The World Is the Home of Love and Death (35 page)

He is saying, “You’re a growing boy—welcome to hell—well, I don’t want to give you pause; I want to applaud you.” He means everything, everything he says, one way or another. He says, “Be young and sweet: use your head. Remember I always said, use your head. You’re a Jim Dandy, I’ll tell the world.” The surprised electricities of the self, dancing and mocking, raked by water noise, magnetically attract further naked electrical storms, response, in grasp and half-grasp in the speed of life. I feel Dad’s voice as an electric touch, cruelly civilized in a burning way, this thing of the
air-raids
on you of an actual voice, thatnervous actuality.… The delicate cliff of nests and its gates and the sore
and
smooth-electrical thorniness, that stuff and the soul dilating—
hurtfully
—the momentary collapse of
loneliness
and the onset of a rash availability, over and over, the rabbit heat and finch tones of sexual sensation enter me as a sort of rape. These windless transfers, mind to mind, man to man, the madly different inner labyrinths and dangers, it is like a dream although it is directly real.

Everything has significance as in a poem. Or as when you’re in love. I’m sorry I lived in the ways I did live, but the different motions of parts of me went whirring and whirring among various electric reeds and in a biological light, meanings half-given to me, half-earned, half-stolen, the mathematics of mental things: the great stammerer speaks,
ab, ah
, what astounding feeling.

“Are you taking a cold shower? Are you getting rid of your feelings?”

Cleaning up I am coldly without feeling, and then suddenly wrenched by sensation and feeling. Who is
he
on the other side of the curtain? The soft-edged, masked-face manifestations of his importance to me shriek among the flusters of guessed-at meanings—the mind is listening:
all of it is real.
 … A wild and stinking horde of ghosts hoots along my nerves and disorders my schoolboy calm. Freakishly compounded complexities of feeling in an interval-breathed self … in a moist pit of feeling, the agonies of pleasure and the dimensionalities of duration and recurrence. Specific memories in their changeable meaning, nanosecond by nanosecond, carom along lines of association, witnessy and radiant.… Unrepeatable singularity, the real geography of the moment, the vocal silence in the bathroom, calculation, sweet silence.… The mind is a sort of angel’s egg of the universe and hatches stuff.

Daddy, back in our room, the two of us, Daddy sits himself in the too-small chair by the window. He is ill and listening to himself, sullen and distant.
He loved you. He always loved YOU.
“Maybe you should take a shower,” I say, drying my hair. Some days he is afraid of bathing and of showers.

He says, “Spare me your opinions. I don’t like smart-alecks.… Well, I guess we are in the land of broken hearts.” What does he know? “Knowing you is like sitting in an electric chair,” he says. Then he says, “Little Bird, you are my sunshine.”
Sometimes an electric chair
, my mind adds.

The smart-aleck boy says aloud, “Sometimes an electric chair.”

We go two-by-two in the flood. In my voice you hear my father’s voice, Daddy’s voice—What did you expect, that you could know anyone with impunity?

“Doncha kno-ohhh? Juh know
j’uhh {k}no{w}, know, know
better than to talk like a fool …” he says with a degree of grandeur.

Each flicker of mind is like a barn swallow circling, hunting, perching. I don’t want to be graceless. The odd, true, jammed warehouse of a world and of an intimacy, the actual leaves in the slight wind at the window, agonized, temporary, interrupted tumbling, the skittery advance into the next moment, the thuds and rumbles and stolen strength of the heart, among the secrecies. A lost ecstatic real is part of the hortatory stillness:
dry your hair and dry between your toes and keep breathing.…
The real billows out in insistent kinship—the real does this in me, assigns me to itself. My parents came to me without footnotes.

My Dad says to me, “Pisher—” Then: “Little Pisser—” Then: “Macher Peepee—” Mockery. Then:
“Don Juan
 … you’re dripping on the floor.”

I thought I knew what he thought life was like for
a man.

