LINCOLN
The most dead one. How did Washington die? Jefferson? Roosevelt? Lincoln's death was the one dramatized, in a theater no less, by an actor acting and acting. History is scripted. The show goes on. Literally, the show goes on. Our American Cousin performed daily like clockwork. The clocks all set for ten after ten. What ever happened to pageants? The great theatrical recreations of historical events by ordinary citizens, descendants of the participants in the original events, on the sites where the original events first transpired? Sure, the Mormons perform each summer, on another mountain in New York, the visitation of the angel to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Now there's a novel! But the art form of the pageant, the Pre-Postmodern art form, seems to have waned. Perhaps. Perhaps pageantry continues but is only now disguised as Real Life, Story and History the same. The recent War in Iraq was staged. It was held in theater. How did the President watch the performance? Not that much differently than I did, I bet. Like a King in Shakespeare watching a play on stage upon the stage. Like the Subjects of a King watching the pageantry of royalty, of war. My favorite part was the soldier, wounded in the hand, waiting for the evacuation by helicopter, who had the word HAND written on his forehead, talking to his mother, half a world away by satellite phone, talking to his mother in real time (Real Time!) while I watched. That was my favorite part. Lincoln's forehead was a stage. In the movie, North by Northwest. All of the presidents look on when the actor Cary Grant playing the role of Roger Thorn-hill playing the role of Mr. Kaplan performs a staged performance of his (Cary Grant playing Roger Thornhill playing Mr. Kaplan) death all witnessed by the back-projected image of the mountain, there, through the window by the barbershop quartet of stone. At the moment of the assassination The Real World approaches harmony with the Fiction of the World. Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Four Fourths
JULY 4TH, 1979, BALTIMORE
That summer I read all of Chandler, Hammett, Cain, one paperback book after the next in an old eight-story apartment building on St. Paul Street called the St. Paul. On the fourth floor, I had one room and a bathroom that served as the kitchen, the hot plate on the toilet tank. My apartment had been a bedroom in a bigger apartment next door, cannibalized into its own space generating rent, ninety-five bucks the first of the month. I had filled it up with used office furniture, dinged gray-metal bookcases, and a store-cut foam mattress on rough pallets on the floor. Out the one window, I could see over Lovegrove Alley to North Charles Street and the park beyond with the statues of Confederate generals and Edgar Allan Poe, who looked in stone a lot like John Wilkes Booth. It would be easy here to say it was hot that summer, but it wasn't. For some reason it wasn't hot and not even cool, but cold. The room's one doorway had two doors — a solid oak one that could be left open for ventilation and still be screened by the second one, a painted pine plantation shutter that let in some air and the echoing sounds from the hallway. There was another door in the room leaning up against a wall next to the bookcase stacked with the detective novels I was reading. I had found the door in the basement. I liked to look around the old building, see how it had been renovated over the years, how everything fit together. There in the basement with the storage lockers, the coin laundry, and the old coal bunkers was a room made out of warped studs and unfinished drywall. The door was open. A janitor's room once, I guessed. There was a bed frame, a broken chair. I looked behind the door, closing it, and discovered the inside side covered with bits of paper glued or thumbtacked or stapled to the wood — gum wrappers and cigarette packs, ticket stubs and matchbooks, a ferry schedule, racing forms, magazine advertisements, paper watch-faces, fortune cookie fortunes, and Mass cards. A private's sleeve chevron stripe, oyster shells, dominoes, a child's block (the letter M), several kinds of keys and coins, a comb with some teeth missing where the brad went through. And everywhere between the paper appliqué and the odds and ends were dozens of every kind of screw and nail holding nothing, it seemed, but screwed or pounded into the inside of the door at different depths for their own sakes. I unhinged the whole door one night and took it back upstairs to my room. I'd read in bed. I read the door and my books. It was cold that summer. I'd turn the page and look up, get distracted by the door. Something new, I'd find it there. Stamps. Baseball card. Time card. Bottle cap. Betting slip. Evidence. The fireworks that Fourth of July were being launched from Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street not that far away. I had found the way up to the roof. I bought a folding beach chair, aluminum tubes with webbing, and took it, a blanket, and a book with me to the roof. I unfolded the chair on the wooden boardwalk that seemed to float above the gravel roof, sat down, and waited. It was cold. I said that. I wrapped up in the blanket, read. I was the only person on the roof, though I could hear the crowds of people down below making their way up St. Paul and 33rd Streets to the stadium. It took a long time to get dark, and I read The Big Sleep until I fell asleep. I woke up finally in the silence after the loud cracking booms of the firework finale stopped, the smoke of all the explosions, black on the black night sky, drifting south toward the Inner Harbor.
