Susu, you are a slime of green down a lavatory wall. Susu, I approach you in my dreams. From my youth I followed a star like the Magi; like Germany, I had a destiny. Perhaps it was you who were Mad Meg—a basket of ballocks slung under one arm, a sharpened penis in your hand like a swordsman, your eye an eye like history’s, your mouth wide open for a cry, the whole of your sleep outside you in a landscape lit by heatless fires which random guns had set beneath previously spitted meats and placidly congealing stews. Susu, you sang none of the old songs, none of the new.

A spider has lidded my john with its web,

lengths lifted from the record player,

a dance with a fly in the center instead

of shit’s smooth seat and neighbor.

The animals are taking over,

midges and mosquitoes hover,

and I shall be mad in a month.

Ants have organized the sugar;

roaches have rifled the till;

our woods are loud with crow and cougar;

the moths are all drunk at my still.

Leopard, lion, come from cover,

the animals are taking over,

and I shall be mad in a month.

When I was six weeks old I was floated from my birthplace in a basket. I drifted up and down a dozen rivers before I found the slain Mahoning lying between banks of cinders and black gravel—a slit-open eel on a dirty plate. You sang, Susu, your cunt a Calypso. Susu, you were filth. Ah, love, you let dreams rise in colored clusters like balloons. The rushes parted; there I was, on a thick, blood-rusty river which seeped through sallow gray-shacked hills to flop like a worn rug over dams thrown up for public service, and puddle into stinking marshes quilled with rotting scrub. Intermittently along its length then, and I suppose still, it was crossed by crumbling concrete bridges bearing fluted black cast-iron standards tipped with milky globes boys used to BB as they cycled under. Fed by gullies, the Mahoning did not flow, it retched its journey. Susu, often have I watched you enter me to enter you . . . Weeds in many tuffets grew beneath the wires which fenced the factories, and crumbs collected in the cracks of the sofas. In 1928 we had carpeted the stairway; everything that year was new. At gates the workers put out pickets, and police patrolled. I imagine—isn’t it true?—that you never wore panties, that your fur piece showed through your skirt like the print of a damp hand. Wine-colored shirts and patched sheets hung between the houses in a boiling haze. Chinese scenes had been drawn on the waxed shades, and small bulbs burned there above metal chains which were linked like a slow drip to the light. Welcome to Warren—to Niles—to Girard—to Youngstown—to Campbell—to Struthers, Ohio (when taken together, more than 280,000 people now)—one end of a gut which shits in Pittsburgh and is sick along the way in Aliquippa, Bessemer, Beaver Falls, and New Castle, Pa. Here burning steel has replaced the sun, and twilight begins in the morning. Welcome, eventually, to Hammond, Whiting, or Gary . . . welcome to Wheeling . . . river, lake, and watertank towns where there are oil and gas cans big as buildings, shouting chimneys, and track after track of almost endless, nearly moving, trains. Sing into the smoke. Is the cellar where I tunnel anything like the rough halls where you worked? You were so thin, yet your voice was not a whistle. Low like something oozing from a gasket. Gypsy, the Germans said, and they cut off your beautiful singing head, though they had used, admired, and loved you and your crimes. The high schools play their football Friday nights; plumes of steam rise from tall outsteepling pipes; the sidewalks crack as a matter of course; fall trees lose their leaves as everywhere they do; and my mother opens the oven door to warm the kitchen in the morning. My father loved to paint bathrooms; he loved, especially, to do trim: fine black lines around the panels of the doors, lemon-yellow baseboards, light blue walls with a hint of sunset in the ceilings. Such was the indifferent divinity of Susu’s singing that she sang always out of her own earshot; no one was watching when she undressed, even her mirrors were empty; and on the medicine chests in a dozen houses where we lived, my father did, as he firmly said, a dandy job. When all the cracks had been covered with paint the landlord would sell the place, and then we’d move. Each of these towns has acrid, yellow-tasting cloud machines, ink-streaked, redly echoing skies, and torches one hundred feet high, burning constantly like sacred flames, discrediting the phallus as a symbol. There are piles of crates and heaps of barrels, mountains of bent, corroding metal. And the bracelets on your slender arm slid, Susu, when your hand flew up to calm your hair. New streets fell across old meadows like a lash. The automobiles of the workers were pastured in gray grassless lots, while the houses of the workers, each the same, had been lured into straight unshuffling lines like people on welfare waiting for their boons. I remember mostly litter, derelict cars, scarred signs, lost ground, high-tension towers which imprisoned the sky, pretending to lift vast units of electric across the valley like skiers on sagging wires . . . and all the residues of combustion: I remember rust, grime, glaciers of gray slag, acres of cinders, coal smoke, acids, oiled earth. Everywhere, too, there were pits and gashes, scooped-out hollows and thrown-up works . . . works—works, mills, plants—yes, by such names we invoked them. I don’t know how many freight cars and cranes were occupied there; how many tons of coke and quenching oils and iron ore were daily needed; how much silicon, sulfur, and phosphorus were used to produce that thick, unbreathable, stench-stained, stinging, lung-eating yellow air—how many men, tools, trucks, and bales of wire—or by how many degrees the furnace fires raised the temperature in the valley to create a new climate. Close to coal and water, near the necessary limestone, the whole area was soon like an unwiped crack, crammed with ovens and machines for smelting metal, and men marched to them every day as docilely as Jews. (Youngstown tripled in twenty years.) And the gray figures of the coons, like their shanties, misshapen, in toeless shoes and dyed sacking, their nigger-eyes globes the boys burst, were, whenever I saw them, grouped on sloping porches where they sat for photographs which Marxists might have taken had the shines on them been white. At factory gates the workers fought police and struck at scabs with sticks. I, a Kohler, grew my face and pit and prick hair in an open zoo of ghettos—yes, it was all free to the public. There were the wops, the Polacks, bohunks, Greeks, the kikes, the subordinate nations, the micks and other anti-Semites—even then the heinies hated hebes (the Youngstown of the twenties was a quarter foreign-born) . . . and the Greeks went to their restaurants, the Italians to crime and the wholesale grocery, the Jews to finance of lowly kinds, watches and jewelry, the blacks to their push brooms, and the Poles to the furnace. What was Herschel doing, Herschel the hushed and hidden, the little person who defends the little people? Come out of your office, Herschel, old friend and colleague. Face the multitude. Be a pope on a balcony. We would drive through the shanty and ramshackle sections—my father, my mother, and I—and I would sing hit songs in the backseat while we saw the sights: Republic Steel in eruption maybe, smoke orange as hair combed out in the sky, or suddenly the slick blue kind, thick and knotty, like bullet grease; and perhaps we’d see some pickaninnies, their heads spiked by tight braids tied with red bows (so cute, so sweet, my mother said), or underclothes roped out to dirty in the light—and I do try to remember my mother as something better than the dump of a hamper, but it’s as though my father had painted that part of my past one of his bathroom hues—or while I sang “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for the laughs there’d be a derelict shoveled like rubble against a fence or possibly something obscene scribbled on a grime-glazed window or a billboard peeling comically the way my father’s scowls made my eyes sore and sickness flaked from the household walls like paint: what the hell is the use of such a life if you can’t have mashed potatoes in the morning and a good fuck at night? At least I climbed out of the smoke, even though it gets so cold in Indiana sometimes snow spews up behind a car’s wheels just like summer’s dust. We went to see the sights where what one threw away in the street—an apple core or fist of paper, a bottle’s brown body—became its only decoration, though now and then within a window there would bloom a dim geranium, also on relief, although in June, in vacant lots or on worn scraps of lawn, dandelions would briefly burn themselves to seed—gray quickly, shatter soon—like everything else. We drove brick roads which winter heaved as if there were something alive in the earth beneath them, though in this poisoned land I already knew there couldn’t be. Across the Midwest, John Dillinger motored openly from bank to bank—while I grew up—a hero like the Babe; racketeers shot one another in the street, or bombed bars, while floods overturned whole towns and left them ass-up in the silt.

Otherwise I never went there. Instead—on stunted avenues and boulevards and drives which huge oaks shadowed so successfully that one could scarcely see the sky—I lived a shaded life. The trees were full of squirrels. I tamed two, and taught the lame one (which I called, with a child’s indifference, Oscar) to poke for peanuts in my pockets. A newspaper folded under his arm (the airmailed Times), Herschel wiggles his mustached lip and crosses the wall like a fly. Who would notice it, but me? Susu’s breasts are no bigger than bruises. My mother’s gray hair smears her face, and the men with the stretchers look puzzled. Why? What worries them, I’d like to know; they have the simple job of ambulancing bodies dead or alive, there’s nothing to it, death doesn’t pass a day by, and the work is quiet: tip the subjects into handy slings, open a pair of shiny-handled doors, and shove the rollered sick inside. Poor Tabor shook so his sheets flagged. Solemn ladies on white feet stood around with watches while he leaped from one death’s edge to another. Otherwise I never went there. His teeth no longer snipped the seconds into little lengths, and I don’t need to remember that they took my mother’s teeth, too, before they threw her in the drunk tank. You’ll not leave me there, Billy dear, will you? And the elevator covered its toothless grin to swallow UP mother with a hydraulic hiss. Herschel always hovers on the brink. My brink. Not his. He is about to unfold his paper; he is about to stand, or speak, or cross the room; he is about to haul open a door through which I shall enjoy his disappearance, unless of course he thinks better of it, and I can observe him now about to think better of it . . . Yes, he is about to suggest I give the little men less blame. I shall remedy that defect, Herschel, exactly as you suggest, I reply cheerfully, and Herschel pinks perhaps a trifle. I’m too cheerful. He sees no seriousness in me. It’s only for a little while, mother, while they get you well, and teach you how to chew without your teeth and sit nicely on a chair in the corner, mother; soon I  shall come and get you; shortly I shall fetch; certainly I shall visit: fruit, chocolates, and flowers shall spill from my lap when I part my knees; sweets for the sweet shall proliferate there as on a fertile hillside, say in Tuscany, while I keep them knocked; and I’ll imagine many letters to you in my youthful tongue which the matron will deliver when you’re back from shock; when they’ve thrown your brains, like squids, in a box; and with the help of their silent thunder volts—yes, with one pun the past has been blacked out until you’re dumb enough again, Peg, to relearn the language of fruits, sweets, and flowers, the relative amounts of nickels, dimes, and quarters . . . though you’ve never been to Tuscany, Margaret, have you? or slept in the Algarve on the hot rocks? not even for a moment, on a visit, not even once before your pins, combs, curlers, glasses, teeth, your purse, rings, belts, snaps, coat, and clothes went off on a trolley, your veins burst, so they tell me, and the blood leaked out like air. Herschel pinks perhaps a trifle. Still, he persists—unusual for Herschel. it’s only . . . it’s merely, he says . . . it’s just . . . It’s just that otherwise, unless my parents take those roads on their Sunday drives, I never go there. I never went to funerals, either, when anyone died. I nearly didn’t go to Margaret’s—which you could say, since I’d arranged it, was my own. All those simple ordinary men, though, Herschel says, the small ones who supported Hitler, maybe they had little chance . . . little chance to see, to understand . . . were poor men in a poor position. I detect a possibly thoughtful squinch. My hands clench. I want to be as if invisible, like the Marquis de Sade, or like Susu, hidden even from myself, for then I could enjoy everything, including Herschel, whom I  should like to kick, commencing with his shins. The sofa was so green, though there were slow bald patches where we often sat. If you had been a stick my father’d flung down the beach, Peg, then perhaps I would have seen it as a son’s function in nature’s scheme to run, wagging, after you; but he let an embalmer’s funnel suck you down, or a dark hall damp as a worm, oozy as an asshole. When I tossed a nut to Oscar, I tossed Oscar, don’t you see? In that way we’d have both been thrown. He persists—unusual for Herschel. Perhaps I’d have left sorrow’s side to tend yours. The others, though, he says, men of power and education, weren’t some of them important to the Nazis too? I wonder (Herschel wonders; in his breast pocket, fingers fish for something, and he pauses; he’s about to go on, but not quite) . . . I wonder, he says . . . I wonder . . . Since I frequently put the peanuts where Oscar would be sure to get them, out of the reach of fleet Achilles, the cripple found himself in chance possession of a characteristic which favored his survival. You must think of it, William, as a disease, like measles or the mumps. Yes, Doctor. Thus we must attack it—in the modern way. We must. Yes, Doctor, yes, I quite understand—as a glandular contretemps. Now remember: we’re not to let this get us down. No, Doctor. We must pick ourselves up and make a beginning; you must tell me: who was the passive partner in your parents’ marriage? Should I be sympathetic with the sick if I’m the sickness they are sick from? Does that seem natural, Doctor? does that seem possible? does that seem right? We slid off along our thighs when we stood up, smoothing the mohair the way water does and leaving the sofa behind us like a green rock relinquished by the tide. I wonder how (Herschel wonders how) their culture—how it happened that their culture—they were cultivated, just as we are, more so, weren’t they . . . ? We, Herschel? We? What’s this? do you have little visions in which you are a man of power and education, in which you spin wines for a knowledgeable nose? Nevertheless, I say nothing; I nod, grin; good for me. Courage, Herschel, courage. But what daring in this worm to crawl up me! If I could once have dug my paws in the soft sand . . . if you had been a beach ball, I should have let my tongue loll and given chase, why not? At least my father could have given me some sun to be a slave in. Funny to fetch you back to him, though. Here, mom, have another bite from the dog that bit you. Everyone is comical, Herschel—tragic, Herschel—fat, Herschel—thin. Oh, a classical education they had indeed, Herschel—they moved their bowels daily in homage to the Greeks—and all the eligible refinements, yes, they had them: high ceilings, the best academies, tasseled draperies, the lessons of the church, very old cognacs, fine china, the noble example of a noble army, tailored clothes and well-bred horses, books bound in rich indented leather . . . and I imagine myself as Mad Meg on the march, trampling Herschel into history from below like a fleeing road beneath a fleeing army . . . or those of a more constructive twist, Herschel—practical men—what of them, the engineers, astrologers, and scientists? Men of every kind, yes: conductors of great orchestras, philosophers and lawyers, clergymen and architects, medicine men and nose-close students of our human health, soldiers (we’d expect that—hard-pricked Junkers, made of medals, we’d expect it), and heartless businessmen, growing rich on munitions and the rags and gold teeth of the Jews (no surprise there, our clichés confirm it), but what of all those firm-minded professors who burst into flame like a match when they were scratched, eh? Do you suppose some study might disclose a redemptive occupation? some work of mind or hand which made a man of you, which so ennobled those who engaged in it that they early took a righteous stand and died a martyr, say in ‘38, after only a year or two of boys’ school, summer camp, and catechism? How Nazi were the shepherds, milkmaids, carpenters? . . . Ah, of course, carpentry . . . it’s the redeeming occupation. How Nazi was anybody? I have Herschel’s image: pale, grave, listening like that dog to its Victrola. Just how many tramps—aside from Charlie Chaplin—shook their fists? Berliners always claimed to hate him. The city was too sophisticated—wasn’t it?—to be taken in by such a simpleton. North, east, south, or west—poor fellow, he hadn’t a friend. Or should we join the ladies? There’s a fair proposal. Susu, I approach you in my dreams. You lived on as the crack in them all. In dear old Margaret, my melted mother, mad as medicine could make her, who used me to murder her, you resembled the lipped glass neck of a bourbon bottle; in my wife, my Martha, now as dangerous to travel on as the dirigible she’s shaped to sail like (sane, though, sane and selfish as the turkey buzzard)—in Martha all the entrances are mouths; while in Lou (stale loveloaf), who both beckoned and received me like the bottom of a precipice, you’re the emptiness after the cliff’s edge. Oh yes. I tell you, Herschel, so many of the sweet sex sucked the cock of war, wet their cunts when the drums rolled and came for a saber, that there were many who wished, at the war’s end, to take the vote away from women in West Germany. You see, the ladies were so creatively cruel that the male mind fell behind and showed the white feather; they were such fanatics, loyal to their Führer—that stupid loony little fart-loud pallid puff-and-pastry-painting fatherfrigger—to the last (ah, Herschel, no mistake, they still are), they made the sunrise seem inconstant; and it outraged German men to be outdone at anything so essentially—so basically—so determinedly—Boche. No, Herschel, no. A noble now and then, a high-placed politician, preacher, occasionally a writer—fled, and then they thumbed their noses. Ah, they warned us! They were all experts then, these noble men. But how often is it, Herschel, that they fail to fool us; that we can see they had misjudged the time, backed the wrong horse early, were therefore marked, and could not on any count, with any cunning or connivance, have convinced their new king of their loyalty? Whether they were little men or big ones doesn’t matter, don’t you see . . . ? I think he is a very stupid student—Herschel. Oh, he’s open to me (doesn’t dry ground welcome water?), but he’s small and tight and stubbornhardpan—just a scratch below the surface. Yes, he persists. My god, I am writing this book about Germans, otherwise I never go there. Come to my rescue, Susu, slender singer whom I loved. And now the first verses have been sung and the whole hall is silent for the singing except for a clink or occasional cough and Susu in yellow or green or red flutters like a scarf, trembles like a flame in a sudden draft while all our smoke rises like string, until she’s still too, and speaks the middle verse in a pale low-level voice:

Now the spider requires to seize its prey,

and suck its life like a frosted shake,

lines which will carry across the day,

though its surface is steep and unsafe as a lake,

but I can only stare at their maneuvers,

and sniff out the cunt of a love I’ve misplaced,

for I fear my tongue’s been caught in its louvers,

and the name of my house and my dog is disgraced.