Some of S.L.’s Jokes

“I have to laugh sometimes: people who look like turkeys think they look like angels—maybe they have their wings in their wallets. I had the face of an angel when I was young, and over prison walls I could fly. The daring young man on the flying trapeze. I would give you the shirt off my back, and a lot of good it did me. You didn’t have to kowtow tome like I was God. I will say this: there is no appreciation in the world. Ah, ah, everything wears me out. Well, I always voted for a short life but a happy one. I wouldn’t say it’s been a happy one. I don’t care. I’m the I-don’t-care boy. How do you like them bananas? Well, you can all go to hell—not you if you’re nice. I’ll tell you the truth: life isn’t good for you. Did you know I was a philosopher? I am but no one pays attention. It’s not my fault I was always a sweetheart. I didn’t make the world—there’s a lot I didn’t do. You are the light of my life—how is that for a joke on me? I guess I’m not too lucky, but I’m a good sport. I give three cheers because I have you in my life: you cheer me up: hoorah, hoorah, hoorah. I wouldn’t believe everything I say if I was you—I wouldn’t listen to me like I was
William Shakespeare,
 … Listen to me like I was S. L. Silenowicz—that’s enough for me. Give us a kiss …” He says, “I don’t want to be listened to like I was a woman—but I sure as hell’m not the man in the family. I’m down and out; I’m cannon fodder. I lost everything and I’m stuck. I’m stuck with you.…”

My sense of accident and darkness comes from him, from what he said in the weakened boom of his voice and how he looked at me, the expressiveness of his face, in the domestic light of his illness, of the time we spent together—bridal, two men in a room, a kind of early adolescent ceremony of education: I mean that being with him was to enter the world of men … “Learn to talk to me, and you can talk to anyone.… Believe me, I understand everything—everything. I’m the center of the universe. When I look up, there’s sky all around, so I know I am the center.” Him and his son more or less—Ah, God, you gave me a decomposing, local emperor, and the relentlessness of moments, death, actuality. “If you don’t pay attention, I don’t exist—do you hear me? If you don’t understand me, I might as well be dead now—you’re talking to a sick man, but I am a man …”

I was impressed by the efficient effect, the sense of truth (of a kind) that he conveyed to me in his talk, in his jokes, in his actuality. I listen and from time to time I actually
hear
him.

He says, with a sigh, “You have a way of sucking me in, little pitcher with “big ears—the big pitcher—well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I always hated old Jews: they smell bad and they think they know it all: they don’t listen to anyone. You want to cheer me up? You want to make a career of this? Half the world is waiting for your sunrise. It’s hard to love a man—ask me and I’ll tell you the truth: I’m such a genius, I can do that. It’s just my luck that you can’t love anyone. Anyone asks you, you tell ’em,
S.L. said I couldn’t love anyone … S.L. always defended me: people said I wasn’t fit to sleep with hogs, and he said I was
 …”

I remember the often ugly but thrilling melodies his voice had, the male implication, shameless-shameful,
men-in-a-garage
, his variety of talk. It stirs me in the bowels of my being—it reminds me of who I am.

“I don’t want everyone spoiling you—anyone,” he said. He often changed his mind midsentence. Pronouns and emotions flew around as did his sense of propriety, about what it was fit for me to know. “You’re just a kid. Everything is hard enough without you making it worse.”

His throat chuffs with obedient and disobedient breath in illness and intimacy.

“What I have to say is turn over a new leaf—actions speak louder than words. Give us a kiss. Who knows what a kiss means? Captains and lootenants—what would it take to get you to be nice to me, a real human being, day in and day out?”

(I said dully and in a pure voice, in some daring and self-protective and in some hurting-him and saying no and some scoffing way, “It isn’t for sale, what I do.”)

“What does that mean?” he said, outscoffing me. And adding a male more-than-a-schoolteacher knowledge of language. Also a social class thing, small-town, ruler-of-the-world thing. He said, “I know more than a schoolteacher does: what you say doesn’t make sense. I know what sense is; ask me, I’ll tell you.”

