a sixtieth story...'misery or something better'

Here’s an interesting story.  Or at least interesting to me because I was there, and now, a few days on, it strikes me as meaning something.  Something that might mean something to someone else; something, without wishing to sound too grand, about people in general.

Last weekend I was at my son’s Christmas school fair.  The school fair was taking place in the old covered market.  It was on the spot where the pet store used to be when I was young, with kittens and puppies in cages and so on.  There were perhaps ten, eleven trestle tables set out with things the kids had made – jams, cakes, clay pots, one kid had made a catapult.  What anyone else would consider bric a brac.

My son hadn’t really wanted to go, but his teacher insisted, and so did his mother – my wife, and so did I.  In the end the fair passed off just fine, no tears, tantrums, and most of the jams, cakes etcetera actually sold! 

It was when I and some of the other parents were helping pack away the various tables, chairs, surplus goods into cardboard boxes that this interesting thing happened.  My son was with me at the time, wrapping left over slices of rum cake in paper towels to go into the Tupperware my wife had supplied.

My wife.  I told her what I am about to tell you over dinner that night, when the kids were upstairs but she didn’t really take in the meaning of it – we had just had an argument about something else, probably my getting a new job with better working hours, and she was preoccupied with that.

So, this drunk comes up to me, or at least that was my first instinct – that he was a drunk I mean, smelly, perhaps threatening, you get the idea.  He’s around five feet six, seven, quite sturdy.  I’m six feet three, also quite sturdy, so I wasn’t intimidated, but I did have my son with me. Anyway, he’s wearing a blue bobble hat, a large backpack and he’s cradling a can of special brew in a brown paper bag.  ‘Merry Christmas’, he says to me in a thick voice.  ‘And to you’, I say, and go back to my packing, hoping my son hasn’t noticed and the drunk will leave us alone.

‘Merry Christmas’, I hear him say again, and then he says something about Whitney Houston.  Whitney Houston!  Still, I ignore him, continue packing.  Then my son speaks up, ‘Daddy’, he says, ‘I’m done’.  And he is, all the slices of rum cake are wrapped and tidily placed in the Tupperware, he’s also put the lid on.  ‘Good’ I say and sweep my son up in my arms, protectively I guess. 

Now, however, the drunk has latched on to me, he thinks in his addled mind that because I have stood up I am going to engage him.  Of course, I’ve other ideas, but I also know my wife won’t be here to pick us up for a half hour, and something in me tells me we’ll be stuck with the drunk until then.

My father always used to say to trust your first instinct.  He had this catch phrase, ‘the more you think the more you stink’.  But standing in front of this drunk, who had just wished me ‘Merry Christmas’, with my young son in my arms, I was torn between an immediate desire to tell him to clear off, and what I tried to suggest to my wife was some kind of innate compassion. 

Sure, I felt a bit sorry for him at that moment, but it was nothing like what I felt when he started telling me his story.

He was from Romania.  He had come over with his English wife to start their new life together, only for her to meet someone else, perhaps even someone like me, and tell this guy to get lost.  In between sips of his beer he told me how he was ‘finito’, ‘caput’ – I think that means finished in Romanian, I don’t know.  And that he had a broken heart.  Whitney Houston according to this guy also died of a broken heart.  He put a rose in the local church when he learned of her death, or so he said.  Lit a candle and all!

My first wife, I should mention at this point, left me out of the blue.  I remember for two, three years I felt bad, low, unable to move on.  Difference is, I had a job, money, and friends.  Perhaps in that order.

Because here’s what our conversation left me thinking - that people have to be useful human beings.

This Romanian, we chatted until my wife turned up, my son in my arms half listening.  He had been kicked out by his wife, lost his job at the same time, had been roaming the streets for a month, would spend Christmas doing the same thing.  He showed me some photos of his past life, a holiday he had been on to Venice, pictures of him standing on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, sitting in a gondola, all of the touristy things.  He also told me he had been a soldier in Bosnia. 

