Brian Kindall's Blog, page 3

Oh, Mistress Mine

Be forewarned, Gentle Reader – this one gets a little steamy. It goes metaphorically asunder, venturing into the more dark, confused, and sensual byways of human experience. So if you are prudish, and not predisposed to the fulfillment of desirous, animal lust as it can be expressed through the unbridled and purpled confessions contrived by wayward writers in the guilty dawn, then perhaps you should refrain from reading any further.
(But on the other hand, I might point out, no one is watching.)

I am but a man!
Sorry blokes throughout the ages – from Adam to Juan Valdez – have offered up this mortal plaint as reason for their failings. And while I admit this is no excuse for what I am about to divulge, I present it to you as my only alibi. For God made us one way, and then the devil warped that basic goodness, luring us by means of wanton, dark-eyed temptation into what we have so pitifully become.

As with so many affairs, it was my wife who ironically – oh, so unwittingly! – introduced me to my mistress. They had been friends since Kristin’s teenage girlhood, sharing an innocent bond of Saturday rendezvous in sidewalk cafes after shopping. Their friendship had deepened into my wife’s college years, becoming something more…more… Well, I don’t mean to say their connection was exactly amorous, but something nearly so. I could tell by the animated and flustered manner in which Kristin described her old chum that she was truly dear to her heart. And now, since Kristin and I had matrimonially joined our souls for all eternity, she was eager that I should meet her friend. I was indifferent, to say the least. What, I argued, did we need with some interloper shadowing our honeymoon-lit happiness? But my new bride was adamant, and so I acquiesced.

Kristin led me to a French café where she left me at a small table to wait rather awkwardly on an uncomfortable wire chair. She henceforth tripped away to order our drinks and, little did I realize, destabilize our marriage.
I gazed about, marveling at the people fondling their tiny cups of brown goo. Sipping. Licking their lips. And then letting their eyes flutter closed with what I would soon realize was utter ecstasy. I didn’t understand. I had been raised on brawny mugs of percolated motor oil in the self-restrained countryside. I was, I must admit, innocent of the more sophisticated pleasures of metropolitan society.
Kristin returned with one of the tiny cups in a saucer, placing it with a napkin before me. “Brian my love,” she said rather forebodingly, “this is espresso.”
I looked down into my dainty demitasse, and into what I would soon realize was to be my destiny, my downfall, my illicit and pulse quickening joy. The barista had made a heart shape in the foam atop my drink, and I had the odd sensation that I was peering into my own life’s pump. The moment was odd.
Awkward.
“Enchanté,” was all I could think to say.
And then, under the expectant, watchful eyes of my wife, I imbibed.

Until that fateful moment, I would have insisted that Kristin was all I cared for. I certainly had no eyes for other women; she was my everywoman, and my everything. There was no temptation great enough to derail the locomotive of my one-way Kristin-bound devotion. But with that first seemingly benign kiss, I knew in an instant that my fate was sealed.
“Oh!” I sighed. “Oh!”
Kristin was pleased that I seemed to like her friend. Of course, I skillfully played down my enthusiasm. I surprised myself at my talent for subterfuge, even feigning nonchalance when she suggested next day that we should all meet again.
“Sure,” I said, with a shrug. “If it would make you happy, my dear.”
But in truth, I would have dared anything for another encounter with Martine.

Yes, I secretly came to call her Martine. And you may well marvel at how a seemingly levelheaded man could so completely personify something like a cup-bound libation to a point where it becomes more humanoid and vivacious than a true flesh and blood being. But it has always been my writerly wont to grant personalities to the more quotidian entities of my life. (For example, I had always found willow trees to be Pentecostal preachers; I owned a pair of mittens named Arnold; the number 69 had always reminded me of conjoined vacuum cleaners.) And so now let me describe for you my Martine.
She was sultry. Dark. Coquettish in the extreme. I had always been a careful sort, but she stirred in me a latent impetuousness. Martine so often enticed me into embarrassing, premature excitement that many times I spilled, scalding my eager tongue and searing my impatient throat. But oh! That pain only made me want her more. That sensation! The ensuing rush of caffeine-laced dopamine! “More!” I moaned. For Again and More came to be the watchwords of our relationship. More! More! More!

Time passed. And whether it was by way of some feminine self-preserving instinct or not, Kristin eventually became suspicious and disillusioned with her old friend.
“She’s not fun anymore,” she told me, one rainy day when I suggested, rather casually, that we should step into a café and meet up for a sort of benign ménage à trois.
“Oh?” I said. “Really?”
“She gives me a headache and makes me nauseous.”
Well I knew what Kristin was saying. And yet it was that very migraine and queasiness that had become my great addiction. I craved it. But on that dreary day, we passed on by the café. I peered sidelong into the rain-streaked window, hoping, I suppose for some blurred glance of Martine. I was granted instead the smallest hint of her sensual aroma wafting from the café’s open door. My eyes teared up. I grew damp with a nervy sweat. I salivated with shameful longing.

In our early days together, I had always looked forward to going to sleep at night only so that I might wake in the comfortable paradise of my Kristin’s arms. But now I could not rise from out of our bed soon enough. I often left my wife in oblivious, gape-mouthed slumber, lost to her dreams while I, sneaking off to the café, so cunningly pursued my pre-dawn trysts. When once Kristin questioned me as to why we never anymore snuggled and lay in of a morn, I used writing as my excuse.
“Alas,” I explained with a forced and playful grin. “I must meet my craft’s demands.”
Kristin took this as justifiable, and so allowed me to continue my wanton habit. But although there was truth in what I said, it pained me much. I realized all too well – Martine had usurped Kristin as my muse.

It only got worse thereafter. The subterfuge. The averted glances. The blatant lies.
“I’m just off for a stroll around the block, my love,” I would sometimes call to Kristin as I left the house in the plain light of day. “I need to stretch my legs.”
“Shall I join you?”
“Gad No! Er… I mean, sorry, dear. I’m trying to work something out for an essay. I fear you would only distract me with your charm.”
I loathed what I had become. I mumbled bits of poems as I hurried to my Martine. I stuffed myself with mints and raw garlic in the same way some men take showers to hide their lover’s scent.

Kristin made a new friend – one Green Tea – and she offered that we should sit around our kitchen table with her and chat. But I found this one lacking. She was plain, even with the largest heapings of sugar and cream. She was incapable of soliciting my passion. Of course, I sat pleasantly with my wife and pretended to enjoy our time, but within the bowels of my soul, anguish stormed.

How well I understand that my secret meetings with Martine are numbered. I have read enough novels and viewed enough films to realize it is only a matter of time before we are discovered. An unexplainable stain on a shirtfront here, an overwhelming need to run to the water closet there. Such is the stuff of human folly. But with this impending revelation, I have come even more to cherish my sensual encounters with Martine. Even now, as I pen this confession, I hold her in my free hand, cradling her warmth, sipping at her teasingly, while my unwitting wife sleeps only a single rod away.
I whisper in the halo of my little lamp, “Oh, how I wish I could quit you, Martine.”
But of course that is a foolish, foolish thought.
For I am, most shamefully, but a man!

I Blame My Mother

Every writer has some sob story to tell. We all have our little excuses for being deviant or, as they more politely mutter with a fake smile, “somewhat off.” Why else would one waste so much time in such a self-absorbed, underappreciated, and delusional pursuit? A balanced person would never intentionally lock himself away for long hours struggling to string words into fanciful fabrications. That’s arrested development, a kind of childish behavior better suited for kindergarten pre-nap story-time. Instead, I am frequently told, a person who is right-in-the-head should “grow up,” put his little fantasies and traumas behind him, and “move on” to become a plumber or proctologist or politician, or any of the myriad other trades that contribute to society by furthering the gross national product. But writers, ever moping and seeking excuses, are a sorry lot. They are a blight on humanity. They are bitter baggage on the planet’s great forward journey through the cosmos. They are, from Homer to Hemingway, a bunch of whining nincompoops.
Still, a few of us have very good reasons for being the way we are. The time has come for me to tell you mine.

