A Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel E-Book

Peter Jalesh

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

There is no genuine affiliation between Joyce’s book “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and this book with the exception of the mock title that in the current usage plays the role of a gigantesque pastiche. Joyce’s portraiture genre, superimposed over a restless American landscape, becomes blurred. In reality “A Portrait of the Artist as an Anthropomorphic Genius-Machine” is an antidote to Joyce’s story. In Joyce’s story the characters fold inside the chronicle and become “elements of style”. In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel” the characters appear, swell and decay as real living experiences, though mundane. As opposed to Joyce’s super-esthetic and pedantic tale where even the pain is suffered as part of some metaphor, this story tends to show that an American version of it is nothing but a byproduct of a society that is wide enough to gulp down success, happiness, failures, anxiety, malaise and death without affectation. The portrait-story is set in a small town called New Braintree and moves around three school pals – Joe, Walter and Peter - whose lives intersect for the length of the story: Joe, the main character, stands out as a nonconformist genius and a trouble-packed kid. He is living his anger filled childhood as if he was hurled into his own life by forces outside his control. Walter is a “prince” boy, and functions as a counterpoint to Joe. It is as if Walter could act only as long as he is part of this double-portrait, though in essence he’d like to be Joe. Peter is the witnessing chronicler. As opposed to Joe and Walter, he acts always like a thin and unnoticeable shadow. In this trio, Joe is the one who puts a fresh and original spin on teenage happenings and its growing pains. Thus, the story evolves most of the time around Joe’s rebellious personality and his spoiled life, seen him either as a problems ridden child - unable to put his life back in order after his mom dies - or as a teenager that falls prey to drugs and gambling, or, at the end, as a young-man-crusader for lost causes for which he dies. Joe’s case would prove not only that brightness and geniality could be weakened and eventually shattered by recklessness and excessive misbehavior, but also that fate and circumstance are playing sometimes an even more fatal role. Though, after all, there is something very wrong and frightening about a genius, who is nothing but an accident of nature, capable to create chaos and mayhem in his life and the life of the others due to a huge imbalance between a swamped brain and the limited degree of freedom he can use on a daily bases to participate in a life experience. Always struggling, either battling lonely the faceless enemy surfacing on his brain or real characters that mess up his youth years, Joe projects the strange feeling that he is living all his life inside an unresolved teenage crisis. His portrait is a suite of rebellious acts leading up to inhospitable consequences and death.

Leseprobe

Peter Jalesh

A Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

A Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel

 Introduction

An unaccountable number of years after: Is it that circumstances of one’s birth create one’s destiny?

 Joe’s Uncle, Mr. Bradley, opens his Grocery Store early morning. He is probably the only man in our town, New Braintree that wears a badge on which it is written in Gothic letters: “Store Owner”. 

“People don’t know, who the owner of a store is, and who isn’t,” he explains. A proud man!

If you stare at his badge and still dare to ask him: “Are you the store owner?” he’s going to show you a picture:

“This was taken on the very day when my granddad opened this store: 2nd of October 1933. It all started when the recession kicked in”.

He’d try to explain to you how his business works now. One day I heard him saying that the name of the store was borrowed from an early Hollywood movie: “Champs Eloise”.

In the front window a framed blue paper that carries a stamp and a serial number DCBD02101933 is the proof that the store does a legitimate business.

“One of my neighbors was summoned to provide proof of authenticity for such a paper and when he couldn’t provide it, he got beaten”.

Uncle Bradley wakes up at five, smokes a cigarette and is ready to live another day until midnight. I saw him looking at Fay’s butt as she got in. Fay isn’t in the right mood:

“If you want to know”, she says, “The eggs I bought Saturday were all spoiled. It is spring already and you keep the eggs in the window. Isn’t that silly? Two-dozen eggs… A waste. Of course that the sun was so hot that day didn’t tell you anything! So, I’m telling you; your whole assortment of eggs is rotten…”

“Yes, Madame!” Uncle Bradley says. But Fay doesn’t want more eggs from him. She wants her money back.

“I hope you’re a fair gentleman,” she says. “I want my money back!” Uncle Bradley doesn’t seem to understand.

“I don’t mean to offend you madam, but I think I have a good memory. And, no offense please, but I didn’t see you shopping in my store last Saturday”.

Fay leaves the shop but she doesn’t go away. She stands in front of the store’s front door and tells to whoever walks by:

“He’s a crook… spoiled eggs and all that shit… rat infested…”

Eventually Uncle Bradley comes out and counts 94 cents, the price for two dozen eggs:

“Stingy thug…” she mumbles. “I hope you’ll die burping, like a pig. What did you keep six cents for? Some kind of a pussy addict you are…”

She is still screaming dirty words but her voice turns soft… Hastily she switches from drama to comedy showing her naked ass while crossing the street. She is in such a hurry that she drops a shoe in the middle of the traffic. The cars go around her in small curves. She is the crazy one in town, young enough to take chances.

Uncle Bradley laughs: “I never put up with her. But I know that if I don’t give in right away she’s going to show me her ass. It’s worth 94 cents”.

Joe, his nephew, chuckles. Uncle Bradley would like to tell to his customers that the boy behind the counter is his son, but he can’t do that. Joe wouldn’t allow him to say that. Joe and his dad, Mr. Emerson, live in a brick house, four blocks from the store.

Joe’s dad won’t allow anybody to call him by his first name or just “Sir”. He wanted to be addressed as Mr. Emerson. “On the way of becoming a man I sat down and thought about who I was. I don’t remember when it occured to me that I was indeed Mr. Emerson”.

You could see Joe every Saturday and Sunday helping Uncle Bradley to put the store in order, loading new merchandise on shelves, mopping the floor with a wet broom and covering the new rat holes with a mix of plaster and pesticide.

Walter and I would stop by occasionally, though we thought that to help Uncle Bradley would be boring.

Joe would show up in the doorway and ask: “What’s up!” He’d just stand there in the doorway waiting for an answer. We’d smile! His Uncle would watch our talk with some envious interest.

“Uncle told me,” says Joe, “that this is what we have to do if we want to help: Walter and I would move the merchandise around and you’d sweep out the emptied shelves”.

“I’m too lazy”, I say.