When my wife finally arrived, she took my son and began packing things into the car.  I had a lump in my throat I have to admit.  I could see this proud man was helpless, heart broken, caput as he kept on saying.  I didn’t know what to do, how to be useful.  I tried to remember the name of a hostel  in town someone I knew had been involved with to tell him to go to, but couldn’t.  When it was time to leave, I gave him a note, told him to buy some dinner for the night.  After everything he had told me it felt like a token gesture.

And then, as I turned to leave, he asked me this.  He asked me what my telephone number was so we could talk again.  I knew this was impossible.  I knew my wife would be wary of someone who to her was a drunk – smelly, threatening – becoming involved in any way with us.  So I lied.  Said I didn’t have a telephone.  And we parted.

While my wife was cooking dinner over the gaslight stove later in the evening I realised why I had lied.  This man could not be of any use to me in my life.  And I could not really be any use to him, at least outside the old covered market with my young son in my arms, at least as things were.  We would not, perhaps never, be able to develop a mutual friendship, unless his misery turned to something better.

Or so it seemed then, and so it seems today.

a twentieth poem...'I'm not really there'

I am not really here –

I’m not really there.

I am at the foot of the stair, or five minutes behind,

Still in bed, in another time,

Another place.

Sad thing is,
I can’t remember your face

Though I can hear your voice, a willow cry on the wind. 

You call to me
Every now and again,

Between sleeping, waking,
Then

Dreaming. 

The German word for dream is traum. 

Traum translates back into English as wound. 

a fifty ninth story...'eddy's retina'

Eddy was a passionate young man, perhaps with passions just like yours.

He cared a lot about things.

He cared a lot about, and expected a lot of himself too.

(and frequently felt let down).

..Eddy also expected a lot of other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends, and so on.

You might say he was naïve in this way.

(He was).

It took dear old Eddy half a life time to learn that in spite of all the marvellous gifts mother nature had afforded him, he still had to rely on the relative gumption and general willingness of other people..

..Just like everybody else – How tedious!

Alas, some of these other people, it seemed, were less than (faultlessly) reliable.

And so Eddy brooded.

He brooded, and brooded and brooded.  Had Eddy been a prize turkey, he may well have laid an egg.

And the egg would have hatched and grown into something terrible; the egg would have become Eddy’s shadow.

A shadow of the dark and haunting variety, of the kind that follows you everywhere, stalks your dreams, chases you up and down the labyrinth ways of your mind.

‘Quit brooding, Eddy’, his friend Jemima would say.  Or implore him with the equally useless but well intentioned platitude – ‘don’t be sad’.

‘I’m not sad’, Eddy would lie, looking at Jemima and seeing the splinter in her eye.

Thing is Eddy could not see the plank of wood in his.

And the more he mooned over the irrationality and unpredictability of other people, and the ruinous effect their actions however well construed appeared to have on his existence, the more Eddy became convinced that planet earth was a pitiless place, a pit of despair.

William Shakespeare, in his most endearing enduring tragedy, Hamlet, understood Eddy’s malaise; Eddy being in the process of losing all mirth, unwittingly guilty of psychological projection.

The egg turned shadow, projected onto one human canvas after another, all of them belonging to other people!

People are this, people are that, people are XY and Z, Eddy would postulate. 

And he wasn’t wrong.

But he was only half right.

Eddy had begun to live in a room full of mirrors, where all he could see was himself.  No one else. 

Not even Jemima whom he adored.

And because of all of mother nature’s gifts afforded him when he was an egg growing in his birth mother’s tummy, he was too vain, too proud to see beyond the flickering shadows cast by all the other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends – dancing callously, he opined, around and around his retina.

Life: one, twice, thrice unkind.

a fifty eighth story...'a serious man'

I am the serious man standing on the fringe of the drinks party with my back to the poster size black and white photograph of yellow taxis in Times Square, New York – you know the one.

