D O G P O E T

Librarians are sexy.

My mother shakes the can of spray paint ticka ticka ticka as I stand off to the side in our backyard. My bike, stripped of wheels and chain, sits upside down on the patch of dirt beneath the oak tree. The leaves above us are lit up green in the warm summer sun. My mother has acquiesced to my demand for a more masculine color. I was ten when my parents bought me the bright yellow bike, but now I’m twelve and ready for a change. We are painting my bike blue. Or rather, she is painting my bike blue and because she is in a good mood I am keeping her company.

Through the thin gaps between the slats of our tall wooden fence, I see a shadow crossing our yard. It sweeps along the fence until it reaches the open gate of our backyard, and in walks Mrs. McIntyre.

Mrs. McIntyre is the closest thing our neighborhood has to a busybody. She and her husband live two doors down, and her son Johnny is my younger brother’s age. They play together all the time, but in my mother’s opinion Johnny is a spoiled brat, and because my mother rarely expresses a negative opinion on anyone, I like to agree. The McIntyres have bought Johnny every single Star Wars action figure and spaceship and trash compactor available at Target and it makes both my brother and I jealous. When the inevitable squabbles erupt between Johnny and my brother, Johnny likes to sweep all the Stars Wars toys into his lap and yell “These are mine! Get out of here!”

Last week I had stopped at their house, collecting my brother for dinner, when Mrs. McIntyre cornered me in the foyer. “Michael, I heard about your parents,” she said, using a tone of voice that she probably thought sounded concerned. “Why did they get divorced?”

Her bluntness caught me off guard. I looked away from her, down at my shoes. Nobody on our block had ever been divorced. Nobody on our block had ever declared themselves a homosexual, either, but I wasn’t about to tell Mrs. McIntyre that. “I don’t know,” I told her.

She crosses the yard, a small bundle of determination wrapped in a cardigan. She dispenses with small talk. “Michael, did you teach Johnny to say ‘asshole’?”

I stand there with my mouth open, looking at her and then at my mother, who stands with the spray paint can frozen in mid-air. My mother looks back at me.

“Uh, no,” I say. “No, I didn’t.”

“Well there’s nobody else around who could have taught him that.”

I look back at my mother, certain that her fear of confrontation will lead her to choose Mrs. McIntyre’s side, if only to be nice.

“I didn’t teach him that,” I say. “I don’t know who taught him that word, but it wasn’t me.”

“Johnny said you taught him the word,” she says, smiling as though she’s caught me in a trap.

That little lying brat, I think. “Well, I didn’t teach him to say that.”

Mrs. McIntyre turns her attention to my mother. “Susan, this makes me very unhappy.”

I look with dread at my mother, and see a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She shakes the spray paint again ticka ticka ticka, looking Mrs. McIntyre straight in the eye. “Michael said he didn’t do it.”

My heart leaps.

“Well then, why would Johnny say that?” Mrs. McIntyre snaps.

“Maybe,” my mother says, “Johnny is lying.”

Mrs. McIntyre stands there, glaring at my mother. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She shakes her head in disgust, then turns and stamps across our yard, exiting through the gate, chin held high.

I look at my mother with adoration. She smiles back. “That woman,” she says, “is such a bitch.”

My mother loved baths. Nearly every evening of her life she’d soak for an hour in the tub, a paperback mystery curled damply in her hand. When I think of those chaotic years following her separation from my father, I picture her in the tub of our yellow house at 1457 Idaho Avenue in Falcon Height, Minnesota, calling for me.

“Michael?”

I would be in my bedroom just down the hallway, reading my own mysteries. She had Patricia Cornwell, I had Encyclopedia Brown. “Yes?”

“Can you get me a glass of wine?”

“Okay,” I’d call back. My mother loved her wine as much as her baths, and the two together must have made the perfect combination, for nearly every evening she’d call to me. Sometimes she’d remember to bring a glass with her as the tub filled, calling me later for a refill.

The alcohol was kept in the highest cabinet of our kitchen. But at ten I was an agile little monkey, climbing easily onto the counter where I’d open the cabinet and reach inside for the red wine. There was a small collection of various liquor bottles kept there for entertaining, but after my father moved out we rarely had visitors. So they sat untouched in that high cabinet, red wine being my mother’s only poison. One bottle in particular fascinated me; the liquor was a brilliant shade of blue, blue as Windex, blue as a 7-11 slushee calling out to me, begging for a taste. But a long-ago sip of my mother’s wine had repulsed me, and it would be years before I’d drink on my own volition.

