropper  into the dog's ears, and then Kofax wimpers  and

has  to be held still. In there is where the drums and  such

work,  which you know more of when it is about your own  ear

because  Mom  and Mrs. Farragut have told you.   Don't  they

told  you  put anything thinner than a thumb  in  your  ear. 

Like don't stick a pencil in there or a pin, or it will  pop

something.  You  imagine  it will be like when  you  blow  a

bubble  gum  bubble  and it bursts.  There will  be  a  pink

shapeless  mess in your ear. Then you'll be deaf and  you'll

have  to  blubber.  You lean down and very  gently  blow  in

Kofax's  exposed ear and Kofax squirms. You hold her to  you

and she wrestles her head around and bites you. 

    Already  your  arm  is  streaked  with  reddish   lines,

scarified  from  Kofax's  nails.   The  bite  leaves  little

triangular  pinkish  places.  You get  furious  for  just  a

second,  your face clouds up with wanting to hurt  the  dog.

Bad,  you say slapping her nose clumsily, hand going up  and

coming  down approximately on the nose area, Kofax  blinking

twisting  her  head  back. Bad, like  you  are  supposed  to

discipline  a dog, hitting her on the nose, like Dad with  a

rolled up newspaper.  Don't kick her don't you ever kick her

again Dad says.

    Since she is turned upside down and you are   straddling

her  the dive bomber hand has free play, no other planes  in

the sky.  She is squirming around on the wooden floor trying

to escape from enemy fire.  You pull her tail a little  bit,

not  a  lot.   You don't want to hurt her only  there  is  a

certain submissive pain you want to feel in her you want  to

feel in you.  But you say when Mom asks why or Dad asks  why

you didn't want to hurt her and they say if you didn't  want

to hurt her why did you pull her tail and you can't  express

the  degree of hurt which you wanted and the hurt  that  you

didn't want. If you pulled her tail too much she would whine

or  yelp or bite.  As you tussle with her she makes  a  high

wimpering sound. Sometimes you try to pitch your voice in  a

high  register   and  whine  in  imitation  of  Kofax,   and

sometimes  when  you do this she will make a  whining  sound

with  you.   Or you pitch your voice even further.   A  very

high pitch is supposed to effect dogs, who have better  ears

than  we do. Dita says don't do that, it hurts  their  ears,

but  Dita isn't here, she is in her room, the  door's  shut. 

There  are a lot of funny things about a dog, like how  they

like  to  bend around and lick their assholes and  how  they

stop  and  lean  over turds and sniff it like  it  had  just

plopped  there from the moon even if it is old and dried  up

and  how  every year for us counts seven  or  something  for

them.   Dog  years  aren't real, they are kind  of  a  joke. 

Although  you don't get the joke.  By dog years Kofax is  as

old  as  Mom.  Dita says Kofax is just a puppy,  her  puppy. 

That's Dita. Anyway, you put your voice as high as  possible

to  make  it like a dog whistle, which when you blow  on  it

makes  a sound, supposedly, that you can't hear.  This is  a

paradox.   You blow hard on a whistle and it doesn't make  a

sound, which means that it is working and making a sound  or

that it isn't working and it really isn't making a sound.

     You  can almost make your voice rise up to such a  high

pitched  shriek that you can't hear it.  Inside your  throat

there  is  a  shudder  in the vocal  chords,  like  you  are

gargling  a  bee buzz buzz a bumble bee  shaking  a  flower. 

When you do this Kofax will look up at you and cock her head

to  one  side.  There will be a shift in her  face,  in  her

eyes,  the pupil in the eye is more liquidy and less  a  dot

and  it  will  change  just a little,  a  look  of  beggarly

incomprehension.                                    

     Sometimes  when  you are grinning about  something  the

tight pull of the way the grin stays on your lips  surprises

you.  It almost hurts.  You don't grin now, exactly, but the

same  grin-tight  feeling happens inside you  when  you  see

Kofax  look up at you like that, and you think of what  else

you can do to her.