I’m wearing a cream white cotton sweater, a collared white check shirt, grey chinos.  I have been losing my hair for a year now. 

At occasions such as these you are likely to find me on the edge of the crowd: embroiled in a stern conversation on say, medical ethics (I am a doctor), or nursing a half empty glass of wine, watching my wife move seamlessly among the throng, being effortlessly charming.

It’s in this environment I feel most alone – I haven’t my wife, my books, my work.  I’ll be gazing around someone’s living room, absorbing the garish patterned wallpaper, the gross Sony branded entertainment system, thinking to myself one of three things.  One: I don’t belong here, two: I don't want to belong here, three: everyone else thinks I don’t belong here.  I am sure, as far as any man can be, on the way home friends of my wife will wonder how on earth she ended up with me, how on earth I could possibly enrich her life.

Thing is I’m not much to look at, sports were never my thing; I don’t know many jokes, never had a memory for them; nor am I good at small talk, being unable to retain the seemingly endless and various details of other people’s lives long enough to regurgitate them in social situations.  I am serious man, an insular man.  I have my wife, I have my work.  That’s all.  I guess I don’t have time, or time enough, for other people, other things.

Before I met my wife I was an outsider, not even a particularly ambitious one; these days, in a sense, nothing has changed – she is my public face, voice, and she’s happy with that, and so am I, as long as I can remain the private I. 

Do I wish every now and again I could possess the social grace of my wife?  Of course.  But I have become an adult (or thought of as such), and change is beyond me, besides change of any great magnitude is often looked on as a sign of insecurity, of something being wrong, or worse a sign of madness when you reach my age. 

I am a serious man, and sanity, or perhaps sobriety, so to speak, is considered, and might as well be given me as my middle name.

a fifty seventh story...'where the trouble is'

Mitch is a kid.  He’s a fully grown kid with all the characteristics adults leave behind when they get older.  Sure, he’s cute, fun, and he can make people laugh, but he doesn’t listen, can’t manage his money, and thinks that being in love is a definite state.  He doesn’t get it.  He thinks because he loves me, I should love him just the same, except that’s impossible because I spend half the time looking after him, and he gets annoyed when I tell him to do something, or anything.  Also he thinks because we are in love, we will spend the rest of our lives together – he’s never said as much, but I can tell: the casual references to the future, five, ten years on, along with flirtatious caresses, hugs, when he squeezes my knee, strokes my hair.  You get the picture. 

He’s a kid.  Full stop.  Touching a woman is still daring to him, and though he’s not shy in bed anymore, nor is he too bothered what I get out of it.  He’s spoiled you see, his parents, filthy rich.  He’s always gotten what he wanted, always.  And so he pays no attention to anyone else.  The touching thing, for example, he’ll touch me, hug me, stroke me (!) when he wants to, when it makes him feel good; he thinks I am one of his cats, or at least I get that impression sometimes.  When I’m in the mood, and sure, every now and again I am – Mitch could stir any girl’s fancy, and he still does mine I admit after one or two drinks – he pets me too long, takes him ages to get down to business.  Really, I think he thinks I am the human incarnation of his cat!  And we all know what they say about bestiality!  Even Mitch!!

I love Mitch, yes, I’ll say that.  But love is complicated in itself, right?  It doesn’t mean you want to be together from cradle to grave.  People need space; we’re all individuals I’ve read, and John Lennon for one said we should all be our own leaders.  Me, I am an independent woman, and a proud one too.  I have a job that pays, or rather keeps the boat afloat, what with Mitch’s spending, and I like to think I’m doing alright by me.  Thing is, and it’s becoming a bigger thing, sorry to say, Mitch is doing alright by me too, and only by me.  He’s a kid, I’m a grown up, or a decent approximation.  That’s where the trouble is.

a fifty sixth story...'ash'

Linda doesn’t think we should bother trying anymore.  She said so on the way home from Jeb and Sally’s place.  I was driving along a dark stretch of road, through the wood in fact, headlights on full beam.  She came out with this and I hit the brakes hard.  I had caught sight of a deer moving up ahead, and being a cautious man by nature decided to stop for a moment: to take in what Linda had said, I guess.  Linda looked at me, the way she does these days, as if I’m a stone in her shoe.  I had a cramp in my stomach, had eaten and drank too much at Jeb and Sally’s place, and then this.  

