Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

I’m the guy who walked out of the building and the building fell down.

That’s certainly the sort of experience that’s going to stay with you, but I sure as hell never thought it would come to define me to such an extent.

A close call like that is all it takes anymore to make a man a celebrity in America. I guess it bothers me, though, to think that might be it for me, that an accident, an utter fluke, might represent …what? My legacy? My entire life boiled down to one terrible moment?

Because in that instant I became a career survivor, the most hapless sort of success story, a kind of superstar of random fate, almost, you’d think, a hero.

You’ve probably see the video footage, the tape that was replayed thousands of times on the television news, a tape that was itself an accident, shot by a German tourist who was panning the square outside the building. It was purely happenstance. They had to blow the sequence up, of course, but there I unmistakably am, purportedly the last person to make it out of the building alive.

I’ve just exited the revolving door in the west lobby, my briefcase dangling from one hand and the other arm swinging free of the entrance. I take three steps into the square and then duck instinctively, covering the back of my head with my right hand. And then, almost as if fleeing a crime in which I had some complicity or foreknowledge, I run, ambling like a drunk right into the inescapable arms of what now passes for history.

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they destroy. Euripedes was a nit-picker.

The gods can destroy you on the installment plan, incrementally, step by fucking step. And, yes, madness is in their bag of tricks, but they have bigger, more wicked tricks up their sleeves than mere madness.

Let’s say you’re me.

But, no, let’s don’t say. I wouldn’t wish that on you.

Seriously, though, this man: Me. What did I do to deserve my status as a wretched footnote?

I guess my sad history speaks for itself; those fuckers toyed with me from the very beginning, making me the least distinguished, the only truly undistinguished member of a formidable family.

I struggled early and often to find an identity for myself, dwarfed, hobbled, and self-conscious in the shadows of my brothers, Prometheus and Atlas. Those were big shadows, and my parents compounded my frustrations by yoking me with an insult for a name: Epimetheus, or ‘Afterthought,’ this in deliberate contrast to my brother Prometheus (‘Forethought’).

I learned to live with this indignity, and the diminished expectations that went along with it. I thought I’d finally caught my lucky break when Hermes offered me Pandora’s hand in marriage (only, of course, after Prometheus took a pass).

My bride was the first mortal woman, made to order by Jupiter and blessed with improvident gifts: beauty, elegance, poise, a natural eagerness to please. Sad sack that I was, I can’t deny that Pandora made me wild with happiness.

There was, though, that damned box, which was a torment to my curiosity. Presented to me along with my wife, the box was a thing of beauty in its own right, ornate, delicately crafted, and glittering with jewels. It came with a strict prohibition, of course; I was expressly forbidden from ever opening the box. Day after day and night after night it sat there on our mantel, emitting noises that were alternately disturbing and enticing. Some of the time it rattled and hummed like an old radiator; other times it purred, a steady, almost comforting wash of white noise.

Despite what you might have heard, it was I who opened that box, not Pandora. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that I was roaring drunk on Night Train at the time, and that was, as you would imagine, a terrible moment, chaotic, disturbing, beyond frightful. I don’t like to remember the things that boiled up out of the box, even though I am still confronted by those memories –and their living, enduring presence in the world– every single day. Ceaseless affliction and misery, is how you often hear the contents of the box described, and I can ensure you that there’s nothing in the way of overstatement in that description.

You also may have heard that in the midst of all the chaos my wife had the presence of mind to lunge from the couch and clamp the lid back on the box.

Here is where I’m not sure what to tell you. Pandora obviously did not move quickly enough. Perhaps, however, she moved too swiftly, or shouldn’t have moved at all. Because when we finally collapsed together in the shag carpeting of our living room and surveyed the enormity of the disaster our marriage had made of this world, we were aware of a sound still emanating from within the box, a noise that sounded eerily like a beating heart. It seemed hope –and hope alone– had not managed to escape from Pandora’s box.