JULY 4TH, 1980, AMES, IOWA
That summer I moved to town a month early before the job started and rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old brick house near the power plant downtown. At night, I walked to Main Street through Band Shell Park that did have an old band shell used, I found out, for concerts once a week by the city's band, wearing uniforms left over from the high school production of Music Man, playing Sousa marches and Sound of Music songs at dirge tempo. In the branches of the oaks beyond the band shell, a cow, a Jersey, perched, or so it seemed, content and grazing. Boyd's Dairy's life-sized sign swayed above the ice cream stand, suspended by invisible wires from old flagpoles. Boyd's served four flavors — chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and a daily special that was usually bubblegum. I got a scoop of chocolate in a cup, walked down Main Street to the deserted train station, and sat on the platform under the eaves, my back against the wide clapboards, and looked out over the double-track right-of-way. I waited for the next train going through, east or west, forty or fifty a day, grain trains mainly, made up of closed hopper cars or gondolas painted in ice cream pastel colors hauled by the green and yellow engines of the Chicago and Northwestern, the Cheap and Nothing Wasted, blowing the horns through every crossing all through town and punctuated on the end with a caboose in a blindingly bright shade of safety yellow whose brakeman or conductor in the bay window usually took the time to wave at me as I waved back with my pink plastic spoon. When I first moved to town, I walked through the park and past Boyd's Dairy and up Main Street to the Hotel Muhm to have my hair cut by the barber whose shop was in the lobby. That summer I was reading westerns, starting with The Last of the Mohicans, Shane, and Little Big Man. I had The Virginian when I went inside, and began to read it after I sat down to wait my turn. Then the barber finished with the customer, and the customer paid while the barber dusted the seat of the chair with a towel. I dog-eared the page in my book and sat down in the empty seat, waiting for the barber to drape the sheet around my neck. “I don't cut long hair,“ he said. “OK,“ I said to the barber standing behind me. “I said,“ he said, “I don't cut long hair.“ My hair was long, I thought, that was why I came in for a haircut, but not that long. Before I could say anything more, the barber said, “I don't cut your hair.“ And I got up and left. When I opened the door to the flat, I saw the door I found in Baltimore leaning against the far wall of the big empty living room that had been converted into my bedroom by the convertible couch converted into an unmade bed. I still had to finish the unfinished white pine wood bookcases, staining them later to look like dark oak. Soon after that, my tooth began to ache, one in back on the left, the lower jaw, from the cold daily ice cream, and I had to find a dentist. I didn't have a car then, so I walked into the first office I could walk to. The dentist was able to have a look right then, no waiting, and I sat in the chair with my finger still in my place in The Virginian. My wisdom teeth were impacted, all of them, and the dentist recommended they come out as soon as possible and recommended the long holiday weekend. I had been told that there was a neighborhood parade on my block — bicycles and red wagons tricked out with crepe paper and streamers, kazoo bands, batons, hula hoops, and everyone with little flags. Recovering after the procedure, I could take my lawn chair and sit by the curb, see the kids ignite snakes on the sidewalk and light sparklers in the daylight, watch the riding lawn mowers trailing bunting and the dogs and cats dressed up like minutemen. I never made it to the parade, only imagined it in my stupor brought on by the pain pills I was given, the leftover effects of the amnesia drugs that kept me awake for the removal of teeth numbered 1, 16, 17, 32 but left me remembering nothing, nothing of it until I woke up on the train platform, my ear to the ground, the steel wheels stuttering over a rail joint, waiting for this train, convinced that a wave from the brakeman or the conductor was all I needed to get better, the cool mint colors of the cars already gone, forgotten, a balm.