I’d pour her a healthy amount of wine, as if pouring myself a tall glass of Coke. I figured more was always better. Then I’d plug the bottle and place it back amongst the others in the dark of the high cabinet, and carefully carry the glass through the house to the bathroom. Most nights she’d have the shower curtain drawn all the way across the tub, and she’d reach through the slit between curtain and tile and I’d place the glass in her outstretched hand. Now and then, perhaps due to an earlier glass, she’d forget, and I would look away from her pale, plump body- this was years before she began running marathons- and the dark shock of her pubic hair floating like algae beneath the surface of the water. I was too young to understand appropriate parental relations -by then most boundaries had already been crossed- but I gathered from her startled expression and the quick tug of the shower curtain that I wasn’t supposed to see her like that. I certainly didn’t want to see her like that. I was a weird little kid, moody and secretive, but thankfully free of Oedipal fixations.

Those nightly wine errands could be considered a textbook definition of “enabling”, my mother unconsciously setting me up for a future of codependency and addiction. A short line drawn from her to me; cause and effect. But I remain stubbornly independent, or rather, stubbornly deluded about my uniqueness. Because so many memoirs have been written about addiction and illness, I resist writing my own. I want to be different. And I don’t want pity.

But my life contains those clichés: addiction and illness; redemption and loss. It’s what we did. When I was ten my parents split up, my father moved out, and within a year they both came out of the closet. My mother drank and cried a lot, my father was cold and distant. I may not have known the definition of dysfunction, but I knew my family was different, a silent suburban catastrophe.

One late summer afternoon my mother was taking her bath, relaxing after a particularly stressful trip. We had just returned from her mother’s funeral in Kansas. Her mother, true to family form, had drunk herself to death.

I was outside, swinging from the branches of the large oak tree in the backyard. I glanced over the top of our fence and saw Grover, my beloved fat cat, lying in the alley across the street. This wasn’t unusual; Grover often enjoyed soaking up the sun on the asphalt, blissfully unconcerned about the traffic in our sleepy neighborhood.

However, there was a car idling just a few feet away from him, and I ran across the street to get him out of the way. But then I saw the pool of blood and Grover lying there, his sides rising and falling in short breaths.

I must have screamed, running from the stupidly confused look of the elderly couple in the front seat of the car, the man peering at me over the steering wheel. I ran full-tilt back into the house, screaming and crying for my mother, bursting into the bathroom and nearly scaring her to death.

“What?” she yelled, “What is it?”

“Grover’s been hit by a car!”

And then a low, mournful wail came from her, chilling me with its despair. “No!” she moaned, “No!” Her fear and grief frightened me; I wanted her to snap out of it; I wanted her to take charge.

She pulled herself out of the tub and dressed quickly, but the odds were against us. Her car was in the shop, and we had to call my father for a ride. My mother found a small section of plywood in the garage, and we pulled this under Grover and lifted him off the street. By now the killers had left. I babbled to him as the minutes stretched. My father pulled up in his little gold Volkswagen, and the three of us drove to the emergency vet at the University of Minnesota, and though I picture Grover lying on the thin wooden board in my lap, I know that my mother held Grover in the front seat, trying to spare me the sight of his glassy eyes and his dwindling, shallow breath.

An impressive number of vets in white coats rushed into action upon our arrival. But Grover was already dead. A solemn-faced woman came out to the waiting room, kneeling before us to deliver the news. We left him there, donating his body “to science.” We drove home, and I sat in the backseat again, pinned there like a butterfly by a dark despair that grew as the minutes passed. Of our many failed attempts at pet ownership (cats in our care ran away, got sick, or were killed by neighborhood dogs) Grover was by far my favorite, and his sudden absence hurt far worse than my grandmother’s death. I still have a picture of Grover: I am sitting in our black vinyl recliner wearing that ugly brown velour shirt with the zippered collar, squeezing him tight, the camera’s flash catching both his wildly dilated pupils and my smile full of braces.

My parents sat in the front seat in silence, two people who didn’t love each other anymore, and I felt as though it would always be this way; each of us an island floating just beyond each other’s reach. We would never be like other families. We would never be able to do anything right, this splintered family of homosexuality, cheap clothes, unsigned permission slips. Our cars would break down and our pets would always die. We would be naked when we should be clothed.