And I ask you now: what does that mean? Should we choose to see this bit of information as cause for optimism, or despair? Is hope still present and accessible, or locked away forever?

I’m afraid that I, who have been turned into a monkey by the gods and banished to the island of Pithecusa, am unfortunately in no position to answer such difficult questions.

All right, everybody get in line and listen up. I want you fellas to get some shut-eye so we can all be up and ready to hump it at first light. We’ll be traveling seven miles to the east over rugged terrain. Word has it we might be in for some heavy weather as well, so pack accordingly.

We’ll have six men to a piano, and each of these pianos is worth more than $50,000, so I want to make good and damn sure that everyone in this room understands the importance of taking all the care and precaution necessary to insure the safe delivery of every single piano in our possession.

I don’t need to tell you that nobody has ever carried a piano –let alone nine pianos– over this mountain, and I’m not about to stand here and sugarcoat the serious dangers and risks involved in this operation. Every one of you has endured months of grueling training, and I wouldn’t send you out there if I didn’t have absolute confidence in your ability to bring this difficult mission to a successful conclusion.

Our most recent intelligence suggests that we can expect fierce if sporadic resistance from the local guerrillas. These people resent the incursion of very expensive pianos into their territory; most of them have never seen a piano in their lives, and the value of these instruments is more than most of these folks will make in their lifetimes. We can expect them to give us everything they have. I don’t want anyone going into this with a false sense of security just because these local characters don’t have much more than rocks and sticks and old surplus Daisy rifles to defend themselves with.

I’ll remind you that when the British tried to bring a piano over this mountain back in the 1950s –and this was one piano, mind you– they were badly routed and the piano was destroyed and burned by the natives.

I expect nothing less than one hundred percent success from this mission. I want you to defend these pianos with everything at your disposal, and, well, boys, you know what they say about making an omelet. Be vigilant out there, and expect a tough battle.

And let’s all keep in mind what we’re up to here: these are poor, backwards people, and they’ve been drumming on rocks since the stone ages. They can’t even begin to imagine the gift we’re bringing them. We’re gonna give these miserable savages music, and you can be damn sure that even if we have to shove it down their throats they’re going to thank us for it one day.

Lights out, boys. Tomorrow morning let’s make the folks back home proud.

Here I am, full of days. Maybe you know what I mean. You let enough time pass through you and pretty soon you start to feel the world within you winding down. There’s this greater, increasingly unfamiliar friction to your days, and the appetite packs up its bags and goes looking elsewhere for its beefsteaks and fine times. One day soon I’ll go gladly, and with any kind of luck it’ll be some sort of Egyptian scenario, with a decent moon and a jackal-headed character leading me along a dry, familiar road toward a light in the distance.

I could really care less, but feel entitled to bray some all the same. I for damn sure didn’t need this many days to come to a few conclusions, and I am one man who didn’t need his instructions printed on the heel to tell him how to piss in a boot. So listen up, you snug pups and whine-baggers, and let an old man set his story straight.

I have been many men, and there were at least a few little things about each of them that I liked just fine. I have been disheveled, certainly. I went away to prison on two occasions, and on two different continents, and once spent a stretch of nice, quiet time in a state hospital. I fought a war or two, without question. I lived in Europe, and sold combs in the Metro and hustled and scrapped and worked my way up until I was –I think it’s fair to say– something of a subway produce mogul. Plenty of confused men worked for me. Plenty of others dreamed of working for me and never passed muster.

I flat out never believed that romanticism was the ‘malignant fairy.’ Not on your life.

I owned for a time a peculiar bar in the Wild West. Here is what would happen to my customers, more or less: they would gain weight. That much was certain. No woman would love them long. They’d live long enough to wear out a pair of boots. And they’d for damn sure turn up dead in either a ditch or a motel room.

I played piano for a spell in the bar of the Winnett Hotel, this when it was still a swell place crawling with oil money.

