Year: 2005

Odd shard, the moon.

Last call.

He lugs his iron

head through the

brass-clanging

days.

The dull trash-can

gong of winter, a throbbing

that starts in his

fillings and swells clear up

straining

against the black

cap of his

underskull.

Snow swept, dead silence,

dead Saturday folding

into Sunday morning.

What is fog and what is

what he feels?

Why are you possessed of such

a thirst while others

walk upright and

clean? Drawn to three

a.m., drifting

the dark roads

beyond the last

lights of the

Hy Vee.

The night behind him

a roller coaster,

a teeth breaker,

an empty bag,

a broken broom

stick.

His mother sleeping,

or awake, her head

full of her own

confusion, his broken

promise.

He can’t see her

crouched

in her old robe,

folded hands asking

once more for no’s

overthrow. Respite: her

one boy asleep

in his own bed,

in dreams,

one man sleeping

like all the

others, not

clipped and limping

along the roads

outside of town,

his blood running

with black bulls

and head roaring

with mineral spirits

and automobile primer,

his face

a shimmering mask of

silver from the

bridge of his nose

to his chin.

Not a howling ghost

broken by boots

and broomsticks

and bones,

stripped

of the last sixteen

dollars in his

pockets and bound

with rope.

A trail in the

snow led back

into the darkness

behind an

abandoned

farmhouse.

They dragged him back there by his heels.

There was an old well

there, and they

stuffed him

in the well.

He showed his broken

teeth to the moon,

and it sat calmly

upon his silver mask.

Snow swept,

dead silence,

dead Saturday

folding silently

into Sunday

morning.

This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through the door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was training me in. This job is a privilege, he’d say. These people are trusting us with their most private moments.

I’ve always been one of those guys who isn’t much for going places –going places, actually, doesn’t bother me; it’s the being there that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see these other places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories these pictures struggle to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and it was nothing but pictures of dead cows –seven dead cows sprawled around in the dirt. There wasn’t a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows, and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, just like they’d been murdered in the movies. And of course you get the pictures of women in bathing suits, and people on the toilet –I’ve seen hundreds of those– and occasionally some actual bare breasts, although we’re not supposed to develop anything that’s “too far over the line,” as my boss says. But I have to admit that in five years we’ve never refused to process a single roll of film that I’m aware of.

My own family never took photographs. I don’t think I ever saw a camera in either of my parents’ hands. These people would come around at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home a little packet of those every year but I’m not even sure what my mother would do with them. They didn’t go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids’ houses, I know that much. My mother didn’t put anything on the refrigerator.

I’m sure people would be horrified to think that we look through their photos, but they must know. It’s human nature, my boss says. I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll of film still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere –in a kitchen drawer or in the glove compartment of their car– and they’ll have completely forgotten what’s on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bring them in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I think that’s when you get some surprises.

People always ask, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honest with you, that’s not an easy question to answer. I’ve seen so many strange and I guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnics and parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laid out on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called the Sign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signs that said things like, “Tammi, I am not a part of your experiment anymore,” or “I am sick and tired of being taken apart with nothing to show for it.” Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a roll of film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.

I have seen so many babies being born that it is no longer strange. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front of Mount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand. Young couples in formal wear, of course, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouched next to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffins and carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids pointing guns at the camera.

People also take a lot of pictures of food, color photos of turkeys and hams. You see everything, really, pretty much anything you could imagine.

Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, the mistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world of what people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are just standing in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn’t tell you, really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, sort of, I guess, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that I can see how small I am.

It’s sad when people wish, my mother always said. She’d say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back and count the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like photos around, because they were like reminders of wishes that never quite managed to turn out like you hoped or expected.

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

We were hunched together on my sparkling blue banana seat; I was peddling furiously and you were clinging to the sissy bar. I wished you had been clinging to me, wished you would put your arms around my chest, but it was nice to feel you there behind me all the same, nice to hear your laughter (all the wonderful variations of your wonderful laugh) ringing out over the silent neighborhoods and your voice at my ear and your breath in my hair.

I don’t know, can’t remember, where we were going. We weren’t, though, going to the Dairy Queen, where the moths were in full swirling frenzy around the streetlamps in the parking lot. We were headed, I’m sure, elsewhere.

We had darkness in mind, I think, the place where the futile over-light of that shitty little town gave way suddenly to a great stretch of emptiness, where the pavement turned to gravel, where there were fields rolling away into the distance, and where there was a muddy creek and there were railroad tracks and trains (which sounded, you said, like iron waterfalls, and which I’ve always said sound like something heavy being carried away) crawling off into the night, out into an America we could only then imagine.

