Authors: C. K. Williams
just the combination ticket office, luncheonette and five-and-dime where the buses turned around.
A low gray frame building, it was gloomy and run-down, but charmingly old-fashioned:
ancient wooden floors, open shelves, the smell of unwrapped candy, cigarettes and band-aid glue.
The only people there, the only people I think that I remember from the town at all,
were the silent woman at the register and a youngish teen-aged boy standing reading.
The woman smoked and smoked, stared out the streaky window, handed me my coffee with indifference.
It was hard to tell how old she was: her hair was dyed and teased, iced into a beehive.
The boy was frail, sidelong somehow, afflicted with a devastating Nessus-shirt of acne
boiling down his face and neck — pits and pores, scarlet streaks and scars; saddening.
We stood together at the magazine rack for a while before I realized what he was looking at.
Pornography: two naked men, one grimaces, the other, with a fist inside the first one, grins.
I must have flinched: the boy sidled down, blanked his face more, and I left to take a walk.
It was cold, but not enough to catch or clear your breath: uncertain clouds, unemphatic light.
Everything seemed dimmed and colorless, the sense of surfaces dissolving, like the Parthenon.
Farther down the main street were a dentist and a chiropractor, both with hand-carved signs,
then the Elks’ decaying clapboard mansion with a parking space “Reserved for the Exalted Ruler,”
and a Russian church, gilt onion domes, a four-horned air-raid siren on a pole between them.
Two blocks in, the old slate sidewalks shatter and uplift — gnawed lawns, aluminum butane tanks —
then the roads begin to peter out and rise: half-fenced yards with scabs of weeks-old snow,
thin, inky, oily leaks of melt insinuating down the gulleys and the cindered cuts
that rose again into the footings of the filthy, disused slagheaps ringing the horizon.
There was nowhere else. At the depot now, the woman and the boy were both behind the counter.
He was on a stool, his eyes closed, she stood just in back of him, massaging him,
hauling at his shoulders, kneading at the muscles like a boxer’s trainer between rounds.
I picked up the county paper: it was anti-crime and welfare bums, for Reaganomics and defense.
The wire-photo was an actress in her swimming suit, that famously expensive bosom, cream.
My bus arrived at last, its heavy, healthy white exhaust pouring in the afternoon.
Glancing back, I felt a qualm, concern, an ill heart, almost parental, but before I’d hit the step,
the boy’d begun to blur, to look like someone else, the woman had already faded absolutely.
All that held now was that violated, looted country, the fraying fringes of the town,
those gutted hills, hills by rote, hills by permission, great, naked wastes of wrack and spill,
vivid and disconsolate, like genitalia shaved and disinfected for an operation.
Still Life
All we do — how old are we? I must be twelve, she a little older; thirteen, fourteen — is hold hands
and wander out behind a barn, past a rusty hay rake, a half-collapsed old Model T,
then down across a barbed-wire gated pasture — early emerald ryegrass, sumac in the dip —
to where a brook, high with run-off from a morning storm, broadened and spilled over —
turgid, muddy, viscous, snagged here and there with shattered branches — in a bottom meadow.
I don’t know then that the place, a mile from anywhere, and day, brilliant, sultry, balmy,
are intensifying everything I feel, but I know now that what made simply touching her
almost a consummation was as much the light, the sullen surge of water through the grass,
the coils of scent, half hers — the unfamiliar perspiration, talc, something else I’ll never place —
and half the air’s: mown hay somewhere, crushed clover underfoot, the brook, the breeze.
I breathe it still, that breeze, and, not knowing how I know for certain that it’s that,
although it is, I know, exactly that, I drag it in and drive it — rich, delicious,
as biting as wet tin — down, my mind casting up flickers to fit it — another field, a hollow —
and now her face, even it, frail and fine, comes momentarily to focus, and her hand,
intricate and slim, the surprising firmness of her clasp, how judiciously it meshes mine.
All we do — how long does it last? an hour or two, not even one whole afternoon:
I’ll never see her after that, and, strangely (strange even now), not mind, as though,
in that afternoon the revelations weren’t only of the promises of flesh, but of resignation —
all we do is trail along beside the stream until it narrows, find the one-log bridge
and cross into the forest on the other side: silent footfalls, hills, a crest, a lip.
I don’t know then how much someday — today — I’ll need it all, how much want to hold it,
and, not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I want to have
that
day,
that
light,
the motes that would have risen from the stack of straw we leaned on for a moment,
the tempered warmth of air which so precisely seemed the coefficient of my fearful ardor,
not, after all, even the objective place, those shifting paths I can’t really follow now
but only can compile from how many other ambles into other woods, other stoppings in a glade —
(for a while we were lost, and frightened; night was just beyond the hills; we circled back) —
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with little hope, to tear away.
The Regulars
In the Colonial Luncheonette on Sixth Street they know everything there is to know, the shits.
Sam Terminadi will tell you how to gamble yourself at age sixty from accountant to bookie,
and Sam Finkel will tell you more than anyone cares to hear how to parlay an ulcer into a pension
so you can sit here drinking this shit coffee and eating these overfried shit eggs
while you explain that the reasons the people across the street are going to go bust
in the toy store they’re redoing the old fish market into — the father and son plastering,
putting up shelves, scraping the floors; the mother laboring over the white paint,
even the daughter coming from school to mop the century of scales and splatter from the cellar —
are both simple and complex because Sam T can tell you the answer to anything in the world
in one word and Sam F prefaces all his I-told-you-so’s with “You don’t understand, it’s complex.”
“It’s simple,” Sam T says, “where around here is anyone going to get money for toys?” The end.
Never mind the neighborhood’s changing so fast that the new houses at the end of the block
are selling for twice what the whole block would have five years ago, that’s not the point.