I once drove two hours behind a truck huddled with bodies. There was barely a road. Twice the ruts sprung bodies from the truck, and the truck would lurch to a stop and two young boys would lug the bodies through the dust and fling them back aboard. I’d honk my horn, never quite certain in my mind whether I was conveying good work or hurry along.

I have been the archetypal Greyhound poster boy, precociously gaunt and tattooed, temporary sweetheart of more loose women than I care to remember. I’m telling it to you straight, because I flat-out don’t have the time to pull your leg. Surely there have been fits of liquored spasticity, but other times I had no truck with the bottle. I’ve trafficked with demons and had aspirations of sainthood; show me a man who can’t say the same and I’ll show you a damned fool or a liar. I drank with my old mother until she didn’t have a penny left to squeeze out of her life. There was never a doubt in my mind that she died thirsty and died unhappy.

I’ve seen things in a demolition derby where other men have seen nothing but car crashes and dust.

I have been called breathless. I’ve known dust devils and waterless wastes, worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and spent one hundred dollars on a Vega that lasted me seven years and took me into Mexico and madness.

I traveled for more years than was proper with a haggard, Rasputin-looking fellow who called himself Reverend Hungwell, this a man who walked with a limp and carried with him at all times a stuccoed briefcase decorated with shards of colored glass. I once saw the Reverend shoot an old woman in the back of the head over a parakeet.

I have snared more women than I can remember with the line, ‘You know, honey, a man loses an awful lot of heat in this world to atmospheric friction.’ I have three tattoos: Born Once is Once Enough; Convicted by Whom? And: Fearlessness is next to Godlessness. You know damn well the truth about tattoos, and I’ll tell you up front that those tattoos might as well be in a lost language for all the sense they make to me now.

No doubt about it, I’ve had what people today like to call issues, but let’s all just face this fact: this world would have been a whole hell of a lot better off if they’d killed Socrates before he ever had a chance to open his fat yap.

Marital status? I entered into the holy state of matrimony on one and only one occasion. This was in some Florida swamp town. I stood in the murky basement of a county courthouse and exchanged vows with my beloved Taberah, who is my wife to this day, thirty-five years after she cursed me in Latin, stabbed me in the cheek with a kitchen knife, and disappeared from my life forever.

As far back as my memory will go I have scrawled the same message on restroom walls all over the world: Blame Zeus!

I played the trombone for a time and learned to play only one song well, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’

In the right moonlight, as God is my witness, the right cow will burn the eyes clean out of your head.

For a number of years my parole officer was a Yale man.

I have always tried to walk exactly as if I had a dog, or even a beautiful, inebriated woman, right by my side.

All of my life I have carried around with me a smell from somewhere down at shit’s sweetest end.

The only men I have ever killed have been slanderers and false accusers.

Lest you think it has been all brass bands and roses, I will admit that there have been down times, exhausted lulls, and it has been a comfort to me that I have always been able to locate something dull, confusing, and sufficiently diverting behind my eyes that enables the wait.

I like music heard from far away, preferably through the trees.

Favorite lines overheard in a bar (tie): ‘Bring me the fat of a dead redhead.’ And: ‘You have to love erosion when it’s done right.’

The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was miles of white crosses along a dark highway.

This much, at least, I know is true: Gravity acts, mister, and that’s all there is to it.

And if you’re looking for some last words, these here will certainly do: Good Boy, Orestes!

Here, it seems, is where we are. Right here.

And for what purpose are we here? Do we have anything resembling a mission statement?

No, no, it appears that we do not have anything resembling a mission statement. Nor, apparently, do we have even a general idea regarding what it is we are up to.

We do have shovels, that much is certain. Or at least a good deal of the time we seem to find ourselves with shovels in our hands. From this we might infer that we are here to dig. From the dirt on our clothing and hands and under our fingernails we also might conclude that we have, in fact, already been digging.

We are so exhausted, so conditioned by numb habit, that we sometimes have occasion to recognize that we may very well have been toiling for an indeterminate period of time in a sort of empirical blackout.

