~
I kept saying: “You cannot have more ketchup, Sammy.” The tree outside the front window was blowing in the breeze.
Sammy wanted more ketchup for his potato puffs.
Tutti phoned. After I finished talking to Tutti I hung up the phone and put more ketchup on Sammy’s plate.
~
Travis and I are the caretakers of this place. What a life we have. We drive into the parking lot early in the morning in our brown cars. It’s so quiet, you can hear the gravel squeak under our tires.
No matter how fast I pick up the garbage, there is always more.
Travis says: “The whole of civilization lies out there in the parking lot. It’s all right there.”
My insides will not support my needs anymore. I am trying to structure the silence under my eyes. Sometimes you are lucky enough to have your hopes dashed in the moment of their conception.
~
When he would get the boot was long beyond him. Out there in a space he pictured out by the clouds somewhere. Partially, it was him that put it there, after he mulled it over, temporarily allowing it space in his thinking.
~
I get messages taped to my mail tray. They are written on pink slips of paper. Phone home right away, these messages say.
I go to the nearest phone, whichever phone is nearest when I read the message, I go over to that phone and I phone home from there.
“Hi, Tutti, it’s me,” I say.
“Dad found a train ride,” Tutti says. “We were over at the mall and Dad found a train ride for Sammy.”
My grandmother died on the weekend. She was blind and senile and then she got pneumonia. So Mom and I went to the funeral in Chicago. We drove to Chicago. It’s a ten-hour drive. When we got to Chicago, I phoned Tutti.
“We’re in Chicago,” I told her. “We’re at the motel.”
Tutti told me the story of how her dad took Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm. Perry’s Pony Farm is this place in the country run by a midget named Perry. There are some mud fields, some half-dead ponies, and some chickens. I used to go to Perry’s Pony Farm when I was a kid. Perry always had this awful smile on his face.
“You should take Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm sometime,” Tutti tells me. “He had a great time there with Dad.”
She tells me this while I’m sitting there on the bed, in the motel room in Chicago, with my suit on, waiting to go to Grandma’s funeral.
~
She used to say it, uk-you-lay-lee. We were in bars and she would say, “Is that the uk-you-lay-lee that guy is playing? I love the uk-you-lay-lee.”
I liked to hear her say that, so I never corrected her.
~
Some days I felt like I wanted war.
Or at least a little rain.
17
HE WOULD go home and sit in the big green corduroy chair and hold his hands out in front of him. He would turn his hands back and forth and look at them. He would laugh.
“I’m forgetting something,” he would say. He would say things to himself and laugh.
He would turn on the TV but then forget he had turned it on. He would go into the kitchen and look in the fridge, forgetting he had turned the TV on and that it was still on.
There was a woman living with him.
“You’re beautiful,” he said to her one day.
She laughed. “You know you left the TV on in there again,” she said.
He looked at his hands. He looked at the woman. She was beautiful.
“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.
She was fat around the middle, and her blouse hung out of her pants. Her face was swollen and her hair stuck out.
“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.
One day she took him to the beach. He found his penis growing stiff at the sight of her lying on the sand.
Later, he drank milk and went to sleep.
When he woke up, the fat woman was there, on the side of the bed, with no clothes on.
“I have to go out now,” he said. He whispered it. “I have to get a newspaper. When I get back, will you be gone?”
~
If the weather was lousy, we would go buy groceries. Me, Tutti, and Sammy. We would get Sammy a cookie, sit him down in the cart, his legs hanging out the holes, and then we would go around the store filling up the cart. We would fill the cart with things we didn’t need. We would go to the front of the store, pay for the stuff, and then go and load the stuff into the car. Then we would get in the car and sit in the car for a while with the engine running, gazing straight ahead.
~
I own five pairs of shorts, two of which no longer fit. I keep hoping for cooler weather. I watch the Weather Network.
Tutti comes and sits down beside me on the couch. She has coffee in her hand. We both sit on the couch and look at the TV screen.
Tutti has dark hair, cut short, and dark eyes I hardly ever look at anymore. The room is long, like two arms joined in a handshake. Light ribbons through the vertical blinds. The air is wide open.
~
Last night Sammy said he had to poo. So we sat him down on the toilet, and he sat there on the toilet for a long time, trying to poo, but the poo would not come out. If you lifted him up off the toilet and set him down on the floor, you could see the tip of the poo sticking out of his bum, but then, when you put him back on the toilet, the poo would not come out. I ran around the house trying to find something that would help. Then I ran out of the house and got in the car and went to the grocery store. I bought a box of bran and some prune juice. When I got home, Sammy and Tutti were sitting on the couch, smiling and watching TV.
~
I think after a certain point in your life things are never the same. For years you try to figure out what went wrong. You try to come up with reasons. Any reasons.
~
First of all, there is this great clamor about getting some of those posts with ropes, or chains strung between them, the kind you see in banks all the time. Everyone on staff wants to get a bunch of these posts with chains and start stringing them up all around the library.
“Let’s get as many as we can,” someone says.
This all sounds perfectly rational. Like having staplers on all the desks, or getting better office chairs for everyone.
But then, at the staff meeting, when, once again, the matter of the posts arises, something occurs. People want to put the posts in every conceivable location in the library. “We can put them up,” someone says, “and if we find they aren’t working in certain locations, we can take them down again.”
Around the time the talk about the posts is reaching its climax, the microwave in the staff kitchen stops working. We must now keep constant vigil over our coffees, lest they grow cold and there be no way to heat them up again.
Cups of cold coffee begin to appear on every flat surface in the workroom, abandoned, forgotten. The most disturbing occurrence, however, involves the Ping-Pong table on the fourth floor. Some people who don’t work at the library, people who merely rent space on the fourth floor, have begun playing Ping-Pong on their lunch hour. So a couple of the boys on staff here head upstairs, vigilante-style, and try to put locks on the doors to the room where the Ping-Pong table is. Only problem is, none of these guys really knows what the hell they are doing. They start moving locks from one door to another, and, before you know it, they’ve locked themselves out of the cleaner’s closet. They can’t get in. They’ve closed and locked the door, and now they can’t get back in. So they spend the entire afternoon up there on the fourth floor, desperately trying to break into the cleaner’s closet. They try paper clips, kitchen knives, screwdrivers.