My mother killed me when I was a still a baby.
Not tried to kill me, but actually killed me.
It’s true.
There!
Whew!
Now everyone knows. The years of carrying that dark secret are finally over.
Granted, I recovered. But not without side effects. The grip of Death held me for but part of a single second, and yet a person doesn’t easily return from such a grim journey. They’re all up-messed afterwards. (Remember how, after his resuscitation, Lazarus was never any fun at parties?)
And for the record, I don’t mean to get my mom in trouble. She’s old now. Doddering and pathetic. At this late hour, what good would it do to have her serve time for what she did? And heaven forbid that she should be made to wear an unflattering beige smock with the scarlet letters BK (Baby Killer) printed on the back just so everyone can know that she’s the one who did me wrong. That, although arguably justified, is not truly what I want. No. Not really. What I want instead is to tell my side of the story. I want people to know what happened. I want, at last, to offer up an explanation for myself and my many failings as a legitimate human being.

Now I’m sure there are those who would argue that a person is not capable of clearly remembering his life’s earliest experiences, no matter how harrowing they might have been. But I’ll wager that none of those supposed baby experts have ever been murdered by their mums. I recall everything quite vividly. God knows I’ve replayed that shocking scene a thousand times in my head, trying to find some way out for my mom, some good alibi for what she did. But alas! No matter how badly I want to prove her innocence, the evidence remains.

It was a chill morning. Snow was falling outside. I watched the flakes tumbling past the bathroom window from the changing table where I was sprawled and airing out. I kicked my legs and broke infantile wind. Life was lovely.
Or at least I thought life was lovely. Little did I suspect that my mother felt otherwise. Obviously motherhood was not as she had hoped; it was not the beatific experience so touted in certain propaganda pamphlets handed out in Sunday School classes for young wives. No. It wasn’t that at all. It was far more tiring. What with spit-up and diapers, it was far more unsavory. One could even say that motherhood was a major impediment to one’s dreams for a happy life. One could say that motherhood, so life-affirming on its storybook surface, was, in fact, a sort of giant, dreary toothache of the soul. This, I now understand, is what my mom was pondering as she prepared, that fateful morning, to give me a bath.

She filled the sink with tepid water. (Wouldn’t want to scald the little nipper, now would we?) She was eerily silent as she went about her task. One expects a mother to hum a soothing lullaby in such moments, but her unsmiling lips, in between yawns, were quite firmly sealed. Her eyes were barely open.
Oh, well, I thought. Maybe in my limited life experience I am unable to know all there is to know about how a mother should act. (I really do remember thinking that, or, anyway, something like that.)
Like an automaton, cold-hearted and mechanical, she soaped me up good. I must say, I felt no love in her touch that morning, no mother-child connection. I could have been a dirty plate she was washing to put away in the cupboard. But then, after another of her exaggerated yawns, she finally spoke. “Golly, little guy, I sure wish you’d let me sleep at night.”
Sure, I suppose you could say I was a bit of a night owl back then. I liked to wake in the wee hours and have a sip of milk while watching the stars and moon through the window. Life was new for me, and magical. I didn’t want to miss that wonderful nocturnal show by sleeping through it. And of course I wanted my mom to share it with me. That’s the kind of thing, I reasoned, that creates a lasting bond. That I softly cried to get her attention… No. Okay – that I howled to let her know it was two A.M. and time for her to lift me from my crib for a little bonding was just how we had set up our system for communication. I’m so sorry that it wasn’t more pleasant. But I was a baby, for crying out loud! What were my options? At any rate, Mom seemed a little put out about our nighttime cuddling. And now, feigning sleep deprivation, she was putting the blame on me.
She soaped my tummy, and wearily gazed down upon me in my vulnerable state. Not with the love one might expect, but with a look that I would later understand was her trying to figure a way to off me.
I shivered.
“Oh,” she said. “Are you cold?”
I didn’t answer.
And that’s when she came up with her devious plan. She reached across the counter to the electric heater waiting beside the toothbrush holder; she slid it to the edge of the sink; she switched it on to Hi.
It hummed as the current coursed through its wiring. The red coils came to life with electricity. An unnatural heat breathed over me in my sudsy sink.
Now I didn’t know a lot about stuff back then. I was only a few months old, after all. But even as an infant I sensed that this particular arrangement was a recipe for the proverbial disaster.
“Heh-heh,” I laughed. “Mom, what do you think about maybe moving that heater back a ways from the sink’s edge?”
Of course, this came out “Gloob.” But isn’t a mother supposed to understand her child’s language? At least, a mother who loves her son and wants to proudly watch him grow into a plumber or proctologist or politician?
She didn’t respond, but left me alone in the sink and turned toward the towel rack. I remember so clearly that next short moment. Haven’t I replayed it a million times in my par-boiled brain? Haven’t I awakened in the night in a cold sweat with that haunting memory looping back around for another go at my already frayed psyche?
Mom swung back with the towel, intentionally dragging it low through the air over the heater.
“Gloob!” I cried. “Flormp!”
But it was too late.

They say you’ll see a bright light when you die. I’d like to verify that, and further that macabre bit of information by telling the world that said light is bright blue. In my case, the light’s flash was punctuated by a loud Pop! and an ensuing sizzle.
As I said, I was dead only for a short time. But it was long enough for me to go on a journey into Neverland or Limbo Land or Oz or Whereverville. I’m not quite sure what you would actually call the place. But time stood still. I remember walking a path through a field of colorful flowers. I remember sweet sweet music, as if sung by angels, or honeybees. And I remember coming to a fork in the path. A flickering neon sign pointing one direction read – Plumbing – Proctology – Politics. And another sign pointing the other direction read – Self-Absorbed, Underappreciated, Delusional Pursuits.

And that’s my legitimate excuse.
Surely I can’t be held responsible for stumbling down the wrong path. I was a baby, and dead, and I had some serious mother issues. How can anyone blame me for choosing that more erroneous route through life? It’s not my fault. I was forced into making the kind of decision that a person shouldn’t have to make until they’re older, after a few years of life, once they’ve been exposed to examples of the harm inflicted by bad choices.

When I came to, I found myself bundled in my mother’s arms. She was weeping, rocking back and forth, and kissing me repeatedly. Apparently she had had a change of heart since she had tried to electrocute me. But of course it was too late for me. My path had been irrevocably chosen. My barometer was fried, my moral compass demagnetized. I was but a mere shell of my former potential. From that moment forward I was destined to a sort of weird progression through life. Rites of passage that most people assume will fall chronologically came to me all scattered. (For example, I had my first mid-life crisis when I was only six years old, and I might have actually fulfilled its promise with the widow down the street had I been physiologically capable.) My actions have always been, to say the least, shocking. Go figure!
My mother apologized profusely. After realizing the horror of what she had done to me, she was all sweetness and cuddling and moonlit milk parties. For a couple of years she seemed truly remorseful for her abominable sin. We had what one might look upon as a normal mother-child relationship. Albeit, with the child part of the equation being “somewhat off.” And I might have grown to trust her again entirely if not for a day in my toddlerhood when she once again was overcome with her demonic urge to be rid of me, this time by way of a blow to the head, followed by a rather painful spinal tap.
But that’s another sob story altogether.

"Gotdandruffsomeofititches!"