Our surroundings, which so far as we know have always been our surroundings, strike us as almost wholly unfamiliar.

It seems, though, that we are experiencing something of a lull in our digging, a lull in which we notice that it is suddenly very cold and getting colder. The sky has been overrun by low gray clouds. We notice as well the strange silence of our companions.

We are in an immense field that stretches to the horizon in every direction, and all around us are heaped the bodies of uncommonly large men.

Given a bit more time to take stock of our situation, we might ultimately be forced to arrive at the realization that what we are doing in this field is burying giants.

We have all been expelled from the garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

–Stanley Kunitz, “Reflections”

As God was his witness, the guy said, he was not shitting me. What he was telling me was exactly the fucking truth. Look at him. He was as bad off as those poor motherfuckers in New Orleans.

That fucking hurricane, that fucking flood, that was just the way it was, that was his sorry excuse for a life every fucking day for more years than he could remember. He didn’t have shit to his name. He’d lost everything. But, no, fuck that, he hadn’t lost everything. It was worse than that; he’d had it taken away.

Look at me, he kept insisting, you can see what I am. This is it, brother. The teeth is gone. I don’t know if my mama is dead or alive, but even if she’s alive somewhere she long ago forgot about me.

All sorts of shit was ailing him. His knee was fucked from getting run over on his bicycle. It could rain on his sorry ass every day until Jesus came back and nobody’d look at him twice.

Throw you a rock in this world and you’d hit someone just like him. Wasn’t nobody holding no telethon to give him back his fucking life.

Look around, he said. You see any fucking television people down here interested in my sorrow? Maybe I’m not even real, he said, maybe I’m already dead and scrappin’ metal in hell.

And you, what do you seek?

—Rene Daumal

The love of books

is for children

who glimpse in them

a life to come, but

I have come

to that life and

feel uneasy

with the love of books.

This is my life,

time islanded

in poems of dwindled time.

There is no other world.

—Robert Haas, from “Songs to Survive the Summer”

She waits for something to change, for her planet to snap back into place.

The seasons roll over, cart-wheeling into earlier and earlier darkness, taking the way it was further into the way it is.

What is the way it is? What happened to her heart? How were these invisible wounds acquired?

The touch, once so familiar, is now harder and harder to remember. Old routines become untangled, the strands of that entanglement scattered.

The trees shed their leaves. The moon waxes and wanes. The stars recede, yet blaze all the more brightly, as if trying to keep the cold at bay.

Something rustles in the walls. The creek where they walked together all those years ago will soon be paralyzed by ice. The din of a wedding party fades in the distance and the night settles once again to silence, a silence that will eventually –mercifully, soon– be drowned out by the idling of the furnace.

Another jet clears the city, and is gone.

She gets up in the morning and dresses so carefully, spends a long time in front of the mirror, turning, scrutinizing, critical. Probably nothing she would do would matter; no one would do anything but look right through her. She hoped each day to be simply noticed, to feel herself observed, seen, alive to another.

It was increasingly embarrassing to be still looking, to find herself loitering so long in the self-help and relationships section of the bookstore. More painful still that she actually bought the stuff. What did it say that she’d go to such trouble to hide these books in her apartment as if they were pornography, fully aware that there was no one she was hiding them from?

She’d had exactly one date in the last year, and the memory of that awkward, almost completely silent evening left her anxious and queasy. What should she have said that she hadn’t? What might she have done differently? What –or who– did the man see when he looked at her across the table?

She had already spent too much time rolling that night around in her head. The truth was that there hadn’t been enough there for her to have learned anything at all.

Inside-the-park homerun?

An 0-2 wild pitch with a runner on third?

All those half-assed at-bats in the seventh and eighth innings?

The inability, time and again, to get a big two-out hit?

Four runs in two games?

S’Awright.

I don’t know what else to tell you.

Maybe God doesn’t work day games.