Listen, Herschel, whether they had the solemn opportunity for sainthood doesn’t matter, either—their craft or professions, the weight of their purses or their brains, their social position . . . all of no account. I have Herschel’s image. Herschel’s ghost and Herschel’s image are the same. Stauffenberg is the name you’re trying to remember, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the colonel who tried to blow up Hitler with a British bomb in his brand-new briefcase . . . and who bungled the job. Blah. What a bunch. By that time Susu’d been divided like a conquered country. By that time daddy’s bones had begun to close as petals do out of the sun, and mama was buying her bourbon like buns from the bread man. Gin later, when short on funds. I’ve forced the English for the rhyme. “Suck its life like a cold parfait”? That rhymes with ‘day’ but spoils the scheme. ‘Shake’ is as out of place as a condom on a canary, doesn’t Culp say? ‘Maneuvers’ and ‘louvers’ will have to go. ‘Shifts’ and ‘lips’? Susu lost her lips, chewing the thumbs of those Jews—licked them away like a ring of chocolate. Well, if he hadn’t been losing the war, the Führer wouldn’t have had an eardrum drummed but by praises. Holla! rat a tat tat Hurrah! rat a tat tat Holla! The whole high command hung fire, you might say, wondering which way they should jump, hoping Santa Claus had got him, but concerned only for their skins. The fatherland—my glass eye! Coup d’etat by phone. If there’s going to be a revolution, General, I’ll ring you up, and then, maybe, you’ll issue a few sympathetic orders. Um, the general says, maybe . . . in exchange for a case of schnapps. The entire plot was reactionary—Jesu! you can’t think how churchy, incomparably Prussian, and superbly independent of the people—parties—allies—anyone at all outside the club. I planned no overthrow myself. I figured that, in time, mom and dad would die of their own dirties, decompose. My plot took patience, firmness, inner resolution, hate, of course; however, most of the colonel’s gallant supporters were strung up while still running away, and this, mind you, was in 1944, not in ‘36 or ‘38 or ‘40, not even in ‘42, when it might have done some good, but when the end was only hours off and not even the mad were any longer blind. What a pitiful display they made, too, before the People’s Court. The crooks they roped at Nuremberg, by and large, did better. I’ll tell you what helped, though, Herschel . . . I mean, to stand firm—to hold on—to live through—endure, resist—to retain a little decency despite the climate of the cages, of the camps . . . It helped to have a crazy living in you, a fanatic—to be nuts in another direction, be a Jehovah’s Witness, say, isn’t that a hoot? But read the books, Herschel, there are hundreds on the subject; there are nearly as many books as massacres. Still, he persists, for he believes the little people to be powerless . . . that’s what makes them little . . . so when evil’s done its never their doing . . . as if being powerless were without sin . . . when there is scarcely any greater one . . . and when some good is accomplished . . . then the many have made themselves matter . . . oh la! Gnaw his cock, Susu! Peck out his eyes! History hasn’t room for heroes like you, Herschel, all the space is taken, the stalls are occupied, you’ll have to go back to the storybooks; and when villainy is epidemic, villains scarcely matter either, as if we should care which flea bore what portion of the plague to Paris. I have seen hate in an undusted mirror elevate the glass like a swollen foot in a carpet slipper. Susu, I approach you in my dreams. No special permit is required for such perceptions. How long has history been hidden from you, Herschel? I’ve sat at a dinner table as wide and savagely policed as a death strip. I’ve been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen. Why must I study Germany? when there is nothing really German about me? Oh yes, except for that—my studies—I would never go there. Or were men different under Stalin? Are they otherwise in the soft towns and crossroads of our South? in the dark crowds of the Northern cities? Is there a redeeming place or nation? an ennobling institution? a kindly fireside, a humble hearth? Susu, I approach you in my dreams. Good men, Herschel? oh, the world is full of good men, good men with their good backs turned, who spend their whole lives safely rubbered over while they remedy our wounds, the way the surgeon’s hands stay sterile in his gloves. Susu . . .

Shall we sing to the stickum on the thread?

the hole we hang in like the fly?

There’s only suction there to dread,

not the chain’s drench or bowl’s cry.

No arctic tern or ocean plover

will light on me when it’s all over,

and I go mad in a month;

for I shall be so bloodless and so dry,

spiny as a blessed thistle,

whatever these creatures occupy

my soul shall blow through like a whistle.

Fire, air, earth-O lover—

the animals are taking over,

and I shall be mad in a month.

I trilled hit tunes to the tires’ hum, my mother’s eyes waited on their washing like soiled plates wait their cleansing suds, slowly my father took the stairs, crying shit every step despite the thick carpet, cursing the help at his elbow and shivering with pain. Like the Sun King, Herschel, I didn’t want to see it; I hated their dirty pictures; why couldn’t they carry their afflictions with an endearing cuteness like my crippled squirrel? why couldn’t they die, if they had to, out of my sight, away from the Court, away from the Kingdom? bury their bellyaches along with their bellies in some suitable box, perhaps beneath the peaceful springs and mattress of my maiden aunt, who kept there the lingerie no lover would ever look at, as well as quiet piles of pretty Christmas paper she admired enough while it was costuming a gift that after she had seen it painstakingly unwrapped—ribbons undone and seals snapped—she carefully pressed it flat to store in neat stacks under her sleep, as though, rescued from use and waiting like the lingerie for the right eyes, it might be worn once more at her dream daughter’s wedding, or, on another yuletide, dress a cheap ring like a royal jewel. Come to the head of the stairs, do . . . and count all the prints on the banister where desperate hands have seized it, or see the time my mother fell on her water-laden rump going to answer the door, in a nervous hurry because she believed it might be the breadman with her booze, it’s still there like a bruise on the runner; and there are several fine examples I could show you of looks so angry the air smokes in the right light yet, as well as corridors where loathing has nearly clogged the passage, and I can still find a few scars from those early years in the normally ignored or rarely haunted corners of the dwellings we’d adopted then, in unusually low, lonely, or elevated atmospheres (we were not a tall family and did not, as a few do, tend to go on tiptoe when we shouted, or, in hate or rage, to stretch out, but rather, if anything, our habit was to contract, to shrink within or coil up, becoming thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, dip-cheeked, tight-skinned, and somewhat bent—the whole of us, you might say, formed a fist—then, too, it was in our nature to spit our words out, hiss, or grind them between our teeth—break them to bits as the sledge shatters stones and shower them on our enemies by handfuls—seldom did we use the full, round tones of the drum and bugle, the doggie-like yelps of the skittish and callow, or the stagy screams of those who wish to impress the neighbors with the glitter, merely, of their razor, not the size of its slice; and since, of course, we never fought on our hands and knees or fucked on the floor, you’d scarcely find there any interesting shards of our ferocities); yes, I can still sometimes discover the remains of especially bitter outbursts like the dents of kicks, dislikes which took their owners by surprise, sour and sudden as a belch may be, inspired blurts you would have to call them, since they relied for their effect upon a freshness of realization, an orgasmic intensity which is quite foreign to the more ornate, malicious, and reflective styles that have, for the most part, covered over and replaced them; indeed, this country innocence—like the honest naiveté and pungent directness of Punch and Judy shows, permitting us to enjoy the primitive response of bruise to blow—these spontaneous but crude expressions of angry passion, like old scythe sweeps we might encounter in a field long fallow and left to sheep, although they have to strike us as superior in their simplicity and ease of maintenance to the modern mower’s nervous teeth, they must at the same time seem further from us now than the mule from the motorcar or air-raid siren from the human scream (of another natural order, that is—as if fallen from another world); yet we have to realize, nevertheless, that these thoughtless rejoinders were actually the origin and often the continuing inspiration of the cruelest and most artful gestures our civilization has so far contrived, inasmuch as the various combatants (time sliding forever frontward as it tends to, and each learning, little by little, the lessons that, these days, only life in the family can fully provide) began to acquire the character of the true artist: ah, began—Anfang ist schwer, aber die Übung macht den Meister; they made a start: they began to achieve a ruthlessness, for one thing, that was eventually so divested of all nobility it would seize any advantage which came its way, make any mark it could if only a scratch, crow over every victory as if each were the conquest of a continent, grudge every defeat as if it were the most meanly contrived and ill-deserved bad luck a good sport ever suffered, and, of straws, the longest and the last; in addition they began to command in themselves a contempt for the easy way—a scorn they could fire like a cannon—which would disdain to draw its energy from the flash but hold on to its heat through a lifetime of labor and dedication—nurse it and fan; so that their behavior began—ah, it began, by and by—to display (as we might expect) that careful preparation, that resourceful attention to detail, that patient, cunning choice of moment, that continuously masked intent, those cleverly counterfeited feelings, and above all that faithfully kept chronicle of grievances, spurious beliefs, and lies which together comprise every symptom, we know, of a long-standing, practiced, and habitual spite—an antagonism which no longer depends on any elements of love or trust it may betray in its object, but proceeds against the same deep dislike and suspicion, the same history of injury and disappointment, the same slow rage, it finds in itself: that of the long-trapped animal whose moves, by now, have figured a path of restlessness on the floor of its cage as regular and abiding and apparently as peaceful as the quiet pacing of the planets—inflicting its wounds when it can on a well-warned and shrewdly defended enemy then, on one so knowing and so like itself it’s as though animal and bars were to interchange or the prisoners run the prison, as if the wound were to become the weapon, and the pain penetrate the very leather of the lash to rush through every passage which the hide contained when it was skin; and bring to blood again, in this unusual way—scar, jinx, cripple—the designs, plans, plots, and patterns of the past. No wonder we admire these beautiful old artifacts; they have a handsomeness which only hate in the hands of the artisan will take the pains to grant. Nothing we have thrown up in stone, Herschel, not even cathedrals so peaked their columns cloud, not even glass so stained the light is permanently sunburned by it, has the shape or dye these looks and voices in their ancient traces have. How often does our history hold a candle to them, even dimly illuminate the hole the hanged man makes in the air, the garrote wire in the shape of a whistle? Ghosts, that’s what we call them, ghosts . . . in our confusion . . . when it’s the cabbage in the soup, the buttered toast, the unlaced shoe, the bouffant hair—it’s the hand, but not the hold it has, which is the wraith; it is my father who will one day vanish without a trace, just as I shall, Susu has, and you will, too, Lou, vanish . . . vanish . . . but not the shake he gave me April twelfth, a shake which rattled every window in me—and wasn’t I a world of windows, for he began to calcify while still alive until now he must be chalk and flour on the floor of his underearth igloo; Susu, herself, began dividing as she devoured those Jewish thumbs, her neck pulling thin like taffy every lustful lick, but did she put a passive look on when she sucked, or was it more a weenie one has roasted open on a stick, to be swum at like a shark with open jaws? (I say he’d been a Santa Claus indeed if he had killed him, that Stauffenberg.) Ah, no, since I have seen an idle ambling dog gnaw at the remains of a fish its nosed up on the beach, I know the look that Susu had on at her feast, it was just as it was when she sang in her café the crow’s song, and I clouded my coffee and hindered my knees to dream toward her image (I say our topmost men are pond scum, Herschel, that’s my opinion; the rest of us have sour blood, we’re dregs, we silt the bottom, we should be poured out), so I buried my nose in the foam, lowered like the dog did my eyes to the fish, the lap of my body, there the beak of the crow—oh how well you know me—and dreamed toward her image, an image which belonged in the same space as that April shake or the doors which closed on my mother’s face, not Hamlet’s father’s ghost, perhaps, but Banquo’s at the very least, and not the Weird Sisters, either, but their spells, make history, Herschel, which takes no note of the hole the hanged man makes in the air or the shake I shook . . . in our confusion we aren’t clear . . . not the unlaced shoe, the bouffant hair—it’s how the fabric feels, and where in history do you find that? the fear the shake shook through me, the way his head swam in my gaze as he shook and I was shaken? so that later on in life, when the quake took Magus Tabor and his sheets shivered as though they were white with frost and crisp from cold, I thought of his sickness as my father’s arms at his shoulders, manhandling him, while my head bobbled and my mouth moved as Mad Meg’s was to chitter during those final hours, trying to say what neither of us ever wanted to hear said

(like a sparrow or a swallow in the sound of it) and once said would remain hammered into him as if he were a brass plate and my cry the inscription—so it would seem written back at me—

