The Ticking Is the Bomb Page 3
(1974) If, without taking your eyes from the television, you call out for a glass of water and your mother, stirring some onions in a pan, answers, Who died and made you king?—it might make you wonder if you were, in fact, a king. Unknown, unrecognized, but still—a king. Or, if you call out for a glass of water and your mother, as she passes on her way out, answers, Who was your slave yesterday?—it might mean something else. Or it might mean the same thing, for kings, after all, often have slaves, the two often go together, you know this.
In school you study the Civil Rights movement, but you aren’t interested in civil rights. You’re interested in the Middle Ages, a time of kings and dungeons, which they don’t teach in school. Medieval, you like to say the word, it has the word “evil” in it. Today the teacher is talking about Martin Luther King—every year you learn the same four things about Martin Luther King—but you are thinking about Nebuchadnezzar, the king of ancient Babylon. God took away his kingdom in order to punish him for his pride, and then God condemned him to live in the woods like an animal. God, apparently, doesn’t like one to have pride. For seven years Nebuchadnezzar lived without society or the ability to think. Hair grew all over his body, his nails became claws.
You look at your own hand, stretch your fingers out.
Martin Luther King sat in a Birmingham jail, locked up for supporting the right for a man to order a sandwich whenever and wherever he damn well pleased. Your father is in prison, your mother told you so, the prison is in Missouri, but that’s all you’ve heard. From the big map on the wall, the one you stare at when you’re supposed to be listening, you know Missouri is in the middle of nowhere. The teacher says that while in prison Martin Luther King wrote a letter. You were supposed to read the letter for homework. Can anyone tell us one thing he wrote in his letter? She looks straight at you as she says this—you blur your eyes and she dissolves.
Back home, belly-down on the floor, you read the funnies while your mother reads the obituaries. You look for The Wizard of Id—you like Spook, the troll-like guy, chained up forever in that dungeon. You like how every time Spook appears he tries to escape, and you both want him to make it and want him to be there the next time you visit.
One day your mother passes on a letter your father has sent you from prison. In the envelope, along with the one-page letter, he has included a clipping from the newspaper—The Wizard of Id. Spook is chained to a wall, a hooded man holding a whip stands behind him.
If you ask your mother why your father is in prison she might say, Your father is a reprobate. Since you don’t know what a reprobate is, you might think it’s a type of king.
But it’s more likely that you’ll think it’s a type of spook.
Your father, from what you remember, from the one time you remember meeting him, looks like a cross between Andy Williams and the Cowardly Lion. All of your mother’s boyfriends remind you of someone you’ve seen on tv. Tom Jones. Dick Cavett. Gregg Allman.
One day you will learn that what was once Babylon is now Iraq. Years later, after your country invades, its king, its president, will be found, some months later, hiding in what will be called “a spider hole”—his beard gone wild, his nails grown long. And some days after this, after he is sentenced to death, he will be hung by the neck by jeering hooded men. You will watch his execution on the same day you see a photograph of a lost pop star showing her pussy to the world.
But for now it is still that beautiful spring day, and you are still inside. Your mother hasn’t gone out yet. Tonight she’ll bartend until two, but she doesn’t have to go in until dark—anything could still happen. The two of you could head down to the harbor, get some ice cream, park by Peggotty Beach, watch the summer people try to swim in the still-cold Atlantic. You could help her chop carrots and onions for her chicken stew. You could drive around the cliffs, past all the big houses teetering on the edge of the ocean, make bets on which will be pulled in next. But if she’s going out to meet her latest boyfriend, the cop (Elvis), it wouldn’t make sense for you to go with her. What would you do, play with his gun again while they make out in the front seat? As she passes you on her way out, you are still belly-down, now staring into your box of shadows—The Three Stooges now, Curly’s head in a vice again, Moe cutting into it with a hacksaw. Moe, it seems, is forever trying to carve his way into someone else’s body.
one simple question
(1995) I’m working as an itinerant poet in New York City Public Schools—Harlem, the South Bronx, Crown Heights—reading poems to young people, helping them to write their own. These are the years of unprecedented wealth in the United States, and if you want to find the worst public school in any city you just have to look up the one named after Martin Luther King. The schools I work in are in neighborhoods that look like Dresden after the firebombing, though the carpetbaggers, the speculators, are already making inroads, buying up the burned-out shells. To start a class I sometimes read the poem A Story That Could Be True by William Stafford. It deals, in part, with a missing father, and I know that the fathers of many of these kids are missing. The poem starts:
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
I’d choke up every time I’d read it outloud, for reasons that were mysterious to me then but seem obvious now. For six years my father had lived like Nebuchadnezzar, without society or the ability to think—hair grew all over his body, his nails became claws.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by—
you wonder at their calm.