“Now listen!” Joe says. “If you’d like to do some nice stuff, that’s one for you: take the white hose and wash my Uncle’s car in the backyard. Usually I love to do that, though, I’ll let you do it today!”

“Thanks,” I say. “I can’t. Mom just bought me this T-shirt yesterday. If I mess it up she’d ask what happened… and she told me not to work for anybody if I don’t get paid…”

“Your mom is a bitch!” Joe says.

“What your slang!” I say.

More interesting than washing Uncle Bradley’s car would be to glance inside the shack that Uncle Bradley had built himself near the garage. You could see through the dirty windows lots of models of birds and kites and Zeppelin helium balloons hanging from the ceiling, shivering in the dusty air. Uncle Bradley got a thing about flying objects. What he lacked was an investor that would back him up with enough money to build a life size machine. He’d have been famous already if he had an investor to help him rent a hangar and build the damn machine. The best of his flying models looked like a fountain pen, with the pilot cabin, that he calls “nose”, detachable and its huge tail sliding back and forth on a bed of beads.

He’s talking sometimes about the troubles he had with this model, how he had to rectify its tail’s shape to make it perfectly aerodynamic, like a dolphin tail cut into two halves, he’d explain. This model was painted red and it used to float next to the ceiling among balls of cotton well packed as clouds. If he would succeed to build a life size machine Uncle Bradley promised that he’d take all of us along with him on its maiden flight.

“I’d stay”, I said, “if you’d let me look at your Uncle’s flying models”.

“No way,” Joe hurried to answer, “The air currents could do a lot of damage. Especially the butterfly wings… they’re so fragile”.

As I leave, I glance towards Walter.

“I’m staying with Joe…”, Walter says.

“Pete’s mom is a bitch!” I overhear Joe saying.

“To work and get paid is really a matter of self-respect,” I remembered mom saying. “Some adults think that a child’s work could be disposable of…” Then I hear Joe yelling after me: “If you want a well-paid job why don’t you become a lawyer!” and I hear Walter laughing like an idiot. That’s how they both are, they settle right away into having fun.  

*

Walter and Joe thought that they belonged to the same fate because they were born on the same day at the same hour of the day. It would become obvious that this was true as their lives went on, since they both lived in the same neighborhood, they both went to the same schools, and, if this would be a relief for this story, they both grew up to be big boys while day dreaming about the same girl, Laura. I didn’t like Laura too much and, to be honest, reading and doing math kept me well and happy at that time. I thought that I would make a mess of my life if I got seriously involved in the early love game.

The truth is that love kept being marginal to all of us if it interfered with our ambitions. I remember quite well my swollen nose I got while being involved with a senior girl in high school: she bit my nose till I couldn’t swell anymore.

Though, what is more memorable was that our parents never got involved in our upbringing. “Boys are boys! If they stay out of trouble for one day they lose their masculinity”, mom used to say.  Parents having girls are different, they’re always get worried:

“Too much danger! Girls are like the first pale flowers that leap through the icy layer during the last winter night”. 

Ms. Marjorie for instance - Laura’s mom - made a principle not to shun any disturbing worries. They were like ingredients to her parenthood, as her nonsense worry of what was going to happen to Laura, her twelve-year-old baby-girl when she gets to be a woman?

“She is so tiny and life is so tough!” The sinking feeling that Laura was going to suffer made her cry.

Sometimes I saw them sun bathing in the park. Ms. Marjorie would read a book whilst Laura would sleep with her mouth open on a little rug. Her breasts are growing discretely: spring buds walking on tiptoe.

Then I saw Laura standing in front of the ice cream cart waiting for her mom, curling her hair. Her mom thought that, although she was Jewish, she’d better put Laura in a Catholic school where she could be controlled and disciplined. Laura used to call her “my domineering religion-less mother!” The closer Laura was to submitting her lips to some boy’s pubescent explosion the more her mom thought of sending her to a boarding school.  

*

Laura was a settled woman now, ex-married for four years and with two kids – a girl, Margi, and a boy  that she didn’t want, Chisel, who resembled his dad and had been living from early infancy on the brink of disobedience. People would say that Laura used a German abortion pill to get rid of the boy but then - after she had a dream that the boy was going to become a famous ruler - she changed her mind.

“Having a second child when you are only twenty one years old, you know, life could be malignant with a baby in your belly… That’s when my hubby began to see that woman…”

Mom saw the end of Laura’s marriage long time before it happened: “That girl doesn’t take her life seriously. And then, those two people are so different… He is tall like a wireless pol and she is mignon and decorates herself like a Tiffany lamp”

Laura couldn’t pinpoint anything tangible - like that she was small and fat and that he was slim and tall or that she was young and fat and that he was old and lean - or something else. I saw Laura and her husband coming together at one of the musical events in the park: she looked isolated and awkward while holding his arm.

“Once it emerges, the estrangement grows at a fast pace. It is less sort of an organic process, the way love is. Estrangement and hatred needs additives to counteract the stench; it needs coloring…”

Laura got a flattering divorce package from her husband: ”Lots of money”. She was talking some other day about her prenuptial agreement: smart idea! When they got married he may have had protested while signing it:

“It’s that somebody is questioning your integrity and it’s your woman, the one you chose to live with”.

Well, he could scream now and howl. And she knew that the divorce was inevitable after her hubby discovered that she had been paying an agency to spy on him.

“She was such a confused creature those days…”

People change their mentalities once they live on their own and have money. She wouldn’t give a damn about any man on earth. Though she’d remember her short marriage when she’d say: ”My ex…” Some days she’d pass through some nostalgic moments and then through some rough ones.

Laura says that if her hubby had just a little bit of humor life would have been more palatable. When she caught her hubby in bed with that woman she tried to catch hold of her legs, pull her out of there and throw her amidst all that junk food and dirty spread lying on the bedroom floor.

“Obviously, if it wasn’t for my little thrill, my hubby would not know that I was around. I called her ‘whore’ over and over again until he said: okay, okay, she is a whore! Now leave us alone!”

What Laura was saying now was that she was at the end of that labyrinth called sex and that she decided to stay put on her position and not let herself dragged into an intimate game again. For a while she frequented single bars and, “It’s Hell,” she says, “to get a man in bed nowadays”. She thought I could understand that. “Sex, after all is either raw love or trash”.