The true measure of a righteous man is in his swear words – those utterances that rise spontaneously to the surface when he is surprised by pain or frustration or fear. You can tempt him with harlots, money, or liquor, but all of those turpitudes can be contemplated beforehand, their ramifications weighed and measured until the potential offender can gather his good sense and turn his back on the potential offense. But drop a brick on a man’s toe and you’ll find out what he’s really like on the inside. A righteous man will either, 1- hold his tongue altogether, or 2 – supply a sugarcoated euphemism in place of a word more awful.
My grandfather was my first great example of how a righteous man should act. Granted, he had a lot of practice. He was a carpenter, and was prone to banging his thumb. As a boy, I would sometimes help him with his building projects, and I’ll never forget the revelatory day he pinched his fingers between a pair of two-by-fours. He clutched his hand. He bit his lip. He turned purple in the face. And then, clear as you please, with all the vehemence of a sedated nun, he whispered, “Sugar!”
I was greatly impressed. Here was an example of pure holiness. Here was a man as sweet on the inside as he appeared on the outside. Wow, I thought. Sugar. I could only hope that when I was tested by fire I would be so sanctified and self-possessed.
That day came soon enough. Shamefully for me, it came while I was in the presence of my grandfather. I was tightening a lag bolt with a wrench, really reaming on it, when – as they say – I flew off the handle. I raked my knuckles hard across a rough board, peeling them like carrots run across a cheese grater. I did all the usual stuff – I turned purple, bit my lip, clutched my hand. I even did a little dance. But when it came time to vent my pain by way of an audible expression, all heck broke loose. A stream of profanities flowed freely from the depths of my startlingly wicked soul.
“*(^!” I howled. “!^*)_<**~! %((#%! /><(^#!¡!¡!”
Oaths came out of me that I didn’t even know I knew. Vile verbs. Sinful syntax. Devilish Diction. Mephistopholian metaphors. Beelzebubular bleeps. Like four-letter party favors handed out at a hell-bent cusser’s convention.
I knew my grandfather was shocked. He didn’t say anything, but surely he was disappointed in his wayward grandson. I could feel it in his silence as he bandaged my bloody knuckles. He didn’t look me in the eyes, but finally, upon completing his first aid, he softly said, “Sugar,” as if to remind me of what was proper. “Sugar,” he repeated. “Sugar’s all you need.”
Of course, I was ashamed. I obviously had evil in my veins. But at least now I knew clearly what I had to work with, what about me I needed to improve.
Time passed. I experienced more instances of sudden pain and panic. Each time I swore like a sailor. I couldn’t seem to overcome my weakness. Profanity had a hold on me. I was a curseaholic.

Then one day I was playing basketball with some friends at school. At one point a pass went wild and smashed a kid named Ned right in the nose. He grabbed his face in his hands. I was the closest, and stopped running, bracing myself for the inevitable spew of loathsome words. Blood trickled through Ned’s fingers. He tipped his head back to check the flow. And then he said, “Flip.”
I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. “What?”
He looked at me askance – the only way a boy can when he has a bloody nose and his head is tipped back. “Huh?”
“What did you just say, Ned? I need to know.”
“Flip?” he gurgled.
“That’s what I thought.”
Could it be that a peer possessed the same purity as my grandfather? Was it even possible? I was intrigued. Sugar had never felt natural to me. It was not my go-to word. It felt old-fashioned, like a quaint explicative pulled straight out of Little House on the Prairie. But now Flip was an understatement I could embrace. I could make it mine. There was a quality in that single syllable that spoke to me on a deep level. It echoed of truth. It rang of salvation. I knew that if I could master the ways of Flip I could be saved from my own wantonness.
Ned turned out to be a nice guy. When I confided in him of my unruly vernacular, he placed a hand on my shoulder and assured me that he completely understood. He offered to take me to his church for a special class before school.
I went. And I’ll be honest, the rigorous re-education program in which I found myself enrolled sort of muddied my brain. Some of what I am about to divulge did indeed happen – I’m almost sure of it – but some of it, I have to qualify, might only have been a dream.

I found myself in a poorly lit basement with a dozen boys my own age – teenagers – as we were the problem group in regards to swearing. If one’s cussed streak could be subdued at this early stage, one could be assured of a long and happy life of euphemistical bliss. So went the theory.
Two clean-shaven young men in white shirts guided the dark proceedings. We began each session by standing in a circle and praying for strength. Then we got down to business. The leaders were ingenious in the many ways they could solicit profanity. They were miracle workers in the techniques of spontaneous hurt. When my first test came, I was asked to take a seat. This seemed a friendly gesture, but I was mistaken. They only wanted me off my guard. When I sat, a strategically placed tack pierced my right butt cheek.
“ƒ¡^*!” I yowled. Which was a long ways from Flip.
One of the re-educators scribbled something in a notebook, and then sadly shook his head.
My road to recovery, I knew, would be a bumpy one.

The ways of Flip (what I came, rather bitterly, to call Flippancy) did not come naturally to me. I just didn’t have the gift. All the other boys made marked progress in the program. You could hear their evolution furthering with each morning’s work. But I was pretty hopeless. My tendency was not to replace my more vile words with Flip, but to incorporate the sugarcoated word into my own verbal sewage. I was beginning to feel beaten. Dark circles formed under my eyes. Futility infiltrated my otherwise bubblingly boyish personality. And then one morning it all came to a head after I was subjected to an electric shock by way of twelve-volt di-ode hidden in a tube of Chap Stick.
“####Flip!” I shrieked. “Flippin’ flippity *>¡)-flip! /*~{-Flip! ^,:+-Flip! `..^§-Flip!”
And so on, and etcetera. You get the idea.
By the time I was done with my tirade, the entire room was blushing, even my white-shirted mentors. They escorted me to the door. “We apologize,” they said, “to you, God, and the world. But you are possessed by a demon stronger than we are able to tame. Please don’t come back.”
Sure, I was crestfallen. But also a little relieved. I had suspected all along how it would end. A born slangster just knows. I wandered the streets, muttering imprecations. I hung out around construction sites and Hip-Hop bars, just hoping to hear a few off-color words. But those dudes were pretty mild compared to me. Mere posers in the guttural arts.
“Flip!” I mocked, in the voice of a little girl. “Oh, Sugar!”
I learned later that the before school reeducation program had disbanded, forbidding any further use of Flip. It seemed my nasty verbal vomiting had managed to change the word for all concerned. It no longer satisfied the need for a euphemism, but had become just as vile by its association to me. (If you doubt this, look it up in the American Heritage Dictionary’s etymological history for the word Flip.) Pity Ned and those other poor boys who now had it in their psychological wiring. They were surely as doomed as me.

Like so many degenerates, I’ve somehow managed to join society. I keep my problem a secret. There is no medication yet available, but I’ve heard that certain drug companies have some promising possibilities in the works (although the side-effects list is still startlingly long and disturbing). Until then, I do my best to avoid situations where I might be exposed. I pray. I meditate. And I take refuge in my wife and kids. They alone know me and my great failing. They know not to ask me to assemble newly purchased bicycles, or to repair the toaster. They keep me away from bricks and open-toed shoes. God bless ‘em. They love me anyway, warts and all. They are the righteous sugar in my otherwise bitter and profane life.

The Menagerie

When I was one and twenty, I rented a squalid room in a ramshackle building. My intention was to hide myself away so I could learn to write. Because I was broke, the old tenement seemed my best option. Rent was cheap, like something out of Dickens – a mere farthing per month. I could tough out the inadequacies of the place – the odiferous communal bathroom, the sparrow-sized bugs, the threat of plague, the radiator that proved itself a medieval mockery of heating units. I just needed privacy and a little nook where I could scribble my poems and stories. But the one thing about old apartment buildings that I didn’t count on was that they inevitably come with thin walls. They also come with an assortment of peculiar neighbors who, no matter how reclusive you might be, find a way to weave themselves into the fabric of your daily life.

