“A”
Efran
sat listening to the Goldberg Variations while gazing at winter constellations
through his upper-story window. He knocked over a glass of wine just as the
pianist splintered a passage Efran had never admired. After sopping up the
spill, he spotted a man tacking up signs on posts across the street. It was
public property. A uniformed guard from the padlock company nearby ran toward
the fellow with the staple gun. Sensing trouble, Efran threw on his cardigan
and ran down six flights to head off the guard who, it turned out, was a friend
of the man posting notices.
They sang in a choir and told Efran there’d been a concert the
night before that. Chuck, the stapler, had missed it due to laryngitis. Samuel,
the security guard, advised Chuck that the freezing air would aggravate his
vocal chords, and since he was also the male soloist, it was unjust not only to
himself but the community that looked forward to the concerts. Chuck defended
his stapling by holding up announcements for future cantatas.
Efran chimed in by stating he’d read “A,” the epic poem by Louis
Zukofsky, inspired in part by Bach’s compositions.
“A what?” Samuel
wanted to know.
“Damn,” Chuck shivered. “It’s getting colder.”
“Go home,” pleaded Samuel. “I’ll meet you in the rectory before
the concert tomorrow night.”
“Boil water, drape a towel over your head and inhale the steam,”
Efran prescribed.
“Already tried that, didn’t help” Chuck responded as the men
parted.
Efran, who was actually shitfaced from his 8th glass
of wine (he’d spilled the 9th), slipped just before the 3rd
floor landing and went ass over eyebrows down a flight, winding up in the ER
with a ruptured spleen.
Anita
Baker in France
Journal Entries
Tuesday: The conductor set the
portable steps on the station’s platform. He offered his hand to steady my
balance as I stepped down. A few minutes later, the train’s couplings rattled
as the whistle blew and it lurched forward. I was greeted by an odor of algae
mixed with Fiat exhaust.
A man and woman leaning against a
wall sensed my disorder and pointed toward the shuttle
stop. “Merci,” I spoke my first
French.
From my window cerulean remained
the backdrop past 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday: A resort town with a
surfeit of untranslatable expressions makes a visitor feel welcome. Diminished
by this observation into ludicrous exuberance? I’ll try not to be.
Thursday: Breakfast at an outdoor
café with Delacroix’s journal and a French/English dictionary: Baudelaire saw
Delacroix at the Louvre one Sunday morning expounding Assyrian sculpture to his
attentive servant, Jeanne-Marie le Guillou, a Breton peasant woman, who came
into Delacroix’s service in 1834. She oversaw his domestic life in Paris and at
Champrosay.
Located brioche. Ate one too many.
Friday: “Sardonic” brought to mind
sardines, the sharp metal band twisted around a key, exposing the can’s oily
contents, which I detest.
Saturday: Ugliness any day over
beauty; pretense mustn’t be tolerated.
Sunday: Slept poorly on my last
night. “You said it was too short, so I shortened it.” This from a dream I wish
I hadn’t had.
Monday: Bought a copy of Annie
Ernaux’s La place as a
departure gift for the trip home.
Our State Fair
The
fair deflected attention from the highway with its rising tolls and trucks that
hummed deleterious tunes. It left everyone to his or her own compulsion. A
retiree awaiting the start of a demolition derby used his cane to point out the
arabesques made by a biplane before it burst into flames near the Ferris wheel.
The pilot crawled out of the wrinkled cockpit, waved to the crowd and proceeded
to a side tent where a documentary on duck hunting was being shown. The
narrator repeated “participatory obscurity” until a clown, still in costume
after selling his supply of cotton candy, stood up and challenged anyone to
locate the blind where the hunters were hidden. Gun barrels peeking up among
the reeds were a dead giveaway. Meanwhile, at the horse show, an equestrian was
thrown off her mount when her skittish sorrel balked at the penultimate jump.
“Ernie!” her mother shouted when she saw the horse’s ears flatten as it
approached the railing. The rider, uninjured, jumped to her feet and ran to
scold the horse. It snorted in the dirt, reins dangling from its bridle,
satisfied with the weight off its back. “What is your problem?” Ernestine
demanded as she stroked the animal’s mane. “I’ve totally misjudged our
compatibility, you immature sack of meat.” She was a levelheaded, perhaps
intelligent, girl who realized an object’s aesthetic value is predicated on its
functionality. Her mother arrived, grass seeds stuck to her slacks. She
reminded Ernestine that the exhibition of ambidextrous gunslingers was about to
begin on the other side of the fairgrounds. Ernie let the horse graze and hurried
with her mother, arriving just as two cowpokes from Gulper’s Gulch appeared.