 She said that she avoided the temptation for sex by thinking of God: “A little fellow, like a dwarf, though handsome, that I held by the hand and I carry with me anywhere I went”.  With her inarticulate and somber tongue she couldn’t pronounce “God” without spitting. Laura still thought that her passion collapsed not because of a generation gap, but in view of the fact that she was oversexed while her husband wasn’t. Endocrine words: “He used to sweat all the time like a lid on a pot of boiling stew”.

Now, only God and Godly words could arouse her interest. What is more, furtively she adopted the latest trivia theories on praying, by eating proper food in pairs like fibers & intestines, greens & blood, etc. and got the strong belief that nothing would stand in her way to achieve whatever she wanted if she stopped being narrow and insensitive to the idea of life after death: having a “what-is to-be seen-as” life, at the spark of her age. “Bible says that life is an exercise in love with whoever proves to be worthy”.

As far as her career went, she wanted to be an actress. Given that her acting career never really took off she used to supplement it with a waitress job. That was before she got the settlement money. What Laura missed most was the interaction with the stage decors and the prompter.  That’s why she went to the church every weekend: sort of getting involved in a show. Shows are all alike, aren’t they? Besides the show what she wanted - and she’d tell everybody that – was to reach the understanding of the essence, which is God… 

“If you want to reach something so high you’ll have to abstain from eating like a pig…” Joe would comment. “In fact you’d have to abstain from everything like it or not, food, sex, shaving your armpits… What you need is a short nap and then long meditations… That pleases God”.

She was kind of the same naïve girl we used to know in the high school: no change there. Then there was something else, which was not obvious to anybody else but me, and maybe to Mom, but not to Joe. That was that low-taste habit that Laura had to throw little coins into the church’s fountain. I saw people doing the same thing in Rome – paying for their dreams of happiness. Every week the fountain was drained. The sewer would suck all the water and the priest would say: “We have a lot of stupid people in this town. How much do you think is there? Twenty bucks and change! Maybe more…” Laura would eat her Danish while sitting  on the fountain edge and throwing nickels into the water:  happiness bought with a nickel floating among inaudible waves towards the muddy bottom.

Walter and Joe still remember how Laura used to look during her teen years: huge breasts that made one’s heart pump with blood and long dark hair that didn’t match the washed out color of the puff under her armpits. In some ways I thought she wasn’t beautiful at all: too much jaw and the nose too curved. But Walter and Joe loved Laura the way she was so they were able to share confidential memories, what they both thought about being with her in bed, and how it would have been to make love to her and go all the way down there.

   “Lousy liars”, she called them. She couldn’t understand how Joe and Walter could still claim her as “their high school sweet heart”. If one tried to show warmth or love to her one had to discover in her defiant attitude the incipient feminist defensive! A cold beam would flash for a second in her eyes before one could hear her cursing around… Then her eyes would turn salty.

It was her astrological sign to blame: governed by Uranus and Pluto, the dirty snowball? (I am just curious, now that Pluto isn’t an accomplished planet anymore aren’t the astrologists in trouble with all their predictions? Or, maybe Pluto could still work, sort of a wild card good for whoever holds it?)

If underneath Laura was still that fragile girl we used to know (now wrapped around in an overgrown layer of flesh), she must have learned how to hide her feelings: no more sobbing, no more giggling. She was now a cranky woman, plagued by unhappiness and regrets. And she wasn’t in need of love anymore. When beautiful women become obese they lose the ability to look for love.

Everybody knew that when she tried the abortion pill one of her glands blew up. When you’re pregnant you don’t take a pill (especially German pills if you’re Jewish) and you don’t put herbs in your ovaries to make the baby want to come out before it is due. Or, it was that her divorce made the food get stuck in her belly? She was telling everybody that if she wants she could go back to her husband.

“No! No way! No more mistreatment for me!”

Why was she complaining about? I remembered that she was always moved by men brutality… Now that she was living on her own – for four months already – she could see clearly and laugh about it especially when she talked “a propos de” her husband’s defects: his endless arguments, his deafness to logic, his New Orleans rural memories and his propensity of siding with the absurd.

“A blood sucker, that’s what he was!” She would go daily for a checkup to a she-doctor who examined her breasts “badly abused by her man” that she despised today so much. Then she’d go to a massage parlor and let her breasts rubbed to keep them in good shape for some prospective good man petty desire.

She thought now of a tiny man, her counterweight, a small town man who’d like to live with her and her two kids and divide their bank account wisely to put some money on the side so that she could go every day to the movies. Though her ex was right when he advertised her as to not “eat a pound of cookies to gain two pounds of fat!”

I mean her belly was dripping wet real saturated fat, greasy sweat (lipids + cholesterol galore?) that made a black round stain on her blouse and spilling creases over her big-and-tall skirt. She was like a huge candle burning fat. From the old good days when she used to be a star what was left was her low register laugh plus some hand sign words. Her huge bottom may have weighted a ton (=40 cu. ft.).

“I got a shitload of problems” she used to complain. Compared to her, Walter was a gentle blow.

“I want you to experience that woman”, Joe would have told Walter that time, as if he was referring to her as food.

“Slim women make love in a simplified manner. The fat ones need help so they would hold on up to a point, until they get hooked up. If they can lie down without moving they’d begin sensing the innumerable love attempts of their man. They can’t see the man as he struggles, buried in their flesh, but they can sense that the man is somewhere there. That’s why an obese woman would be considered more chastised than a lean one. Though, I don’t think a lean woman gets turned on faster…” said Joe.

“If I can’t sleep at night and I have to, I think of Laura. Usually I see myself climbing up her body, clowning around her big teats”.

 Then he continued by repeating his usual stories about his first obsessions with Laura,

“It’s clear now, she was in love with that old guy, Stable, not the slightest doubt, and what about that mulatto, Zech, what a jerk, to pee on the Altar, and yet he thought that he can have her…” all those stories mixed with mystical accounts of his mom’s last days, unhappy days:

“She didn’t complain. She just smiled. To die like that… She got a hell of a vision, which”, he had to admit, “wasn’t so great”.  “Where is she now?” “Behind the tunnel, in the picturesque Heaven…”    

Sunday, at the Church (Laura is now a distinguished converted member of the Episcopalian creed), while people light assorted candles for the dead, one can see Laura turning heads and bodies as she struggles to get to the front row, whistling with her deep and disturbed breath: “Ex-Cozy-Me!” Her words travel like a murmur. Once there she crosses her legs to feels safe.