The first fellow resident I encountered was Monsieur Le Fou, or Mister Crazy. (I never learned if that was his real name.) He sported wild white hair styled after the fashion of Albert Einstein. Le Fou had been a French professor at the local university. Upon reaching retirement, he took his entire savings and blew it on an extended, extravagant trip around the world. He trekked to the headwaters of the Ganges; he sailed the South Seas; he visited an outpost in Antarctica. At the end of his journey, he found himself back where he began, penniless. The only home he could afford was a room in this dilapidated building.
“I expected to die on my journey,” he told me. “Or I thought I would perhaps hang myself from a palm tree in Tahiti, or take poison.”
“So what happened?”
“I became scared,” he smiled. “I became to think that even a bad life is better than not life.” He shrugged. “Besides, I am not so not happy. I have good memories to be my friends.”
And so now Le Fou wandered the halls of our building with his invisible friends, wearing nothing but socks and a dingy blue and white striped bathrobe. He never went out. I don’t know how he got his food. I would hear him shuffling past my door, singing Frere Jacque, or muttering a few lines from Rimbaud.
Sometimes I would hear Le Fou speaking very animated French with Boscoe. Boscoe was a young man from Cameroon, and was in the states studying to be an engineer. He was lanky and tall and had the most musical, deep voice I had ever heard. I met him one day on the stairs.
“So you are living here now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So you are one of us?”
“One of you?”
He laughed and spread arms to the building. “A member of the menagerie.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”
I didn’t know whether to be pleased, or worried.

Old men gravitate to old buildings. Or at least that’s how it seemed. With the exception of Boscoe, myself, and a Vietnamese student living on the third floor, most of the menagerie consisted of old fellows who had somehow made a bad plan for their dotage. The two most prominent of these men were Grumpy and Smokey Joe.
If you’ve ever wondered where your favorite Disney characters go after they retire, you need to look into the dark corners of old buildings. Apparently Disney has no good retirement offerings for its former employees. Grumpy was the dwarf from the movie Snow White. He had always secretly hoped to win Snow White’s heart and live with her in a little cottage at the edge of the woods, away from the nuisance of his other six crones. But then when that fop Charming showed up, all of Grumpy’s plans went south. He took to the bottle, which triggered a growth spurt, became unemployed (nobody wants a six foot dwarf), and wandered aimlessly for a few years. Eventually, heartbroken and disgruntled, he took a room down the hall from my own.
Grumpy was disheveled and unpleasant and uniformly gray. He never spoke, only growled or gurgled. I got to where I would wait for him to leave before I would go out into the hall because he was so surly. He swaggered and tipped down the corridor, banging into the walls along the way, as if he were moving through the bowels of a ship experiencing rough seas. Of course, he was merely drunk. The passageway always reeked of his boozy mien after he had passed.
Smokey Joe, on the other hand, left behind a sweet and lingering aroma of apple wood pipe smoke. He was the antithesis of Grumpy. This dapper little octogenarian always dressed in tweeds. He smoked a pipe. He wore a wool driving cap. And he always carried a black leather case under his arm. He was deaf as a post, and the few times I tried to talk with him, he only cupped a hand to his ear, smiled, and shook his head. He left the building every evening, and once, being curious, I followed him down the street at a distance. He shuffled along, leaving his trail of smoke, until he turned into the local pool hall. I watched through the window as he greeted everyone there like old friends. They slapped him on the back and brought him a pint of beer. Then Joe opened his case and fitted together his pool cue. He bent over a table set up for a game, lined up his stick with the white cue ball, and – Crack! – he came to life. It turned out that Smokey Joe was a brilliant billiards man. He went out every night and hustled the locals out of their loose cash. One man told me he was sure that Joe had a million dollars hidden somewhere. He lived so frugally, and was so successful at his trade, that he had to have a stash. I imagined the old hustler back in his room at night, sorting his piles of money, making plans for – what? Who knew? We members of the menagerie were generally secretive and unforthcoming about our hopes and dreams.

The menagerie was exclusively a men’s club. I suppose the general atmosphere of the building made it inhospitable for feminine occupation. But when January rolled around, the vacant room next to my own became the home of two young women. At first I was annoyed. The thin walls made it seem that they were right in the room beside me, and this was disturbing as I tried to write. But the women were Greek, and I, unable to understand their language, came to think of their foreign prattle as a sort of melodic white noise. I even got to where I liked to hear them laughing and talking when they came home at the end of the day. I guessed they were students, too, and probably taking classes at the university. Not knowing the facts, I guessed a lot of things.
Sometimes in the dawn, as I was sipping my tea and sharpening my metaphoric pencils, I would hear the women leave their room and walk down the hallway to the stairs. Curious, I would stand at my window and watch from above as they left the building and passed below me on the square. They walked arm in arm, huddled close. They left a trail of dark wet footprints in the new snow. The scene was very artful to my eye. Like something captured by a great photographer. I remember feeling an inexplicable fondness for these women. I knew nothing about them but what I could glean from this image and the little sounds they made beyond my walls. They were strangers, and yet there was something about them that made me think of them as my friends.

The Angel

When I was a kid, my best friend was a boy named Buck. Buck’s family owned a farm. Not a hugely prosperous farm, more of the break-even variety. They owned a beater Chevy pick-up that they used for work, and a beater Fairlane station wagon that they used for going to town. Buck had two little brothers and an older sister. They all lived with their parents in a singlewide trailer house, and when they started to outgrow their space, Buck’s dad tore out a wall on one end and built an extra room. The trailer had a closed-in porch built around the front door – a place to hang coats, and shed muddy boots – and in summer Buck’s mom kept a pair of purple geraniums in matching pots on either side of the entrance. Buck’s parents got their own room, and his sister, but Buck and his brothers had to share. Because Buck was the oldest, he got a separate bed, while his brothers had to sleep in bunk beds. Their room – what they called the bunkhouse – was just big enough for the beds, and when I spent the night, Buck, being a good host, would give me his bed. He slept underneath the bed with a blanket, on the floor.
What Buck’s family lacked in cash, they made up for in dignity. When I think of all the people I’ve encountered over my life, I realize that Buck and his family are among the ones I’ve respected the most. They worked hard on their farm, and, at least in my presence, without complaint. Somehow they managed to give one the impression that they were privileged people. Who wouldn’t want to own a farm and tend it with their own hands? Who wouldn’t want the Biblical satisfaction of planting and harvesting with the seasons, and of raising animals from calves and piglets to an age when they were old enough for slaughter? There was always more work than could be done, and so, in the summers, when I was eleven and twelve, Buck’s family hired me to help them out. They lived about two miles away, and I would get up as soon as it was light and ride my bike to their farm.

By the time I arrived, Buck and his brothers were usually just finishing their morning chores. They slopped the pigs, gathered eggs from the hen house, and fueled the tractor. Buck was in charge of milking their six milk cows, and I would help him pour grain into the bins in the headstalls and wash the cows’ teats before we hooked up the milking machines. These machines were the single modern convenience on their farm – all black rubber tubes and suction and stainless steel – and they were slung like sadistic torture devices under the cows’ bellies. The cows took it all in stride. In fact, they even seemed to enjoy it. They chewed their grain with sublime expressions while the machines went ka-choog, ka-choog, ka-choog at their nether regions.
After milking, we’d eat a quick breakfast and head for the fields. Most of the things we did would be in violation of some child labor law now. We drove a John Deere tractor – what was called a Johnny Popper because of the way it puffed blue smoke rings out its smoke stack – pulling all kinds of implements with swinging arms and whirling blades and chopping hoppers. We cut hay and bailed it and hauled it to the barn. We dug ditches under the hot sun. We stretched barbed wire for fences and trapped gophers. We castrated calves with a pliers-like gizmo called an Elastrator, one of us sitting atop the animal to hold him down while the other worked the brutal tool between his legs. Buck’s dad was around sometimes, but more often than not, he was busy elsewhere, and we were left to do this work on our own. If anything broke down out in the field, we’d tow it back to the shop and weld it back together. The members of Buck’s family were, if anything, self-sufficient.
It wasn’t all hard labor. We were boys, after all. Sometimes if it got too hot, we’d strip off our clothes and jump in the canal to cool off. Sometimes we’d go to check irrigation on our bikes and we’d take the long way because it was fun to ride down a certain hill, or because we wanted to pick a few blackberries along the way. Still, we got a lot done.
But every day at four thirty, no matter what corner of the farm we were working, Buck and I would drop whatever we were doing and head to the house.