I knew my father would drop us off and probably sigh with relief as we slipped into the house. He didn’t care for animals. My mother would make frozen dinners again and I’d stand with her in the kitchen, watching with mute dread the fruit flies hovering over the garbage can. And she’d disappear with her red wine, and later I’d hear her crying late into the night, alone in her bedroom upstairs. And in my own room I’d turn to the dependable company of Judy Blume and Casey Casum, wanting to go to her but not knowing what to say.

We pulled into our driveway and I grabbed a tissue from the box lying beside me on the back seat. I crumpled the tissue into a ball, climbed out of the car, and walked across the street to the alley where Grover had been killed. I pressed the tissue into the small pool of blood until its edges bloomed red. I crossed back to our yard, past my parents who stood there watching me. “Michael?” my mother said. They followed me to the corner of our yard where we had recently planted a young seedling. Even the poor tree was barely scraping by, its barren branches drooping towards the ground below. I knelt down and scooped a handful of loose soil aside, and then buried the tissue.

Even at twelve I was aware of my melodrama, but I felt their eyes on me, and I felt their concern, and because it was rare I performed, seeking more concern. I knelt there for a moment, basking in their worried attention, then retreated to the house, leaving them there, forcing them to look at each other and talk.

A bright spring afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, I am unlocking my bicycle outside the Norwest Center. Aesthetics have forbid the clutter of bike racks around the pale building rising 57 stories; I simply lean my bike against the limestone face, and lock the front wheel to the frame. I and the other messengers of the city weigh the odds in our favor: a two-minute delivery vs. the random thief.

The two-way radio strapped to my messenger bag comes to life, the speaker/mouthpiece crackling from its tethered position on the bag’s strap; inches from my ear.

“Seventeen?” The disembodied voice of Jeff, our dispatcher; a nasal monotone that I associate with the outer burbs. I’ve never seen him; he sits in an office twenty minutes outside the city.

I press the button on my speaker. “Seventeen here.”

“Mike, I got a dash for you.”

A dash is our fastest run; a fifteen-minute sprint between spots; several of these in the last hours of sunlight can put you past the $100 a day mark.

“Go ahead.”

“Mike, picking up from Fallon, Fifty South Sixth Street dropping at Pixel Farm on First Avenue.”

“Ten-four, seventeen out.”

I copy the run on my log sheet, fold the metal clipboard closed and slide it into my bag before swinging it around to my back in one fluid movement. My t-shirt is stained with sweat a darker shade under the shoulder strap. I straddle my bike and swing the front wheel around to face south, towards Fallon on Sixth Street.

A movement out of the corner of my eye: a woman approaching on the sidewalk; her gait slower and more awkward than the hurried mass of office workers on their lunch break streaming alongside her. She steps with deliberation and focus; her eyes flashing beneath the round frames of her glasses. Her slack jaw and unsteady gait reveal a physical or neurological difference. Suddenly her foot turns awkwardly and she falls forward; I reach towards her but miss by several inches and she lands face-first on the sidewalk a few inches from my bike. The crowd steps back from where she lays. She struggles to her feet; she has cut her lip against her teeth; the bright panic of blood against her pale chin. She stands and for a moment she is alone among this crowd. There is a terror in her eyes; a confusion of fear and pain, and it pierces me deep.

I set my bike down on the sidewalk and run across the street to Arby’s, where I steal a handful of napkins. I dodge the traffic coming back. She stands silently, but her open, bloody mouth and the shine of panic in her eyes are like a scream in my ears. I hand her the napkins.

“Here…you’ve…you’ve cut your lip.”

She takes the napkin and slowly dabs at her lips. A young couple has stopped and the man leans towards her, his hand stopping an inch from her arm.

“Are you okay?”

But the woman only looks at us with confusion. The blood, her slack jaw.

I do not know what else to do. The minutes of my dash are ticking, the business of two companies demand my attention. The couple stands awkwardly; a look passes between them. What do we do? She seems utterly alone and helpless and I am shaken by something cold and quick that has slid into me, resting alongside my heart. I feel helpless.

The couple lingers, and I let duty prevail. I slowly turn from her and mount my bike. I look back once, then push off towards Fallon.

I am haunted all day by the sight of her falling, always inches from my grasp.

Why does this image still cut? Years pass but the pain bears down hard on my heart, squeezing it between rough fingers no weaker for the passing time. In fact they are stronger; the pain unmerciful because I cannot change the course of the memory: the invulnerable, inflexible past. I could have stayed, tried to talk to her, find her destination. I could have stayed till she stopped bleeding. I could have.