Her next act is to let her little shoes slip from her feet. Long time ago ten admirers would have rushed to pick them up. Not today! Though, Joe and Walter are there, no doubt! Both good church goers – to a certain point. It’s brainwashing time for everybody around. One could rot while standing in the deadly smell of the sacristy. Yet, one could resurrect also.

Other church regulars besides Laura, Joe and Walter are the twin sisters: Maria and Jane. They look always troubled as they pray. I think they’re having a hard time coming to the church. But they come regularly, anyway. You could see them taking a pill now and then as they begin insinuating: “God’s medicine…” Jane, I’m sure, is involved in some kind of dirty business, but she’s still able to borrow an air of innocence when she smiles. Her lips are red and soft, like two patches of poppy flowers. “She distinguished her ass here and there,” people used to say.

What I like in a church is that nobody gives a damn about what you are or what you are doing. The other sister is wearing a low cut dress that makes the priest blush. She acts cheerful but pointless. Though she has the audacity to dye her hair red and treat her ears as separate entities, one wearing a pink diamond, the other wearing a two-inches shiny platinum ring.

One day I crossed their path: I could smell that organic odor coming from a fresh made sweat, some humorous release, women stuff, I thought… “That’s marvelous!” I exclaimed.

Once a year every parishioner is allowed to have a hygienic speech at the stand, something like an AA talk, to allow people to cure themselves of sins. Jane’s went like that: she used the allegory of a saintly woman whose mission was to educate brothel workers how to keep them from sinning. Instead, the saintly woman found out that sin doesn’t deserve pity, but rather compassion and understanding. And she fell for it: “I renounce now the utopian world of those who stop living because of their fear to sin,” she’d have said. Eventually the crowd understood that the allegory was Jane’s own life-story. Then she wanted to convince the parishioners of something more: “I’m a very clean woman,” she said.

 The crowd laughed that day and the priest got upset. Mom said then that it would be difficult for the twin sisters to wash their hands of their upbringing. Though what was amazing was how the twin sisters could make a good living from little illegal trades, that they called business. In reality they called what they did “charity sports”, a code name for drugs, that they thought were indispensable to the American mentality. The charity part was that they acted as a liaison between the hospital and derelicts: the sisters supplied needles and medicine to the drug addicts. The attitude of the sixties… What an intelligent solution!

Who else would know where the needy is if not those that supply the needy. The twin sisters’ names and phone numbers were written on the walls of the abandoned houses around the burned church. There was nothing like the local newspaper said, that moral aspect of people that makes one keep a distance from those afflicted by drugs or by disease, that is, all those armies of believers that would let others to suffer and live their life in transit from here to nowhere until they died: the two sisters would be really of help to everybody including the scavengers living under the bridge. They were saints.

Every now and then the priest – a wide-eyed Southerner fellow whose face always expresses astonishment - has an interesting homily which sounds like the gossip column from the local newspaper.

“We’re all in God’s hands, aren’t we? Then, why some of us are beaten, others are not?”

All this astuteness makes Father Mongoose popular: the church crowds love him monotonously. He might comment, for instance, on current events from the life of the community and give appropriate advice to sinners.

Everybody knew for instance that Laura’s baby son came into the world through an accident pregnancy. The result was a new born American citizen described by his prudish mom, as “German abortion pills cannot stop Americans from breeding”.

The priest though thought that it was God’s will to make it happen. And he’d continue his homily: “Now that the old values are gone life tends to become objectionable. It’s not true anymore that when everything is right nothing terribly wrong could come about. It’s more likely that almost nothing is right and that nobody wants to look at what is wrong!” said the priest.

At times the priest is so theatrical that Joe and Walter can’t abstain from laughing, sometimes so loud that they need to give assurances to people sitting around that their laughing is not some kind of a sickness. “Yes, I’m okay!” they’ll answer in a voice. In reality every Sunday the priest was telling almost the same story: there is a small detail for which he tells the story all over again. His story! Somehow he changes a little bit that one story making it fit for each occasion: usually the current events alter it…  

Today, the passionate voice of the priest began the homily with a question: “Why should life, the way we live it, follow the morality found in the Bible or other books derived from it? Why?” followed by a long pause, “I asked God! Why?” followed by another pause. At that moment Joe and Walter began laughing. The priest stopped his act and addressed them both: “Am I not worthy of your attention?” As he stopped for a pause he looked even more comical then before. “Your body grew up but your mind didn’t. You’re still those two little boys that I baptized 22 years ago”. Again, his voice rose undisturbed:

“Why? I asked God why? And God didn’t answer…!” Hell! Now they were all ears, silent lambs, listening to the priest talking about sins, abominable sins and crimes, like forced labors (he wouldn’t call them abortions), and punishments, terrible ordeals before death comes, like earthquakes which are nothing but signs that the divine order is crumbling… He would utter a sentence and follow it with like “Why God!” gestures of imprecation and pointing to the church crowd.

He would then say: “That’s why!” Then he’d start up again. Luckily, at a certain moment during the homily people sitting in the first two front rows were asked to move back to make room for the boys’ choir. Before the commotion was over, Walter and Joe left the church trying to unleash another laugh and by doing that emptying the meaning of the whole homily…

Mom used to say that whenever she went to the church she felt ennobled, though, the priest, with his very off-hand manners intimidated her. “No head is allowed to run sideways; no lips could smile towards a neighbor singing a psalm. It strengthens me, it puts my life back into my head”, she used to say.

Dad would stop her from saying more. “But we sit too much!” she’d continue. “After a while I feel pain creeping into my buttocks”. She was always afraid that she’d do some blasphemy lapse talking about God. She’d start crying abruptly: “Forgive me God for what I’m saying!” But no question about, the church was for mom a sacred home.

“As soon as I cross the thresholds I feel like being part of God. It comes with a change in my attitude!” she’d say. Her insistent tone and her search for faith and the help she looked for – in the Bible – made the priest believe that Mom’s future had some messianic meaning.