A poplar tree stood behind Buck’s house next to a little spring that bubbled up into a trough. We’d wash up and lounge on the grass in the tree’s shade before a stump upon which was perched the family’s television. Buck’s mom didn’t want us in the house with our dirty clothes, and besides, it was too hot inside because she and Buck’s sister were always busy at some heated task like canning peaches, or making raspberry jam. An extension cord snaked out the window to the set, and we’d drink Cherry Kool-Aid while we waited for the commercials to finish before our show. Buck’s brothers would usually join us. And sometimes his sister would come out and sit in a lawn chair to watch.
It’s funny when I think about it now, almost quaint. We could have been hooked on Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, or any number of fancifully premised television programs popular in the day. But the one show we absolutely could not miss was The Brady Bunch.
In this program, a man and his wife live in a large modernist house with their six kids – three boys with curly black hair, and three pretty girls “with hair of gold.” Their house is kept spotless by their housekeeper – a woman with disarming wit and a Hollywood version of down-to-earth wisdom. It is always temperate in their world. It never rains. It is a world without soil. Music plays every time a character walks into a room, and this music is either light and happy, or somber, cueing us to the appropriate mood of the scene playing out before us as we were sprawled on the grass before the television.
I think what was most enthralling about this program for us was that this was supposed to represent reality. And yet, these people never once had cow shit on their shoes. Their living room was so big it would have held four trailer houses the size of Buck’s. And the problems the Brady kids endured were so bizarre – having to decide between joining karate club or scuba club, being traumatized by a bad haircut, having to share responsibility for the family dog – that we watched with a mix of fascination and disdain. Of course, the Bradys represented an idyll. They were held before us as how a family should cooperate while in the throes of diversity and disparate needs. Sure, we secretly wanted to be them. And yet, it was almost impossible not to think – Wow, these people are a bunch of pansies!
Buck and I sniggered at the show’s jokes, endured the family’s dramas, and waited for the scenes featuring our favorite character – Marcia.
Marcia was the oldest daughter. Tall, slim, long blond hair, and a coy smile. Honestly, she was slightly dumb, and generally shallow. But these traits only endeared her to us. We could live with her faults because they came so beautifully packaged. We could see ourselves showing her what life was really all about, maybe even take her swimming in the canal, or just sit holding her hand while watching the sun set over the cornfield. Those, at least, were my own adolescent thoughts. I can’t speak for Buck. But I couldn’t help but notice a certain reverence in his manner whenever Marcia came on the show. He liked her. I could tell.

One day, after the Brady Bunch was over, Buck and I went out to milk the cows before supper. We walked to the barn without speaking. Both of us were still thinking about the program we had just watched, and now it was like stepping through a door from an alternate reality and back into our world. We passed jarringly from clean pretty girls in tight polyester sweaters to a world that smelled of cattle and sweat and dirt.
We herded the cows to their stalls like automatons.
We washed their teats.
We hooked them up to their sucking machines – shluck – shluck – ka-choog, ka-choog, ka-choog.
Buck finally said, “You can go on home, if you want. I can finish up.”
I shrugged, but didn’t leave. It was a matter of honor to see the day to its end.
We stood with the cows. Buck ran his hand along one cow’s black and white hip, and its hide shivered under his palm as if it had felt a biting fly.
Ka-choog, ka-choog.
Buck’s dad drove by in his pick-up, and we both stepped to the doorway to watch. We waved as the man passed, but Buck’s dad didn’t see, and he disappeared over the hill on his way to change the water in one of his fields.
Buck nodded. “That Marcia sure is a pretty girl.”
“Yeah,” I said. I stood silent for a moment, but then took a chance to say what was on my mind. “I think it’d be fun to really know her, and to show her stuff.”
Buck snorted, and chewed on a little stick of hay. The early evening sun turned his face ruddy. “Yeah. That’d be fun. She sure ain’t like none of the girls around here,” he said. “She’s a real angel.”
We stood for a moment. A haze of dust was settling over the fields and swallows were swooping and looping to catch bugs. With a sigh, Buck turned back to the cows.
After we finished up with the milking, I said, “See you tomorrow,” and rode home on my bike.

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Five – In Which My Grandmother’s Warning Proves Itself Correct)

First, you need to understand where I was coming from. For the following fiasco to make any sense, you have to know that I was raised in a straight-laced Protestant household where communion on Sunday mornings meant a morsel of saltine cracker washed down with a shot of Welch’s grape juice. Alcohol was not part of our daily life. In fact, up to the time of this story, my entire alcoholic consumption would not have filled the smallest tankard offered at the corner bar. My cumulative inebriant punch so far had included: 1 – a taste of bubbling Cold Duck forced on me by a worldly friend in junior high school, 2 – a half can of warm Budweiser shared with a gregarious farmer after hauling his hay, 3 – a tablespoon of cough syrup poured down my gullet during a bad chest cold, and 4 – two big gulps I accidentally swigged from a carton of orange juice that had gone a tad past its expiration date in the back of my mother’s refrigerator. I was, that is to say, an alcohol virgin.
Not that I wanted to be. I knew that all the greatest writers were fervent imbibers. Heck, Hemingway alone had made drinking seem an integral part of the creative process. But I was wired pretty hard in the ways of Protestant self-denial. Regarding the evils of drink, I believe this went back to a morning in my childhood when my grandmother and I had walked by the Pastime Tavern on our way to Milt’s Market. There on the sidewalk, curled up in a ball of slovenly disgrace, laid a man in drunken slumber from his boozy binge the night before. My grandmother tried to shield me from his sinfulness, but I saw him clearly – the drool puddled on the cement beneath his unshaven cheek, the oblivious, wicked smile on his lips – and this image burned itself into my young and impressionable psyche as the greatest example of the dangers of drink.
“Wine is a mocker,” grandmother whispered to me as we hurried past the hell-bound degenerate, “and strong drink is for fools.”
Still, I knew I would someday need to partake of this particular vice if I were ever to understand a large portion of the wayward humanity for whom I hoped to pen my poems. If nothing else, it was a necessary part of my research for becoming a writer. And now, like a blessing from Bacchus, the perfect opportunity had arrived.
“Why don’t you come up some time,” the girl had asked me on that blustery day in the square, “…for a glass of wine or something?”
Wine and a pretty girl named Sara – there was a lovely ode hidden in there somewhere. I could feel it in my poetic bones.