Dr. Kohler

Nazi

By Appointment

—very dignified, and worn like he wore his nose, as if it had been there longer than the rest of him, for, Herschel, where does the slate sea go when it has filled a Greek eye for a whole day (Thucydides doesn’t say) and the wakes of the boats lie still in the waves like paths to pasture? where does the Greek gaze go when the lines run away from the boat like cracks in the water and fish are drawn up through the gray sea as though brought up through gray stone? no, normally he wouldn’t touch me, never, he would simply fix me with a stare like a steel stake, yet that day passed as all the others have, since on the following morning the wind shattered the water, bouncing the boats like horses tugging at tethers, the sun fell in gleaming showers, and the green floor of the ocean rose and lay on its mottled surface like a bather, thus creating one more condition which Thucydides passes over, for consciousness is not a character in history, Herschel, had you noticed? that most fragile and translucent of screens, that most rapid and forceful of hidden rivers, is a floating web, really, of the most delicate connections, I’ve heard it insisted, that that shadow show, strand-ambling animal, that sugar-seeking fly or carrion crow, that Scandinavian movie, sea worm, linear design—flat, intricate, and passive as a Persian carpet or as lilied, calm, and public as a park pool—is a soft fog, frosted window, log fire, mill wheel, set of steps, a flower-filled and bee-belabored meadow; is as hot, aglow, and runny, it is claimed, as molten metal; is the sun; is smirched paper, so some say, a bubbling kettle, spittled wall, or boarded well, imagine those, and then—twee whee!—a dancing bear, the daily paper, a small box riven with silver wires—no—but one of those eruptions which take the lives of people on the other side of the world; it’s any cornered creature or the chuckling gull; it’s dark tubes and tunnels, overdecorated skies, a plate of pastries, an ocean on which it’s been raining; it’s a pigeon coop, fall trees, mirrors, and a German band, gay, loud, and martial, like children wading; or it’s obscene underthings, old albums, stoppered bottles, basements, closets, attics, pulsing coals; it’s incessant little dents in clay, wax, or pillow—this soul, this spirit—and consider how a slip, dripping on the white enamel bottom of a bathtub, slowly sings the earful; yes, it’s said it’s cliffs with crumbling edges or it’s paths up mountains; it’s snick, pouf, whish! illumination: lanterns, flashlights, beacons, tallow candles; it’s boxes under beds; it’s strings of beads or onions; it’s fireflies captured in jars—this wind harp . . . trembling; and it has a surface, don’t they tell us? soft as a bog, a reaction—snick, pouf, whish—like a light coming on or a breeze springing up; it has an intention that’s more murderous than any of the mantis’s patient plans; it has a substance somewhat solider than the rainbow and a reach which is as looping and as long and, like a fluttering scarf, as colorful—yes; and does it not possess the fidelity of the weathercock? does it not emulate the flight of the bat, simulate the sounds of the dove, and imitate the habits of the snake? doesn’t it always write itself away like chalk? ah, Herschel, greedy as a grasshopper, wouldn’t you agree? sleepy as a sofa cushion, lecherous as a flea—as nip—as pop—this paradise of dreams and pharmacy of poisons, this veritable hail-rattle of events, Herschel, is not a character in history, no one considers how the wonder of our consciousness came about or is composed (a melting fresco gets a better press and more money can be collected to feed homeless cats); yet what have we made throughout our time together but just this, and haven’t you frequently felt your cock, bursting with juice like a grape, strain toward its dark oaky barrel? so my father would drive his swollen eyes into me and in a low cold voice, a voice so steady it must have taken all his energy to restrain it, when it wanted to be a leaping fish, in a slow monotonous. voice so level it rocked, he would move in and out of me the way a knife cuts pie or a clock divvies silence, item by item, describing my worthless nature, tock-tock till he came, and the hairs of his nose waved like the feelers of a carnivorous plant, tick, and what have we heard from Herodotus on this point? ha, Herschel you have already vanished, even now you leave no trace, yet I can see my own steps in the Woodbine Street house where I left them burning in the linoleum, and the closet where I hid from my father, crooked like an arm at the elbow, while he called out, Don’t hide from me, you little snot! bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang the Jews were shot and how was any Jew alive to feel about a German or perhaps a gentile after bang bang bang bang and all that rot most were starved or gassed or shot, Planmantee said, we shall solve that, we are able, we shall create an international ghetto—call it, what a comedy, call it Zion—we shall surround it with Muslims, we shall sic the Jews on the Arabs, bang they may bang all they like at one another bangedy bang-bang, who will care? not my father who felt they were filthy as a South German should, not my mother who was suspicious as a North German should be, because they didn’t drink enough to be normal, since normally he wouldn’t touch me, but this time he said I’m not going to hurt you whatever you answer, bang, he said, hanging on to my shoulders for dear life, just as Mad Meg beckoned to me though he shook like a town in Anatolia, saying son, my son, bang, he said I’m not going to hurt you however you hurt me but you have never liked me, have you, you’ve never loved me the least bit (Tacitus, Herschel? he left it out), and now you believe I hate you, don’t you, bang you bastard, son he said, his words disassembled as fast as he spoke them, lettered up as if our anagrams were over, the bits swept off in jumbles to their box, Kohler, my boy, you will make a good German, you will make a good German, you will make a good German, and I think that even after he died he still flopped, his backside silver, with gaping mouth, loose dry spittle flaking from his lips like soap chips shaken from a box—and was I shaken out like salt on the wound my father was by that time?—well, the room he went to rest in was nothing like his life: clean, light, bare, nurses who were nothing to leer at, and those medicos that Magus Tabor hated so, trying to save his life by saying no, oh a good German? even though my brick passed through that Jew without a sound? so I said yes, my head snapping as his arms pumped (he still had that sort of strength), yes, boy! bang you bastard, yes, dad, yes yes you do, you hate me, you, you do, youdoyou, doyou dodad, and that’s what it was, a trinket, a bauble, no better than a bit of junk to jangle from a bracelet just as those wide-thighed girls in their tight skirts sat in class and jingled, teasing the prick of the prof, or Planmantee who shakes the change in his trouser pocket with his right hand while he talks, charms to ward off harm by hanging, though she ate those thumbs one after the other like cold cocktail sausages in sauce—the palm is the best portion—while I sang hit songs in the backseat: ‘‘Where Is the Lord the Ladies Love So?” and other hymns, and I think she would have stood on my chest in her bare feet if I had ever had her—if she had ever had me—and I would have looked up between the thin struts of her tepee to the dark tip where the smoke emerges, her hips turn chest neck face hair going up like a signal between savages, as she clenched her toes the way a cat closes a paw it’s just flexed—the palm is the best portion—and did I see any backseats among the sights I saw? no, so on his dying day and to his dying face I said there is nothing, there is nothing, I said, there is nothing genuinely German about me, and the rest of Susu is simply smoke her hole lets like light a fart out when you draw the bombing curtain, it’s her split speaking as I  suppose her disembodied head still sang the crow song or the animals are taking over while her trunk like Magus Tabor in his final lecture and in his last labor fluttered like a beheaded bird, don’t the peasants say? when poetry has got their tongue, and the cameraman took pics of what they chopped—Magus did his dance before he died to music composed especially by Europe and did those girls have castanets for cunts? there was such a clang and rattle in my class—how dare!—their twats would tweet, bums bang—how dare!—bang bang bang bang bang bang the holes in them would hiss, my love, it was the bullet’s kiss, until you couldn’t hear myself speak—and I’ve one such snap in its smart blue gold-embossed travel case slid flat between sheets of burial data in my desk, otherwise I never go there, for didn’t I do (since he had dubbed me sir, made me his heir) the right thing finally? pursue and overtake his chair to have it shipped from Germany, to carry on his work in the same seat of learning, and even nearly dedicate my book to him before on second and a better thought I crossed the dedication out? ho, by all the gods of history, what possessed me?

TO MY FATHER

The Lord Is Where the Ladies Love It, therefore, Herschel—if so, Herschel—then let him smite us all, march everyone to the ovens or turn us under to fertilize the onions, yes, Susu’s where I burn, a naked worm I go to her hole to be consumed (to shit shave shower, weren’t they sent?) and so compose her jaws lips tongue teeth (the gullet of the gull is a good place, gulls, I have heard them, bleat like sheep), the crow’s tune, Herschel,

I once went to bed with a nun

by pointing a pistol at one;

said she, with a quaver,

that’s a good big persuader,

but what is the point of the gun?

how well, you

know, you know it knows me, aren’t you my spitting image? and that is how I see things, as history should, certainly, as though it were a dog’s nose, time a beach, because when I double back upon myself, I find these doubles—don’t you?—the way a dog discovers his owner in his owner’s clothes, sees itself in the clear mirror of its pee, for it catches a sniff as I might catch a glimpse, and there I am like a hard word or a blow, perhaps a little paler, stiff, and there is my father banging on the door of the closet with his still fistable fist (don’t you see, Herschel, in that fist already is the claw it will come a cripple to, so his hand will one day nevermore lie flat again but curl constantly like burning paper), and there my sentence is, my life stretch, hammered to him like a revolutionary placard to a tree—for good—to hang there: you hate me, and hung around the corpse of Magus Tabor, Professor of History for All Germany, my ID, like a warning drawn in crayon on criminals: there is nothing genuinely German about me, as if—from before—from now—from then on—they were to write out the message themselves, not to sail it toward me as my wife’s words sail sometimes, like paper planes, but to publish and order it like commands of the army, and I did sincerely and obediently believe for a long time that there was nothing genuinely German about Magus Tabor (there was nothing genuinely German about anyone), no, I never mentioned the matter, any more than it ever occurred to me to call my father a filthy Hun—he wasn’t—or my wife a lousy cocksucker—she was—even when he pulled me from my closet cave and safety tree: what are you doing in there, Billy? dreaming that Susu is standing on my shoulders like a Turkish masseur, her cunt a dark cloud coasting across the sun, even then it never occurred to me to call him our household Kaiser—he was—or my wife a tease—she wasn’t—or when he shook me (though I was no bough to be jigged through April, he was no breeze): why are you hiding from me, Billy? I am running away from home, dad, my belongings in a black bottle, I am escaping the camp, I am fleeing the country, pa, I am digging a tunnel quite as long as a chimney, I am outwitting my warders by wearing their views, I am breaking my parole then, spilling ink, and slipping by the guards in the guise of a girl, and it never occurred to me that I  should need a wig on my womb—I didn’t—or that escape would be the pastime of my life—it was—even when I sowed my seed in Martha’s mouth and she bore me my ill will forever, it never occurred to me that the Way In and the Way Out are the same, or why, for instance, the sea should be so celebrated when long gray gravel roads run neglected into weed and we lie near an open window in the deep hum of summer and slide in our sweat over one another like two seals, so there is only one Final Solution to the Human Question, Herschel: total war, no quarter, unconditional surrender, Heiligblitzkrieg, V-ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ DAY . . . with dancing in the former streets.

Leopard, lion, come from cover,

the animals are taking over,

and I shall be mad in a month.

Susu, I  approach you . . .

Sentenced to sentences . . .

And wasn’t the court horrified by

the account of our crimes?

I’ve been condemned to continue . . .

No arctic tern or ocean plover

will light on me when it’s all over,

and I go mad in a month . . .

Didn’t it curdle the blood of the people? you cannibal, didn’t you harrow . . . What, the body? Herschel said, well, it’s like an aerial; you have to have one to pick anything up. What this, Herschel, I can’t believe—do you fancy yourself a funnybone? will you rub yourself shiny? which is soft shoe, which is trouser? Be my Valentine

for I shall be so bloodless and so dry . . .

I have been condemned to continue till my life, drawn like a thread through the narrow eye of language, sews

What do I want to do?                I want to kick Herschel.

I want to break his teeth with the black shining nose of my boot. I want to boot and kick and kill and loot.

Fire,  air,  earth—O  lover—

sews at least one belly to one button

What do I want to do?                  I want to tie your ears to

my feet, for I’m the messenger of the gods; I sing hit tunes in the backseat.

button, one fly to

its feasting

What do I want to do?                  I want to kick and kick

and kick and kick and kick and kick and kick and kick and kick . . .

feasting, and one wound to its weapon

the animals are taking over,

weapon

and I shall be mad in a month.

Shall we lose sight, overlook, ever forget?

Never.

. . . O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

Ach, let things take their course, Herr Behlen said of History, I remember. In five years’ time nobody will want to hear about them or their cursed course.

Susu, I approach you . . I approach you in my dreams.

Down and Dirty

Last night I gave myself a good scare. Two scares actually. I nearly buried myself alive. I shall never forget the weight of that dirt on my back, the soft moan of the earth when the tunnel’s roof gave way, and my groan, too, as if the ground were in pain. I’ve still got gurk in my hair, and when I blow my nose, my snot blows black, I imagine like a miner’s. Moreover my hole was nearly discovered. Martha is away so much, I had gotten careless, tracking dirt to distant floors, disposing of loose soil too boldly, becoming lax about my appearance: allowing dust to show on my clothes, to darken the lines blue-roading my face, permitting telltale crud to cross my palms and to remain beneath these broken nails I  am inspecting now with great distaste and no little anxiety, as if criminal acts were mapped out there like chains of lakes (what transgression would be handed the harsher judgment, I wonder: my tunnel or this text?); then my irritated eyes should be a giveaway, my cough, even my habitual crouch, that little bend to my back as if I had grown old in the wind, and my stiff sore knees, too, all the bruises which make my body into a billboard proclaiming the fact that “Something Down Is Up!” though, this time fortunately, it is a body at which even I no longer look; and of course there are also the messes in the basement which a makeshift neatness can scarcely disguise—drains clogged with clay, matted burlap, suspicious shavings, sawdust, scattered nails—the stockpiles of materials, too, not easy to conceal, digging tools, my absences while in the house, either because I’m writing up here or digging down there (I call my disappearances Herschelations), which ought to be mysterious but so far have failed to elicit even the mildest query.

There she was, though, at the top of the cellar stairs, her arms full of irrelevant brochures she’s about to bring down in a pair of paper bags. At one a.m.? I ask angrily, fearing I’ve been caught; well, I have been caught, just out of my dig suit, my face smeared with dirt still, my hair like dust bowl grass, my soul somewhere in my socks (since I cache my digging boots and ready tools in an old vegetable bin). Long meeting, she says through the bulk of the two grocery sacks she has filled her embrace with, way out now in advance of her chest so her short arms have to stretch, and I can smoothly suggest she transfer the bags to me, she shouldn’t try to carry such a burden down steep narrow stairs, I’d be pleased, anyplace in particular did she want them put? Okay, she says. It’s yucky down there. Yuckier than usual, I reply, hefting the load, and trying to turn around on a step as narrow as my escape. What’s in them? Leftover brochures—you know—old out-of-date folders about the museum. Anywhere. Okay, I say, with relief I must conceal, but relief which feels for the moment purely physical, like a bladder eased after a long and painful search. Then I realize that because the sacks were in front of her face she hasn’t seen me, but may glom me now lumbering toward the floor of the basement; god knows what the back of me looks like after the night I’ve had; it’s certainly easier concealing a simple adultery than this sandhog’s occupation; however, the door shuts without a significant slam and I seem to have ducked the collapse of my secret as well as survived the cave-in of my cave: i.e., being buried alive or flayed.

So I tried to clean myself up a bit better before coming to bed, not that I need to worry that she’ll drop in to inspect me, to appreciate the ways all the small dirts which sweat sticks together seem to pack themselves into folds of fat where they uncannily resemble those nervously retraced pencil lines on a schoolroom desk, managing the matter under layers of clothes too, till the bellybutton really looks to be one, sewn with dark thread onto a creased and grimy pillow.

I didn’t know when I’d be able to get back to the dig—the routines of ordinary life are daily and damnable, those of the university equally stupefying—but I vowed to be more careful both inside the escape route and out: disposing of my burrowing clothes and tools properly, sweeping up and concealing the site, disposing of tunnel-shit safely by spreading it about in the garden, now that all the drawers of her commode, desk, bureau, and dresser collection have been packed with dirt like seedling flats. In particular, though, I had to be watchful about my person. I had been allowing too many stains to get by, and my hands were a sight, rough, scabby, and lineated, fingertips sore and nails fractured, patched with Band-Aids and darkened with iodine. It was certainly a lucky thing, right now, we slept apart, for I couldn’t have touched her with such raspy hands even in the dark. Touch her. Oh. That would give her a start. She would think she was being crawled on by a bug, a rapist, or a rat. After so long a length of absence. And especially now I had rid her of her cat.

