Who do you love? All the other Americans. The astronauts who work where it’s clean and clear. The boys in uniform. Mothers whose children are fat, rosy-cheeked, lovable. Thin fathers in suits. People with their own washers and dryers. With new cars.
May everyone get the gifts this year that’ll do them some good. That’ll save them from the lions.
In my wallet there’s a wrinkled bumper sticker. If I owned a car I’d put it on the windshield. “America: Love It or Leave It.”
Toward New Year’s I get restless, moving from one boardinghouse to another. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ‘I find a wonderful old hardware store. If I’d gone, then gotten the GI Bill, I would own a hardware store. Full of useful things fine people come in to buy to fix drips and torn screen doors. I buy a new ice pick on a card. Still a wooden handle. Still a bargain at $1.29. Someday I’ll buy a dozen because you know they’ll quit making them soon. Who needs them anymore?
POLICE SEEKING CLUES IN MURDERS
The bodies of two male children, approximately ten and twelve years old, were discovered early yesterday morning by state employees emptying dumpsters at a roadside park on US 250 twenty miles south of Wheeling. State police are questioning residents along US 250 in an attempt to identify the two boys. Details are being withheld pending identification, but sources in the Wheeling Police Department say the two children were bound wrist to ankle and stabbed repeatedly. There is no evidence of sexual molestation.
April 1979
There is rain against the window of my room. Has my life been a dream? I ask my coffee. Do I dream with my eyes open? There’s a face in the mirror. It’s almost fifty I think.
I read about black holes in a Newsweek I take from the bus station. And I’m one. Everything collapsed, collapsing. Unbelievably heavy with years, thirty years of dead leaves, spring green, Minneapolis, Rock Springs, Detroit, Atlanta. The soldier dressing in the morning, after coffee. All the armor, including righteousness.
I am not crazy, I swear to myself. The boundaries of the country expanding, deteriorating. While I can only contract, suck into myself cities and days, my people, their waste.
The gypsy moth takes one, sweeping down from the sky. The moth doesn’t read or write or speak or hear, listen, grow larger, only smaller. My hands shake now; my back’s bent. My eyes as milky as theirs at their coldest.
I work even harder. A frenzy of concentration while spring brings other things to America outside. We lost the war. The people have lost their resilience. My people only increase.
The man turns to me in the line and snorts at the service. He’s there for food stamps. He fails to notice I don’t have a letter in my hand. My hand in my pocket. My smile for him and my country. It’s everywhere on posters. Around us the faces of Roosevelt, Stowe, Mencken on stamps.
The child I see left alone in the car. A parking lot full of activity but the black hole edges in invisible. I am invisible. I have always been unseen. I’m not in the mirror some mornings. Sometimes I fail to appear until afternoon, over a sandwich. Through me, in the bathroom, there’s a crack in the tile, the calendar from two years ago, the naked hooks behind the door. Brass plate gone sea green. Humidity streaking everything. Surfaces the feel of snake. So many simply go unreported. Missing because I’ve found them.
Had I gone, come back, sat still, it would all be over. But no GI Bill, no store. I imagine myself a General Grant. As short as he, exaggerated next to Lincoln, that great American. Never out of uniform. I lie on cots in flophouses always dressed.
I take the epaulets off, remove the brocade. Wait at newsstands in the poor sections of the city. They buy a paper. I’m in it. And next to them at the same time. The power of being invisible, two places at once; a dozen places at one time. My hand on the Navy Colt fresh from its paper card.
Roman legionnaires served twenty years. Almost all their short lives. This is a prayer. From a black hole to the things it swallows, absorbs — even the light. Tomorrow let me be absent from Lincoln’s side. In this photograph I carefully clipped from a book in the library.
I act. All those others sit and carp. Despise the poor, illegal aliens, welfare, communists, atheists, the poor. Action. Action. Action. McClellan to Hooker to Grant — that black hole in the wilderness. The movement of the horses outside muffled by the canvas of the tent. On the cot I alone hold the entire country in my mind.
“MAFIA MURDERS” ALARMING
Salem, Oregon (UPI) The State Attorney General has called for the formation of a special commission to coordinate the investigations of the so-called “Mafia Murders.” The proposed five-person task force will gather information and direct state law enforcement officers in an attempt to capture the murderers who have gone on a rampage the last six weeks throughout western Oregon. So far five victims have been found. All were bound, gagged and shot “execution-style” with one bullet to the head from a.22 caliber pistol.MORE DETAILS ON OP-ED PAGE AND READERS’ LETTERS.
August 1983
I don’t know if the street’s foggy or my eyesight’s getting worse. I got glasses last year but they’re no help at all. Every morning this month I’ve walked along Seawall Boulevard past the Flagship Hotel and the Galvez. It’s warm, the air thick and salty.
I walk toward town and, with the usually stiff wind at my back, I come into Mae’s Café and have coffee, look out the window.
Those people all around me here, but now I thank God for my lousy vision. I nod at the ugly waitress, elbow a space between two delivery-truck drivers. Smell bacon grease, coffee, the terrifying odor of six o’clock cigarettes.
I tell myself stories all day. The garage in winter. My father’s auto-repair shop. He’d be late because he’d still be drunk until nine or ten when Mother’d get enough coffee in him to “start his engine,” as she called it.
It is cold, the light through the filthy panes the color of the ashy deposit on spark plug tips. It could be terrifying, I knew. Empty. Greasy. Leaden light. The floor oily. All the surfaces cold. The tools, the destroyed engines. Tailpipes bent in fantastic shapes. But I breathed it all in deeply. Stretched myself on the single stool. The table in front of me cluttered with broken things my father would fix. He could fix anything. Wire this, tighten, solder, wash clean and new with gasoline. I knew I was exceptional too — an eight year old so full of admiration for his father’s abilities.
This morning over the black coffee I quit recalling and turn around quickly, squinting hard, which helps me see a bit clearer, farther. I’ve had this feeling only once before and then it passed. In Tucson at the bus station. I walked all over the place. Feeling it get weaker. My neck hot and prickly, my collar soaked.
He’s sitting at the window in a booth. I take my coffee with me, ashamed the cup rattles so loud on the saucer. I sit across from him. He’s still looking out at the row of cars facing the window. There’s a Polaroid camera on the table by the salt and pepper. He’s had a big breakfast, a stub of toast, yellow egg stain on the chipped plate.
When he does look it’s only toward me, not at me. My neck cools. I want to say everything at once. I think of the bumper sticker in my wallet. He drinks his coffee and I follow him, my eyes on his face that nods and smiles, his front teeth gapped. Smiles toward me in recognition. We know one another. The feeling’s mutual. We do the same work. He takes a deck of cards from his coat pocket and strips off the rubber band, begins laying them out on the table above his dirty plate. It’s a game, I think. But I see they’re not cards at all but larger — photographs. I look up but his young face is red with concentration as he separates the pictures into stacks.