 “A bit of a prayer each Sunday wouldn’t do any harm to you too!” She tried to lure me but to no avail. Mom kept being completely ignorant of any fundamental concepts such as the true vehicle of the universal being. However, she thought for instance that the faint shadow of Madonna in her last appearance in Utah was worth taking into consideration though it didn’t leave an imprint on her film. Dad would say that she was a strange sentimental case for a cause that cannot buy a head of cabbage nowadays. Though, even Dad used to like when Laura sang with her sweet voice “Soon it will be all over!” a romantic melody using odds and ends from Beatles and lyrics written by reverend Franklin Goldman:

“That’s your age/ Under the blue sky/ Don’t be sad/ Don’t cry/ As you see/ The non-reversible end/ Is still far and wide”. 

Listening to the song mom used to display a quick and smiley sob. Age had slowed her determination to express herself and made her opinions hesitate between a hidden belief that God existed and the accepted quasi-indifference of Dad that if existed God wouldn’t ask for anybody’s worship.

That’s Mom’s speech given to the assembled parishioners on the Lent: “Everything that hurts yields to love. Then love hurts more. (She really felt good while wiping her tears away, keeping her lips moist to be able to continue). Thanks to what I learned in this church, like being good and fair to other people, I grew up a better woman. There was nothing more gratifying than helping those in need and falling in love with them. That’s a must for those who want to see and talk straightforwardly with the Creator”.  Mom made a difference between people who showed up just to be seen attending the church services and those who came to get together for the sake of their faith.        

*

In those days, the future seemed so far while the past was touching my every step.  I could feel it, still alive, wandering around me. Though what I noticed one day was that people close to my heart began slowly to die. Joe’s philosophy might be of help when interpreting those times: “Life goes on, in rounds, making sounds to be heard, and again, going in rounds, until there are no more rounds, for there is no more sound…”

What I suddenly understood in a satori kind of moment was that those who disappeared from my life had so much to tell. What I needed to do was just to ask. My dreams were still revealing their amazing beauty in flashback sequences.

“Twenty years from now”, I thought, I’ll be here again, looking at a different but clearer future. In fact, I thought, we’d all be here. It seemed it was still a long way to go. Not at once, as it seems now, anyway. So many dreams, wasted! Was it worth trying to find a substitute for whatever I lost?

Mom used to say: “It’s impossible to understand the future by scavenging the past. Let it go; and never try to go back. There is so much new stuff on the other half of one’s life…”

 Zech, the queer one, will be a family man then, like anybody else. He’d own a bagel shop on 4th Street (positively naughty) with a color portrait of his older brother (Ronald Zech, dead in the Vietnam War), mounted on the front window. The store would make cookies too and, (this is new stuff), it would serve Colombian coffee in a new kind of paper cup with cute colored handlers. When the old Zech got buried the town was quiet. He came home too soon. Everybody was sorry for the three surviving brothers so, for a while, people bought more cookies than they needed.

What was strange was that the old brother Zech went to Vietnam and came back dead after only one-week, before even being involved in any combat. Nobody knew how to interpret that. It’s like when one gets stuck in a puzzle. No help there! One would have to take a different path to find the appropriate word and even then… Certain war events were consumed in discussions one would initiate in the Irish pub. Some began rumoring that Zech may have had deserted the army. He was one of those old style boys who felt uncomfortable with the version of military discipline that a war asks for. Then the rumor had it that he died of a cocaine overdose. Nobody really knew what did happen. Military secret, I suppose!

But people liked what they heard, that he came from a troubled family – which was true – and how he took care of his brothers after their mom ran away and how he teamed up with the Special Forces because he was a street wise guy, etc.

Walter was in shock like anybody else. The mayor kept the flag in front of the city hall at half-mast for two days. Then eight people designated as Zech’s friends were lined up for a wait that was kept short. Little Zech, who wasn’t little anymore, was crying. “What are they doing?” he asked while turning his hat backwards. Death is like a photo processing: it doesn’t get consummated before the image is developed.

 “Some extortionists,” middle Zech was saying, “tried to convince the mayor to bury my brother in the other cemetery”, which was located on the outskirts of the town and was used at that time for humans as well as for their pets. They even showed to the mayor a map of the out of town cemetery with free spots highlighted in red.

“I said, gee, but my brother was a hero! And the mayor said that he wasn’t really what one would call a hero. So I told him, either the cemetery behind the city hall or nothing. Who needs cheap glamour?”

 That part of the cemetery is gone now. When they built the highway they relocated half of it, leaving untouched only the historical wall flanked by the brown stones belonging to the monks that inhabited the cemetery morgue during the 18th century. The city hall is gone too. The local government operates now from within a mansion used years ago by the psychiatric clinic. The Main Street where we used to bicycle had been enlarged and looks now just like a minor segment of the highway. And then there is nothing else I could remember belonging to that past!

“People are losing their personality because of this overwhelming road development,” Dad would complain. You can’t see any more kids playing around the vacant lot where I broke my toes playing clay hockey! Both of my big toes! The mini-golf square lot, near the barbershop, is now a garden where people, who qualify, get a small 3ft/6ft lot to grow vegetables. Mom is making her soup with dill she grows there. And the gazebo where we gathered to listen to the brass music is gone. What the past had offered us? Mom used to say that it’s okay not to be suspended in the past though the past was supposed to teach you how to live your life in the present. What did it teach us? I heard her saying that hundred times: that if the past didn’t teach you how to live in the present it means that you still live in the past. Let it go! Let it go!

She thought that it was difficult for a child to understand those simple thoughts of hers. The time came for me to use her sayings in my writings. As I watched how life went by I realized that my parents were very much following the teaching of the past. But when I think that Dad almost left us with his silly idea that he wanted to go to a Buddhist monastery and get enlightened; I have this thought that he was wrong thinking like that. Then I think that maybe mom drove him crazy so he had to run away.

I thought and thought about them both: Dad used to slap Mom’s butt, sometimes in public, as for instance at that street fair when he slapped her twice, so they quarreled until Mom calmed down and apologized to Dad for making such a fuss…

As far as I was concerned they were interested in one thing: to see me excel in something they saw important for them such as politics or to have a carrier that provided more excitement than responsibility, like for instance being a diplomat.