I slide these sheets between the sheets of G & I and wonder when I’ll run out of history to hide in, or if I’ll be forced to double the center of the sandwich with another layer of ham. I guess it’s right that my secret life should lie inside them. Oddly enough, I have a similar problem with the offal I dig out of the rte. The clay is so damn yellow now that I’ve had to sink my second shaft in order to get under the gas lines. It comes out in heavy clumps, or almost like shavings where the pick slides down along the hardpan, tough as a trunk, and there’s no easy place to put the stuff. Earlier I could slip some into flower pots and beds around the house. I also covered up a lot with garden turnings, and even weighed the garbage down with dirt. Of course, a good deal can still be carried off in cartons in the car, but only when I can load the trunk and back-seat in secrecy. The boxes have a habit of breaking apart, too, which has discouraged me with that method. There’s more moisture in the dirt than you think, so if a box sits a few days, its bottom’s going to be soggy and the cardboard will most inconveniently unfold its flaps. Ideally, I need the same system I’ve always needed: a way to get rid of an evening’s digging on the evening of the work. Now I carry clay away from the face in pillowcases, and then, when I’ve got to the trap, I dump each load in the coal scuttle till I can think of a place to secrete the stuff. Christ, it’s yellow as aspen, fairly shouts its presence, hardens into unmanageable chips, and doesn’t act a bit like earth. Which, I guess, could be an advantage sometimes. The loamier stuff I reserve to fill Martha’s future furniture store, though I wonder whether the extra weight is safe on the second floor, because those pieces are huge and mahogany heavy, or built of an overload of oak already, and quite a few have deep pockets, seem like they could hold a ton, so the beams of this old house, big as it is, and big as I imagine they are, are getting a real workout.

How could anyone have guessed, when Martha started collecting these mastodons, and filling all the hallways and spare rooms with unmerciful Victorian highboys and rustic rodeo wardrobes, squeezing light and air, not to say space, out of the house, as if she hoped that soon there’d be no room for me; yes, how could I have guessed that her dream of one day managing a barn full of antiques, and selling pieces of our Olden Days like pyramids to pikers, would take on this much measurable reality or become this menacingly residential; I can scarcely wigglesneak my ass or rubber my belly between the ugly bulks which have taken up the upstairs landing and line the hall as if it led to a soup kitchen—she couldn’t collect pretty earrings and pins, of course—no—or rare rag dolls, or even little figurines you could at least smash against a wall when enraged—if you kick one of these motherhulkers, you risk your toe—and then just to let them sit there, after all the trouble they required and provoked, undusted, you bet, undisturbed, for whowouldbelieveit years, enticing me to inscribe weird curses on the hazy wardrobe mirrors and other stretches of set-in glass the way ‘Wash Me” gets fingerwrit on the rears of trucks, with similarly futile effect, too, not even a scowl or a sneer or a smile or a nod to suggest she’d ever seen them; to ignore them as if they were invisibly familiar, even after young equally heavy men had muscled more chiffoniers up the stairs or into what was once a spare room, to pack them side to shoulder and knob to knurl, with twirly handles kissing curly spindles, so many footed with feetlike feet, too—hoofs or claws or paws—which ought to have drawn at least a glance of amusement—and with one, I think, taloned, as though the chifforobe were worn by an eagle.

Now that I’ve put my dirt in her drawers, I feel differently about the furniture I’ve hated for so many years: the ugly bulk of each piece, the crowds of them, their vulgarly carved and treated woods, their out-of-date nicks; now I think of them as mausoleums, tombs where the burial grounds themselves are put to rest, where what never was alive has died—in a dresser, a hautboy, a bureau dusted with dust—each a chest of coffins for the clay we once were made of, the last casket like the last roundup, suitably housed in mission oak; and now, when I squeeze myself by them, I squeeze to my face a smile as long as paste. Sometimes—though only sometimes—things work out, and the going goes good.

Martha rarely visits our “spare rooms,” and certainly never the attic, to gloat over her treasures or to pet their flanks, slide their drawers in or out as I would, study the forlornly funny face which appears in their discolored mirrors, or follow a whirl of woodgrain with a happy finger. None of that. She doesn’t even dawdle on the upstairs landing where so many sit. In bygone times, I went to the auctions where she bid and often bought them, but we would quarrel over their character, our need, their use, where we’d put them, their inherent worth, so I eventually stopped going along on her hunting expeditions, stayed home and tried to be absent when the heavy old hags were unloaded; period pieces hold little charm for me, ugly objects even less; they’re not at all like ancient words which I might enjoy collecting; and words hardly bulk, even long ones, or draw dust, but then they can’t be resold either; which is what Martha always claims she aims to do: open a shop, sell these morose elephants at an enormous profit, go on journeys called “buying trips” not “buying jags,” create a career for herself; what the hell, why not, I say, worn out with wrangling, whatever you want, just leave me out; which is what gets well done, hereabouts, the leaving out; we rarely talk; we rarely argue anymore; we orbit at intergalactic rates, coming in sight of one another on ceremonial occasions like the return of a comet, otherwise by accident, and pursuing our surrogate passions as only those whose natural passions have been blighted can—with unrelievable and relentless desperation.

Ironically, it was I, when the bite from this odd buying bug had just begun to itch in her psyche, who suggested she store her treasures in the basement. We’d have to fix up the cellar door, presently decrepit, because the regular stairs were too old, unsteady, narrow, and precipitous; but that wouldn’t be terribly difficult, I said, and then great commodes, or whatever, could be brought in easily, and put away like political prisoners out of the sight of the king; however, Martha wouldn’t hear of it, far too damp, she said, warpage would occur, inlays would pop out, marquetry curl, veneers become venereal, u.s.w.; so instead the creatures marched upstairs and occupied what was soon a conquered country.

The kids have continued to bunk together on account of her acquisitions, every spare room eaten like a chocolate, the guest bedroom as well, the walk-in closets, odd pockets under eaves, stairs, and dormers, now occupied by these woody charmers; although the boys don’t seem to mind, dashing between them like commuters, as indifferent to their presence as their mother, equally and always out—at school, with friends, on Boy Scout excursions, taken in tow by Culp, who will no doubt pull them through growing-up’s glandular perversions.

Now I’ve a hole in the ground down there two stepladders deep, though presently its length is perhaps no greater than twelve feet, if you count the nose cone. Still I’ve got myself beneath the gas, water, and electric, the frost and sewer lines, and broken a bit past the edge of where the house sits on the lot, wholly free and clear of its domain; moreover the rte. had been scrieving pretty well, I was feeling a quiet elation, when the earth above me turned soft and fell like plop on my head, shoulders, and half-chest, up at the face of the dig, in the narrowest part, of course, not yet shored, because not yet enlarged, and not yet lit, either, in dumb damn dark, so I couldn’t breathe the awful air either, the sudden weight driving my nose into the clay with such force it began to bleed—god, what a stupid situation to be scared in—wondering what the hell, of all the places of this earth I could possibly be on (where I’d be safe as a Swiss bonbon, too, decorating a paper doily that’s shielding a silver plate) I was instead deep in dreadful dutch here, in an escape route of my own contriving which could go undiscovered for years, years after I had mysteriously vanished from home and haunts without a hint, apparently in reasonable health and at least not unsound mind, the hole as hid as my hidden text, and no next of kin likely to rescue—à la Rin Tin Tin--the private inventions on these pages from their tunnel into Time, or, at the last min, to pull these old bones and swaddled skin from the fallen walls of their previous owner’s runaway tunnel into HYPERBOLIX ESCAPE SPACE.

Quashed was what I was. But what shook my head loose was the dirt in my eyes, which was worse than being breathless, worse than being quashed. I was scared I was about to be a stiff. I was ashamed I had been so suicidally stupid. Yet none of these feelings were galvanic. Instead, I instantly, quite wordlessly, realized there was dirt in my eyes, under the lid, against the ball, against eye-white and iris, against the soft wet wall where I met the world—who cares about being dead when there’s dirt in your eyes—and my head rocked from side to side as if it were a bag punched, and I pulled back by pushing against the end of the tunnel with my hands, shivering violently along my length like a plucked wire, earth in my eyes—hell, my bloody nose was nothing—there was dirt in my eyes; and then suddenly I had retreated into the ladder, I must have felt it against my boots, so I buckled my knees, my ass rising behind me, screwing myself round to climb the five steps, bleeding too, but O that was the least of it, the blood removing the earth from one nostril at least, yet with dirt in my eyes, my mouth too—yellow clay—I could taste my chew as I wriggled up the first five horizontal feet to ladder number two, the shorter one, and crawled gasping and cursing in no time I suppose out of the trap to stumble my way to the laundry tubs and their goddamn rust-stiff taps where I tried to get the water to run over me like a rock beneath its fall, not with much luck, and batted my bare eyes at the stream, weeping, I think, while washing, my nosebleed in well-marked subsidence, though that’s why I blew black snot from my nose when I blew it—no wonder—fluttering lashes like a lovely, showering my sight until the pain began to ease, and when it eased . . . while it eased . . . I huddled on the basement floor, babybabbling, wrapping my knees, water leaking down my shirtback to the belt, softly bawling, a sight, I remember thinking, as if a Culp had come upon me, for sore eyes.

I figured I’d have to wear BVDs when winter came. The frozen ground, its cover of snow, would make disposal difficult, unless I flung my clay chips about in a blizzard, one sort of flake fooling the other. Maybe I was so weary of this work by now I wanted out of it, and would be happy to be discovered, hauled back to my cell, put in solitary, given sexless bread and water; maybe,’ thought that would be better than lying full length along that everywhere narrow path and pushing a few shavings of clay back by my sides to below my waist and then inching rearward in such a way the clay came too like rolls of erasure, until space permitted my cupped hands to heap it into the pillowcase so I could pull it up and out of the hole and into the scuttle, punching the dirt down with my fist, though you could scarcely call the clay dirt, it was something else, yellow pencil shavings, the petrified puke of ages past; but someday I had to hit loam or real earth or soft mud, something a little sandy, so the work could progress at least by feet and not by inches; I tried to have that hope; I remembered all the books I’d read about escapes, from jails and dungeons and camps, about the long weary secret nights of scraping and scratching, the wondrous holes which had been dug with bent nails, a bit of sharp stone, single spoon, can lid, penknife, and how tin cups had hauled off handfuls of the way out, until there was a way out, and didn’t I want a way out? O sure, sure, in the worst way; but I was certainly discouraged, well before the cave-in, before Martha and I had our peaceful business with the brochure-packed bags, so my god now what? how can I continue this comedy? I was faltering, then, no question, I had forced myself into that damn pit time after time, putting my nose into a most solidly obnoxious nothingness, the ground hugging my head like a helmet, breathing only the skinny air which got by my shoulders and crept past my collarbone, O everything was so claustrophobically close, so stifling not merely to the nose but to the spirit, yet my suffering was to what effect? by now? and I read how others had gotten rid of their rubbish, carrying it out into exercise yards in socks beneath their pants, and in pockets, sifting it evenly onto the ground they jumped around on, spading it, sometimes, into gardens, hiding it—who would dream?—in attics, under floorboards, in waste cans, between studded walls; but in those cases there’d be a digger who’d play “God Save the Queen” on his harmonica, and there would be lots of jolly chaff and cheerful jokes, camaraderie to keep you going, whereas I didn’t even have myself; I was more alone than the Count of Monte Cristo, who at least knew that an honorable lineage made royal his rags; I didn’t dare grow a beard; I didn’t dare fall sick in a cold cell’s corner; I had to lecture on the Treaty of Versailles, or on some other sublime-sized silliness of so-called human society; I had to listen to student excuses; I had to mark exams as if I cared whether the dumb klutzes lived or died; I  had to listen to my colleagues brag about their publications, run down rivals, gossip like hags; I had to keep calm when Martha never came home, when she went away for days to buy—what would it be now?—divans; I had to pretend to read the daily papers, to be concerned about Vietnam and other screws-of-the-world; I  had to pack peanut butter lunches for the kids; I had to hug Herschel because—did he say?—he was going blind, and never ask him about his funnel vision; I had to do the shopping certainly—Martha had forgotten what a vegetable looked like before it was cooked; I had to keep the household accounts without having a household and knowing nothing of what she spent or earned or frittered or socked away in some substitute for her cunt, like candy for a rainy day.

I could say to no one: this is my hole. This is my highest heaven of invention. Don’t you admire it? Isn’t it grand? See how the ladders have been wedged, the sides of the rte. smoothed as if paper had been used, or a sander; look at the clever way the hole’s been hid, snuck inside a furnace like a kid gone to pull his pecker; watch in wonder while I disappear down the so small maw of my machination and then in a minute come out again, hey hey, it’s target practice time, the prairie dog is in view; or, if you’ve a moment and the inclination, slip down ladder number one where there’s still enough light to inspect the shoring, for which I’ve used bed boards in the classic manner, even stealing the initial ones from my own bed, how’s that for a twist on the old routine? yet who will answer (assuming, assuming) yes, sure, happy to, to these inanities? and can I  ask an old friend (assuming, assuming), can I ask him up to my study to watch me write: a b c d, or as the bullies used to make me pencil “my penis” on paper, “needs sucking,” they’d say, now write “I eat cunt,” do it! c u n—come on—write t down; do it! to watch me write, read and weep, scoop up the sweepings of my soul—that may be too grandly put—so what? since all my words are soon sent from every sight between these other leaves, this history of another Reich, of other nose-bloody days.

It has discouraged me: the secrecy, the loneliness of my occupations, the losing battle, so it seems, I’m waging, and, like every battle, pointlessly; I am sorrowful because I cannot share even a line of my real life with anyone, show anyone my mind--even my fat and fallen body would make a more acceptable display—so this cave-in has come at a bad time, when I’m already down and dirty, as deep in dung as any honeypot handler, with a heart which has no heart for tunneling another trowelful (as Culp says, my heart is beat); no heart for hiding one more thought, forming a phrase, following a lead; none for fleeing one more disappointing day the way dawn eludes both night and morning by subsiding into darkness or fading forward from the shade.

If I’m to go on anyway, I guess I’ll have to crawl back down to the tunnel face and scoop out the roof-fall—careful as a cockroach—and shore the shaft, somehow, against this unforeseen softness, which seems to be located just above the line of my dig; it’s certainly not in front, which is as hard as Martha’s feelings for me—no, not harder—for I  do curl by curl carve my way through the closeness of this clay, I do chip by chip chunk it out, and that’s what I have to repeat to myself, tell myself, that I succeed, chip by curl and chunk by trowel, to hack along. Have to, hey? well, won’t do it, no go, no way.

If I’m to stay the course—continue—if I’m to keep my nose to the hole’s head, mole on and over, then I’m going to have to drop a little light down—a little light on a little wire—covered by a wire basket—because I can’t stand smelling my own sweat, hearing nothing but my own breath, without an eye to alleviate the monotones; I can’t bear the blindness of the job, mucking on without knowing what or where, or catching sight of the clay curls I’ve taken out only after I’ve taken myself there; they could be maggots from an ancient grave, good grief, who knows, down there in that absolute and nearly breathless darkness, I could come upon the corpse of someone I’ve murdered in my dreams, suddenly touch . . .