‘Why have you stopped?’, she said annoyed at me, suspicious at the same time.  I rolled down the window, let in some of the cool night air.  ‘I’m feeling sick’, I replied, although I should have told her about the deer further on up the road.  She turned her eyes away from me, followed the beam of the headlights.  If I had asked her to get out at that moment and left her there in the middle of the wood, it would have taught her a lesson alright, made her see I wasn’t such a push over after all.  Instead, I opened the driver’s door and got out. 

‘Go on, be sick’, she said impatiently, still looking straight ahead.  Thing is I wasn’t feeling sick, so much as lost for words, or at least the right words.  Anyhow, after a few short moments, I walked over to the other side of the road, knelt against a tree with my back to the car and to her, and pretended to wretch.  It was a small, pitiful thing, and when I think about it now, this morning, with a cigarette and a coffee on the go, and Linda away to work, I realise we have lost all trust, all sincerity between us, and that the dying embers in the ashtray on the kitchen table in front of me are in some way symbolic of how bad things have become; but like any cigarette we’ll both share what there is to the end, until nothing is left but ash, and more ash.

a fifty fifth story...'guilty'

‘Get  me a beer’.

‘You said you wouldn’t drink tonight’.
‘Look, I’ve had a tough day.  Get me a beer’.
‘But you..’
‘C’mon honey, one beer.  Please, c’mon’.
‘One?’
‘Just one..to take the edge off things’.
‘Ok.  Just one’.
‘Thanks, honey’.
‘One’.
‘Yeah, one, and brush the ice off of it’.

~

..She goes out of the kitchen.
He feels around the back of his neck with both hands.  His shoulders are tense. 
The whole cutting down routine, tiresome.
And it means having to spend more time the wife.
They got hitched too early.
Rushed right into it all.
They were in love too soon, used to tell her ‘nobody’s gonna love you like I will’.
Yes, really..

..Trouble started when they spent summer in the back country, house sitting.
That was when the cracks started to appear.
They argued a lot.
Drank too much.
There was nothing else to do.
Then she got depressed. 
Would stop halfway through they were making love together, saying she was tired.. 

..Tired!
What does that say to a man?!
Makes a man fall prey to his thoughts in the small hours of the morning, when thoughts come too readily.
And now he was working a ten hour shift.
And she was sitting at home, mooning over him, his bad habits.
She made him feel guilty for his drinking.
Guilty!
She should have seen the machinist at work!
Pressed the wrong switch with the engineer fixing the laundry press..

..The engineer had his arm crushed, bone and all.
The engineer had a wife, three kids.
The machinist lived alone, a bedsit down town.
Grim neighbourhood.
And still she moped about her life.
Even though she had him.
Was losing him..

..They both knew they were losing each other.

a nineteenth poem...'the lawn'

I wake up

Of a winter morning

And there is warmth

In the bed

Where I imagined you sleeping;

But on the window pane

Crystal patterns of frost

Have formed,

And looking outside,

I cannot see your footprints

In the new fall of snow

Across the front lawn.

an eighteenth poem...'crossed threads'

You and I

We are crossed threads in a telescope

Aiming at the early stars

Burning holes

In the sky.

a seventeenth poem...'empty'

My head is rotten with your song,

The room all shuddering blue rhythms;

And when I leave the house

On the stroke of ten,

The world seems an enormous, empty sinkhole

Again.

And now...the two grandest words in the english vernacular!

MANCHESTER UNITED.