She realized actual gunfighters never drew their pistols with both hands as
shown in Monogram Pictures. Soon afterward, an octogenarian dressed in an
antique baseball uniform was drawing considerable attention at the dunking
tank. He wound up and threw with a velocity Bob Feller would have envied. The
Fire Chief perched in the chair didn’t have a chance, and splashed the crowd
with one plunge after another.
Petey
Petey
made a pair of stilts and practiced walking on them. He’d seen a picture in a
magazine of Giacometti’s sculpture Man Pointing from 1947. The caption
said a companion figure was planned but was never finished. Petey couldn’t find
a mirror tall enough to see what he looked like on stilts, so he went to a lake
and stared at his reflection with an arm outstretched and an accusatory finger
at its end. This pleased him. He threw the designs he’d made for the stilts
into the water. On the way home, he took a shortcut through a park and into a
clump of trees but struck one and fell. He dragged himself back onto the lawn.
The stilts became entangled when he tried to unstrap them. Finally, having
freed himself, he threw them under a hedge. No more stilts for Petey, he thought.
That night, discouraged by his failure at trying something new,
he took himself to the Mocambo lounge. He knew one of the waiters, Bret, from
the old days. They’d been extras in forgotten movies. Pleased with his table at
the room’s center, away from the glass cages along the walls with their
squawking macaws and parrots, he ordered a Singapore Sling. Faces of bit
players he’d met long ago were scattered among a few of the surrounding tables.
He flagged a waiter after tasting his cocktail. “Pardon me, too
much grenadine,” he held the glass at arm’s length.
“Of course, sir.”
Brett came over. “Sorry, Petey.”
“No harm done. Has Bogart been in?”
“Away, on a shoot.”
“I’ve heard he wears lifts in his shoes.”
“Could be,” Bret replied. He kept his eyes on his tables. “What
have you been up to, auditions?”
“I tried to walk on stilts today.”
“Really? Bataille wrote a raven on stilts/goes into the eye.”
“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Petey asked.
“I like to read,” Bret shrugged as he took the menu to a scriptwriter
new in town.
Road to Utopia
Phil
Waynefil sat in his sled holding a compass indicating the magnetic North as a
reliable direction. He was yanked by impatient huskies across the tundra with a
vision of a baby seal disappearing with sea bubbles in a polar bear’s jaws.
Finally a structure appeared. An Inuit woman with an ivory hair-band answered
the door. She kept her radio tuned to a progressive jazz station as he slept on
a futon. When he awoke, inadequately rested, he referred to the “pyro-specific
walls” that the woman concluded were riffs on something he had experienced in a
former life. She reconfigured the futon into a couch so he could sit up “while
the sun’s glare does its dirty work,” as he put it. The woman hung a hand towel
over the only window to fend off the light.
“Would you care for a Caesar salad?” she offered. “It’s been
vacuum-sealed.”
“No thank you,” answered Phil. “A glass of Gatorade would be
nice.” He could hear the ice shifting. Ribs of a portable heater’s elements glowed
orangely in a corner. “How is it that, without fail, I anticipate what I’m
going to bluster before switching on the tee vee to channel surf.
“Applicable signals prompt us to locate the remote while we
sleep,” the woman suggested. She handed him the remote.
“Quel installation!” Phil belched.
“Exactement,” she responded as
she filleted a violet grayling. The initial incision was precise as the wet
gills shifted, shiny as mica, on the cutting board. His ichthyology lacking,
Phil couldn’t ascertain what would be on his plate. The slices recalled the
grotesqueries in a Grimm’s tale. Perhaps “The Juniper Tree,” he thought.
The TV screen was disproportionately large for the iglu’s size.
Robert Mitchum appeared in pinstripes. A
ceiling fan circulated billows of smoke from a peroxide blonde’s Pall Mall.
Blackened eyelashes spanked her sockets. She addressed too many questions to
her empty glass and woke up the lush sitting between her and Bob, who was
on-the-lam. The bartender juggled olives and mocked the girl’s insinuations
with “ baa la do o say.” The Inuit woman flipped the fillets in the
sizzling pan. “This iceberg is nothing but one enormous sound-scope,” she
explained. ‘You think what you like.
You’ll never get a response.”
“It’s even emptier than I think it is,” Phil blustered. “Can I
use that towel in the window for a shower?”
“It’s only a hand towel. Anyway, Monday night—no water,” the
woman removed the band from her peroxide blonde hair. “I’ve seasoned your
fillet with ginger and scallions. Are you an ice fisherman?”
“I used to install satellite dishes,” Phil answered.
“Do you know anything about microwaves?” she inquired.
“Only that they scramble thought patterns.”