That’s what we really don’t know. We sail the seas and fly the skies and drive up and down all the roads, but the deepest caves, the cleverest caverns, cannot take us to the underground, tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens, whether it’s as we think, ever so slowly, and life sleeps upside down there like bats, or whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no need for any action and all is over and nothing’s begun: because we’re in that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal, compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond each form of the past, to be free of time like the proverbial bird, fixed—frozen sufficiently for it, fired, glazed—that’s what we really don’t know and maybe motivates my burrowing—if there’s a bottom nature, and just what’s what where the well ends, when we pass beneath its water, when we actually enter ‘in’ and find ourselves in front of n and on the other side of i.

Another irony. I used to annoy Martha by making up frightening stories to tell the boys: this was back before the boys had become so obnoxious, before their skinny acne’d smartass basso days; when they were runts not yet rebellious. I related tales full of concealed panels and secret passages, of peepholes in paintings, so placed there might be eyes where the eyes were; I told them about drape pulls which caused walls to pivot, latches in desk drawers which revealed hidden strongboxes and opened disguised safes, levers which activated trapdoors to drop bodies into underground rivers, of back stairs, escape routes, ornamental armor one could hide in; I described walls wide enough to slide inside of, beds which folded like chairs to murphy their occupants, or tables which turned, or chimney bricks which pulled out; I also spoke of legs which were hollow and lamps which listened, of tubes through which coral snakes slithered, or spiders were rappelled, the better to bite naked necks or sleeping thighs; and I told them about boxes with false bottoms, and explained in detail the malevolent significance of apparently innocent designs: treasure maps woven into rugs, secret signals conveyed by candles, codes of confederation contained in stained glass, otherwise indifferent objects which nevertheless rhymed; and I went on with relish about all sorts of grim things: dungeons, rats, bats, insects of diabolical deviousness, earwigs and tapeworms and mites which ate through eyes, centipedes and scorpions, all of whom lived in basements deep and dark and damp beyond belief, where vapors were produced which threw noses into comas if inhaled, and where ghosts, weighed down as if drowned by the self-indulgence of their prior lives, still plied their trade, scaring the talkative into silence, and terrifying the taciturn into gabbling. I did such a good job with my ghouls and goblins, my creatures, so called, of the dark, that for a long time the boys refused to hang their clothes in closets, and will rarely go into the basement still—a condition of character I could not have imagined would be of eventual value, and one which, had I wished to, I could never have induced.

I complain of the tedium of my task; I grouse about my lack of loving companionship and the absence of any appreciative understanding, true; yet I know how hallowed the hidden is, how necessary it is for us to occupy a world of our own contriving, even though it has to find its moment of secrecy and silence in the midst of rabble’s rousing. I am also only too well aware of what happens when you try to share such unsharable things. Martha, for one, would tear my hair if she heard even a whispered word of my project; she’d call me crazy, rant about racism again, return old scars to active duty as painful wounds—it’s all so old, so trite, so automatic—nevertheless she would find my tunnel insufficiently tunnelesque in a dozen ways; she would wish, if it had to be dug, it had been done under her supervision; she would probably insist on one drop instead of two, on a more commodious entry, on better light and ventilation; she would be opposed on principle to off-the-cuff planning and makeshift shafts, although making do, cobbling, shimming, fudging, somehow getting on, is nearly the whole idea.

Certainly, my own imaginary world has been under construction for a lifetime, and even as a kid I loved being hidden—hiding, eluding, evaporating, disappearing—not the way Herschel manages, simply by making no demands on anyone’s attention—but by keeping an active, even aggressive, public front, the board behind which Billy, Bill, Willi, William sat on his cycle like a cop and waited for speeders unwittingly to pass; whereupon, in my mind, Bill, Willi, William would pursue them, arrest them, screw the girls and shoot the guys, think their thoughts, swallow their saliva, untie a shoe or unstrap a watch, carry a grudge, condone their crimes, forcefeed them The Bostonians, enjoy how Willi, William made them writhe, pop back behind my board and be all smiles outside, once again chummy to my chums, all to all, this space available, as advertised.

I would spend whole weeks as another person, in another place and time, spinning a heroic tale which would ingeniously include all I normally saw and thought and did, but reinterpreted in dream terms, revising Martha, my work, this house, class time, my moments of self-abuse, as situations, scenes, and players, because I lived in a double context: I was a secret agent, the prisoner of Zenda, a dime novel’s heroic hero; but later a Senate informant, a journalist with a nose for news, an absconder, con man, magician, Nazi mole; I was a Don Juan with a cock so active there wasn’t a day it didn’t crow; I moved in the highest circles, was consulted concerning national policy, handled delicate negotiations, contrived stings, planned crimes, by god wheeled and dealed, did things, took over businesses, developed properties, cornered markets, cashed in stocks, bonds, markers, chips. Walter Mitty, master of men. Now, though, I do what I formerly dreamed: slipping inside the world in such a way I remain outside everybody, creating a kingdom like a realm of play, but now a realm in the Real, for I have made a cave which can cave in, a hole which can hide me better than my purchased plot, my advertised grave in Memory Green, a place where I can say absolutely anything I have testicles and lung and tongue for. There I can tell myself the truth, too, as Magus Tabor taught me, because ordinary life is supported by lies, made endurable through self-deception; because in my illusion no illusions are allowed.

The cat. An uncomfortable case in point. The first fright. I had just encountered the drains, pipes of several kinds, and I realized I had to drop the level of my shaft another five or so feet to be sure to clear these and other utilities I might meet. It was early on, I was not so expert then as I am now; that is, I am presently more adept at overcoming the awkwardness of my ideas, the paucity of my means, the clumsiness of my execution, the occasional carelessness of my follow-up, although the awkwardness itself remains and I still progress, when I manage to, more in fits than starts.

It was late. It was dark. I didn’t feel as bold about my work then as I do now, and I felt I had to proceed with nothing but a flash in one hand and a sharp trowel in the other, nervous as a burglar. The basement was a pit of pitch in the midst of which the furnace sat unseen, while inside it, darker yet if that were possible, my hole began, sinking like the look of someone blind to the turn below where the ladder sat—a bubble in the burrow to function as a wheel-around—before the tunnel’s horizontal shaft hollowed out a black that was blacker even than the surrounding compact of lightless dirt through which it had started its movement toward the cellar’s outer wall. That’s where I lay with my light, trying to crawl toward the tunnel’s nose, one arm, with the trowel, flung ahead of my head because the space in front became the size of a shoulder for the length of an arm, and I’d move that arm, its hand, hand’s tool, back and forth like a piston or a penis, punching the trowel point into the soil, rubble, hardpan—whatever was in front—and prying, scraping, picking, raking the earth back toward me where I’d sack it later, the light pointing rearward to the ladder’s bottom rung, a sight I preferred to see because somehow it was a comfort. I suppose it signified the way out. I have put a permanent crick in my neck, I fear, and to my general phiz I’ve given a nasty slit-eyed look, since at my dirt work I want only light to pass the lid, a not unreasonable concern inasmuch as the roof of the tunnel is terribly close above me and particles fall constantly, endangering anything open, as I confirmed to my discomfort when the ceiling subsided last night.

So much for the situation. I push my arm into the dig’s narrowing neck: touch fur, hear hiss, draw back in total terror, first reflexively, cracking my elbow against the excavation’s closing sides, and then convulsively, thinking “rat” as I retreat: which takes the form of a swift wriggle hard for a man so fat, a wriggle which leaves me weak, a weakness I thank god didn’t feel until I was topside nearly sick. “Rat,” I thought between heavy pants. Then past me, through the flashlit light, fur fled, frightening me again, so the flash fell to the basement floor and my flesh crawled after it. Cat, I said, quite out loud. Cat. Her cunt-cozy cat. I followed the light as it led me upstairs, cursing with a constancy which measured my humiliation.

That, as they say, should have been that. Except the sneaky beast was using my fleeway like a pan, shitting and pissing at the tunnel’s face, another unpleasantness I literally discovered when cat turds turned up in the clay curls and my hand came back damp and ammoniated from its work. I thought our encounter might have frightened the creature for good, but it apparently thought the hole was perfect for its fecal needs and kept returning. The situation became totally intolerable the night the cat clawed me coming out, bolting, as it was able to do, along the shaft, and running over me as though I were some fallen tree: neck, shoulder, left leg, catching it in series, my shoulder really suffering—it’s still sore—and my exasperation reaching beyond the range of mere degree.

C. A. T. Martha’s cat was orange and black, short, fat, hairy, called tabby something, the vain possessor of a full tail, it was also fannied like a fist of feathers, fair hairs sprouting from its ears, with a permanently sly smile, a little flat peke-style nose, altogether a messy genetic mix, and a rotten lot of trouble, clawing carpet and curtains, shedding hair in moltlets, coughing up balls of the stuff in pukes of food, leaving dirty shadows of its sleep on beds and on the couch, but most annoying of all, crawling down between Martha’s legs to snooze next to her snatch, so she’d have to pet herself to pet it, hidden hair-smell everywhere, pussy to pussy, like putting a hat on your purse, the cat’s deep purr vibrating her, making Martha smile in her scissor-shaped sleep.

Where once upon a time, against those so soft inner lips, I’d smiled a smile to see how it felt, and Marty said it did, it felt . . . it felt . . . swell.

I would call up the tunnel to kitty kitty the cunt-snuggler. I wanted to determine if it was lurking there; to try to lure it out if it was; but it could never be inveigled, would refuse to make a sound, and wait to run by me, having shat in my palm, claws at crescent, always a shock speeding by me, a needle-bearing bolt of fur. Then there was this one time finally, when I found I had it—I was entirely surprised—I had it by the neck, I had both hands on its neck—how I managed I cannot imagine—but I had both hands on its neck, the cat kicking like crazy, and I’m trying to hold it out in front of me, away from me, farther up in the hole where I had grabbed it; I had it, both hands had it; and I squeezed with a hate of long duration, so hatefully hard, and angrily immediate, I never heard a neck snap or much of a moan in its mew, instead the back legs jerked, perhaps twice, against my extended well-sleeved arms and that was that. I had on my hands a dead cat.

Not so good. No. Took it out of there, though, for the last time. That was okay. That was good. And I’d never have to clean its turds from in front of me again, though I’d have its piss smell as a memory, because even now when I crawl past that point, crawling to the front of the shaft, I get a whiff of where it was when it took its last shit and relieved itself in the soul and center of my secret. So it was a good thing it was gone. I couldn’t complain. Nor would I have to imagine it curled against my wife’s cunt again where I should have been, intoxicated by a tickle, in the warm dark center of her secret. Nor would I miss the puling and the petting and the carrying-on, the babytalk, the special food, the fawning and the combing, the rubby-dubby-dubbing, nor the circus of filthy pulex either, which it would carry around like a lorryful of Hessians, ready to leap out and rape and pillage or at least fleabite every flea-able surface, getting at me in the most obnoxious venues, no, actually, I would miss nothing of it, not a floating hair’s worth, not an insolent stare, nor one more insolent tail flick, nor one more insincere purr, insincere leg rub, indifferent snub, arrogant walk.

Of course I would keep my mouth shut. The kids would wonder. Martha would feel in her sleep for its fur and not find it. There would be predictable tears. I’d trouble myself to look nonplussed and glum. But I would remember: no shit at my site, not again; no cat pee soiling my tunnel dirt, no scratch marks, no fur fly, no mourning when nothing’s been lost.

I had a dead cat on my hands just the same. I plopped it in a paper sack, and thought about what to do. I wanted to get rid of it warm. I didn’t fancy sitting with a stiff cat as a corpse. Where’s your purr now, my fine feline? I even composed a soliloquy of scorn and triumph, but mostly I kept quiet. The solution, you might say, rose up and smote me. That, not the cat’s killing, was my victory.

Sort of sacked, it now lies beneath several layers of carefully selected soil in the bottom right-hand drawer of a large and hideous Wild West wardrobe, the one the delivery boys heaved as high as the second-floor landing before their willingness gave out. I wondered would there be a smell. But there’s no air in there. Packed with dirt, I wedged the drawer as tight as fast friends. So maybe it won’t spoil. Or if it spoils, it won’t smell. Or if it smells, the smell won’t seep out. Or if it gets out, we won’t smell it. Sometimes things go good. Every day I look with Culp’s eye at that chest and I say: catacomb. Every day I try to dig a little farther. Every day I draw something down in the dirt.

Learning to Drive

My father was happiest behind the wheel. And he always managed to own a vehicle of substance and standing. For many years he drove a Packard which he had bought secondhand from one of those proverbial “little old ladies” who had never unwrapped the spare or let the car roll down her drive. The traditional salesman’s lie may have been true this time, for that is how the car behaved. Indeed, it was a beaut, and sported (this was the detail I loved most) a shiny metal figure, winged at head and heels, leaning out ahead of the car’s hood: Mercury in a helluva hurry. The running board was high, the headlights huge, rounder than eyes. Its paint was as deep and black as outer space, its chrome shone even at night as if it had absorbed and saved light during the day. The grille was grand and cleaved the air like a set of silver knives. To this day I cannot understand why people want to sit as close to the road as roadkill, because I remember how wonderful it was—short as I was, too, I suppose—to be perched where I could see the world around me whiz by through the car’s wide windows.

And because my father loved to drive we took trips. The shortest might be two or three days, the longest the customary vacationer’s two weeks. Maybe they were his rivers, but it’s more likely they were an opportunity to get away from an increasingly disagreeable routine, and a chance to exercise a skill which gave him pleasure.

We were motoring through New England. I was probably twelve or thirteen. My aunt was not along with us on this trip. We were all relieved. My father kept track of our daily distances and miles per gallon. If either was good he was greatly gratified. He liked knowing that he’d been down this or that road, and, for many years afterward, would remember the route numbers, the names of the towns we passed through, the tourist homes or motor courts where we stopped (we avoided hotels as too expensive), our adventures on the highway (car trouble, detours, cops), pleasant points of interest, strangest sights, most memorable moments. He liked going where he hadn’t been, as if, with the car, he was crayoning the country and would be pleased when it was all one color. He shared with my mother his memories of these journeys, they spoke about them often, and even the bad times were recalled with affection. I was not expected to participate in the composition of this part of our family history.

Although right now I am the one whose hands are on the wheel—the one, this time, in charge of the car.

On this particular trip, we had driven up to the top of Mount Washington, the third-highest peak in the East, so many and so many feet above sea level, a long hard haul for any engine, and our car had been valiant, had warmed without overheating, had never coughed or panted, had taken hairpin turns with aplomb. My father was proud. He bought a banner which said, in effect, this car was driven to the top of Mount Washington, so many and so many feet. I think the sticker was long, green, with white letters, and clung to the car’s bumper as determinedly as its chrome. Well, ole Alice made it, he would say with nostalgic affection. Though the brakes got a little mushy going down and needed a little pumping. And the rocky washed-out roadbed softened the springs. Still, ole Alice managed.

All our cars were given, by my father, female first names, and they were “ole” even when brand new. There was Sadie and Gertie and Alice and Doris. Doris didn’t do well. My father seriously considered rechristening her, and did call Doris Doris, rather than “ole,” oftener than not. Damn you, Doris, was the usual form of address. I accepted all this without a thought. Ships are similarly sexed by sailors, I gather. Yet the allegedly phallic character of the car, as I came to understand it, didn’t comport well with Gertie and Doris and Alice.