Business shits, right? Besides, the family — what’s that they’re eating? — are wrong, right?
Not totally wrong, what are they, Arabs or something? but still, wrong enough, that’s sure.
“And where do they live?” Sam F asks. “Sure as shit their last dime’s in the lease and shit sure
they’ll end up living in back of the store like gypsies, guaranteed: didn’t I tell you or not
when the Minskys were still here that they’d bug out first chance they got, and did they or no?”
Everyone thought the Minsky brothers would finally get driven out of their auto repair shop
by zoning or by having their tools stolen so many times, Once, Frank Minsky would growl,
on Yom Kippur, for crying out loud, but no, at the end, they just sold, they’d worked fifty years,
And Shit, Frank said, that’s fucking enough, we’re going to Miami, what do you want from me?
But Sam F still holds it against them, to cave in like that, the buggers, bastards, shits …
What he really means, Sam, Sam, is that everyone misses the Minskys’ back room, where they’d head,
come dusk, the old boys, and there’d be the bottle of schnapps and the tits from
Playboy
in the grimy half-dark with the good stink of three lifetimes of grease and sweat and bitching,
and how good that would be, back then, oh, how far back was then? Last year, is that all?
“They got no class: shit, a toy store,” Sam T says. What does that mean, Sam? What class?
No class, that’s all, simple: six months there and boom, they’ll have a fire, guaranteed.
Poor Sam, whether the last fire, at the only butcher store for blocks the A & P hadn’t swallowed,
was arson for insurance as Sam proved the next day, or whether, the way the firemen saw it,
it was just a bum keeping warm in the alley, Sam’s decided to take it out on the strangers,
glaring at them over there in their store of dreams, their damned pain-in-the-ass toy store.
What’s the matter with you, are you crazy?
is what the father finally storms in with one afternoon,
both Sams turning their backs, back to their shit burgers, but old Bernie himself is working today,
and
Hey,
Bernie says,
Don’t mind them, they’re just old shits, sit down, I’ll buy you a coffee.
Who the fuck do they think they are? Here have a donut, don’t worry, they’ll be all right,
and of course they will be. “In a month you won’t get them out of your hair,” says Bernie,
and he’s right again, old Bernie, before you know it Sam T has got me cornered in the street.
“What is it, for Christ’s sake, Sam? Let me go.” “No, wait up, it’s a computer for kids.”
“Sam, please, I’m in a hurry.” “No, hold on, just a second, look, it’s simple.”
Soon
The whole lower panel of the chain-link fence girdling my old grammar school playground
has been stripped from its stanchions and crumpled disdainfully onto the shattered pavement.
The upper portion sags forlornly, as though whatever maintenance man had to hang it last
was too disheartened doing it again to bother tensioning the guy wires to the true.
The building’s pale, undistinguished stone is sooty, graffiti cover every surface within reach.
Behind their closely woven, galvanized protective mesh, the windows are essentially opaque,
but in the kindergarten and first grade I can make out skeletons and pumpkins scotch-taped up.
It’s Halloween, the lower grades are having their procession and I stop awhile to watch.
Except that everyone is black — the kids, the parents looking on, almost all the teachers —
my class, when we were out there parading in our costumes, must have looked about the same.
Witches, cowboys, clowns, some Supermen and Batmen, a Bo-Peep and a vampire.
I don’t think we had robots, or not such realistic ones, and they don’t have an Uncle Sam.
Uncle Sam!
I
was Uncle Sam! I remember! With what ardor I conceived my passion to be him.
Uncle Sam. The war was on then, everyone was gaga with it; Uncle Sam was everywhere,
recruiting, selling bonds — that poster with its virile, foreshortened finger accusing you —
and there, at the local dime store, to my incredulous delight, his outfit was.
It must have cost enough to mean something in those days, still half in the Depression,
but I dwelled on it … The box alone: Uncle Sam was on it in his stovepipe, smiling this time,
and there was a tiny window you could see a square of bangles through, a ribbon of lapel.
It burned in me, I fretted, nagged: my first instance of our awful fever to consume.
When I’d had it half an hour, I hated it — even at that age, I knew when I’d been cheated.
Ill-made, shoddy, the gauzy fabric coarsely dyed, with the taste of something evil in its odor,
it was waxy with a stiffening that gave it body long enough for you to get it on,
then it bagged, and clung, and made you feel the fool you’d been to want it in the first place.
My cotton-batting beard was pasted on, and itched, but I knew enough to hold my tongue.
The little patriot in his rage of indignation: so much anyway of education went against my will.
Fold your hands, raise your hands, the Pledge of Allegiance, prayers and air-raid drills.
We were taught obsessively to be “Good Citizens,” a concept I never quite understood.
How the city’s changed since then: downtown, businesses have fled, whole blocks are waste,
all that’s left of what went on between the rioters and Guard tanks in the Sixties.
Here, even the fieldhouse on the ballpark where they gave us nature lectures is in shambles:
the grass is gone, a frowsy gorse has sprouted from the brick- and bottle-ridden rubble.
The baskets on their court are still intact at least, although the metal nets are torn.
Some men who must be from the neighborhood have got a game going out there now.
The children circle shyly, hand in hand, as solemn as a frieze of Greeks, while a yard beyond,
the backboards boom, the players sweat and feint and drive, as though everything depended on it.
The Gas Station
This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even before Whitman and Yeats.
I don’t think there were three words in my head yet. I knew, perhaps, that I should suffer,
I can remember I almost cried for this or for that, nothing special, nothing to speak of.
Probably I was mad with grief for the loss of my childhood, but I wouldn’t have known that.
It’s dawn. A gas station. Route twenty-two. I remember exactly: route twenty-two curved,
there was a squat, striped concrete divider they’d put in after a plague of collisions.