Mom hugs me & stands on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. Her bones are like dried sticks I could break in my hands so I stand very straight & still not breathing to inhale her smell. What that smell is I do not know & do not name. Mom was a plump woman once with soft big breasts like balloons filled with warm liquid unless I am remembering her wrong. Dr. E__ says all mothers are big in memory because we were tiny infants nursing at the breast. Dr. E__ says there is the GOOD BREAST & the BAD BREAST. There is the GOOD MOTHER & the BAD MOTHER. You know we love you Quentin Mom says like a tape when a button is punched This time things will turn out well.
I say, That’s right, Mom.
I say, I’m sure going to see to that, Mom.
These past ten months or so I’ve been driving out to Dale Springs & taking Mom & Grandma to church, & I’m missing some Sundays now but I intend to get back on schedule soon. Mom says This time things will turn out well. With God’s will. & Grandma says, This time things will turn out well. With God’s will Amen.
26
EXCEPT: the old dreams starting again in this new bed in this very house I’d visited so much as a little boy, Junie & me the grandchildren Grandma & Grandpa loved. They never knew Q__ P__ but they said they loved him. These old dreams now I’ve stopped taking my medication, I’m waking with a HARD-ON big as a ROCKET & sizzling-exploding going off LIKE A COMET’S TAIL. My cum is thick & clotted & gluey-hot wiped on the bedsheets, on the curtains, on the cardboard pizza box & napkins from Enzio’s I folded to an inch square & placed in Akhil’s bed (which was not that neatly made, not what you might expect) one afternoon when the house was empty.
Waking up in my caretaker bed at the ground floor rear of 118 North Church Street & I’m shuddering-groaning as the ORGASM slams through me like a bolt of electricity. Dreaming I’m strapped in the dentist’s chair & lowered helpless & knives & picks in my mouth till I’m choking with my own blood. I’m feeling O.K. once I get up & turn the TV to “Good Morning America” & I boil some black coffee & take some uppers I pick up on the street when required. & I remember the computer class was the day before. Or I’m driving out to Dale Tech & it’s the wrong day, or the wrong time of the right day. Because Time is like a tapeworm jammed inside you in any direction. So I drive out anyway once the van is IN MOTION headed in that direction I’m superstitious about changing course just on impulse.
& if there’s a hitch-hiker along the route, often just off the expressway I’ll probably stop & give him a ride & I will observe him detached as a scientist calculating what kind of ZOMBIE he might make. But I am never tempted so close to home. & out at Dale Tech which is this crappy fifth-rate place everybody at the University including Professor R__ P__ looks down their asses at I will park my van in lot C I have a sticker for & cross “campus” (just concrete & scrubby strips of grass & stick-trees half of them dead over the winter) thinking O.K.! I’ll visit my profs to explain there’s an illness in the family, my Mom in a struggle with cancer, or Dad with a bad heart but I can’t find their offices or if I find the office it’s in the wrong building or the wrong wing of the right building & by the time I get to the right office it’s shut, door’s locked, the cocksucker is gone for the day. Or say I get sidetracked trailing some young guys from my engineering class into the student union where I’ll have cups of black coffee till my eyeballs spin like pinwheels sitting seeing who’s around ANYBODY KNOW ME? ANYBODY WANT TO SIT WITH ME? squinting seeing if I recognize anybody, if it’s O.K. to sit with some of them, maybe they’re in my engineering class or maybe computer or I look enough like somebody they know so it’s O.K. I’m carrying some textbooks, it looks like, & my hair cut & not in a ponytail or straggling down my shoulders since the arrest though I am wearing RAISINEYES’ funky leather slouch-brim hat & BUNNYGLOVES’ soft-bunny-fur-lined leather gloves are in the pocket of my $300 sheepskin jacket & my aviator-style amber prescription lenses are in BIG GUY’s frames so I look pretty fucking cool I think for a shy white guy on the downside of thirty, weak chin & hairline receding. & it’s weird how friendly the Tech students are, & how trusting. Like if you are enrolled & a student you are one of them & no questions asked. All of them commuters like me living in Mt. Vernon or the county & most with part-time jobs or even full-time, like me. Even sometimes a girl will pull out a chair to sit at my table if she knows somebody with me. Hi! she’ll say like a high school cheerleader. Like the girls at Dale Springs High who looked through Q__ P__ those years like he didn’t exist. Are you in my computer class?—you look familiar.
I should mention my handtooled kidskin boots just a little too big for me courtesy of Rooster. Last observed striding along the street in Greektown, Detroit, Thanksgiving weekend 1991.
Never have selected any specimen except the black boy I don’t count, from the Roosevelt projects, from Mt. Vernon & vicinity. But it is a shrewd idea to keep in practice speaking with them. Though mainly I listen. To learn their words, their slang. Like they say, cool they say, that’s cool! every few words. Gross, fucked-up, weird, wasted, retro, wild, far-out bummed—the words don’t change that much, & there are not many of them. It’s more the way they move their hands, mouths, eyes. Though shrinking from their eyes unless I’m wearing my dark plastic shades.
Sometimes like Mom says I’m too generous paying for somebody’s lunch or beers or whatever. Or actually lending money. & driving one or two of them home sometimes if they’ve missed their bus going a few miles out of my way into suburbs not-known to me & No trouble! I say & in such instances Q__ P__’s kindness will be remembered, my face & the Ford van with the AMERICAN FLAG decal on the rear window. A big decal exactly fitting the rear window. If I needed a character witness (for instance at a trial) you would remember Q__ P__ from Dale Tech & the fact that I was kind.
Once lent a skinny Chinese kid my sheepskin jacket on a freezing winter night, no questions asked. & he returned it, maybe two weeks later but he returned it. Engineering student named “Chou” or “Chin” with a ping! sound in it. & his eyes shining-black & he did not seem so young & so innocent as most of them but when he said Thanks, man all I said was a mumble Sure.
27
That last time in my place on Reardon St. I was taking a chance bringing NO-NAME home. Picked him up on 1-96, Grand Rapids exit ramp but he said he was from Toledo & traveling west. Fighting the drug eyes rolling sideways in his head like marbles. Hey man I guess I don’t want to do this O.K.?—lemme go man & I told him I wanted him to stay with me like we were friends, brothers, I told him I would pay him well & he wouldn’t be disappointed & he was sweating saying Man I’m cool won’t tell anybody I swear just lemme out of here man please?—O.K.? & I tightened the cord so his big eyes bulged & his skin was ashy-plum & the lips I could not take my eyes off were ashy & it was shooting through me like electricity HE KNOWS! NOW HE KNOWS! NO TURNING BACK! which is the point that must be reached. The threshold of the black hole that sucks you in. A fraction of a second before & you are still free but a fraction of a second later & you are sucked into the black hole & are lost. & my dick hard as a club. & big as a club. & the sparks of my eyes. & I did not stammer as when first he swung into the van this cool dude eyeing whitey & his easy smile like Here I am, man, what’re you going to do about it? In the back the old battered Elements of Geophysics textbook to provide a false clue, & my stick-on woolly moustache & hair parted weird-neat high on the left side of my head & in the tavern in Grand Rapids where we had a few beers he did the talking & I sat quiet just listening & if anybody saw us it was NO-NAME they saw & some white guy who never was there.