Borges walked the aisles of library upon library,
his hand on the arm of a lovely assistant.
Mothered & honored, a reader,
a writer, poet & lecturer. A blind seer
speaking into auditoriums, from memory,
from centuries.
Borges, I too am moved by a love
of story & the sound of voices. A proud
citizen of one place & every place I read.
What do you see when you look within?
Do you remember a terrain before
the darkness?
[Modeled after Clint Smith's "How Malcolm Learned to Read". Inspired by Borges's 1967-1968 Norton Lectures at Harvard and of course, by this]
“When she was there, she had not loved it enough” (Pachinko 239)
My mother says that I cried when we left “my little red house,” the first place I lay my head after the hospital. That’s it up there. It’s not far from where I’m writing this. In the late 90s, I even lived a few blocks from it. Still, I haven’t driven by it in at least thirty years.
It’s just north of the highway, but then again most of everything in the town is now. It had a low chain link fence, probably, and humble dimensions. One rectangle. No nooks or wings. When I looked it up on Google maps, I saw that simplest humblest of destinations — one of innumerable grey blocks. Like a little Lego that cannot be anything at all on its own. You can walk from the front to the back door in seven or eight steps. I imagine. I don’t remember much, and there’s little in the boxes of family photos that could jar any memory.
The family camera broke when I was born. They didn’t realize it until they developed the film, returning from the one-man booth in the parking lot of the mall to the little red house with an envelope of muddied prints, multiple images purpling one another on each glossy page, a date clear in the frame of each deep dark unreadable mass. The coffee-brown cellophane strips in the subpocket as always.
Surprisingly, mercifully, we have a few photos from back then, from there. They’re all black & white.
In my favorite of those photos, I’m in the backyard, almost two years old. My brothers, I know from other pictures taken that day, are on the swing set. I’m looking directly into the camera, my cheeks filling the hand-me-down hoodie on this cold spring morning. My lips are parted (in speech, in wonder, in exhaustion?).
Below the frame my left arm is in a cast, broken in a fall two weeks earlier while we were jumping on the bed. They took me to the doctor’s because I kept fainting — they took X-rays just in case I had swallowed something. My mother, out of the X-ray frame, no weighted apron to protect her, had to hold my shoulders flush against the cold clean metal, propping me up in case I fainted again. By chance, my left arm fell into the X-ray eye for one shot, the one showing the clean compound break.
You can’t see my broken arm in the photo, and I can’t see the backyard in Google. I could probably navigate the Google Earth eye into the backyard if I wanted to, could pivot and zoom in for a glimpse of something to jar my memory.
What I have instead — dimming greys, this black & white photo, of me alone (rare for a middle child of five). A record of my mother’s love. Her hands on the camera, ignoring her other boys for a split second, a morning at play behind my little red house.
I shared a room until I was thirteen and a bed until I was nine. The television was in our room. We got used to sharing it — cartoons Saturday mornings, Carol Burnett Saturday evenings, Cowboys games on Sundays. During the week, we’d call through the house any time HBO’s Video Jukebox came on, crowding into our room for that rare glimpse of a song from the radio on TV.
Our room didn’t have a stereo. We had to go upstairs to listen to my brothers’ records — Van Halen Fair Warning, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes — and sometimes dad’s Beatles greatest hits album, the one with the before & after LSD photos on the front & back covers.
I loved my family. I cherished alone time.
Long bike rides past the school, down by the 7-11 and back again, the dust kicking behind me as I pedaled hard then stood up to coast home, the gentle tread rumbling beneath me. And hours kneeling by the bed, Legos spread across the sheets, the gentle creative snapping of pieces that I can feel on my fingers even now. And especially those moments late at night, the house dead quiet, the chinaberry dappling its shadows onto my window, and the Rock Island Express whistling a mile & a half away, rolling through my hometown at a gentle clip, never stopping, carrying men & things somewhere I’d never know.
Music was not me time. Until October 1983.
Nickelodeon wasn’t known for its teen market. I couldn’t tell you why I was watching it that day, but I can hardly imagine happening upon Livewire by accident. It was a talk show for teens. The host was not cool, but he wasn’t condescending or cheesy either. He had a thick shock of white hair parted to the side — white, not blonde, white. He wore button down shirts and neutral slacks. We didn’t have the term yet, but he was business casual. More weatherman that veejay, earnestly introducing a band and then joining the studio audience on the dance floor.
The drummer had an authoritative snap, no big fills or flash, and he was constantly pushing the band forward. Nobody was on the back end of the beat — this thing moved with a kind of urgency that wasn’t menace or anger, with a purpose that wasn’t political, with a longing that wasn’t nostalgia. They rocked in a way I couldn’t figure out, the guitar & bass mixed in a way I hadn’t heard, their Rickenbackers slung low.
Rickenbackers were broader bodied than anything my brother & I pulled off the racks at Murphy’s Music on the weekends. In an era of Van Halen striped primary colors on Fenders & heavy black Les Pauls, these guys had wood-grain gear with f-shaped sound holes, a look of another era. The bass had a melody all his own, not just following the guitar. The guitarist was all jangle and quick picking, throwing his elbow way up to strum before resting his palm right back on the pickguard just in time, right on time. They were constantly in motion, an edgy pacing up to the edge of the stage & back, that wasn’t quite dancing but instead a constant bridging of the space between the band & the audience, an angular unplanned tight motion & energy framing the singer, who barely moved at all.