Whereas my apartment was shabby, Sara’s was not. I noticed this right away when I stepped through her door. Where was the rodent smell? Where the grime and bugs and peeling linoleum? Instead, Sara had clean carpet. Her sparkling kitchenette was furnished with a stainless steel teapot and a tidy bowl of bruiseless fruit. She had framed prints on her walls – things by artists with exotic compound names like Maholy-Nagy and Cartier-Bresson.
“It’s nice,” I said, with nonchalance. But I could hear in my voice that first hint of intimidation.
“Stay cool,” I muttered to myself. “Kerouac cool.”
She showed me the rest of her cozy apartment. She had a separate bedroom and her very own bathroom, complete with a shower. (My building had a latrine at the end of the hallway that I shared with ghostly, fragrant people I never saw.) She had an arched window looking out onto the main street in her front room. She led me to her work nook and pointed out another window into the near distance. “And there’s your place over there.”
Sure enough, there it was. The moment was mildly shocking. I felt I was being allowed to see myself through Sara’s eyes. My dilapidated writing table stood waiting across the intervening space like a lame and sway-backed horse. Don Quixote came to mind. It was sort of like passing a mirror and discovering, with a certain measure of horror, that you have a booger on the end of your nose.
Well, I encouraged myself, Sara did ask you to come up to her place “for a glass of wine or something.” So she must like guys with boogery noses and pathetic apartments. Stay cool, Brian. Just stay cool.
“Why don’t we sit and chat?” said Sara.
Stiffly casual, I sat into a comfortable chair. Sara put on some soft music and settled into the chair opposite me. She wore a pair of yellow socks scrunched down around her beautiful ankles, and she drew her feet up onto the cushion while tucking a strand of blond hair behind an ear. Between us on a short table, like liquefied forbidden fruit, stood two empty glasses and an open bottle of wine. A plate of white cheese and thin crackers sat beside them.
“I hope you like merlot,” she said.
“Mmmm,” I replied, not knowing for sure if she was referring to the music, the wine, or the cheese.
“Would you pour us some?”
“Of course,” I smiled. “Absolutely.”

Once, when I was about seven years old, I was in a Christmas play in our church. At one point in the production, I, dressed as a sheep, was supposed to step forward from the other kids and address the audience with an adorable and meaningful speech about the Christ child. But somehow my nerves got the best of me just as I was to deliver my lines and instead of saying, “Behold, baby Jesus!” as I was meant to, I said, “Behold! Bejesus!” Feeling the heat of shame spreading over me at my mistake, and then hearing the gasps coming from the various righteous souls in the audience waiting for me to correct my wrong and move forward into my eloquent soliloquy, I lost all control of my brain and said, again, “Bejesus!” And then, in a downward spiral of infamy, as if to seal my history in the church as a corrupt and demon-possessed child, I said it once again.
“Bejesus!”

That old mishap flashed in my mind now as I prepared to pour comely Sara a glass of something called merlot. Forcing myself to bolstering thoughts of Kerouac, I bravely took up the bottle and glass into my shaking hands and began to pour.
Something told me that wine wasn’t supposed to glug when it came out of a bottle, but I’ll be danged if I could make it stop. Glug, it mocked. Glug-glug-glug.
Behold! I thought.
Somehow I completed the action more or less successfully. I handed Sara her full glass, and then glugged another for myself. I felt her eyes on me.
Cool as an ice-cold cucumber, I told myself. Think James Bond.
Sara held up her glass, “To getting to know one another.”
I felt like an awkward youngster who had accidentally wandered into a grown-up movie. I held up my glass.
“Cheers,” I replied, with all the charm of an orangutan.
Sara slowly moved her glass to her lips, and I, following her lead, did the same with my own glass. But whereas Sara took only a single sip, I, with what must have been the innate survival method of a little boy about to swallow a draught of castor oil, downed my entire large glass in a series of quick gulps. I guess in my panic I got the sophisticated art of wine sipping mixed up with how cowboys throw back whiskey in old Hollywood westerns. Dribbles leaked along the edges of my glass. I wiped my chin with my sleeve.
I realized my blunder at once. I could see it in Sara’s astonished expression. I could feel it in the liquid fire of hell burning its way down into my innards.
“Wow,” said Sara. “You must have been thirsty.”
With my eyes watering, and my throat constricting, I could only nod.
“Have some more, if you like,” said Sara.
I shook my head and carefully placed my glass on the table. “I’m good,” I wheezed.
I suspected now that I had only a moment to express myself with any eloquence. I knew enough about alcohol from reading Hemingway to realize that the poison would soon be entering my bloodstream to do its lethal work on my already languishing personality. This was, after all, my first ever glass of wine. My system would surely go into shock. Time was – burp! – of the essence.
“I broughted one of my poems to read for to you,” I announced loudly. (It had seemed like a good idea at the time.)
“Wonderful!” said Sara. “I’ve been curious about your stuff.”
I smiled.
And smiled.
Something odd was happening in my head.
Finally, I pulled the folded paper from my pocket, smoothing it flat on the table beside the cheese plate, and then held it up to read before the wine could do its mischief. But I knew it was already too late. My shirt was suddenly wet under the arms. I felt the room shift a few degrees to the left. And then I left my body to float near the ceiling over our heads. But by that point, I knew, I had already made my leap. There was nothing left but to make my fall appear as graceful as I could.

The poem I read to Sara that evening was what I considered at the time to be my best and most honest work. It was, at the very least, sincere. I no longer have it (I burned it later that night), but I remember certain details in its style and tone. It was something of a collision between HOWL and MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB. There was a stanza in which I waded through “the knee-deep blood of my own decimated heart,” and another where I continued my “lachrymose journey into the bitterest depths of my inkish and fretful soul.”
Looking back, I suppose my intention was to impress Sara by being up front about who I was. But I don’t think it came off that way. The wine was doing its dirty work. I was becoming so nervous (Bejesus-style nervous) that my voice began to sound as if I had taken a hit off a bottle of helium. It just kept getting higher and higher, like an adolescent in the midst of a hormone surge. To compensate for this, I slipped into a presentation that had a swaggerly braggadocio. I gestured wildly with my arms. I clutched at my chest over the place where my decimated heart was supposed to be. I gnashed my teeth and writhed in mortal anguish as I rent my hair. I knew that my poem was not having the desired effect on Sara. How could it? I wasn’t channeling Kerouac. Instead, my words were joining into a single, nonsensical slur that sounded as if it were being delivered by a demented, born-again version of Mickey Mouse.

The rest of that evening was, to say the least, fuzzy around the edges. I remember the look of horror on Sara’s face. (She was kind, but she couldn’t hide it.) And I remember a change in the general atmosphere of her apartment. I did my best to save the evening, but it was no use. I was drunk as a proverbial skunk. We never really got around to the “or something” part of the date that I had hoped for. When I finally staggered to the door to leave, I knew that Sara and I would not be moving in together as I had secretly hoped. We would not travel to Nice by tramp streamer. We would not someday settle down as a successful poet and his equally successful artist wife and have two lovely children – a boy, and a girl with blond hair. Instead, I would only see Sara a few times on the street. She was getting ready to leave after Christmas for her apprenticeship in New York.
“Wish me luck,” she said.
Snow was falling in the square.
“You’ll do great.”
She smiled. Those crushing blue eyes. And then she kissed me on the cheek before skipping away into her me-less future.
I watched her go. And then, as was my wont –
I dashed straight home
and wrote a poem.

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Four – In Which I am Bumped From my Existential Rut)

I had resolved that I would never again – not in a million *%^#~´¡ years! – fall in love. That regrettable opportunity, I bewailed, had come and gone with the bitter winds. Instead, my destiny would be one of a brokenhearted solitude expressed in gloomy poems penned as I aimlessly roamed the indifferent world.
Alas! And woe!
Sure, I might stoop to take a lover now and then, might make a hapless friend or two along the way, but these affairs would only leave me evermore hollow and glum as I recalled the betrayed love of my bittersweet youth. (I can smile now, but at the time, I truly was pathetic human wreckage.) But as with so many foolproof outlines for life, things sometimes go awry. For me it happened on a chill afternoon in the early December of my twenty-first year unto heaven.

