And do not say then that I will wait for something to wait for.
LABOV
"Go on out of here with yourselves and leave the lady alone!" I shout at a mobster gang of boys in leather who are taking up all the space of the plastic shelter of the El platform and who are whistling and making with comments at the tears which are frozen by the wind on the thick spectacles of Mrs. Tagus. I can feel in my cold feet on the platform (feet: arthritis also) the fact that the train is coming.
I tell Mrs. Tagus to call when she needs a late taxicab home. I will meet her at home.
A vagrant beside a burning ashcan for trash is singing the national anthem across both sets of the tracks, but the song comes to us and then goes in the strongly blowing winter wind on the platform. All the snow is frozen in rigid positions. I give to Mrs. Tagus the Thermos vacuum bottle of the tea for on the train, the ride takes three quarter-hours except for thank God no transfers.
I tell Mrs. Tagus to tell her boys to call my apartment. We'll drink something hot, talk the whole matter out.
So here comes the train. Mrs. Tagus feels her way. She never talks when she cries, Greta. We pretend how it's not happening, for dignity. She is inside the door of the train. She gets a seat alone, but facing away from where the train's going, which I'm worried is bad for stomachs. Greta takes her gloves from her hands and puts her yellowed hands, which I can remember when they were white, she puts her hands up to remove her frozen eyeglasses. Without her glasses Mrs. Tagus is older. The doors close themselves before I can walk with my stiffness to tell Mrs. Tagus through the opening to face where the train is going. There is so much noise I can't stand the noise. I have my hands in my gloves I bought over my ears and I see Mrs. Tagus pulled away north on a track. In our building in my kitchen I look at my kitchen and see the train pull her away.
EVERYTHING IS GREEN
SHE says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.
She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette in light through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.
I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.
I light up myself and I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make everything feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you that are in the way.
She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.
I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more.
Her hair is up with a barret and pins and her chin is in her hand, it's early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.
Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenet is cleaned off from the hard rain last night and it is a morning with a sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the big wheel toy that is on its side under a clothes line without clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY
"As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse,"
"For whom is the Funhouse fun?"
BACKGROUND THAT INTRUDES AND LOOMS: LOVERS AND PROPOSITIONS
THOUGH Drew-Lynn Eberhardt produced much, and Mark Nechtr did not, Mark was loved by us all in the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Writing Program that first year, and D.L. was not. I can explain this. D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of herself she'd extend to the space around her. Thin the way mean nuns are thin. She walked funny, with the pelvis-led posture of a man at a urinal; she carried her arms either wrapped around her chest or out and down at a scarecrow's jangly right angles; she was slatternly and exuded pheromones apparently attractive only to bacteria; she had a fatal taste for: (1) polyester; (2) pantsuits; (3) lime green.
Vs. Mark Nechtr, who was one of those late-adolescent chosen who radiate the kind of careless health so complete it's sickening. Ate poorly, last slept well long before the Colts went West, had no regimen; however strongly built, well-proportioned, thick-necked, dark. Healthy. Strong. (This was back when these qualities revealed things about people, before health-club franchises' careful engineering of anatomy disrupted ancient Aryan order and permitted those who were inherently meant to be pale and weak to appear dark and strong.) Not handsome in a to-die-for way, just this monstrous radiance of ordinary health — a commodity rare, and thus valuable, in Baltimore. We in the writing program — shit, even the kids over at E.C.T. Divinity — could love only what we valued.
Also because D.L. was also weird, and conspicuously so, even in an environment — a graduate writing program — where neurosis was oxygen, colorful tics arranged and worn like jewelry. D.L. carried Tarot cards, and threw them (in class), would leave her loft only on her psychic's endorsement, wore daily the prenominate lime synthetics — a lonely onion in a petunia-patch of carefully casual cotton skirts, tie-dyes, those baggy pastel post-Bermudas, clogs, sandals, sneakers, surgeons' clothes.
Also because she also seemed greedy and self-serving, and not near naïve enough to get away with the way she seemed. She idolized Professor Ambrose with a passion, but in a greedy and self-serving way that probably turned Ambrose himself off right from the very first workshop, when she brought a conspicuously battered copy of Lost in the Funhouse for him to autograph — at East Chesapeake Trade something One Did Not Do. Was thus, for our interpretive purposes, right from day one, a sycophant, an ass-kisser.