The singer’s curly hair was in his face, covering part of his glasses (not sunglasses) and he held the mic stand with both hands, his feet crossed at its base. The pose & hair reminded me of Jim Morrison but without the ecstatic me-me-me preening & leaping. This singer was not trying to rock us or woo us. He was tense, assured, contained, unintelligible.
I couldn’t understand what he was singing until the chorus, which was about boxcars pulling out of town, and I thought of the Rock Island Express the night before.
I fought back tears that I didn’t understand, praying that nobody would come in to break the spell or change the channel.
Later that week, I took my paper route money and went with my big brother’s friend Carmen to Bill’s Records, an amazing (ergo, now closed) record store way north in Dallas, where Bill himself (I heard, and later saw) smoked weed at the counter, and nothing had any prices on it. Anything you wanted to buy you brought directly to Bill, in this case the band’s debut EP with only their first names on the back. Bill would look at the thing briefly. Then, he studied you, really studied you. Then he’d tell you what the thing would cost you, in this case, eight dollars.
In the car on the way home that fall afternoon in 1983, I prayed that what was in my hands would match what I saw & heard earlier that week. It did. It does.
PS: This performance that changed my life in 1983 was filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater — the site of life-changing, pop-culture defining performances by Elvis Presley in 1956 & The Beatles in 1964.
Years ago, he got a tic in his eye that he couldn’t control. He was at a party, drinking. Figured maybe he’d had too much. (He probably had.)
Hours later, he woke up to find it worse. Figures swam before him, not blurred, not moving, but liquid in this re-vision. He made it to the bathroom, figuring he’d had too much last night. (He probably had.) He saw in the glass darkly a fright — the face in the glass was often a fright after such nights.
For a quietly panicked minute, he blinked, rubbed, even prayed. But he couldn’t right his crossed eye, nestled now like a thick bead heavy against the bridge of his nose. A round persistent sightless weight dead center of his disbelief.
That day & the next, he made do with a patch from the drug store. Shrugged it off to anyone that asked. (Everyone asked.) He kept it on until the doctor removed it, gripping the paper sheet rolled across the examining table, hoping the bead would roll right.
In a swift ten minutes, the doctor moved with the kind of sanguine approach and gently urgent pace that you’d expect from a young professional practiced in hour after hour of these fifteen-minute appointments, one after the other, from one not well person to the next not dying person, from one end of the hall to the other and back. She moved a light around. She asked him about his drinking, about his weight, about his eyes, and those of his family. He answered everything.
For days & weeks, he answered even more, in other offices, crinkling paper on table after table, test after test. Each time, a penlight moving laterally, searching out the pupil of his eye now fixedly lightless. His wife right there with him now, noting everything, repeating the questions and responses and hopes to every person who called. (Everyone called.)
One day, they found something.
A walnut-sized tumor deep in his skull. It had probably been there his whole life, they told him. What a relief, he joked, for a minute, I was worried someone had left it there by accident. His wife slapped his shoulder, not softly. They repeated, Probably growing his whole life, micromillimeter by micromillimeter, now just large enough to just push just enough on his optic nerve just in time to ruin that party that night.
In a couple of weeks, they said, they’d saw part of his skull open to enter his brain through the ear canal and arrive, dead center, where the tumor was. You’ll lose your hearing in that ear, but you’ll also lose the tumor. There was no other way.
The afternoon before the saw and the scar, before the great cleaning (as he called it), he moved the living room speakers to either side of his easy chair, the cords stretched taut above the frayed rug. On the side table, three fingers of mescal and a stack of LPs. He sat down and listened, the stereo turned up like it was the last time. (Which in some ways, it was.) Tupelo Honey. Eydie Gorme y Los Panchos. Taj Mahal live at the Fillmore East. Tom Waits On the Nickel. His wife & the kids could hear the Julio Jaramillo album as the car pulled into the driveway. He welcomed them home, smiling, tears darkening his eyepatch.
After it was all over, after it was all out, they stapled shut a long pink rainbow of a scar over his ear.
It’s been years. He’s okay. Sometimes, he even forgets which is his good side.
it's black on black
hanging
swirling slowly
balanced delicately
a mathematical
suspension
of wire & metal
hand made world
twisted & curled
it's a reminder
maybe to know
that we spin
& live
surrounded by
nothing
that movement
is slight & shape
is subtle
to seek out
light & motion
to look up
I've seen videos of horses
long legged, just born, shuddering
& steaming, fighting just to stand
too soon. A life of running,
a strength of body, a rippling
brown energy they don't yet know.
This video, an interior shot,
loose hay & metal buckets,
a kind of everystall. Everyhorse
reborn & unshod. For now.
I watch, the image handheld,
the camera handheld. Held
in suspense through the inevitable
slips & corrections, hooves clean
& unsure. For now.
The newborn saddled only
with expectations. No hands
steady the slow progress,
no mare's muzzle
in frame.
A foal alone. Eyes wide.
Such a drama to rise,
still wild, still free. Then
still. wild. still. free.
I've never seen youtube's
part two.
The gelding & tagging, the shots
& shodding. The saddle cinched,
cold steel along the tongue,
head gear, iron, leather,
& a name.
Be careful who watches you
take to your feet.
Be careful who tames you
& calls you by name.
cuidado: Spanish for "care" "attention". Sometimes used on its own to mean, "Be careful."
middleagedmiddlechild. 