Mostly we notice the girls. These girls, whom none of us ever approaches or speaks to, are part of the Black Rod Club. Somehow they have become part of the club.
Today there is a guy sleeping on one of the benches out there. He keeps rolling around, and once in a while he rolls right off. Sometimes he undoes his shirt and talks to himself. Eventually he undoes his fly and, without getting up off the bench, he lies on his side and pees onto the interlocking stones beneath the bench. One of the managers finds out and calls the police. The police come and take the guy away.
I think the men in the Black Rod Club are afraid of something. They all laugh when the police come and take this guy away. They all make comments. There is talk of never having lunch in the courtyard again. Someone asks if any of the guy’s pee splashed on the picnic table. Beneath all this talk and laughter I think there is a kind of terror.
~
Anytime Sammy wants me to carry him, I carry him. Sometimes I carry him from the living room to the front steps. I carry him so he can get his shoes on and go outside and play. Sometimes I carry him all the way to the mall.
Today Sammy wanted to go to the mall to buy Tutti some blocks. “We could give Mommy some blocks,” he says. “Let’s get Mommy some blocks.”
“She doesn’t want blocks,” I say.
“Mommy wants blocks,” he says.
“We are not getting Mommy any blocks,” I say.
“Mommy needs blocks,” he says.
I carry him over to the mall on my shoulders. The air is cold and we go into Kmart.
~
Are you the kind of guy who, when it says, Take One, you always take one? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t get that kind of thing where you are. We get it on the buses.
~
There are things you can think about, where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.
~
Hypnotize me or something, would you?
32
ONE DAY Tutti takes all the bank books and the bank cards and the bank statements and she says to me, “When your check comes in, give it to me.”
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We just got back from visiting Mom. Yesterday, when we had to leave, Sammy stood outside the donut shop where my sister works and cried. He cried because he wanted a lemon donut. Tutti said he couldn’t have a lemon donut because he already had a chocolate donut and he couldn’t have both. We took him back to Mom’s house and put him in the car. I had all the suitcases on the roof of the car. Tutti was in the passenger seat with her seat belt on. Sammy was in the back seat, crying. He kept crying. He said he wanted to go back to the donut shop.
The thing is, I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back to the donut shop and get Sammy that donut. I didn’t want to hear Sammy cry anymore. He was crying so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. He said, “Daddy, you’ve never done this to me before.” Only, you could hardly tell what he was saying because of the way he was crying so hard.
~
It takes x number of years to figure out what you are trying to say, and then another number of years to find out that what you are trying to say cannot be said. What I want to know now is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with the rest of your life?
~
I took Sammy to the beach today. Tutti is out with Coco, shopping. I don’t know when they will be back.
It was cold and windy at the beach, and I didn’t bring any sweatshirts, because of the way the weather has been around here for the last week or so, and because I always think, once it is July, and it gets hot, it is just going to stay hot. I made egg salad sandwiches with cheese on them, but we never wound up eating them. We couldn’t even swim, because the waves were knocking Sammy down and it was scaring him. We ended up eating chips on the way home in the car. It was the jumbo size of rippled chips, and there weren’t many left, so Sammy would reach down into the bag and his whole arm would disappear. Then his hand would come out with some chips in it. He fell asleep on the way home, and I had to hold his head up with my elbow while I drove.
~
You know those things that look like various breeds of dogs, and you get them in the backs of guys’ cars, where it sits on the back dash and the head bobs up and down? What the hell are those things called?
~
Things would get quiet. Then, after a while, things would get quiet.
33
I GET that letter they send every year from the hospital, asking me to send them money.
~
She kept holding up the little cards with buttons on them. “What do you think of these ones?” she would say. She would hold the little card with the buttons in front of my face and wait for me to say something.
~
It is my belief that you can never have too much playground equipment. At the community center, near where we live, there is a playground for the kids who go to the day care over there. It says, Day Care Only, on a sign on the fence that surrounds the playground. I like taking Sammy over to that playground after dinner, when there are no kids left over there from the day care. I lift Sammy up over the fence and set him down in the playground. We watch the sun go down behind the community center. Then we hurry home. When the dark starts overtaking the sky, we feel a kind of fear. This is in the autumn. The air is cold. From the driveway, we can see Tutti in the kitchen, washing the dishes.
~
I got all my money out of the bank. I rode the bus. I called some of my friends, but they said, no, give it to me loose.
~
Coco once bought a little electric thing that was supposed to shave off those fabric balls you get on your clothes after you have washed them a lot of times. She lent it to me one time, and I brought it home, thinking about all the clothes I was going to save with this thing.
34
I THOUGHT I was alone. But then I hear this banging out in the hall and I say to myself, “I wonder who that is.” I open the door and look out. Gerome is out there. I turn on some lights. I go into the kitchen to make some coffee.
The light is on in the managers’ office, but I figure it’s Gerome who has turned it on, for whatever reason. Then I see Lina, one of the managers, working at her desk.
“You’re in early,” I say.
“I think I set my watch wrong.”
I think Lina is probably lying. I don’t think her watch is wrong. I think Lina is probably the same as my mother.
My mother used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and sit at the kitchen table paying bills. She wrote in her checkbook in this perfect handwriting she has. Sometimes she would get up and turn on the light over the kitchen sink, because she couldn’t get her solar calculator to work.
~