The automobile certainly enlarged my father’s powers, and his attitude toward his machines was like that of a pet owner: affection found nowhere else in his nature flowed forth toward the dials and levers, wheels and lamps and buttoned leather seat covers, of his cars. They were washed and shined and dusted and polished, tuned up and repaired and broken in, but above all they were discussed. New improvements. Model years. Costs. Performance. Lubricants and fuels. Designs. Now I believe I understand why we took the trips we did. Our journeys were for the sake of the Chevrolets and the black Packard. For Sadie and Gertie and Alice. Even for Doris who got her fender dented on her first outing, and broke her fan belt another time, and was given to flats and to fuming and to tappets which sounded like nervous spoons. The rest of us were really along just for the ride.

When my father’s friends got together they spoke of sports, politics, and automobiles. And each of these fields of study and discourse was filled with figures having to do with expense and achievement, with expectations expressed as promises, and with any number of conflicts and tests. More and more, in my mind, brands, teams, and parties resembled one another. There were always new elections, old candidates to be enjoyed, new candidates to be assessed; there were always new model years, new claims to be examined, new performance figures to be argued, merits to be weighed, prices to be compared; there were always more matches, more predictions, more explanations, more excuses. And everyone was partisan: loyally for, strongly against. And everybody bet. Even if the bets were only betchas. They were made. Remembered. Added up. Successes were loudly enjoyed. Failures were publicly scorned.

For my father, the garage, not the saloon, not the pool hall, was the center of the male domain. I saw calendars with girls on them, yet, except for these images, there was no mention or reminder of the “fairer” sex. Tools were deities here. The oily rag was a religious relic. The hoist, the pit, were as theological as altar and nave. And garages were cool and dark, noisy as machine shops sometimes, always as odoriferous as a bakery, casual yet purposeful, messy yet ordered. They were realms of respect (in those days, they were not considered regions of ripoff and rudeness, as they are thought to be now), because the mechanic combined the surgical and diagnostic skills of the medical profession with the encouragements and canny know-how of a coach: he repaired, but he advised.

I didn’t enjoy my visits to the garage because I knew it meant I’d sit around a lot in a little ratty office on a little ratty chair to cool my heels while my father chatted, with nothing to read or look at but parts catalogues. There’d be a dirty wad-filled toilet, and on the outside of the sick green toilet door always shone that calendar girl whose big bazooms I’d preferred to have stared at without being seen. For me, the environment was foreign, seedy, disagreeably adult. Cigarettes and sodas were available, and candy bars which were never sold but lay snoozing in their boxes like the garage dog. A familiar jokey tone prevailed. Benign teasing was permitted. Still, it was sagacity which held sway in this confidently masculine environment where manual skill was united with practical intelligence, and problems of every kind were understood in terms of nuts, bolts, oil, the failure of rings to fit, and the failure of cogs to mesh: daily, the grounds for our most immediate social discontents were laid bare; hourly, reasons for the recent collapse of the team were reviewed; momentarily, the causes of concern for certain valves and cylinders were vigorously investigated. Symptoms proliferated like roadside signs, and here at least they were shrewdly read: a hitch in the left-hander’s delivery, layoffs by the motorcar companies, a little zingy sound when the engine was revved, they signified, they explained, they foretold; and as the machine was repaired, so were the wide world’s ills, if not remedied, at least diagnosed, and the team’s present plight understood.

Now, of course, I realize the importance of such relationships—the easy camaraderie of the skilled with their clients, for instance, in a richly significant locale: the garage, the barbershop, the bank—which foster that good will among citizens so essential to the welfare of the State; but then it was just a bore, more adult self-indulgence, more odd profitless behavior one had to endure.

So my father knew what spark plugs were for, where all those wires went, and why, when, and how to add and measure oil, what to listen for—this rattle, that knock, this ping—how to check the hoses, why the battery needed its regular ration of distilled water, what to do when the engine overheated (a common complaint), how to replace wipers and execute a dozen other small automotive chores which I resolutely remained as ignorant of as my mother or my aunt. I loved to watch gasoline bubble through the pump’s glass, and hear the hiss of compressed air, but that was about it; nor did I notice what the driver did to shift gears, or what pedal the foot hit to speed up or stop, or what most of the dials meant (I understood the speedometer, one gauge was enough); I could open and close windows and doors; I could sing in the back-seat; I could snooze; but the rearview mirror made me dizzy, the glove compartment would never open at my touch, and I burned an important finger on the cigarette lighter. I have never learned a license plate—not to this day.

It was my father’s world—the bank, the barbershop, the gas station, the playing field—and he could have it. You might squeeze pimples with those big clippers instead of chew hair—what did I know?—since, for all such things, I had no care. I had a little account which my father oversaw, though there was nothing to see because I never drew anything in or out. The bat he put in my hand, I broke bottles with. Glass flew down the foul line. In the late afternoon, I remember, light would streak across the floor of the garage through open doors and dirty windows to fall like water into the grease pit whose floor it seemed was a mountainside below. And the clippers would buzz in my ears too loudly for bees, the cloth was always pinned too tightly around my neck, and the teller would count Ten, Mr. Kohler, twenty, Mr. Kohler, twenty-three, and twenty-five, then grin, then say, Don’t spend it all at once, then with a thin finger touch the tip of his green visor in a convivial salute. Except for a game or two a year, which we’d travel a tiresome distance to see, sports were reports in the papers, broadcasts, and talk, soft-toned, temperate, leaning on a fender over which a long cloth had been thrown for safety, toothpick in the mouth to improve the meditative quality of the mind, wrench in the hand to lend ideas heft, and the soft rustle of turning pages where the patrons waited, in a chair, on a bench, for your hair to be shaken to the floor, and for the word “next.”

A distant cousin, who cares? she had a cunt I was curious about, as I was curious about every cunt, about the idea of such a pocket, their alleged existence; this cousin, come to visit, was inveigled by me into the garaged Packard’s backseat where I would show her something amazing, at least surprising, at least something, she’d be delighted, I’d let her pet it, and then she’d show me, et cetera, the space where penises came from like carrots pulled out of the ground, I had some such idea—the good earth—nothing resembling castration, so she pulled up her dress in the gray light of the shut-up space where the Packard was parked and before I could tug her panties down her mother called from the kitchen window, my cousin giggled, said, Another time, as if she were twenty-three, and dashed out the garage door to her mother’s side as if she were five, the scaredy cat, so I sat in the front seat instead—why was the car unlocked?—and pretended to steer, making small motor-sounding sounds, speeding up dale and then down, fixing in my imagination the universal connection between the automobile, an insecure privacy, sexual fumbling, substitute fantasies, and bitter disappointment.

The trip I remember most was our drive down Franconia Notch. Beautiful country. I love New England’s tame mountains. It gave me a thrill to read signs insisting I was standing three feet above the ground. A thirty-degree grade was dizzying. It made me happy to pass posts saying we were entering this or that national forest. Holy precinct. Or to be warned about fires, or see towers where park rangers spied on the leaves. Every stretch of moving water was a pleasure, the gentlest creek provoked glee, and any place called Glen was indescribably desirable. As towns were admirable if they possessed a white wooden steeple set in a green square.

Often, on these trips, my mother’s fingers would, in effect, burst. They would suddenly swell, especially the middle ones. She would lather them with creams and wrap them in gauze, but I never saw the good. Then they would pimple all over like pink pickles. We would lose lots of valuable time hunting down a doctor who might treat her. This was never easy and made my father angry. My mother did countless cruel things to herself just to displease him. We drove around several of the clapboard-covered squares looking for a physician’s sign. Generally, when we did track one down, the doctor said ringworm or eczema or allergy and slathered her fingers with goo and wrapped them in gauze, to no good I ever saw. One MD said dermatitis, what was the difference? the fingers swelled just the same and then pimpled and then popped, the good in that being the itch, which went away when they oozed; and I’d buy more tape and gauze and wring my own hands to no effect. The third doc we dug up on that trip said, standing in his office doorway when we left, my mother wrapped like a mummy up half both arms, Something close to you hates your hands, something you put on your face, something you pet, eh? something like clothes, something like that, you better find out what, eh? otherwise you have cancer of the liver.

I envision my mother stretched out on a grease rack, the mechanic eyeing her from below. Rust. Simple case of rust, he says, beginning to scrape her rotting flesh down to the bone. Repaint. Rechrome. Good as new. Better. I’ll put on more coats than it had when it came from the factory. Bake each layer as if it were cake. Wax the result like skis. Give it a super shine just like it says on the can.

It’s money your mother’s hands are allergic to, the dad in me says. She shouldn’t touch money, especially bills, big bills. Don’t bring her to the bank, not anywhere the ink of finance stains the air.

I had a cousin once, it got in his scalp, the wormy stuff, as if it were coming up from his brain, nobody could do nuthin, hey, his hair was coming out in gouts, in whole hanks, hey, horrible, so I shaved him smooth as a pool ball, not so easy, that wormy stuff everywhere, but I shaved him smooth just the same, and then I used this skin sander stuff, sanded his scalp clean, and then I scrubbed the sucker with green soap, that stuff with the hospital smell, and we put him under the dry lamp like he was a boulder in the desert and baked the shit out, did the trick, you gotta be severe, he steamed like a pot, but in a few months his skin grew back, and his hair, too, eventually. You just gotta get to the roots. That gets results, the barker said.

I began to hate those green-treed squares, the straight white fences, the little polished brass plaques which said WHO ME, M. D. And my father would be furious about the bills, and then about the cost of the medicines, and then about the time lost, and then about the nuisance of what he called her nerves. My mother tended to bear her suffering in silence, even when she shook, but her eyes would be abrim with tears, her nose red from wiping, her shoulders slumped into all sorts of soiled housecoatish attitudes, her bandaged hands half held out in front of her like an embarrassed beggar, so that you wished she would say something instead of mime her misery. How annoying it was, when my father and I would find—and finally get her through—a doctor’s door, to have her minimize her pain, her itch, the visibly sorry condition of her hands, and to answer most of his questions wrongly or falsely or vaguely or not at all, and then maintain, afterward, a disdain for this man and his advice and his profession (an attitude which my father and I also shared, but one we did not find agreeably confirmed by her childish criticisms and mean-spirited prejudice).

Can’t hit, someone would say, the slow curve. Curve him and unnerve him, my father used to yell at the pitcher, although he was seated miles away—a fact which caused me at first to wonder why all the outcry of advice, as if it were so important, so impelling, when the man couldn’t hear it, probably had been offered it before, doubtless didn’t care, or couldn’t throw a curve or he would have, or maybe really knew better, knew this guy hit curves like a drunken driver—though it turned out my father simply wanted the batter pitched inside: don’t throw at the bat, you fool, throw at his head instead, he’d shout, but not, I’d finally understand, so that the players would obey, but so the other people in the stands would appreciate his vigor, his know-how, his active concern; it was, like the Shakespearean soliloquy, meant merely for the world. Can’t hit the slow curve. He don’t run out dropped thirds. Bats good in the cage. Has an arm like a gun. Won’t bunt a mate a base. Got no glove. Can’t count past one. Sneaky as a kike in cream cheese. My father drove like that, on the fuel from a line of baseball-style chatter: left turn—geez!—is that what you call a left turn? hey, thanks for the signal, pal, go back to sleep, Mister Nertz, you in the Olds, stay in your lane, lady, be a hog at home, smartass, you must have your plot paid for to pass on a hill like that, I ought to run your cheap tin off the road before you wound somebody, on and on, the whole way through traffic, in every town, though on the open highway he’d quiet some, when the road grew empty, and the hills lay out on either side like a painted scene: barn here (red), a cow there (brown), fence around (white), meadow below that (green), and the small blue stream of complaint he spoke, like his bellows from the bleachers, all for us, safely behind closed windows; for he was a tough guy in his automobile, equal to any other, lord of his run of the road, and watchful, skillful, deft, as others were not, careful yet bold, aggressive though safe, and quick as a wink, as no one else was, broadcasting his opinions as if he owned the station, and managing his machine with a smoothness which substantiated every claim and made him king.

I sail on a stream of curses, too; I picked that up from dad; though, unlike him, I am an impatient driver, and dislike being held up by anything, however legitimate or beyond anyone’s control. My father’s vituperation, as meant as mine, as mean, was verbally more mild, for there were women and children present, whereas I encounter assholes everywhere, and motherfuckers, certainly, and pushy bastards, and cunts of all kinds, crowding the highway, obstructing my path, or failing to signal (an omission which my father also hated), or simply not charging a light and leaving me to sit and fume in front of a too recent red.

Everyone with a fat neck—all he could see—was a wop, anyone with knotty hair was a kike, blacks were niggers, naturally, spicks were swarthy and skinny, women were unspeakably women, an observation invariably preceded by “whaddya expect, it’s a . . .” or “Don’t that beat all—go home, girl, and cook dinner.” The difference between us, on this point, I guess, is that my father hurled racial slurs, while I employ obscenities. Pass me, you prick, and you die, is, I think, more impersonal than my father’s: don’t honk at me, you bohunk, you haven’t earned the right; but maybe it’s simply six of one. The worst is when a woman, observing me in her rearview mirror, my mouth going as though I was at dinner, gives me the duckchatter gesture. Then I want to dismember.

My father didn’t speed up when angry, as I do, or challenge some knothead whose mother was clearly a cannibal by pulling alongside and giving him a glare or a stare or a finger or a fist fuck, or by cutting in front of the dame who was born with her cunt misplaced in her nose, or slowing to a stall ahead of the honky who dared to toot his horn at the last light to suggest you get your ass in gear; no, my father’s Fury did not make him do foolish things, it only increased his word power; but, my goodness, how completely he spoke his mind behind the wheel, one reason he loved driving so, I suspect, although he spoke his mind at the radio, too, at the magazine, about events in the daily news; nevertheless there was in that freedom no release, no encounter with another person, no power under one’s feet, no words, as it were, abetted by the grip and guidance of the hand.

My father’s animosities, unlike mine, were confined to the human sphere; he did not yell at detour signs, curse a run of red lights, condemn the streets on which he was lost, sneer at speed limits. On the other hand, although it was a mistake to have given women the vote, it was a catastrophe they were allowed to drive, nor should any young whippersnapper be let on the road, nor any of the inferior races, unable to see or read or think; but there it was, all you had to do to understand what was wrong with our society was to venture out onto the highway, drive down a single street, and there they’d be, those others, mucking up everything, disobedient, incompetent, irreverent, irresponsible. Behind the wheel, one sees in others only evil.