The day was gray. I sat on a cold bench reading next to the empty fountain in the square below my rented room. Dry leaves scuttled over the sidewalk on the breeze. An occasional snowflake glanced off the open pages of my book. My collar was turned up in existential seafarer fashion. I was shivering. Everything, that is to say, was as it should be, as I had come so forlornly and quixotically to expect it.
And then I heard a voice – “Hello.”
The word was so pleasantly put that I didn’t bother to respond. There was no way it could be directed at me.
“Good book?”
I looked up. And there she was, right before me, all sunny and sweet and incongruent.
I think I only stared.
She smiled. “I’m Sara.” She pointed with her thumb to the building over her shoulder. “I have the apartment up there, across the street from yours.”
I knew who she was, all right. Hadn’t I seen her a thousand times through her window? But she had always been so far away, behind glass, in a parallel realm of dreams.
“O’m Blhom,” I said. Or at least that’s how it sounded in my head. My mouth and heart and brain were not collaborating. But she seemed to understand. We shook hands – which I think struck us both as kind of funny and too formal considering we had been waving back and forth to one another for weeks – and then Sara sat beside me on the bench.
She told me about herself. I learned that she was studying graphic art, and that she was working to get her portfolio together before she went off to New York for some sort of an apprenticeship. Her voice was even more pleasing than I had imagined. Her eyes were blue, the only points of color, it seemed to me, in the whole wide and otherwise colorless world.
I tried not to get too personal, tried not to mention that I sometimes watched her from my room late at night with the lights turned out – that I knew she was left-handed, and tucked her hair behind her ears when she worked. I didn’t want to creep her out. Instead, I told her about writing poetry, alluding only vaguely to my wretched, angst-ridden persona.
The moment had that teetering feel to it – the kind where you’re not sure if you’re real, or just some character being born from the pages of a really great novel. The gods seemed to be grinning down on us. An odd sensation. Doubtless a symptom of my spending too much time removed from reality and immersed in books. Sara was an idyll. She was so pretty and smart and nice. How could she be part of this cold world in which I dwelled and suffered?
Holy Cow! I thought. Maybe I could fall in love again!
“Well,” she finally said, “I kind of have to go. But why don’t you come up some time for a glass of wine or something?”
“Schwurr,” I said. “Glaphe!”
We set a time for Friday evening, and then she went off down the street.
For a long time, I watched the corner around which she had disappeared. The snow was starting to fall for real. Lights were coming on in windows. Had any of that magical moment really occurred? I could have convinced myself that it hadn’t, if not for the echo of Sara’s lovely voice still sounding in my head, and the warm fragrance of her lemon-scented soap lingering beside me on the empty bench.

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Three – In Which I Dabble in Voyeurism)

No one likes to think of himself as a Peeping Tom. A guy wants to be a decent fellow. But when I lived in my squalorous rented room, my window afforded me a view so attractive and magnetic that I found I could only divert my gaze with great effort. It was like how it is when there’s a television going in the room. Try as you might to concentrate on something else, your eyes just automatically drift in its flickering, mesmerizing direction.
Not that my view was of anything untoward or X-rated. It was simply of a girl working at her drawing table across the way. The private, inner reaches of her apartment were out of sight to me. But the alcove where she worked was at the exact same level as mine, lined up like a little parallel universe, as if whoever had built our buildings had intended for our windows to correspond across the intervening space by way of a corridor of uninterrupted vision, the same way the Egyptians used to line up their monuments with the sun and the moon.
I would sit at my desk, writing distracted poems, while she sat at hers, drawing. And although a great expanse lay between us, and the business of the streets passed below, it sometimes felt as if we were in the same room, shoulder to shoulder, both toiling at our craft like secret sharers on a common mission to harness the mystery of the universe. Windows began to play prominently in what I was writing, and blond hair. I began work on a clumsy, oblique poem in which a young man attempts to walk a tightrope stretched between his window and another glowing window far away. Very clever.
She knew I was there, too. Sometimes she would wave to me and smile, and I would wave back. Sometimes she would hold up her teacup in my direction, and nod. So it wasn’t as if it were a one-sided affair. We were in league somehow. It felt nice. It felt friendly.
This went on for a few weeks. Nothing changed in our comfortable arrangement. But like all boy-girl relationships, no matter how unusual, there comes that inevitable moment when one must decide if it’s going to move beyond friendship and become something more. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that way just yet – I was still enjoying our benevolent camaraderie – but then the stars moved into place and the moment was subtly forced to its crisis.

It was late. A November night. I was tired and ready for bed. (A long day of poetry can really wear you out.) I turned off the lights. And then after a big yawn and stretch, I stood for a moment in the center of my room and peered out my window. I saw that the girl was still working at her table. It occurred to me that I could see her, but she couldn’t see me. Whereas I had always been afraid to stare before, I could now watch her freely. I could learn more about her, get a better sense of who this enigmatic being was by how she moved and held herself when she thought herself to be alone.
She had a nice, studied way of holding her pencils when she drew. She was left-handed. Her posture was perfect. She was pretty. She kept her hair tucked behind her ears. Everything else I learned, everything I believed I could infer – that she was lonely, that she was earnest, that she was somewhat sad – I gleaned from those few objective details.
I watched her through my window. It didn’t feel wrong in the moment. I was too spellbound to realize how inappropriate I was being until she did something that caused me to pause. After some time, she laid down her tools, stretched her arms above her head, and then stepped to her window, facing out.
She stood for a long time, arms crossed over her chest, looking across the square toward my window.
My room was cold; I held myself still.
She made the slightest gesture, a little nod of her head and a whisper, in the manner of a familiar goodnight.
Then she turned away and flipped out the lights.
Her window went black.
I shivered.
I continued to stand in the center of my room. Had she seen me? No. She simply knew I was there. Perhaps she had done the same thing herself a time or two. Maybe she had secretly watched me writing my poems from her darkened window. And so she knew me, I realized. Who I was. In fact, in that moment, she seemed to be the one person in the whole world who knew me best of all. It was an odd sensation, all mixed up with joy and gravity.
Eventually, I crawled into my bed. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about what had just happened, wondering what her name was, imagining her voice, until at last I slipped into a dizzying dream of tightropes and falling and flying away.

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Two – In Which I Venture onto the Treacherous Byways of Language)

You wouldn’t know it unless you’ve tried it, but writing poems can be difficult, dangerous work. Those who look down on poets as namby-pamby couch loungers in plush purple bathrobes are in for a surprise if they ever deign to take up pen and paper and give it a go for themselves. The mental stress alone is more than most mortals can endure. The hunt for metaphors is exhausting. Imagine your soul is a cabbage. Life is your vinegar. Now run it all through a mill churning on slow speed. The resulting slaw is your poem. May the gods grant you talent enough to make it palatable. And, Oh, Brother! May you survive the punishing process.