 The reason to become the later was that I knew French before I exchanged the first few English words. When I was ten years old I was allowed to decide for myself what I wanted to do, so I dropped French from my other interests and I opted for math. Without French my life became quiet, no more buzz exchanges with Mom.

I miss Mom, especially during the cold winter days.

Compared to me Walter was different. He was the spoiled rich kid. His dad owned a company called “Copper.Al&Wire”, a multinational corporation. The factory name was engraved on a huge copper electroplate above its headquarters. I was little but I still remember that for some reason whenever I passed by the factory I felt like throwing up. People would tell stories about acid fumes that made lots of workers get sick and dying. “That is true” mom would say. “Stay away from the factory”. Anyway copper made Walter a rich boy. You could see it from the way he was dressed: yellow soft leather shoes, a “members only” dark blue jacket from London, blue stripped shirt and gray pants. It was within the school dress-up norm, okay, but his uniform went so far beyond it that you could see Walter across the hallway and have no doubt about it: his dad was a distinctive member of some yacht club. And then the way he got to school and the way he got picked up by a valet and whisked in the window tinted chauffeured automobile, and then, that enigmatic old black man who wouldn’t stop smiling before moving the wheel and get off! And eventually, the way the car moved, without making a sound, just a small purr of a big black Rolls Royce cat.

Joe, on the contrary, didn’t give a damn about clothes or anything else. He may have been poor, but, as far as I know, he was better off that way! He was a dreamer, a well-played distracted genius. I remember how he installed himself in the Empire chair one day, making the girls cheerleaders giggle as they looked up and saw two big holes in Joe’s pants, just between his legs.

“You are not supposed to give to anybody an idea about your underwear…” Miss Molly dared to say. That didn’t make Joe step down.

“My eyes hurt!” said Miss Molly.

“Mine too,” said Joe and this was it.

Getting back to that volleyball match that showed me how strong was Joe in his determination to “correct the wrongs” as he used to say: two or three times a year, our schools – boys and girls – had to compete with two schools from Warren, a nearby town. We always expected them to win. Joe saw the whole thing conspicuous and decided to change the rules of the game, having two boys, one from each school, acting as empires rather than having a certified empire from the other town make the calls. Joe was chosen to be the empire for our schools and the effect was terrific. Joe learned the rules of the game so well that he succeeded to make all the calls during the game. The other empire-boy was reduced to watching the game and agreeing with Joe’s calls. Our mixed team, that appeared to have guts it never showed before kept roaming all over the place and won the first set. The other team seemed to comply.

Then something strange happened. We saw this big guy running towards the volleyball court and shouting and gesticulating wildly. I thought the guy was kind of an official from the other schools for I never saw him around here before. He called out to Joe to get down and kept shouting something I couldn’t hear because I was hundred yards away and because the crowd became suddenly vociferous.

Then the guy took the cornet from Joe’s hand and shouted: This game is annulled because of illegal changes made in the championship rules”. Then we saw Joe taking the cornet in his hand and shouting: “Get out of here! Get out!” right to this guy’s face and then all the teachers began entering the playground and quickly the whole thing became a mess and one could hear Miss Molly’s hysterical voice trying to make order, shouting “Order! Order!” like in a court of justice and the crowd shouting “Cheaters! Thieves!” until the principal climbed up on the empire chair and the crowd got silent.

“We won!” he said, and then he addressed the big guy: “Let the kids work it out between themselves, for now! We’ll discuss the rules after this game is over. If what you say is correct we’ll have to reschedule the game some other time!”

He made though a compromise and allowed the big guy to stand behind Joe and watch his calls. With the principal standing still on the other side of the ground, things got back under control. At the end though, everybody was shouting so loud that you couldn’t understand what Joe was saying. The cheerleaders were screaming and I remember laughing at the whole mess and feeling dizzy.

Where did Joe’s guts come from? One would be always surprised by his sudden faith in himself. It wouldn’t last though. That day we won the match. Of course, it got officially invalidated, because Joe wasn’t a certified empire. But now, that Joe completed his act, he went back to his withdrawn self. This was his boyish class, a class by itself. He surely knew how to play big roles. Whenever he went back to himself he didn’t talk too much.

Mom said, at the moment she saw Joe: “Something is bothering him, like a bad thing he’s waiting to happen”. For her there was always something wrong with him.

She would have liked to give Joe the same advice she always gave me: be modest, like anybody else, try less and be open to events. Nothing wrong is going to happen if you don’t make it happen.

Joe would have taken her advice in the wrong way, anyway. Like on that day when he wanted to prove that he could break a window glass with one punch without getting hurt! We went that day past the ruins of the old Catholic church that burned down to its very foundation a couple of years ago. Nobody ever figured out if it was a thunderbolt that got it or arson. The house next to it was abandoned because the owner thought that the burned church was a bad omen.

That day, we all went there, six of us plus Laura, to watch Joe showing off. We even ran bets on it. Laura was jumping up and down and applauding. Anyway, we were supposed to have fun. Once there, we looked at Joe preparing for his showcase. He’d charge his arm mocking a punch hit, and then he’d wait a moment, and try it again. Eventually he was pleased with his exercise. He swayed his punch for the last time and then hit the window glass forcefully.

First, I heard an awful scream and I saw Joe’s arm bleeding, caught between the sharp spikes of the shattered window. The spikes were so close that it made difficult for him to pull his hand out. Laura was screaming and trembling like a leaf. It was horrible to watch Walter trying barehanded to break the spikes to free Joe’s arm. Joe showed always character when it came to suffering and pain. Some small whiter traces of skin scratched that day would remain visible on Joe’s arm for the rest of his life.

 Just to have an idea how Joe was those days I’d have to continue this story to its real ending. Next day after the accident, Joe called Walter who then fetched me, and as we got to Joe’s house he told us that he could prove to us that he could do it. Walter didn’t want to hear about it. And, honestly, I was tired of Joe’s gimmicks.

“Don’t worry!” Joe would say. “Yesterday I had a bad day! Maybe because Laura was there, who knows?” Eventually I had to go back with him and Walter to that dreadful place again.

Walter kept repeating: “Be careful!” as if what he said could have helped Joe to perform better. I knew in advance what was going to happen and I couldn’t loosen up at the idea that we’d have to escort Joe to the hospital. And then how were we going to explain to our parents what happened? And then we’d have to live through the scandal that will break loose once we got back to school… Then, what about Joe’s dad whom everybody called Mr. Emerson, who didn’t like us, and who’d call us names, as if we were responsible for Joe’s acts, etc.

