They still locked up mothers there for being mad
Daring to call the tall walls of stone -- a park
The gray covering over the ill deeds like a veil
Shock treatments to silence the voices
People heard only in their heads
Part of that 1950s savagery, they called therapy.
Maybe our mothers met locked in the same cell
Your mother looking for a key in the sunlight
Mine seeking signs of salvation on my forehead,
She swearing God had tattooed the crucifix there
One she could not always find
As if the Catholic cross I bore on my back
From grammar school was not enough
Maybe both our mothers met my father there
That incompetent hero of a sailor
Who split with the gifts after the wedding
Returning a home a week later with VD
That attendant operating outside the bars
Courageous enough for Korea
But not for fatherhood,
Whose final leaving left my mother pleasing
With her voices to bring him back
Swearing from the wrong side of the hospital's bar
To be a better person if they did,
Swearing to God she would dedicate her life to her fatith
If God would only keep me safe,
Shocked again and again into forgetting
Me, my father, but never her faith.
Liz looks just like David Bowie, if Davie Bowie was a girl. She loves his look as much as she loves his music and comes to the club each night looking at much like him as Pauly tries to – the band insisting he put on makeup to fit in with the new hip trend of looking gay. He hates the look as much as he loves the music; he loves the money he gets for singing even more, loves the pot the money buys -- which is why he agrees to go to Liz’s house in Montclair after our gig because she says there will be pot there. I go because I’m the one who’ll have to drive him home if Hank craps out and Garrick gets as drunk as he usually gets at these kinds of parties, only I get stuck driving Liz there first, so I don’t get lost and leave Pauly stranded. “She’ll show you the way,” Pauly tells me. “Then you’ll be able to find your way back.” This isn’t a part of Montclair I’m familiar with, not so ritzy as the places on Upper Mountain Road, but not so down and out as the rooming hous...
To this day I can't stand the smell of Chantilly perfume. She word it all the time, day and night, so thick, the cloud of it had the effect of a chemical attack. You could tell when she was in the building and how close she was to your room, the smell growing more intense, despite burning incense and towels stuffed along the bottom of the door. The hall before her room stank of it, as if leading to the entrance of some perverted garden. Very few people could breathe long enough to look in on her, let alone enter, though the smell might have been part of her defenses. She didn't like people bothering her; yet she didn't always like to be alone. Sometimes I could hear her through the thin wall that separated our room, pacing like a caged animal. Occasionally, I'd hear romantic music mumbling, too, and imagined her teary-eyed over the record player, mouthing out the lyrics from memory. She arrived at the Montclair house during my seco...
Tiger Stevens nudges me in the ribs when he finds out I just moved into the rooming house across the street from our favorite bar. Guys I drink with always talk about the girl that lives in the three-storied Victorian house across the street. Now I’m living there. I never get it, always confused by the nod and wink as if I am supposed to know something I don’t know. I guess I’m a bit of a snob. I drink with the boys I attended high school with but always assume I won’t end up like them. Sure I load trucks like they do as some Fairfield warehouse, yet I secretly scribble masterpieces into notebooks after house with the assumption I might some day get discovered. Sure, the girl, I met my first day in the rooming house is intrigued by the notebooks and asks me to read some of the contents to her each time we meet inside the house. I never do. I keep thinking I’m not ready. I tell her maybe next time, and really hope I am ready next time. Tiger hoots more when I tell him about...
Comments
Post a Comment