But which we did imagine, together, breathlessly, with ridiculous hope and optimism. That place was where we knew we would eventually have to go to make our escape, to complete the process of becoming, to find ourselves even as we lost each other.

That was also the place, the place beyond our close little world whose secrets and sadnesses we felt certain we had already divined, where we would one day, through exactly the sort of occasional miracle this world is still capable of delivering, find each other again.

I am still, every day, my sister, my old friend, stunned by this miracle, still gratefully puzzled by my bounty of blessings entirely undeserved. And now it always seems to be that same magic dusk I remember, and I find myself once again in the position of trying to talk you onto the back of my stingray bike, trying to convince you to ride with me out beyond the false, feeble light of that low town, away from and out from under the people we have allowed ourselves to become; trying to get you to slow down and to listen again to the roaring silence and the moving water and the watch-winding racket of insects throbbing from the ditches, and to lie on your back with me marveling at the stars and the heat lightning trembling down the dark sky across the fields.

I have two options when, as now, the Muse deserts me (and this has so often been the case of late, and over, say, the last dozen years).

Well, actually, I suppose I do have more than two options. I could recognize, for instance, that anyone who uses the phrase “the Muse deserts me,” or even just “the Muse,” deserves his desolation.

I could simply stop.

But I do not like to stop.

Or I could keep going, Muse-less and muddling, which is, of course, the usual routine around here. If there’s one thing I’ve pretty much figured out how to do, it’s how to keep going. I can keep going with the best of them, just so long as we can agree that by ‘keep going’ we really mean ‘keep saying.’

I could also repeat myself, which I’m more than happy to do in a pinch. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t even know I’m doing it. There are words all around me, stuffed in books and in the pockets of jackets and pants, scrawled on index cards, scraps of paper, napkins, ATM receipts, and Post-It notes. There are shelves of black, lined journals that are also full of words, words that stretch back now over a decade. Those books are a loose –very loose– chronicle of my long nights, an inventory of the conscripted words that march across my skull in the wee hours.

Sometimes, out of desperation, and out of that frankly terrifying and inexplicable impulse to keep going, I just grab whatever words are at hand and force them to flee through my fingers a second time. In the process they are occasionally transformed, often (well, not often) in surprising ways. Most commonly, in fact, they are entirely unchanged from the day they were born –homely, in other words, and entirely lacking in sense.

When I’m truly strapped for inspiration, though, I turn to Jean Kent’s The Professional Writer’s Phrase Book, an essential tool for any struggling writer. Don’t be daunted by that title; you don’t have to be a pro to use Kent’s book. Even a fledgling scribe will find “thousands of descriptive tags that put pizzazz in any copy.”

It says so right on the book’s cover, and the professional writer who wrote those words wasn’t kidding. I have no idea anymore where the book is (things tend to get lost and buried around here, or it’s entirely possible I loaned it out to a professional writer colleague and never got it back), but I did, once upon a time, jot down some handy examples in a notebook. I’m sure you’ll agree that just about anybody could write a professional-quality story using almost nothing but these phrases and a few simple words of their own.

Take a crack at it and see if I’m not right.

ANGER

time to bring out the heavy artillery

the words were sudden and raw and very angry

feisty as hell

she gave him a most unladylike dustup

the rage in him was a living thing

their eyes traded strings of malevolence

like an awakening giant

if I hold it in any longer, I’ll blow out my teeth

LIMBS

hooked her thumb in her panties and cocked her hip

he swatted her behind

raising the tea cup to his heavily mustached lips

kissed his bunched up fingers…MNYEH!