My father gave no sign he understood the impact of the automobile on what, even then, we were calling “modern life.” The very pleasures of power and independence he prized in driving were available to everyone, including those he saw as his social inferiors, immigrants like his own family perhaps, but those who had come from the wrong countries, and had brought the wrong eyes, lips, noses, to the new world: Jews, Slays, Southern Europeans. Nor did he count the cost to the countryside of the roads he loved to motor down: the land lost to gas stations, auto courts, and parking lots, as well as the acres buried beneath the highway itself, the poles, the signs, the shops which accompanied it and disfigured the landscape, the sewer lines and drainage ditches, the sums of money spent so that barbarians from all over—especially the South—could show up in your town (ah, but they bought gas, needed to be fed, wanted to locate a doctor). He did not care or calculate the pollution of the ear and eye and air, the unhappy social mobility which depopulated small towns, overcrowded cities, tore up families and pulled up roots as though every root was a weed’s; nor did he measure the immense amount of natural resource which went into the automobile’s manufacture and maintenance, and the resulting yards, fields, and mountains of junk which accumulated, the extent of the fossil fuels consumed, the miles of land which mining stripped and raped, the number of lungs blackened by factory smoke, the forests of destroyed trees, an almost military encroachment upon the wild with the consequent loss of plant and animal life to the vulgarest forms of human habitation whose spread was encouraged, if not made possible, by the car; the clogging of streams and killing of fish, he never monitored, the immense damage to the birds, not omitting the fact that the automobile is the world’s most effective killing machine, with victims outnumbering any war, with millions maimed, shocked, crazed by the car, half the world trashed by its production, made brutal, ugly, used up, useless, with endless highways and hospitals to maintain, most citizens in debt to their eyes for this toy, only so my father and I and everyone like us could drive about in our insulated canisters and curse one another. Mr. Hitler’s Holocaust can’t hold a candle. After all, his is kaput. This way to the gasoline, ladies and gentlemen.

We think we’ve been given a gift, and it turns out to have been a catastrophe. But catastrophes, too, have their benign consequences. People nowadays talk about winning or losing the war in Vietnam as if either result could be confidently given a value, whereas the future in any case remains obscure. The Bomb, the Big Bad Wolf of my time, will probably bring neither extermination nor peace, but prolong the life and use of conventional arms. Drop napalm not a nuke. Anything nonnuclear seems almost benevolent. So the Holocaust (bad) makes Israel possible (good), and unsettles the Middle East (bad), but prolongs Arab confusion and impotence (good), while deepening their sense of grievance (bad), until ping no longer follows pong, and we grow too smart to make these simple moral judgments (pause for a moment of bitter hilarity), for Manicheanism has much to be said for it: what hurts X helps Y, or so they think, but give them time, they’ll change their mind, meanwhile the historian should shield his eye from these distortions (noting them, though, for they are also details), refuse to take sides, remembering that innocence is often guilt, and guilt somebody else’s grievance, and grievance often an excuse, or, to other interests, a downright lie, while the lie, stripped of its intent, emerges as the new view, acclaimed as wise, until times take another tilt, and we begin to go around again, now more or less confused, until the fog lifts (some blowhard has brought to bear his big wind), the scene clears, and the truth is known (pause for another moment of scornful cackle), for Manicheanism is so much malarkey: what hurts X hurts X, and don’t forget it, dwell on it, take it to heart, make history out of it, encourage feuds, and it is unjust, it is intolerable, that what has hurt X has helped Y, for Y is an evildoer, that’s well known, din it in our children’s ears, until Y finds it convenient to be a friend and X to excuse him, sure, that was then, we’re over that, let’s progress, get on, ahead, except that Y, the deep-down despicable little rat, will betray X once again, has betrayed him, is even now making wily plans, history repeats, we should never have shut our eyes to that fact, din it in our children’s ears, make their hearts bleed for the past, put it on their backs like the cruelest burden, although what they carry allows another a lighter life, and there is something to Manicheanism after all [period of ungovernable Olympian mirth].

My mother’s fingers grew too swollen for their rings. She couldn’t even squeeze her fist through certain of her narrower bracelets. I was grateful for that because I disliked my mother’s bracelets. She wore as many as an African. And most were made of cheap silver, were thin rings of copper or wide ones of brass, so her wrists were always both noisy and green. I guess like parrots, although that comparison didn’t immediately occur to me. The gauze which wrapped her hands was cut and slit when it reached her arm and then tied in a tight bow, another sort of bangle, at the place on the wrist where a girl might wear a gardenia to a ball. She and her hands, we and our worries, were driving beside the scenic banks of the Merrimack River, out from the village of Concord toward Laconia and Lake Winnipesaukee, and it must have been near midmorning (I remember the summer light stinging the surface of the water as though the water were slapped), when my mother said, in a low clear-for-her quite frightened voice, My rings. She had left her rings, both wedding and engagement, on the edge of the washbasin, in the cabin where we’d slept the night before. She believed. She saw them there in her muddled mind’s eye. In any case, she didn’t have her rings. They weren’t in her purse where she’d been keeping them. She’d just looked. She didn’t know where they were. She thought she could see them lying together on the porcelain. That’s where she’d left them. Both rings. Fifty miles or more to the rear. If they were still there.

Your wedding ring? the engagement ring I gave you? your rings, my father asked in a voice as swollen as her fingers. You left our marriage in a cheapjack cabin in a third-class motor court? Normally he would have berated her nonstop, but this time he was in a sorrowful sick rage, in a genuine fury, and his feelings were too enormous to emerge with any ease. My mother began to cry in earnest. It was not the self-pitying sniffles of the drunk she was even then becoming. There was nothing manipulative about them. These were sobs of despair; for if those rings were lost (I knew it, too, overhearing, huddled in the backseat, almost numb with apprehension), her marriage was lost; my father’s voice and posture, his choked silence said it, her sobs said it, and I knew, too, overhearing, even if my arms were around my ears, even through their pounding, I could tell it from his driving, as we returned, swiftly but with exaggerated care, toward Concord, everyone silent finally but the blood beating in our heads, that the fragile dying relation my parents had could not sustain such a blow, such a symbolic statement, the simple truth: her fingers could not bear to wear his rings.

The maid will find them, my mother eventually said. Maid, my father snorted. Maid in heaven. That place has no maids. Well, somebody cleans. She’ll find them, my mother insisted. Steal them, you mean. Gone into some spade’s pocket. Call. What? Couldn’t you call, call the court, I suggested, tell them to keep an eye out. So that blond bun-headed babe behind the desk can take them? Better they buy beer for the spooks. Those were my mother’s rings, my father then said with needless cruelty. They were—we’d heard it often—heirlooms, handed down—you might say, literally—from parent to groom. The stones weren’t large, though the design had a certain style. In any case, they didn’t dazzle.

My father knew nothing about Freud, about signs or portents, about losing, forgetting, or slips of the tongue. Yet, intuitively, each of us gave it—the loss—the same dreadful and decisive meaning. As it is in history, it wasn’t the event but its interpretation that mattered. And if we should return in time to recover the jewelry, find the rings precisely where they had been put, it would mean my mother had come to her senses in time, that this severance was not as fateful as it, at first, had seemed, since she might not have noticed her loss for several more hours, or even days. Only the road rolled on ahead, through a landscape in which there could have been anything—had there been dinosaurs dancing, they wouldn’t have been able to attract our attention.

Even in my father, grief was overpowering anger. Later, when I considered my parents’ marriage, I wondered at first why they should mourn. Would I mourn Martha? Yes. I would. And won’t finding my dirt in her drawers divorce us? Yes. Most likely. So should I have done it, or just thought about doing it, bag after bag, I suppose, carried up from the basement and poured carefully into the slide-out privacies of her dressers? My parents were bound by their suffering. Without my father, my mother would have foundered instantly, instead of dying from a decade of drink, and my father, already in pain from the disease that would cripple him, what would he have? not even the dubious company of my aunt, who would be borne off in the wake of her sister, though he’d certainly say good riddance, still, rid is what he would be.

Are you sure, I asked my mother in desperation, are you sure you didn’t put them somewhere else? in one of the bags? mightn’t they be in the trunk? No, she said, beginning to weep once more. No, they are lying there on the sink, both together, I know. Can it hurt to look? No, I can see them. I remember. I felt my father slow the car, though. A mile or so, it slowed. My mother said, We better check. Another mile and we were down to twenty by the dial. Won’t take long, I said. Better, my mother said, blubbering. We stopped near a brook, well off the road. Where rainwater from the shadowing hills ran into the river. My father said nothing, just got out and opened the trunk. My mother tottered to his side. He pulled out the biggest bag first and undid the straps. It opened like jaws, and there, in a small built-in box which was fastened shut with a simple flat hook, in a cardboard tray like you find in steamer trunks, the first place we looked, the rings were, lying in a tangle of safety pins with a thimble for company and a single white powdery pill as well, whose indented cross told me it was aspirin.

Jesus Christ, my father said. Jesus Christ, Peg, what did you nearly do to us?

How can you feel relieved and ruined at the same time? I heard the tumble of the stream as, nearby, it passed over rocks. Now that my heart wasn’t ringing in my ears, the water was loud. I said my own Jesus, under my breath. Jesus, just rings, just rings, I said.

Of that trip, my father apparently remembered the drive up Mount Washington. My mother recalled most clearly the doctor telling her she might have cancer of the liver. I remember the sound of that stream. In a car you can see what goes by, but you can’t hear the smile of the world.

Squam Lake was large enough to have an island in it. We checked into a tourist home nearby, in the cheap seats, then drove to the water’s edge to watch the sun set. The road we took went straight into the lake, breaking up as it entered the water. Once they may have used it to launch boats. Wherever the public park was, we missed it. For the remainder of the day, my parents hadn’t said a word more than necessary. It was a silence of exhaustion, not of hurt or anger, I now suspect. When we stumbled down to test the temperature, my mother turned an ankle, and my heart, already resting on whatever of me was bottom, sank into silt, was twice submerged. However, my father took hold of her, held her up, steered her down, and she managed to put an unwrapped hand in the cool lake like she was being blessed by the Ganges. Then, with my father’s arm around her back, they watched the sun sink behind the far shore’s trees while I nervously observed them. It was one of those moments, false to the core, in which you think that “everything” is going to be all right. I resolved never to learn to drive a car. My breathing was shallow, and the lap of the lake was light.

When my father decided I was old enough, when my father determined it was time for me to become a man, he announced—it was Sunday morning, I was facedown on the floor, reading the funnies—he told me he was going to teach me how to drive. No need, I said. Not interested. I knew my father had no enthusiasm for this project. Others might sit in his car, enjoy his car, admire his car, but no one else might drive that car. Yet my reluctance was met with indignation. Nothing I care for ever interests you, he complained. It was true. You reject everything I believe in; you dampen my enthusiasms more than your mother; you root for opposing teams only to annoy me, I know it; you approve whatever I dislike, detest anything I esteem. He had it right. I get around quite well on my bike, I said. It’s not natural, all your buddies drive. You want to wear short pants all your life? I remember I had to yell at you before you’d learn to dribble. That was it, of course. My father felt obliged to make a man of me. What else were fathers for? And that meant teaching me to drive a car, just as, in the past, a baseball glove had been forced over my fingers, a basketball had been bounced off my nose, and I’d had to spend hours trying to throw a spiral. That’s not it yet, my father would shout, retrieving the football from the street.

I fell my first time on roller skates and fortunately sprained my wrist. Although my tricycle had been like bones to me, and I believed in my BB gun more than I ever did in God, I was sixteen before I found an old bike parked in an alley and wobbled off on it, imagining a hot pursuit which never came. In minutes I rode as I fancied a master might. Hell, I could shoot; I could ride; what else did I need to do to prove I could pee standing up? catch the clap from a whore? Apparently, I needed to be able to drive.

Driving was indeed what daddy did, dad did, father did, not me. I sang hit tunes in the backseat. I watched the road whiz by. I snoozed. I tried to read. I was sometimes interested in our speed. Otherwise the front seat was where they were, and where not even my eyes wished to waste time. They might look ahead, I looked to the side. They fetched the whiskey pint from the glove box where it had grown hot as Christmas punch. I sucked on balls of butterscotch. Up front they suffered and bickered and tried to decide on roads and when was lunch and where we ought to sleep the night, but the seatback was the Great Divide. I occupied my area like a little nation.

My father was appalled to find that though I had spent many hours, actual days, in an automobile, I had noticed nothing about how they were started or stopped, driven or parked. In fact, my father refused to believe my ignorance was as great as it seemed; he was convinced I was shamming, being stupid to confound him, inept to shame him, shilly-shallying to annoy. That he should have to say “gearshift” at all, or show me its positions, to have to suffer these pretenses (for I was plainly pretending) that I (his son) didn’t know what or where or why “first” was, or where the key fit, or what you wiggled to raise the hood, and once you had raised the hood, why you had, or what you then did: this was bewildering, aggravating, and humiliating to him, all at once.

My father could see I was completely confused. I was behind the wheel. My father sat in the seat beside me. That meant his seat pads had to be moved and readjusted. His discomfort sat beside me so heavily the pads sagged. My father believed I should learn the basics, and this meant I should learn the standard shift. However, because of his arthritis, my father had finally purchased an automatic—Dyna something—which he could manage only by pushing the shift buttons with a piece of round stick like a fat dowel held against the palm of his right hand. So the stick wouldn’t slip away, while driving in traffic possibly, it hung from his wrist by a wide rubber band. Consequently he was making me imagine a lever which came out of the floor and had a big black knob on the end of it he told me to pretend to move in airy patterns while I pushed an invisible pedal to the floor with my left foot. My father would make gear clash noises when he felt I was failing to follow his instructions, noises which startled me, coming from him, and noises which I failed utterly to understand.

What is the matter with you? This was said so often—the outcry question—it might have been my name. Weren’t you ever curious? How many times have you seen me start this car? back out this drive? signal for a turn? I might have pointed out that my mother, who had sat beside him many more years than I had lolled on my back and rump in the seat behind, knew perhaps less about his machine than I did, but that fact would not have received a very warm reception or relieved me of my blame. He would shake his head in evident disgust. What’s the matter with you? I might have pointed out that he had driven the Packard years ago; that a Chevrolet had been the car to follow the favorite; that he hadn’t been such a cripple then, during those halcyon Packard days, but now there were these buttons, and this Dyna thing, the past was past and I didn’t need to know it; that I had sat in the backseat, anyway, and had a poor view; that if driving had been his pleasure, being driven was my fate, and anyway I had no buddies; that he should hobble back indoors and hate Gabriel Heatter, or some other voice from the radio or the page, ask what was the matter with the world, and not me; that in any case what really was the matter with me was the car was a cage; that I hated history; that I’d never learn to go backward, even for his mother’s marriage rings, even to reach any day before now when he was healthy, my aunt wasn’t living with us, my mom was helpful, sweet and pretty, not lying about with a snootful, and I was simply a kid who was happy and had happy folks and maybe a dog.

I get behind the wheel

when I fail to cop a feel.

To compensate for this

I pretend I cannot miss

any rabbit, dog, or toad

who dares to cross the road.

What in the world is the matter with you? You mean to say you can’t locate the spare? Point to the battery, Billy. Well, open the glove compartment, for god’s sake. At least you know what the rearview mirror’s for? Come on, Billy, what’s the matter with you? Where are the tools kept? What does this red mark mean? no, the red line. The simplest quiz disclosed a complex system of ignorance, clearly achieved with effort and intention, a system I didn’t want violated, a system I seemed ready to defend even in the face of his wrath. It amounted to a denial so deep he could not reach it, even with the increasing length of his alarm. What . . . is the . . . what . . . the what with you?

At this time, my father also discovered my rather unusual relation to the road map.

It unnerved him. There was no original way for him to respond. After I told him, gave him the details, played my trick, he simply spluttered with conventional incomprehension and disbelief.

