Reunion

H
UGH
F
OX

LUMINIS BOOKS
Published by Luminis Books
1950 East Greyhound Pass, #18, PMB 280,
Carmel, Indiana, 46033, U.S.A.
Copyright © Hugh Fox, 2011

PUBLISHER'S NOTICE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover art for
Reunion
by Alexandra Fox.

ISBN-10: 1-935462-47-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-935462-47-7

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Bernadete, thirty years of jungle delight
.

Praise for the work and legacy of Hugh Fox:

“ … a new sound built upon Whitman, Hart Crane, Ginsberg and Snyder that swirls into a kaleidoscope of American life, personal and public.”
—
Choice

“Reading Hugh Fox … is a bit like getting on a bus with a ticket you've no idea to where, you are jostled, take some wild curves, have breath-taking vistas, get to where you'd never expected sometimes dazed, shaken up, sometimes laughing, never bored, always a little different than when you began.”
—
Lyn Lifshin, poet and literary critic

“Like Charles Ives, like Herman Melville, Hugh Fox is an American original. There is no one else writing like him today.”
—
Richard Morris

Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932 and is one of the founders (along with Ralph Ellison, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Buckminster Fuller) of the Puschcart Prize for literature. He is a poet, novelist, archaeologist, and has published over 100 works, including
Depths and Dragons, Home of the Gods
, and
Approaching / Acerando
(poems written in Portuguese in Brazil, translated into English when Fox returned to the United States).

He was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Hugh was editor of
Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry
from 1968-1995 and Latin American editor of
Western World Review
&
North American Review
during the 1960s. He was former contributing reviewer for
Smith/Pulpsmith
and
Choice
. Hugh Fox is listed in
Who's Who: The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in the Last Millennium, Dictionary of Middlewestern Writers
, and
The International Who's Who
.

REUNION

“L
OOK AT THIS
!” Buzzy (Professor Lox) shouted at his wife as he sat down at the dining room table and opened the day's mail.

“What is it?” asked Malinche. Just a trace of accent. Just a little “spin” on the ‘i's' in “is” and “it,” almost “ees” and “eet,” but not quite. You'd have a hard time guessing she was from Karachi and that her native language was Urdu. Kind of lightish skin too. She could have passed for a lightish Chicano. In fact often did.

“What a harebrained idea, it's an invitation from my Grammar School. Fiftieth anniversary of my Grammar School class graduation. They're having this big reunion in Chicago in January. I mean what a crock-of-shit month to have it in anyway. You wait fifty years and then pick January 12
^th
. I mean it's not even from the school, it's from Fran O'Callaghan, one of the old gang. Fat Franny. I mean I haven't seen her since she was fourteen and now she's sixty four … ”

Malinche took the invitation in hand. It was edged in black and began:

O
UR
L
ADY OF
P
ERPETUAL
S
ORROWS
S
CHOOL CLOSED DOWN IN
J
UNE OF
1990, O
UR
L
ADY OF
P
ERPETUAL
S
ORROWS
C
HURCH CLOSED DOWN THE FOLLOWING
A
UGUST
(1990). T
HOSE OF US WHO HAVE MAINTAINED CONTACT WITH EACH OTHER OVER THE LAST FIFTY YEARS THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE TIME TO HAVE A GENERAL GET-TOGETHER WHILE WE STILL CAN GET TOGETHER
.

“Bizarre! It's absolutely bizarre!” said Malinche with finality.

Of course everything she said she said with finality. She was THE SURGEON, after all, pulled in half a million a year, and all he was was a Freshman Comp prof at Southwest Michigan Tech in Grand Junction, pulled in a piddly $45,000.00. Although (points on his side) it wasn't called The Freshman Comp Department where he taught, but Language Technologies. Like he taught Language Vectors I, II and III, which was Frosh Comp I, II and III, but like the secret motto of the department went “I won't snitch on you, if you don't snitch on me.”

Accent or not, size or not (she was a solid 5' .0003 inches), The Surgeon was the Surgeon.

“What's bizarre?” he challenged her.

“Fifty [feefty] years. You won't even know each other. The face changes ‘morphically' through time. It's not just fat and sagging, but irregular growth, noses grow, eyes shrink, hands twist, ears twist … what I always try to do when I do a Reconstruct is to get the person back to Stage I … but it's [eet's] impossible … and what's that Lady of Perpetual Sorrows all about? What Lady is that?”

“Our Lady of Baghdad, geek!” he snapped back at her, then softened, knew better, his fourth wife, after all, and he'd be sixty-four
in four months and when he could get it up it had an attention-span of micro-seconds and there was no one on the substitute bench waiting to get into his game, “Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows is the Blessed Virgin. Like she had all these sorrows. Like, you know, Jesus and Veronica's veil and the crowning with thorns and all that … ”

“Crowing with thorns?” she asked, and the worst part was she wasn't kidding.

“Crowning! Jesus gets crowned with thorns!”

Starting to get sharp and testy again, calming himself down, activating a little Suzuki Zen … coming in and out of Nothing, coming in and out of Nothing, breathe, in and out of Nothing, less than Nothing, zero and then into Minus World … minus ten, 20 … countdown into Negative World …

“And so his mother is sorrowful because he gets crowned with thorns?”

“You got it! Terrific!”

And he reached over and gave her a little kiss.

All these odd odors as he approached her. He ought to be used to them by now, but … sandalwood and lemon-oil, garlic, cardamom, just an inexplicable trace of humus around her ears.

“I love you,” he said.

“Me too,” she answered.

“So you want to go down to this thing with me in Chicago?” he asked.

