I take the measure of my Heights street’s space partly by my two-sewer line-drive which Hugh Blood backpedaled to catch without coming within thirty yards of the harbor-view dead-end whose lamp-post and black-iron fence were roughly in the same plane as the street window of my parents’ third-floor bedroom to my right and Binocular Bill’s station on the roof to my left. As the space of your screen in your late kitchen showing at this hour the Educational Channel’s bright blank can’t be measured apart from your throwaway option to last night’s audience involving your now approaching son Richard: so the space between me and Bob can’t be traced by the down-then onward-bouncing trajectories of my trick pitch to Bob apart from his swinging third strike’s coincidence with the “Look out!” bawled by one of Joey’s pals as if for a car. Who could have foreseen the effect of that interruption on Bob’s anger at striking out and taking such a cut that ten-year-old A.B. let it right through her dark legs and almost forgot to chase it seeing Bob instantly move with his stick toward the Joey Neurohr Three? And Joey dismounted on the sidewalk side.
All three had dark hair, darker than Al’s. Joey’s pals were a big-eyed Italian and a Puerto Rican kid apropos of whom my Irish doorman had said spics don’t use toilet paper. Joey’s broad-boned face built around small eyes could well have used more than its now-arrested adolescent mustache. Joey lowered his forehead eying Bob, the other two raised their chins. Even I could not have foreseen that the vectoral elite, of whom I must have been the sole representative there, pay for their strange power to receive incoming vectors, with a virtually gravitational impulse to launch vectors indirectly perilous to themselves: for without thinking, I called, “You wouldn’t have hit that pitch in a million years”—I, who believed that German Joey Neurohr could well have hooked my Corona as a joke (and a joke with that ending). But I then said, “Don’t worry about these sneaks, they only robbed you of a base-hit.”
Bob said he was not worrying. Joey said to me, “Who robbed you, buddy?” and Bob clattered our broomstick into the gutter and put a hand on Joey’s steel carrier and was about to do something, as Joey’s pals moved in on either side, but a short braking skid whistled our eyes around toward A.B. who, looking back at us had run right into a car that fortunately had already come to a stop after whipping into our block as if headed for the far dead end.
“So don’t worry about some of your friends who—” my father two years later eased off into other words he now saw would not ease our bedroom scene about God—“who expect you to get off these unclever quips. Now I don’t mean Camille, or even Bob, or anybody special. It’s just that I hate to see you get to be a wise guy. Even if you don’t go to church any more. You see, Cy, God is exactly not the one you can tell your petty little side of the story to, He’s beyond that.” My mother had paused in the kitchen long enough — I bet at least fifteen pages of this Outer Paraspace, but because of time there’s no more chance to check than to check all those pages your son-in-law took — and my mother now came audibly to the hall and was about to join us, and my father said with quiet precision and a deadpan wave, “Your pajamas are wide open,” and then, “Maybe you know your Bible but you don’t know Solomon’s concubines,” I subsequently found he was thinking of Solomon’s favorite Abra — quite a Sunday joke for him.
Did you know, Dom, that Richard would get wind of your public remark about TV screens and him? But he probably didn’t read your odd words. But it’s unlike him to come without phoning the police, and they’d demand his key, wouldn’t they?
Or is Richard just coming? That is, just to be here. I could tell him a thing or two about this space and how it’s become mine to become itself.
Abra ran around the car slapping its front fender and chased the ball. The car jumped, and we all divided, and it pushed Bob right up against Joey’s steel carrier with the insignia that Bohack had asked him to take off. Petty and I and some others came across in the wake of the car.
I must get home to Ev in order to wake early, but after tonight perhaps like you Dom I’ll sleep late. That’s what some of us need — a new federal, state, and local Program Oversleep. I’d hoped that my paraphase would be a break-through. Into the unimpeded field beyond the sway of ordinary light: Beyond that foully funny dream in which you Dom ask me to be your Secretary of Field-State and I consent as, simultaneously, though in another congruent kit of coördinates, I frown down on my father’s powdered cheeks that are roughly at right angles to the casket’s satin pillow, and I say, “But I was God.”
yes, Beyond even paraday and night: to what you may have meant when you agreed with but would not support those who counsel emergency Silence, for you wanted (what can I name it but) Paraspeech. But I have not on this Sphinx bond paper of yours created Parawrite after all, have I. On the way back from the Hillsdale station and drawn in a kind of pressure between his family and the trees, my father listened to me tell about Al’s father, how he’d bought us ice cream Thursday and how tonight we’d done the Heatsburg puzzles, and how Tuesday he was taking us to a Legion game. And my father asked my mother what progress she had to report, and she tilted her head humorously and said she and Emily were giving a recital after all on the Labor Day weekend, and my mother talked about how Emily’s cousin who ran the Hour was depressed about costs and didn’t know how long he could keep going. My words to you have taken me unexpected places where, though no one is waiting to receive me, it was something just to get there, or here. The Puerto Rican said to Bob lucky for him he had his girlfriend to back him up, and as the Italian with an eye on us picked the stick out of the street and leapt back to the middle of the sidewalk as Petty came around the front end of the delivery rig, Petty and Bob spoke words that began and ended together and had the same number of syllables: “He doesn’t need me” and “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“I seen you with her,” said Joey, “she got nice tits.” But gallant Perpetua Belle Pound over her own words had heard Bob’s “She’s not my girlfriend,” and Bob knew she had, and yet Bob hadn’t exactly meant it. And so he jumped through Joey’s bike frame and as he and Joey shoved each other’s shoulders I raised my guard and moved around the rear of the bike and in on the Puerto Rican.
I was jabbing him up onto the first few steps of this brownstone stoop that was an absolute home ground though we didn’t happen to know who lived there, but as on impulse I turned to see Petty clout Joey’s ear from behind, I caught our stickball stick on my left arm right to the bone, which was better than getting it in the back which was what the Italian had tried for, and when the little Puerto Rican came off the steps to grab me from the side thinking I was occupied with Ginzo, I got the Puerto Rican and heaved him round so Ginzo had to let up as he went to swing on me again.