I muttered, “Leave me alone.” My eyes were not averted. My politeness; my refusal to be tough with him encouraged him.

“What? What is it now? You talk gibberish, Esperanto … pidgin … pidgin English … pidgin shit …”

Looking at him and feeling the express reality of my youth and comparative
freshness
(it is in the eyes and eyelashes; it is in the youthful skimpiness,
spindliness
, newness of nerve endings), I scowl, knowing that it affects him.

He winces. “Being nice gives people a reason to like you,” he said encouragingly.

I was aware that if you were nice to him for
a reason
, that then he wouldn’t consider it
nice
—he had a thing about love, about the paradisaical—always more and more complete and pure, more and more ideal, or nearer to it. I knew better than to say anything to him about him and upset him; he sometimes had spasms of heart fibrillation if I crossed him. It’s interesting if you’re thinking, if you have a thought or whatever, and you don’t want it to show on your face, how the thought itself becomes nasty and more pointed because it is hidden:
He’s being stupid.

Anyway, my silences, my glancing away are part of our language which has problems because of the differences in our ages and in our minds—you know? You have to do it by feel and by eye—and you know misapprehension is built in—if I use an ideal measure, then he is not bookish. If he uses an ideal measure, I am not sonlike in the way sons act in movies or in daydreams—I am too fancy, too modern. To
understand
requires a physical sympathy, vaguely sexual, and an emotional sense of calculation. But when I manage it, it is like being dressed up and clean.

Then if Dad hugs me too intimately, it gets all fucked up.

As long as the gestures were sparse, then the signals, words, and breathing had precise musics or urgencies. When the sympathy grows more heated and touchy, then everything becomes gross. My side of the dialogue, already limited, is wiped out in his imposing this passion—or whatever it is—imposing it on us. I don’t
feel
that stuff. It seems ruinous to me, ruinous of me. I mean, in the room, in the smell of dust, in the smell of sunlight, in the smell of the hour of sunlight in that room, in the nearby sense (and sight and odor) of my father’s arms and chest, I was wiped out. Ugh. This made me skeptical toward his feelings. But if you’re not going to be
destructive
, you have to be skeptical only in
the right way.

I felt my existence had no merit in his eyes beyond that of to-be-devoured. I don’t think there were many possibilities for him. The notion of infinite and different realities of meaning exhilarated and frightened me and seemed very secret, a
closed book.
But people felt I was an
open book
, which means young.

S.L., suffocating me, said, “You’re a tough nut.”

It is scary: the
infinite
time-bony extent to which someone touching you is an antagonist, casually ruthless, part of a delusion where
love
(and laziness) and surrender are entwined.

He said, “You’re not so much fun as you think—you hog the floor. A real person has to make sense out of you. Your problem is you doubt people. You’re no better than anyone else.…”

“You don’t treat me as if I were the same as you.”

That triggered his temper: “Shut up! SHUT UP! Hush! I want to hear my own voice for a change. I am smart by popular demand. I am good-looking in my way.” Old routines he used to do at parties he and Mom gave. I kept wanting to understand
clearly
as when I read books. I knew his was love talk in a way.

But what was important to me—to my
soul
, if I might be permitted to say that—was that you couldn’t film us. Or quote us as some kind of high, noble,
sentimental example.
The unordinariness and then the aura Dad has of his right as a full-grown man to have passions, the way he has so many ways of getting his way, the way he mostly runs things—you can’t film that. He has a tactic of being in control impatiently; he has a fluster of
wicked
principledness. Male realism.
Glamorously
intent.

And that is always just about out of control in a
good guy way
, alive and human, and stinking and dark-willed in an invertedly and endlessly different-languaged world—his world. A stink of acrid nerves is in him as if he has been traveling day and night to this hug—traveling, ill in the moments … (His reactions to me were the basic medium in which I learned to swim.) Compared to the world—and in the light in the room—I was, at my young age, preeminently a change of subject for him, a change from illness and death, and from his own being, his own personality—that was the term back then.