That day, though, Joe’s demeanor was different.  He kept balancing his arm back and forth, saying: “I’ll show you! It’s a matter of mechanics! You’ll see!” All of a sudden he punched the window glass. “Wonderful! Isn’t it?” he gasped. Obviously, Joe was enjoying himself. As he hit the window the shattered glass fell almost entirely off the frame.

“That’s the trick! Like Houdini!”

Walter put Joe’s success on the cotton band Joe was wearing over yesterday’s cuts. He’d say that the cotton acted as an absorbent of the punch and helped distributing the shattering force uniformly!

Joe was yelling and screaming, calling it: “Bull! That’s bull! You’re jealous! You just have to hit it with a centered punch, as perpendicular as possible, to get the whole thing smashed. The hole gets bigger when you hit the glass in a perfect perpendicular way”.

On the next window, used for yesterday’s bragger, you could still see a bit of Joe’s bloodied skin, hanging.

Joe turned to me: “Nice, huh?” He was sucking his finger. One of his yesterday’s scratches bled.

“Nice, okay! But I didn’t see the purpose of it!” said Walter. “Was it worth anything, like, was it knowledge like worth what you did? It didn’t mean a thing! It was worthless!”

 “It wasn’t worthless,” insisted Joe. “It was a challenge! It was worth accepting a challenge and being a victor at it. The worst thing that could happen with every challenge is that you lose or you die. I drew up a list of challenges I’d like to risk taking. One of them is not to fear death. And not to fear life either! It is like being ready to take risks”. 

Joe looked elated. We knew at that time that whatever Joe was going to do he’d be a winner or he was going to come out fine, as he did today, no matter what.     

Walter was skeptical but we knew that he was a pussy. That’s how he was. I think I was a pussy too. But I’d stay on to watch the full drama. Walter would disappear whenever he felt something we’re doing was not going to turn out okay. You could see him and his older sister Gwendolyn, walking through the park on Sundays. Walter was holding his mom’s hand, dependent on her caress and sort of a damn elegant British boy, while Gwen was holding her dad’s arm.

Gwendolyn had a lisp that inspired Joe to call her Gwendolisp. It made Walter mad whenever…

I liked Gwendolyn though she was two years older than all of us. Otherwise, Walter’s family was a comfortable cocoon for a prince like baby that Walter was and that’s the way he was going to grow up and die.

Joe grew up differently, squeezing his lips to kill “his instinct of crying” as he’d confess lately, and becoming the one who wouldn’t like to show emotions whatsoever. This was his ideal. But then, Joe’s family, what a colorful crowd it was? His father, a 6ft 7” body, the tallest man in town though his small head made him look shorter. Then Uncle Bob, fifteen years younger than Mr. Emerson, the most generous Uncle, Joe used to say, and a dreadful womanizer, whose victims were always women whom a normal man would call close relatives. And then Joe’s mom, Ellen, who was the most beautiful woman around, and a certified beauty queen! 

As far as my life went, I remember mom, of course, stuffing the dough with potato and fried onions, the first telephone installed in my room and the first color TV when it got switched on, the upsurge of American consciousness held back by fear and cowardliness, the McCarthy’s witch hunt. Then, of course, my childhood swarmed with aunts and Uncles as anybody else’s. That’s the only way one feels that his family is institutionalized.

Long time ago Dad built a genealogical tree to prove that our family tree had roots in Jura, a Scottish island, from which Lord Galosh emerged. Around the year 1824 the name got re-spelled, and became a stamp on the Great Commonwealth map, as Jaleshwar, a village in the Indies. Mom always got caught in those interminable arguments about our ancestors. She thought that acknowledging royal stuff on the American soil was kind of creepy. 

“Get back to your senses, we’re just middle class Americans,” she’d say. One of my Uncles, Tim Banjos Chamberlain Jalesh, suffered dearly because of Mr. McCarthy. Uncle Tim Banjos was an idiot and I guarantee you that. And none of his neurons thought in any leftist way. He always looked to me as if he lived at the bottom of his life. He wouldn’t have any room to fall further. After he saw Dad’s designed family tree he became fanatic about the idea that we were aristocrats. Whenever he came to see Dad he’d supply him with new information about Lord Galosh. To me he looked more and more like a freak.

The illusion of aristocracy – more destructive than a poisonous drug…

“Nobody wants to change his soul or his body or his brain,” he used to say. “What about blood? As far as blood is concerned I’d like mine to be blue”.

Dad asked him why he doesn’t move to Scotland.

“To be what?” he asked.  “A Scottish bastard?” His best years of life got pissed away on cars extravaganzas and women, until that fatal day when he lost his front teeth in a car accident. He was a changed man after that; he felt neglected by friends and of no use to his wife. One of his best words of “honor-kind-of-a-saying” was: either you give a diamond to a woman to show her respect or you kick her in the ass.

He couldn’t stand the “indifference” as a feeling: “Indifference throws a man’s soul sideways”. In loud terms he was pointing to any of us. Then another saying was: “We are alike when we have to beg. When we have to get we’re different”. 

His wife Esther was like a pink-wrinkled doll: “I couldn’t get the one-two dance right,” she’d complain. Those were times when old women would take tango classes.  Evita’s craze? Uncle Tim accompanied her to Buenos Aires. (Relationship strictures in a discussion about women and their dependency on dance: “You’re still thinking in American terms,” she told him. “Argentina is a land of passion!”).

 Tim thought that Esther, at her age (43 years old, probably more) had remained the same misguided girl he used to know before they got married. Though, he sensed that, once in Argentina, Esther’s soul, as he knew it, disappeared in a vacuum and reappeared there as something else, a strange pink creature made out of candy and fashioned like a doll that had to live on its own. He couldn’t stand it.

“It wasn’t a real thing, nevertheless!” he’d try to explain. Esther was flirting with Argentineans male dancers while Tim kept being as he ever was, a reliable husband wearing oversized dentures. Esther had a genuine sense of her value when she danced tango. She glanced at times sideways to watch the movers and tossed a flattened smile towards Tim to show that she was still his. Suddenly Tim understood that even Esther, so committed to accepting maturity with an open mind, didn’t want to get older.