By the time I was reading Stafford to second-graders in Harlem, my father had been off the streets for nearly five years, living in his government-subsidized studio apartment in downtown Boston. But once again I’d lost contact with him, once again he’d slipped into the shadows. Or I had. When I found him again, I told myself I wanted to ask him just one simple question—how had he met my mother?—but I had to keep going back, for it took years for him to answer this question.
as we drive slowly past the burning house
(1971) When a siren—police car or fire truck or ambulance—punctured my Saturday morning cartoons, twisting the blue from the sky, my mother would tell me to go start the car. Let’s see what’s happening, she’d say, and we’d drive, to the place where the sirens called us. Afterward we’d drive to the coffee shop in the harbor and I’d go in and order her the usual—cream no sugar—while she’d wait in the car. She’d worked in that same coffee shop when she was in high school—it was where she met my father. I don’t want to give them anything more to talk about, she’d once told me, to explain why she’d send me in alone.
After I’d come back with her coffee, we’d drive to the beach, sit in the car, look out at the Atlantic. One day she told me that she was thinking of marrying a carpenter she’d been seeing for a couple months. Travis wants me to marry him, she said. What do you think? Travis was just back from Vietnam—ten years younger than her, ten years older than me (I’m eleven)—a nice enough guy, but a little wild.
That’s a mistake, I tell her.
A couple weeks later Travis is living in our house.
After they’re married, my mother and I still drive toward our burning houses. Travis never joins us—maybe he’s never invited. Once we drove past the house of a woman who’d killed herself—no siren had announced it. Maybe we read about it in the paper, maybe we heard about it from a neighbor, but still we got in the car, and drove slowly past. It was a house I’d never noticed, though I’d passed by it every morning on my paper route, the windows now curtained shut, the grass already overgrown.
; scylla
As we drove past our burning houses, what was my mother hoping to find, what was she hoping I’d see? Was she hoping to teach me to pay close attention to the world. Or to pay close attention to the afterworld? In The Odyssey the Sirens sang out to Odysseus to lull him into stranding his ship on the shoals—it could be argued that our sirens were merely calling out to strand us as well, to scuttle our ship, only it would take years to know that was what they were doing. Or, it could be argued, at least it wasn’t our tragedy, at least we were able to step outside our house for an hour, into the fresh air, to witness something outside ourselves. To empathize, or to practice empathy, even though we never knew the people who’d lived in the burning houses, nor did it seem we cared to, even after their house was gone. What could we have possibly offered—a room in our falling-down house? (There was no room) A meal, a blanket, some clothes? (We never did)
Or maybe my mother simply wanted me to practice, like other families practiced fire drills, so that when the sirens came for her I’d know what to do. To get in the car and drive, toward the sound, whatever it was—fire or heart attack, car crash or suicide—to get out and stand on the sidewalk or on someone’s lawn. Or to not even stop, to make it a slow drive-by, while the stranger is carried away on a stretcher. But where do you drive to when the siren is outside your own house? What do you look at when the strangers on the sidewalk are looking at you?
you don’t take pictures
(2004) On the day the photographs appear, a veteran of the Korean War is interviewed on the radio in a coffee shop in Tennessee. By now the photographs are in every newspaper in the world, it sounds as if he is thumbing through them as he speaks. You know, he begins slowly, searching for the words—stuff like this happens in every war. It’s hard to tell if he’s disgusted or merely baffled. He pauses, then his voice gets slightly more indignant—but you don’t take pictures.
The next day a radio commentator weighs in—This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. And we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we’re going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time. These people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of the need to blow some steam off? This is the moment before the soldiers dragging prisoners on leashes and giving the thumbs-up behind pyramids of naked men will come to be known as a few bad apples. This is the moment when the soldiers are just like us, which—strangely, uncomfortably—is perhaps closer to the truth.
(1984) While living in Boston, when I was still drinking, I began working in a homeless shelter. I was twenty-four years old, my father had yet to be evicted, and I had no way of knowing what was to come. Sometimes, on weekends, I was named “supervisor,” put in charge of other workers—some were twenty-two, some were fifty-two. At our change-of-shift meetings we’d vote on whether to bar this guy or that one, to put him out for a day, or a year, thumbs up, thumbs down. Afterward, when these barrees came to the door, hoping to be let in for the night, we’d stop them, turn them around, send them back out into the snowy darkness. We knew they could die out there, but (lord of the flies) we’d been given the power of life and death. I’d step over bodies on my way home from work each morning, and sometimes I’d watch children, on their way to school, step over the same bodies. They held on to their mother’s hand, and I’d hear them ask, Why’s that man asleep on the sidewalk? Twenty years later, and some of those same children volunteered to go to Iraq. Maybe they thought they could do some good, maybe they thought they might even save someone, or a city, or the world. Or maybe they just wanted to come back and be able to afford college. But that’s not why they were sent. Maybe it isn’t so hard to get someone who has grown up with the idea that human beings are disposable to brutalize someone else—especially someone who doesn’t look like them, or speak their language, or worship their god—even if all they want to do (was it possible they were there and not haunted?) is help.