The image of her, standing with her mouth open, crying without sound, her panicking eyes, her utter solitude; in her I see my mother. I see that woman on the sidewalk behind me as I glance back a final time, and then I see my mother the way she was with ALS, sitting beside me in church. Around us the congregation is singing a hymn; the music and their voices triggering her tears. She cries silently beside me, her jaw slack, mouth open, eyes confused and pained. She turns to me and her eyes meet mine and it is all fear and desolation, and I am devastated. I can wrap my arm around her. I can hand her tissue. And that is all.

I no longer see the woman on the sidewalk: I glance behind me one last time and she is my mother, mouth open, blood on her chin. I see the enormity of her fear and the anguish dragging her to a place where no one can keep her company.

Why was I not born a superhero, a Man of Steel? Why this mutant heart, so quick to absorb pain greater than its own weight? Why can’t I protect, only stand and witness?

Sometimes, God, I hate you. I hate the misery and the cruelty and the violence of this shitty world. I hate the arrogance and the bright blood. I hate what we always abandon. I hate that she is gone, and I hate that other people get their mothers.

And it seems that I will always be angry, I will never accept what happened to her, what the disease took and continues to take. My rioting heart, my staccato pulse. Pumped full of useless adrenaline propelling me to fight what I cannot touch: random pain, disease, rejection. My red-shot vision blurs, turning the world on its side. My hands reaching, longing to tear apart some one or some thing but missing; closing only around her absence.

Another bout of insomnia; the flickering blue light of the television, movies I’d already seen. At two a.m. I remember with a jolt to move the car from the museum lot at the end of the street; signs had proclaimed Saturday would be “Bug Day”, whatever that is. I drive down the hill. Below me the city is half-asleep, the lights of the bridge stretching across the bay. Quiet winding streets, an empty parking lot, the bright glow of the Safeway drawing boys and girls stumbling home from closing time like moths. I squint as I step through the door. The hand basket bouncing against my leg as I circle the store, aisles cluttered with boxes and pallets, the late night stock boys stepping politely aside. I wander the same three aisles in confusion, hopeless before the logic of beverage categories; fruit juice here, soda there, water another aisle over. I stop before the Gatorade, yellow sale signs marking decimated shelves. I had passed here three times. Now I stand, dizzy under the florescence, scanning the color-coded flavors, the quarts and the eight-packs, the confusingly clear fluid of the “Ice” series. Pink label equals Watermelon. Later a half gallon of milk, four pale bananas and a bottle of vitamins. The basket hanging heavy from my hand. At the express lane a skewed microcosm of the city’s youth, everyone here this late is under forty. We crowd around two registers, stunned silence under such brightness. A boy steps away from his group of friends and faces me. But he is not you. To look back at him would be unfair, as nobody in this city could be you, nobody could resemble the handsome monkey contained in my swooning, biased heart. I have forgotten, for an hour or two, that this was the day we were to meet. I have attempted, for once, not to dwell on all things absent from my life. I move to the next register and pay for my meager groceries with a crisp twenty.

///

Sunday night I tie my shoes. Everyone else is working in the morning so I take myself to a movie. I drive out to a theater near the ocean; the blinking marquee, two screens, a pimpled usher in wrinkled shirt, steaming popcorn spilling from the spinning silver bowl. Twelve of us sit in the dark theater, nuzzling, whispering couples and other solitary souls.

Afterwards I take the long way home along the wide, empty avenues. The night’s unexpected warmth, a passing dog tethered to a shadowed figure, the darkened spires of St. Ignatius pointing to the starred sky. I roll down the windows and play the song, the one that makes you think of me. I sing along off-key, slowly cruising the dark streets, and I don’t know how I can wait any longer. The pinpricks of lights over the hills, a murmuring in bed. The shower’s spray across your back. My hand on your knee in a dark theater. The white walls of a museum and the view I would show you. But I haven’t found the limits of us, and driving home tonight I feel like I could wait forever.

Sudden derailment, gravel road detour through an unfamiliar town. Or wait, I’ve been here before.

Hello, mister. Welcome back. All your doubts are waiting, just ahead. They’re having a picnic. Spread out on the artificial lawn, a patch of green in red desert. The shimmer of heat over the road, a cold rock sunk in my gut.

I thought I lost you guys. Shit.

Merely a minor vacation, they say, what did you bring, we’re starved.

Just me, I say. I look around at the desolate landscape. You might as well have at it.