Then, of course, my Aunt Clarita was among those relatives that impersonated outsiders. She’d like to show to all of us that her life was fundamentally different than ours:

“Family shouldn’t be like the need of all of us to respect some customs which we don’t want to be aware of”. Mom used to call her an extremist: “Why don’t you go to see a shrink?”

Then lastly, my Aunt Augusta and her husband which I refused to call “Uncle”. She met him in a small Brazilian town called Jales. She thought that due to the name similarity with our Scotish roots it was meant to be. I heard that he puts her body up as collateral for some risky business.

“Love is a game” her husband used to say. “Some win, others lose”. Or: “I did this for you darling,” he’d say. Two centuries ago they’d have to bet a pair of boots for their women. Now it’s a cards & drugs games, or stocks & bonds or acres of rain forest in Brazil. That’s what turned Aunt Augusta’s tiny love upside-down.

“No more bodily stripping, no more sexual exploitation”. She turned to motherly companionship with a boy half her age.

“When they are together they talk, they blush together”.  Though, she discovered lately the security that comes from being part of a large family. “

“Augusta doesn’t have any body parts of hers left untouched by sex and there is more to be said about what illnesses she might have caught meanwhile, I’m sure you know, though I always agreed that she should be accepted as an equal member of our family. At one time or another we all do or try what she did. Thanks God, in our time nobody had to use a rubber. But I think she got something. You get a hint if you catch her while she’s scratching herself”.

 Aunt Augusta, who had a heart of gold, confessed to mom, (and I remember hearing that) that she had an affair with the School counselor. She told mom that she didn’t want to go as far as it usually goes. She thought it was just a flirtation. “I teased him!” she said. “But then he became violent, and, you know how Latinos are, he banged the shit out of my pussy…” Aunt Augusta seemed impressed. The School counselor retired in 1968. By then my aunt’s story became kind of a Cio-Cio-San story.  That she’d have to get pregnant with a Latino became the obsession that kept her life going.

Now that she passed away her “cardinal secret”, as she used to call it, will hang about forever blurred and foggy. Giving birth to a new race was her desire. Being American was her fatigue. The day Aunt Esther left for Argentina I heard Aunt Augusta saying: “What a woman (that is a cheap imitation of sainthood) can do out there? She can’t lay her hand on anything”.    

*

The doors of my brain are now widely open: you can read it or write on it as you please. Otherwise, what I hate to remember is that I worked like a dog doing my homework, that I resolved all my school assignments or I found a way to avoid failures by veering around them in order to become what my parents wanted - a good lawyer. I’d have preferred to be a draftsman like my father, but I couldn’t draw a straight line. But hey! There is a whole world waiting for lawyers to suck up people’s money. People don’t really know where they’re at with a lawyer. They’re waiting for something to happen so that they could go to their lawyer. It’s like a check-up with their doctor. A legal check-up! As far as my life went I knew that nothing dramatic could ensue. I made my life predictable.

On the most fortunate side of this story, Walter would become a capitalist, owner of two fancy restaurants and of a modest joint near the train station.

“With restaurants – you know what you could expect. You go through a lot of trouble finding waiters and a good chef” Walter would say. Then you’re in business! “Food, one bank on!” was the label Walter’s restaurants were running ads on. “What else is more important than becoming very materialistic when playing with ideals”, he’d defend himself. And of course, what used to be those ideals? Nobody could guess. “The least important aspect of the human life on Earth is its allegiance to an ideology or religion, or to a system of thought. They are all perishable!” he used to boast.

Though Walter deserved unmediated praise for his books and critical essays on Joe’s writings, despite the fact that Walter’s name on the cover was written in bigger caps than Joe’s. One could see there how he used to stamp his ego.

Well, his restaurants are gone now. The last dinner I had there seems still memorable: ten littleneck clams, two spring potatoes sliced in four, sprinkled with olive oil and a pinch of stir fried young garlic, 1 bay leaf, 1/8 coarsely ground pepper and fresh blue Swiss bread. No more soufflé, no more gateaux.

Eating in town became catastrophic. On the other hand, Walter’s books are out of print. Susan, his wife, is a celebrated widow. I saw her twice standing in the official rostrum, elbow to elbow with the new young black mayor, watching the 4th of July fireworks.

(Erotic locale: the mayor kissing Susan’s hand, a long kiss at the expense of her patience. Her lips stretched apart in a nervous angle: “Don’t be stupid,” she says, “People are looking at us”).

Nonetheless, people understand that the mayor is the law and order in this town. He made it to the top without losing his head; hence he wasn’t going to lose it there on the official rostrum. Would anybody remember how life was when we all were alive and well?

Susan won’t talk about it. “It looks like yesterday!” She wouldn’t talk about Walter either who has been dead for two years already. Next, she won’t talk about what she does nowadays or about what she doesn’t. Then all of a sudden she’d talk: “I could tell you something that will make you throw up, if you promise not to say anything to Lilly. One day I set out to explore the attic. I found a chest filled with all sort of boxes, mostly Walter’s old courses, handouts and notebooks. I thought I heard Walter talking to me from his grave so I had to mix the two prayers I knew to keep searching. Well, and what I discovered? That Walter lied almost about everything to me.

One of his journal’s notes says that his life with me was boring. He then says that our marriage was like playing tag with a girl. Well, he started this game even before we got married. He writes full pages about a woman named Alice, who knows who she is, and then about his affair with Lilly that happened just before we wed. Did you know that Lilly got pregnant? And that it was Walter’s baby?”

 I said “No! That’s impossible!” “Now all these” she continued, ”are behind me and I can look at my life with clear eyes. I don’t give a damn shit anymore that he lied to me. But I feel sorry that all this time after he died I prayed for him to go to Heaven. I hope he went to Hell! And I can’t be sorry anymore that I don’t want to talk about him now that he is no more…” Her voice was chocking. She called Walter “a lone assassin!”

“For me,” she continued, “Love was a matter of life and death. I mean life wasn’t simple when Walter was here. He was very demanding, fat and noisy. I didn’t care less. I’d rather be unhappy with Walter, I thought, than happy with anybody else… And look what he did to me!”