a moth-wind flutter of her hand

rotates a finger near his temple

HEAD

he twisted a benzedrine inhaler up a hairy nostril

and took a somewhat beery breath of fresh air

she pushed her hair back, the better to glare at him

BODY IN MOTION

all his gestures were outside and violent

grabbing up her gown for the run to the kitchen

she slapped her sleeves to get rid of the crumbs

grasped his tightly rolled umbrella like a sword

she ditted around past all the channels

he sat on the porch and waved away the flies

a body so supple it twanged

he moved like a slug

the slow-spitting and squatting men watched her covetously

standing at the lip of a hole

she walks like a construction worker

he moved with the sure grace of a forest creature

a nudge here, a hip there, and an occasional light shove

left the room like a scolded hound

still beavering away

taking on that ‘Let’s be reasonable’ slouch

BODY MOTIONLESS

a thin old man, frozen on the edge of the fallow fields forever

huddled in the water

standing there with an indolent, tomcat grace

TRADE TAGS

bronzed and beautiful

the massive chest of a body builder

a tropical tan even where it doesn’t show

foundation training in the iron game

highly visible in an alluring bikini

with great stability in the shoulder girdle

BUILDINGS–EXTERIOR

a small, nasty shed with a furtive look

a security system that had everything but a moat filled with alligators

it wasn’t an ordinary building but a home

a suspect motel named El Ranko

the sort of railroad flat you find in the ghettos

INTERIOR

sat at a table about as big as a diaper

a husky oak table

the walls started to sweat

the room smelled of dust, mildew, and old love

rancid grease hung in the air like a wet sheet

CRIME AND FIGHTING

a man doesn’t become an investigator without a capacity for cruelty

a man who didn’t think but let his sinews rumble him to oblivion

his first foray into thrilldom

and then came a moment of atavistic horror

he was covered with blood and vomit

the pain in the testicles streaked up to his stomach

the velvet trap of easy living and hard drugs

the code of the vendetta was absolute

an animal instinct told him all was not well

no gun racks in the pickup truck

he ran like unleashed hell

my goal is to stay out of the morgue drawer

DEPRESSION

in the twilight world of the half alive

restless, seeking

hoping the wind and rain would take away the brooding hurt

he stood in the burning lake of himself, unable to escape

slumped into morose musings

pain and loneliness walked with him in the dark

a life which daily negated all her dreams

FACES–DESCRIPTIONS

the upper-echelon mafioso type

his nose looked like a wedge of cheddar

perspiration on her forehead, like water beads on good butter

a nose that could slice cheese

he looked something like a hawk with mumps

he had a face like a benediction

HAPPINESS

a few crocuses of hope poked through the surface

the feeling of happiness rising wonderfully inside you

beer commercial joviality

when I feel this delicious, I laugh at practically anything, sometimes nothing at all

Enjoy!

INNER THOUGHTS

he took the world by the nose

I still believe happiness can be worked out. I am a fool.

there’s nothing worse than a hero out of work

you could catch it and kill it and pin it down, but then it wasn’t a butterfly anymore

The world was a jungle. Only the strong survived.

Bastard! she whispered behind his back.

yet deep, deep inside he still burned with his love for her

preoccupied with matters of nomenclature

you can’t fall off the floor

love was a weed that flourished in the dark

as bad as being told God dislikes you

PHILOSOPHY

I live in a silent movie

a satisfying influx of Mexicans

not everything was cotton candy

two nice people made for each other

when you walk among women, do not forget your whip

Who knows where terrific things begin?

SMELLS

I smell sneakers

I could smell her light, warm femininity

the lusty odors of earth and cattle

See what I mean? Wow! What you have here are the raw materials to make a writer out of the drabbest, most tongue-tied closet dreamer. And I haven’t even made it to the phrases related to lovemaking (he took a look down her decollete). I’ll buy lunch for the person who can send me a reasonably coherent story –or, what the hell, an entirely incoherent story– that makes judicious use of the largest number of these helpful phrases, and I’ll also post the story for at least twenty-five other people to see! So start beavering away! And send those entries to zellar at rakemag dot com.

There are surfaces you can’t get a look under. You see just a flat line, for instance, or a face, or the horizon, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something beneath or beyond them.

It never means that. There’s something behind or under everything, depths and layers and distance, and it’s a rare thing that’s simple enough, small enough, or that will hold still long enough for you to properly dig around and pin down what’s really under the surface.

Face value truly is the currency of our understanding, and of our trust and our faith. Human depths we infer from art or action or speech or behavior; we take people at their word, choose to believe in their sincerity or in the truth of how they present themselves or the stories they tell about who they are.

We learn all the time to our great disappointment (and disenchantment) how flimsy and unjustified this faith is; we are lied to and betrayed and deceived hundreds of times every day, and yet still we continue to believe and to embrace the idea of depth, and to wrong-headedly confuse this notion, somehow, with virtue, as if depths were not just as often roiling with darkness and ugliness and contradictions and mystery and even evil; as if one of the primary functions of surface and depth were not to conceal.

A wall is a surface, as is a facade, a trap door, a mirror, a mask, a voice.

Most of the time –an overwhelming majority of the time– we are left to wholly imagine what is beneath a surface, and this gives the imagination its incredible freedom, even as it serves as an open invitation to our basest insecurities and fears.

This is what gives our heart its hope, and allows it to dream and to love and to tell stories. And this is also how our heart gets trampled and broken and then put back together, again and again and again.

Do you think it’s easy,

not biting

the one you love?

Try loving someone so much

your mouth is only at home

in the place where your teeth

meet the flesh

of your beloved. Try

not tasting the flesh,

not taking in your mouth

the beloved, not

going all the way.

—Jim Moore, “Teaching the Dog Not to Nip”