As a young hopeful settled into my sanctum sanctorum – or rented room – I began my apprenticeship in the disciplines of poesy. I studied the old masters – Milton, Chaucer, Donne, and Byron – and I studied the masters closer to my own time as well – Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, and Plath. I blithely fell to the wiles of both free verse and rhyme. I heroically galloped into heroic couplets, and fearlessly ambled into iambic pentameter. I scribbled haiku until I was punch-drunk with nuance.
For the first time in my life, I began to really probe the gutworks of language. Sure, I had been speaking and writing in more or less comprehensible English for quite a while, but like most people, I had been blind to its sparkle, deaf to its musicality. Now, suddenly, words became amazing to me. How could these little gasps of breath, blown as they are over our tongues and teeth and lips, carry so much meaning and magic? How could a string of words send our spirits soaring with happiness in one moment, but then, when rearranged, crush us with their gloomy weight in the next? That these spoken words could then be transposed into abstract written symbols, and then strung together into lyrical epics of lasting worth to the passing generations – well, that was almost incomprehensible to me. And yet, struggle to comprehend it I did. For long hours. Day into night into day. Week after week.
I didn’t recognize it when it first started happening to me, but writing poetry was slowly becoming a sickness. I began sleeping at odd hours. I kept to myself. I broke into sweats. I mumbled and giggled in my empty room, as if I were channeling whatever depraved or moonstruck personality I imagined speaking and giggling the lines of my current poem. The most distracting symptom of my malady was when a single word would lodge in my brain, vibrating in my head like a pop song, or the buzz of a mosquito, refusing to leave me be until I found a place for it in a poem. I couldn’t shake it loose. The word owned me like a slave. These were sometimes only benign words like toaster or happy or lark, but could sometimes be weirder words like ennui or hobbledehoy or floccinaucinihilipilification. Some of these words were so persnickety and tenacious that I would have to go for a walk – get them out in the open – just so I could see more clearly what I was battling.
These walks were like something from the realm of zombies. On one plane I was a young man aimlessly strolling the quaint suburban lanes of my little college town, while on another plane I was a desperado seeking escape in my turbid brain from the twisting, hazardous pathways of language. This other wordy way was full of pitfalls and terrors. It was full of shadows and dead ends. I remember one night following down an obscure path that lead me tumbling headlong into the dumbstruck conclusion –
“There is no suitable rhyme for foible!”
After the shock and disappointment had passed, and after the fear of being lost had subsided, I began to fantasize about starting a movement based on my new discovery. Surely it would revolutionize poetry. No one would ever read literature in the same way again. I would call it Foibleism. I would be its chief practitioner and founding member. It would be a poetry based on hopelessly rhymeless words strung together in nonsensical patterns. Years hence, when students cracked open their books on the history of verse, they would find a portrait of me with a little blurb underneath that read – “Brian Kindall – daring… brilliant… radical … said to be the first Foibleist.”

Looking back on that time, I can see that poetry might well have killed me. I was obviously too young and untried to ever truly meet its challenges. I was travelling on nothing but enthusiasm and the desperate need to shape my recent heartbreaking experiences into something I could clutch and cherish and then throw out to the world so it could see how I’d suffered. All very romantic. But my skills were next to nonexistent. My naiveté laughable. Still, the sickness had me pretty bad. Nothing, it seemed, could save me.

Summer passed and autumn took hold. The nights grew frosty without me even noticing. I grew sicker. The true stuff of poetry – all that life passing beyond my window – was lost to me. I was too immersed in the detail of craft, too bound to my own blinkered tragedies, to ever notice my need for new lifeblood. And then one day, thankfully, something happened.
The fountain in the square outside my window had been running nonstop since I had moved into my room. It had become a sort of white noise, always burbling and splashing in the background. But one afternoon someone decided fall was far enough along that it was time to turn off the fountain before it froze up the works. A switch was thrown; the fountain stopped.
The sudden change in the air was enough to cause me to look up, something I hadn’t done in weeks. And when I did, my eyes, as if guided by some divine force, lifted to the apartment above the jewelry store directly across the square. There, behind another window like mine – only less shabby – sat a girl at a table. She was working hard at something, using what appeared to be drawing tools under a low lamp. I watched, transfixed, as if viewing a distant dream. Finally, the girl paused to assess her work, and then, tucking her blond hair behind an ear, she turned and looked out her window, her blue eyes falling directly on mine.
For a little eternity, we just stared at one another across the misty space. A flock of sparrows passed between us. Then she smiled and waved. I lifted my own hand. I was surprised to find my gesture to be less of someone saying hello and more of someone reaching out for help.
“Not waving,” I muttered, “but drowning.”
The girl didn’t know it at the time, but she was to become my salvation, curing me of my sickness just before I slipped away once and for all into the verbose and moribund depths of my own paradise lost.

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part One – In which I Embrace a Splendid Squalor)

When a young person is starting out in the writerly arts, the first thing he or she must do is ask three soul-searching questions –

1 - Where do I fit into this wide, book-filled universe?
2 - What do I have to write about that will further humanity?
3 - How can I be cooler than Jack Kerouac?

Hemingway was big, too. But even old, uncool people liked him, so Kerouac, being more exclusively admired by the younger set, became my standard for literary coolness. He was syncopated Jazz Scat on paper. He was a resounding Beat in the big drum of the Cosmos. He was everything I longed to be – a spiritual seeker and life embracer, a marrow sucker and word experi-mentor.
Granted, I didn’t have Kerouac’s capacity for drugs and booze. I was more of a teetotaler in those days (although I had experimented with strong coffee). And I had yet to travel cross-country by the seat of my pants, as Jack had done in On The Road. So I had to take stock of my other virtues. Upon close inspection of my own limited journey so far, I decided the two greatest strengths I had going for me as a writer were –

1 – I was heartbroken.
2 – I was poor.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much to work with. In fact, anyone with any savvy would likely have sensed from the outset that it was a surefire recipe for sentimental, self-absorbed drivel. But as Emerson said – A man must suck the sucker he is given to suck. (Paraphrased) And so I started to carefully shape and craft my persona.

My first move was to find new housing. Since starting college, I had lived with four other guys in a rented house. They were great friends, but they had little interest in traveling the same dark pathways of the psyche that I needed to explore in order to become a literary giant. Besides that, our digs were just too lavish. It was undermining my angst. How could I plumb my mortal and forlorn depths if I was sitting around in brightly lit rooms with these good-natured comfort seekers in puffy chairs, watching music videos, while eating relatively well-rounded meals? No. It was obvious to me. If I was ever to succeed, I needed squalor of the variety enjoyed by George Orwell or Henry Miller. I needed misery. I needed solitary confinement in the drabbest cell I could find.
Now this wasn’t Paris or New York, but Moscow, Idaho, a town of no more than 18,000 inhabitants at the time, and drab cells – looked down upon by the general public – were not easy to come by. But at last I found just what I needed in a sagging, three story building right in the center of town. I took a corner room on the second floor for eighty-five dollars a month. It had high peeling ceilings and three tall windows looking out onto the main street on one side, while three more windows on another wall looked over the town square. A fountain geysered below me in the square – its spume sometimes wafting through my open windows on breezier days – and laughing children often floated sticks and paper boats in the fountain while their parents waited nearby. A clock on a pole told dubious time beside the fountain. A bar was just across the street, and oblivion-seeking college kids poured in and out of its doors most nights until the wee hours.
My room was furnished with a sink, a hotplate, and a shelf complete with a bowl a plate and a pot. It came with a half-size Frigidaire refrigerator that hummed the doleful, meditative tune of a Cistercian monk. The room had a large bed and a wide table made of boards. A spoke-backed chair sat before the table, and an armchair was placed in the corner where the windowed walls came together in a sort of cloistered nook. I also had a lamp on a flexible pole that I would move back and forth from the table to the armchair, depending upon where I was writing or reading. A steam radiator stood like a medieval sculpture under one window. The communal bathroom – la pièce de résistance – was down the hall. My room emanated an odor of rodents and lead paint and long-gone budding poets. Silverfish scurried into cracks whenever the lights were flipped on. Street noise was constant. The place was squalor incarnate.
My favorite touch was the ice cream shop on the ground floor directly beneath my room. This seemed profoundly fitting to me. While the masses were enjoying their sugary, double-scooped treats down below, I – the self-sacrificing wordsmith at the edge of society – would be laboring on high to create for them offerings of a more soulful worth.
I took two classes at the university that fall – Shakespeare and Modern American Poetry – since that was all I could afford. I eschewed student loans in those days because, I reasoned, that would only obligate me to the Machine, turning me into a slave as I struggled to pay them back. Poetry was a precarious occupation after all, sometimes not paying big money until a poet was well into his thirties. Besides, taking only two classes would afford me more time to pour out my heart into the beautifully cadenced sonnets and poignant villanelles I saw drifting before the open window of my mind’s eye.
Ensconced firmly in my splendid squalor, wearing my heart on my sleeve, with the ghost of Kerouac hovering over my shoulder, there was nothing left but for me to get to work.