“Sure! Why not?!? I love Chicago!!”

“OK.”

And it was settled, although, as he walked upstairs to the computer to write a Yes-letter to Fat Franny, he was full of misgivings.

There were whole rows of misgivings.

First of all, he was already depressed with all of his six kids gone, Pepe (40) down in Houston working for a garbage processing company (“Detritus Engineer”), Conchita (38) in a mental hospital in Dallas where her mother, his first wife, Maria del Carmen (Bolivian) lived, very successfully passing for a Chicano, although she looked like The Andes Incarnated. Jeeyoun (32) (pronounced GEE ON, as in GEE WHIZ) back in Seoul with his second wife, Mitzi. Which was a ridiculous name for a Korean, but … three grandchildren who he'd only seen once two Thanksgivings before when they'd come to visit but didn't speak one word of English, and his Korean was beyond totally rusty, more like dismantled. A Japanese son-in-law he'd never met. Then Hannah (24) back in Israel, feeling some sort of what she called “ethno-historical gene-pull” to return to her mother's homeland, Israel, studying for a degree in Computer Science in Tel Aviv, married to a soft-spoken, humid-handed West Banker … putting off having children until she finished her Ph.D. Sarah (21) and Itzak (14) in New York with Sally. Hannah, Sarah and Itzak all Sally's kids. But Sally had always said “the last place I want to go back to is Israel. I prefer the perfume business in New York.”

But he hardly saw them either.

Sol, Sally's second husband, wouldn't let him stay at their place. And hotels, even the Hotel Wentworth down on Times
Square, the world's seediest dump, was a hundred a twenty a day now.

And there was this Anti-Pakistani/Anti-Moslem bias that both Sol and Sally had. So he'd converted. Why not?

Jesus … he'd actually thought of putting up a big poster thing in his room in the basement:

W
IFE
N
UMBER
1—M
ARIA DEL
C
ARMEN
R
OBLEDO,
B
OLIVIAN
:
T
WO KIDS
:
1). P
EPE
,
2). C
ONCHITA
,
W
IFE
N
UMBER
2—M
ITZI
C
HUNG
:
O
NE KID
(J
EEYOUN
),
THREE GRANDCHILDREN,
WHOSE NAMES HE ALWAYS FORGOT SO HE CALLED THEM
M
ANNY
, M
OE AND
J
ACK, WHICH GOT
J
EEYOUN
(
AND
M
ITZI
)
MAD
,
W
IFE
N
UMBER
3—S
ALLY
B
ERNBAUM
:
T
HREE KIDS
:
1). H
ANNAH
,
2). S
ARAH
,
3). I
TZAK

It was a fucking mess, a fucking joke.

It was really all the fault of the Fulbright Commission. All those overseas teaching jobs they had kept giving him, Bolivia, Korea, Israel, Pakistan. And there was always a pair of eyes that got “interested” in him. And this exotique impulse in him that responded to the eyes. And he never seemed to be really getting
along with any of his current wives anyhow, the promise always out there that, yes, CHANGE, AND THINGS WILL GET BETTER FOR YOU.

Not that they ever did. He got to the top of the stairs and looked out. A beautiful October day in Michigan, the leaves all bright reds and yellows, like flagrant, thriving skin-diseases. The air crisp and dry. Like you could snap it in half like a Pringle's potato-chip.

But he never got rid of his sense of mortality. One beautiful yellow-red maple leaf fell from the tree outside the window and it became a major symbol for his mortality. OU SONT LES NIEGES D'HIER? Where are the snows of yesterday? Which in Hebrew would be something like BEMATZAV HAROEEN AVAR … and in Korean CHANG-NYUN NAERIN NUN-EE UNDIE Y-SUMNIKA.

Or was the Chang-Nyun supposed to be where the Y-Sumnika was?

Was any of it right? Or do I wake or do I dream?

He wasn't sure.

In Urdu?

His brain like a broken microwave oven, a Mixmaster with a broken OFF button.

He was afraid that some day someone would ask him his name and he'd look up and stare as blankly as the noonday sun in the middle of the Sahara.

MY NAME IS EVERYWHERE-NOWHERE,
EVERYTHING-NOTHING.

Another month and the leaves would all be down. Wasn't there supposed to be some time of fulfillment toward the end of
a life? A time to sow and a time to reap. A time to sleep and a time to peep. A time to fuck and a time to roar. What a shame when there ain't no more!

Stood there staring so long at the leaves, projecting himself out into Winter when all the leaves would be gone and the trees like so many gaunt grey-brown fingers projecting agonizingly out of the snow-covered frozen earth, that Malinche came to the bottom of the steps and tapped lightly on the old oak bannister, asked “Are you alright?”

“Just meditating … meditative … ”

“I still think you ought to have your prostate checked,” she said quietly, as if there were some sort of direct mystic link between meditative moods and prostate, as if you cut enough and get “preventive” enough and you're going to cut out Death, prevent It from ever entering into your life …

“Check your own!” he said, his meditative flow irrevocably interrupted, leaving the bright yellow patch of leaves and sun and going up to his room and stretching out on the bed, invitation to the reunion in hand.

Only one person from his entire grade school class that he'd kept in contact with—Ellen. And even with her, over the last few years she'd (they'd) been getting increasingly arthritic in their relationship. No space, really, no time … no DESIRE to actually share space-time, her in her perfect little Grimore Park home and (since she'd retired from “management”—and he had no idea of what she'd been “managing”) an endless series of quilting events, and him piddling around with Indians, Indians, Indians, where did they come from, why? Each of them trapped
in his/her private little time-capsule and never the twain shall meet.