    When you play with Kofax the aim is to torment her on  a

very  low level, the way tickling is a torment.   When  your

cousin  Tom tickles you he passes just beyond the  limit  of

acceptibility,  he  will  begin to  look  grimly  determined

straddling  you, his knees on your chest, his hands  flying,

the  fingers  wiggling almost like he can't stop  them.   He

says he is the mad doctor and finally you are out of breath,

you  are wheezing, and you gather up what breath you can  to

shout  for Mom. Tom is Dita's age, Mom says a boy  that  age

should know better, that Aunt Mabel should control him, that

he's  not  too bright you know. You are about at  that  same

point  where you can't stand it with Kofax except it is  the

dog  who can't stand it. Kofax will snap at you if you  keep

it up, she'll growl and sometimes that is frightening, maybe

she'll  bite you hard and you'll have to get rabie shots  in

your stomach.  The dive bomber comes in and now it is a hand

clamped around Kofax's muzzle, which makes the dog buck  her

head backwards.  Your hand is a rodeo rider on a bronco.

                              3.

     Then you let Kofax go, suddenly.  She scrambles to  her

feet in a scribble of nails on the floor and then she  jumps

on  you.  A paw comes up and swipes a scratch on  your  lip.

Then  you  rush  to the kitchen door. Go get  him,  you  go,

putting a lot of pull and urgency in your voice, like it was

tensile  as a leash, a thing to pull the dog with,  you  can

feel  it a texture on your tongue a string.   Kofax  follows

you.  In  a rush Kofax goes out the door  making  a  belling

sound, her fat body swaying on the rapid little movement  of

her  legs. The grin-tight feeling vanishes. She runs  almost

to the end of the driveway barking, and then it dawns on her

there isn't anybody to bark at and her barks peter out  into

puffs and snorts. Kofax is fat and has terrible breath which

she  sometimes snorts out, she makes a funny  sighing  sound

and then you smell it, it smells like the bottom part of the

stuff stuffed in the garbage can.

                              4.

    Finally  Mom  says  the  dog  is  getting  too  old  and

unmanageable.  It has a temper, it bit Scott, who you didn't

like  anyway, you think who wouldn't bite him if  you  could

get  away  with it. Dita cries and says no, it is  her  dog. 

Mom  points  out that when they leave it out  there  in  the

garage  it  howls and it has scratched up the  door  to  the

kitchen. Also it is unlearning toilet training. Dita  blames

you.  Maybe Dad says you are too young to have a dog around. 

Or maybe Kofax is getting cranky in her old age.   Sometimes

he  tells Dita it is better to put the dog to sleep than  to

let  the situation get out of hand. Dad hates the  situation

getting  out of hand, when it happens at the  table  between

you and Dita he'll get up and leave, he'll sit in the car in

the  driveway and drink, he always hides a bottle of  scotch

in the car under the seat, and then his eyes get a stainless

steel  glint to them, as if they were as blind  as  cutlery. 

Mom  hates it when Jack does that, when Jack just  sits  out

there,  what does he think the Eberts think? At the  busstop

the  next day Dita knocks you down with her  math  textbook. 

Most  of the kids standing around are bigger than  you,  you

are  the  only one on this stop going  to  the  kindergarten

which  is next to the school.  She takes a big swing at  you

and  hits you on the shoulder and you fall down in the  snow

and  shriek not because it hurt you but as a  precaution  so

that  Dita won't do something else thinking that this  thing

didn't  hurt  you.  The math book flies  away,  loosed  from

Dita's  grasp  by the force of her swing, and  her  homework

falls out of it into the snow too. The snow will melt little

water spots on the ruled sheets, it will make the  pencilled

numbers  wavery.  She  stands  over  you,  her  plaid  skirt

flapping in the breeze. Baby she says.  

Interlude: the encyclopedia of the second hand

Interlude:

Since I decided, on the spur of the moment, to empty out the file that contained my novel of the 90s – a novel that, while I was writing it, I was sure would be my claim to fame – I’ve been looking at it and thinking about what is right and wrong about it.

One of the things that is really wrong with it is the boy’s voice. I wanted, then, to represent, to reconstruct, to design, to animate, to ventriloquize mesmerize simonize and tie down this voice that I thought of as a pure product of an American line in juvenilia, going back to the sainted Huck. The deal with such a voice, if done right, is that in its fledgling notes, its raw views, there is something true and right and New Worldish for good and ill.

This, however, I can now see, did not work out. To muck about in the world of first impressions one must be capable of them – and I am not. I’m a second and third impression man. I was trying to force that kind of consciousness into a smaller and purer consciousness; I can now see the phoniness of this.

On the other hand, I enjoy the teen and adult Longstreet Early. That enjoyment is still alive in me, which means that I really can’t close this book. I can only abandon it.