They eat me alive. They down shots of whiskey and throw bottles up in the air, howling. The glass shatters and they wrestle over the shards, their blood joining mine. Why the long face? they ask. Then they laugh. As if it was the funniest goddamn thing ever.

I pull myself up. They play along the edges of my vision. They’ve thrown my keys behind a pile of rocks. I stumble over and fish the flash of silver into my palm. They walk behind me, fat and happy. They poke each other.

You’re out of gas, they say.

I slide behind the wheel anyway, focused on the hills unraveling ahead. Bug stains on the windshield. I slip the key into the ignition and turn.

///

Three muscle bears sitting in the open window of the Edge bar as I walk past.

“Woof,” says one.
“Hey, hey! Hey!”says another.
“I am all about THAT!” says the third.

I smile in spite of myself.

///

“I met your friend Ski,” Prometheus says over dinner. I look up at him, chewing.

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“Yeah. He was kind of down. Said he was seeing someone now. That he hadn’t dated anyone in a long time.”

“Thirteen years,” I say.

“Yeah, since, uh…”

“Since his boyfriend died.”

“Said it was bringing up a lot of stuff for him.”

I chew for awhile, then swallow. “Funny. I wanted to rescue him from all that. You know. Be the first one since.” Prometheus nods. He gets it. He always does.

A year ago I shared a little cabin with Ski, up in the woods near Sebastopol. We slept on twin beds a few feet apart. I pretended to be just a friend. Who can predict a year of change? I wouldn’t trade it, but there it is, the ghost of a sting. Ski’s dating again.

///

This letter is to confirm your acceptance into the Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar for Writers to be held June 22 through June 27. Pay up.

///

Running on empty. Night sky, a haze of stars, cold wind whipping through the open window. I’m a fugitive, a loner, a Springsteen lyric. My hand cups the wind. The fluorescent signs rushing past. Motels dying by the side of the road. “Life’s a journey, not a destination” read a poster in my Sunday school classroom, many years ago. I step on the accelerator.

The lessons we’ll never learn.

///

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.

This Sacred Image created by Todd

You’ve become a really great person.
-Oh come on.
-No really
-
-
-Well, thank you.
-You’re welcome. I can say that, we’re friends now, right?
-Right.
-So we can consummate our friendship, right?
-What? What are you talking about, “consummate our friendship”?
-We can do that now, right, I mean we’re over it, we’re past it, right?
-Stop.
-What?
-No.
-It would be fun.
-No. I…. no.
-I’m just kidding you.
-I’m kind of saving myself.
-You’re saving yourself?
-Yeah.
-That’s cool, I respect that.
-Yeah, well.
-I had a dream about you the other night.
-You did?
-Yeah.
-Do I want to know?
-Uh, you were really good, that’s all you need to know.
-
-Your laugher is infectious, I’m on a roll, aren’t I?
-You certainly are.
-No, really, you mean a lot to me, our last conversation helped.
-About?
-Your suggestion of quitting for thirty days, it’s something that I can, uh, get my head around.
-You mean the crystal…stuff.
-The Crystal Light.
-Right.
-Yeah. And when you said that other thing.
-What?
-You said I had burned a hole in your heart.
-
-Didn’t you say that?
-Uh,well….I think I said you’ve earned a place in my heart.
-Oh.
-But that sounds better.
-Yeah, it does, can I use that?
-Yeah.

“The Day Lady Died”

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesoid, trans. Richard Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Négres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfield Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

-Frank O’Hara

I swear, if I make it through this, I expect to be made a saint. I want people praying to my image. I don’t care if there’s already a Saint Michael, we’ll figure something out. Saint Dogpoet or something. Something easy to remember. I want my own special day and I want shrines, lots of them. I want my medallion to hang around the necks of cute Catholic boys. Dogpoet, the patron saint of endurance.

My handsome space monkey has been offered a terrific work-type opportunity that will interfere with his visit. Once again we must reschedule. We have met at a time of great transition for both of us, and I suppose it’s a testament to our connection that we keep holding on as these months pass.

I know I have been rather vague about the monkey here; I am continually torn between my desire to shelter this relationship with a little bit of wise privacy, and my need to write about my life, as I have done here since Day One. And the monkey’s slice of my life continues to grow. So I feel like I must acknowledge this, him, if I want to keep writing. My heart hurts, but I am proud of him. We will make this work. Perhaps I will Fed-ex myself to his house.

it gets kinda rough
in the back of our limousine