A few days after the photographs are leaked to the world, at a press conference on what is beginning to be called a “scandal,” the secretary of defense says, I don’t know if it is correct to say what you just said that torture has taken place, or that there’s been a conviction for torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the torture word. The torture word. A few days later a U.S. senator will echo the pronouncement that the photographs show little more than what goes on at a fraternity hazing. Charles Krauthammer (I’m not really sure what Krauthammer, with his comic-book bad-guy name, actually does for a living) will be more explicit—we must all be prepared to torture.
thrown it all away
(1987) I’d been working in a homeless shelter for three years (a lifetime) when my father got himself evicted from his low-rent apartment, a ten-minute walk from my own low-rent apartment, in downtown Boston. We lived that close to each other, yet until he got evicted our paths had never crossed. After the eviction he lived for a few years on the streets, and some nights, many nights, he slept in the shelter where I worked, which sent me into a tailspin, at first, but eventually got me into therapy, and sober. My tailspin, truth be told, was merely the acceleration of an ongoing, if mundane, tale of liquor and drugs and late nights with women who weren’t always my girlfriend. By the time I was working with the homeless, I’d been arrested a few times, spent a few hours in protective custody, totaled a few vehicles, lied a few times to this girlfriend or that. By the time I was working with the homeless, even I could see that I’d rarely been arrested, or left, when I didn’t deserve it. I knew that the cop, or girlfriend, had likely saved my life more than once, by simply towing away my car, or by simply saying enough.
In the shelter I got to know a few cops, the duty officers hired to work security. Outside the shelter, I’d see them at the protests we’d organize, at the tent cities we set up, or at the abandoned government-owned buildings we tore the boards off of and occupied, demanding they be renovated into low-income housing. At one demonstration one of these same cops arrested me, and he smiled as he put the cuffs on me. A hard-ass, a ball-buster, like most cops—it seemed I shouldn’t like him, but I did. He was like those lumberjacks I got to know a few years later on Meares Island, home of one of the last old-growth forests in North America, in the Clayoquot Sound, a system of waterways on the west coast of Vancouver Island. These lumberjacks sat on a bridge with us, the protesters, while the Mounties tried to extract our friend from the log she’d chained herself to—we’d rolled the log in place the night before to block the logging trucks from crossing the bridge. It was slow going, as our friend was straddling one end of the log, which jutted out over the edge of the bridge, dangling her over the river, far below. If they jarred her, she could fall, which wouldn’t make for good headlines, for either the Mounties or the lumber industry. This action slowed their trucks down for a day, and in that day we found out that the lumberjacks were really no different from us, just trying to get through another day. They reminded me of my mother’s boyfriends when I was growing up—the carpenter and the gangster, the fisherman and the guy who ran the Concrete Pipe Corporation—guys I got to know and like. None of them were much different from the guys who were building the nuclear power plant just over the state line in New Hampshire. I worked in that town for a couple weeks one summer, building greenhouses. At lunchtime, in the sandwich shops, I’d see the nuke plant guys—they didn’t look that much different from me. Later, when I was in college, friends I knew would go back to that town to protest the plant. A few years later I read that there were problems with it, structural problems—it came out that the workers had been filmed getting high in their cars in the parking lots at lunchtime, so all these problems were blamed on them. It was the late seventies, then it was the early eighties. Everyone was high—the guys who built the nuclear power plant, the kids who went up to protest it, my father as he entered his first bank, my mother
as she loaded her gun, me as I stood before her coffin, as I reached out to touch her cheek, murmuring to my brother, She’s not even real. It was how we made it through our days, wrapped in gauze, frozen, like Walt Disney, waiting for some scientific discovery that would make it possible to wake up again, one day.
I’ll try to say this in another way:
(1977) I’m riding shotgun in my friend Phil’s oversized Impala, listening to the Cars on an 8-track—Since you’re gone, I took the big vacation. My mother, in her late thirties, works as a waitress weekend nights, after her day job at the bank, serving up fish-and-chips and bottled beer as the locals listen to the bar band. The bar band for a couple years, up until the moment their first album will make them famous, is the Cars.
I can’t help it, when you fall apart.
By now I know she’s going, not like I know everyone’s going, eventually, but with an unease I’ve carried since birth. Part of me imagines she’ll just up and leave, drive off with a guy she met at the bar, and she probably did, more than once. More than once she didn’t make it home, nights my brother and I stayed at our grandmother’s. It’s not that she hadn’t warned me, she’d told me she wouldn’t be around forever, told me where the important papers were—the documents, the instructions. Instructions? When the time came, the instructions meant nothing—doggerel, gibberish, babble (well, nothing’s making sense)—when the time came, the money meant nothing. All I wanted was a few crumbs to lead me back, all I want is to ask her one question, one small question.
three
a box of dolls
(2007) I have been on this train, heading south along this river, the river off to my right, forever, it seems. I can’t complain. I got on early, got a window, and if I want I can look up and see the river and whatever is washed up along its banks and the little fallen houses that I still imagine I will one day wander through—like that one, the door left open, as if someone went out for a look at the river on a day like this, a warm fall day, and simply never came back.