When I had barely begun to read, and scarcely knew what a road map was, I had seen in a store a statue covered with red and blue lines and wide patches of brown and green. This, I was told, was the anatomy man, used in school instruction, and that he was made of layers of skin and nets of nerves and organs of breathing and digestion. I too looked like that beneath God’s overclothes. It was scary. And when I scraped my knee, the blood appeared in an ugly puddle of confirmation. The road map looked to me exactly like the picture the anatomy man was wrapped in: lines of red and blue, patches of brown and green, nets of nerves and organs of breathing and digestion. It was scary.

Eventually I learned to peruse a map like any normal person, and not break into a sweat simply at the sight of its irreversible unfolding. Now I know what the numbers in the white shields stand for, as well as the less pretentious routes in the round. Road widths and city sizes no longer puzzle me, either, or the lakes I took for organs, and the shadings which merely mean rise, hill, mountain, sudden declivity, or the flat green patches which represent those national forests I was formerly so pleased to enter. County borders made of dots and dashes don’t dismay me, and I can stare a coastline straight in its cerebrally shaped face and say, ah, there’s New London, Roanoke Island, Chesapeake Bay. All the labels, little and large, I must confess, still distract me, and I can never connect name with feature satisfactorily, getting Tippecanoe County confounded with the river, and the battlefield with the wrong presidential campaign.

But back then, when my father decided to teach me to drive, though I could read a map, and disguise from my teachers my nervous condition, I still saw, as if the unfolded sheet were a scrim, an actual body of ground, with its deepest nakedness depicted, its nets of knowledge, organs of osculation, its faintly green pastures of received opinion fully represented, those darkly dotted centers of passion, too, or irregular areas of irritation, while habits of hoping and holding on, keeping pets and making friends, were laid out in front of me the way a quilt’s design sometimes repeats the cultivated patterns of the land. Try as I might to suppress the confusion, I nevertheless saw, in its methodical print, points where suggestions of illicit sensation had been symbolized, and could locate swampy crosshatched places of depravity and decay, or find where the earth’s equipment of procreation was iconically revealed like a penis drawn on the side of a cave, large as a vulgar brag, or, in the same space, where a dreamt breast had been recently released from its pocket behind a blouse; yes, unless I blinked to jiggle my natural response back to normal, in each green graphic of a piney tree I’d spot the presence of a public park where a whole set of secrets was blatantly displayed. Thus a fanciful reason for my father’s love of driving was, in this odd way, lodged in me; it was the concealed cause and therefore the real one; for he was uncovering the country when he traveled, and feeling its features with his wheels.

Impatient as a puppy, but not in a puppy’s playful mood, my father pushed me into the driver’s seat and said, You are going to begin by backing the car out of the garage, just as you’ve seen me do so often; then you are going to back all the way down the drive into the street, just as you’ve seen me do it a thousand times. Then you’ll pull back into the drive again. That’s the first lesson. All back. We’ll start easy. Don’t worry. (He’d seen my look of consternation.) I’ll sit alongside.

Which meant that all his pads had to be moved and rearranged. His pain and his rage made the pads sag when they sat beside me.

In my father’s view (since the first thing he did when he drove he did in the garage) I should begin by putting my knob in neutral and turning the key to start the car—give it some gas for god’s sake—by imagining I was shifting the stick into reverse while pushing the clutch appropriately in, by looking carefully in the rearview mirror, gazing circumspectly in the stem-held side glass, first one then the other, though they weren’t really adjusted for me, next turning my head way around to the right—no, jesus, not to your left, not out of the window, always inside, the center, stare right out of the center of the rear window, got that? what a simpleton—then ease the clutch, give it a little gas at the same time, ease the clutch, jeez, you’re going too fast, no, not like that, don’t stop like that, you’d have stalled the car if this were the Packard, can’t you concentrate? okay do this button, push it in, no, too fast slow down brake not jeez not like that well at least we’re not moving now, where were you all the time you were riding in cars? for years! let’s try again, easy on the gas, god, don’t back over the lawn, shit, steer, stop, that’s your mother’s bush, no, hey, stop, the curb, oh my god you’ve put us in the middle of the street, I can’t drive this thing while sitting over here, not in my condition, what have you done to my car, you dunder? that’s your mother’s bush, wherever it is, are we standing on it? push the forward button number one dummy and put this car back in the drive not over the bush again I said not over the bush again god over the bush again, what a kid, he ain’t mine.

My first lesson was my last. My father pushed his painful body from the passenger’s seat and slowly stood and surveyed the car’s scratches where we had passed over—back and forth over—what had formerly been a forsythia. My aunt—I will never forgive her—had been watching from the front step. My father carried his seat pads painfully to the driver’s side and resat himself with time and difficulty in order to drive the Dyna down the drive and back into its garage like some cowboy star holstering his gun.

Damn you. Damn you, Doris. I said.

Being a Bigot

My father was unable to teach me how to drive, nor did his bravery in the grip of pain produce any satisfying imitation. I was never able to fill my face with his kind of hateful countenance—so compelling—nor could I match his vituperative skills, the stream of complaint of which he was capable, possibly because much of it was directed at me. I was sportless, unhandy, an indoors-man, mental. But I did learn from my father how to be a bigot.

I am aware that bigotry is often loosely defined as a kind of intellectual and moral intolerance, but the dictionary is never right, always deferring to the mob. You can’t be bigoted about your brother even if he’s an envied Abel and you are akin to Cain. Nor is bigotry blind, as is often asserted. It may tell only half the story, but the story it does tell is true. Nor will any sort of opinion, just because it is fanatically held, qualify as a club in the bigot’s bag of tricks. If I remain stubbornly opposed to fluoridation, I am not, on that account, a bigot. Bigotry is directed toward persons. It does not believe in abstract universals. Bigots, as opposed to racists, achieve scope by hopping from particular to particular like a toad from pad to pad across a pond. Bigots also consider themselves empiricists. Their attitudes are based—they believe—purely on experience. They believe in the signal instance, outstanding examples. Whether a fact is a fact, though, depends upon its value. Which is mainly moral. Thus a bigot’s beliefs strengthen a fragile superiority. Again, unlike a racist, a bigot is not nearly as concerned with his own truths (which he takes to be traits of his character) as he is with the falsehoods of others (which he takes to be traits of theirs). The truth, he fears, is impotent, its belief futile, though he wouldn’t care to say so in so many words, thereby giving comfort to his enemies, whereas error is like an epidemic, insidious, swift, overwhelming, unstoppable. The bigot believes in details, in specifics. So let me get to the teachings of my father.

It was not my father’s rant which was instructive, it was his reactions. They were litmussy. For instance, there is his response to the intrusive stranger. In the lobby of a hotel or on a railroad platform, you expect to see people you don’t know, and that is why none of them are strangers. They are simply people you don’t know. When the empty lot next to my father’s house was sold it was sold to a chinaman, which was my father’s name for someone not only unknown to him, but unknowable, a stranger who would always be a stranger—a person permanently out of place—a stranger, worse yet, to whom my father was an alien. He treats me like a foreigner in my own town, on my own street, on my own damn lawn. Had the chinaman merely passed, like Halley’s comet, into the solar night . . . had he . . . but he did not; he wanted to build a house on the lot he had recently purchased. This man was very tall, very thin, very sallow, very polite. He went down the block, from house to house, introducing himself and explaining his plans. Creating more suspicion than had he been dressed like a burglar. He should have worn horns, my dad declared. Then I would have offered him a beer. He wore instead a suit cut like a carnival barker’s, with lapels, my father said, wide enough to walk on.

Maybe that’s the way they do things where he comes from, I said. Yeah? Well he’s not where he came from now because he came from there, now he’s here, and now he has to do what we do or repack his camels and go home, my dad responded. Or git. That’s what he actually said. With all his smokes. My father adopted a kind of made-up movie vernacular to express disdain. Git. However, there was no sign he had accepted any of these proffered alternatives: the stranger was clearly going to remain strange. His friends, all thin, all tall, all sallow, had a bonfire on the lot he’d bought, and blew tin whistles and clapped their hands. They held a plot-clearing party, chopped down weeds and small trees, burned the branches green. Appalling all who looked on through the smoke from curtained upstairs windows. The chinaman now had a name: Toottoot. His thin tall sallow wife got a name too, one I wasn’t supposed to hear: Toottwat.

Father was furious when he found out that the plans Mr. Toottoot had flourished in everybody’s face, when he’d come so ceremonially round, were of a sort of Cape Cod saltbox, wholly out of keeping with the two-story plain frame tent-peaked houses which made up the neighborhood. Well, I said, it will at least present the right height to the street. Yeah? and what will we see every day for the rest of our lives? its slopehead side. One thing which had riled my father had been Mr. Toottoot’s attitude: he wasn’t asking our permission; he was congratulating us on our good fortune. We were going to live luckily next to—my father’s nomenclature—Toottoot’s Squatbox. The chinaman should put up a sign out front, my father suggested: Mr. Toottoot’s Toottwat’s Squatbox. So we could all know why we were proud.

The Squatbox would lower the resale value of the surrounding property; it wasn’t according to code; a lawyer would stop it in its muddy tracks. But nobody wanted to foot the bill by themselves. Or spend the energy or invest the time. My father tried to organize the neighborhood, the block. But if residents were out of eyesight of the prospective eyesore, they were indifferent. Others feared lawyers the way they feared snakes, and felt fees would grow more rapidly obnoxious than the foreigners. Much of my father’s wrath was thereby diverted. Meanwhile, although the house was not according to code, its construction went ahead. Strange thin men came and poured a pad. It was all very sudden. Toottoot’s not even going to have a basement. We all have basements. What kind of cover are they putting on the ground? A slab, a neighbor to whom my father was still talking said, a but on a slab like a corpse in the morgue.

My father’s vigilance was now continuous, his eye sharp, his fury fueled. He noticed that the workmen who came to pour and smooth the base of Toottoot’s Tomb, as the house was now called, spoke the same gibberish as Toottoot did (why not English, we knew Toottoot spoke English, he spoke English when he came calling, English with an odd English accent, so what was up? to keep their secrets secret of course, hide their plans). My father furthermore saw physical similarities between the workers and their so-called client, and a camaraderie which could only mean one thing: they were related. One Toottoot meant many. Wouldn’t you know? Moreover, they were clanbaking, as my father put it. You watch, that house’ll be built by Toottooter’s big and little brothers.

Naturally, being strangers, they felt more at home with their own kind, could make themselves understood, felt a reassuring trust for one another they could not yet extend to the sometimes suspicious citizens of their adopted land. I offered this opinion to my father. Right, he said. They stick together. To foreignness and intrusiveness add clannishness, which meant that one Toot brought more, more and more made for many, and instead of being able to do at least a little business with these bozos, since Toottoots trusted only other Toottoots like themselves, you had to watch them make their little nation, do business only with themselves, and set up their own shops in competition. At this time, traits and other qualities of character, habits and customs, distinguishing physical marks, were carefully observed and systematically sorted out. Tall, thin, sallow, smug, superior, tribal, clothed like an escapee from the circus, these people were truly geekish, with high-pitched voices given to clicking sounds, a fondness for whistles and clapping their hands when happy, and the custom of keeping forbidden chickens in illegal cages: thus the list began to grow, and as the work went on and people came and went, the traits my father naturally detested seemed to enlarge themselves, increasing his revulsion; meanwhile he added others.

It was observed (and no one turned a blind eye or made things up—not yet) that they had two sorts of manners: a familiar, slap-hands, easy way with one another, and a stiff even regal politeness with others, which was taken as a sign of their superciliousness, their condescension.

Why a saltbox, this ain’t Cape Cod, my father wondered with derision, as the odd object grew beside us. Perhaps it reminds them of the houses of their homeland, I said. People tend to resettle in resembling places if they can—in a sympathetic landscape, familiar climate, and where they can resume their occupations, continue their customs, lean on helpful friends, and so on—I had studied geography and knew how to answer when quizzed. This sort of street can’t be found anywhere in Azjurbazur, or wherever they’re from. Saltboxes I bet are unique to Cape Cod, and Toottoot ain’t a Codder. Why are you sticking up for them? I claimed to be neutral: neither sticking up for them nor running them down; I said I was neither pro nor con. I know—nee nor, nee nor—just to be different, my father said, only to annoy--nee nor, nee nor—get my goat.

Well, they weren’t going to show up at the local church in checkered Sunday duds, where they weren’t welcome anyway; but everyone got angry when it became clear that Toottoot and his friends had ceremonies, did things to living chickens (we suspected geekism from the first), with nary a roof over their heads yet; nevertheless on Wednesday about dusk they would put on piratical caps and parade around the incompletely cleared lot tootling like crazy, swaying, clapping their hands high over their heads. It’s like having roaches, my father said, every time you look there’s more of them.

My father held his nose. The weather is nice, why shouldn’t they cook out of doors, have picnics in their backyard, I said just to get his nanny. Back or front, it’s all mud, my father said sourly, and have you smelled it—that smoke’ll turn your nose into a dirty chimney. My mother said, so shocked she felt the disturbance even beneath her gin, They dress their bushes in underclothes. They’re just draped there to dry, I explained. My god, my father said, haven’t they heard of rope?

Toottwat appeared to be pregnant. They’ll multiply like rabbits, roaches, rodents; they’ll overrun us; they don’t live at our rate; they don’t have our standards; they care only for their own kind; they’ve got a religion that’s worse than idolatry or atheism; they are building what they call a Clap Hands Hall down the road; they’re rabbits, roaches, rodents; they’ll overrun us; they don’t live at our rate; they don’t have our standards; they make rugs out of old rags; they care only for their own kind; they are selling furniture made from the wood of packing boxes; all I know is that cook smoke’ll turn your nose into a sooty chimney, and they dress their bushes in underclothes. They are doing a big business, I can tell you, in pennywhistles.

Yes, at first I found my father’s fury foolish, typically half-cocked, old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud like that salt-in-the-box. But he and his neighbors, incompetent as they were in their resistance, were nevertheless right. The strangers were strangers; they were intrusive; they were clannish; they wouldn’t give an inch; they did have a double standard—one for us and one for them; they encouraged their kids to continue with their own language, to maintain their own customs and habits while pretending to live in our land, when they were clearly here only to make a profit; their cook smoke smelled frightful; their living quarters were egregious eyesores; and it wasn’t long before they became economically competitive, unfairly so, undercutting us, favoring their friends, grimly pushing their way into every conceivable venture, outscoring us at school while failing, with their frail physique, to provide the football team with tackles, and, with their other more intellectual interests, refusing to furnish the basketball team with thin tall sallow centers who could shoot the hook and hit the hoop.

Eventually, the facts began to slip away into the realm of myth, where all facts go in order to remain immortal. Tooters fucked on the front lawn; they shat in twiggy thickets. They tortured their chickens and read the future in their entrails. Mostly, though, the real enough traits of the Toottoot tribe were made more pronounced through this scrutiny, their numbers multiplied, their nefariousness exaggerated, their influence rendered ubiquitous. Yet whose fault was that? It was the fault, my father said, of those who let these people into the country in the first place, when there were few enough jobs, little enough food, shrinking opportunities, a small number of positions of prominence, already enough spics, bohunks, wops, and kikes to go around. My father thought that, from an upstairs window, we might spill paint down the Toottoots’ chimney. He talked about releasing moles in their garden (which had got embarrassingly lush). Maybe we ought to have a dog, one which could outbark, outshit theirs, and give back growl for growl, since they had brought with them an ugly black cur my father had already, and uselessly, complained to the authorities about.

The Toottoots, it was believed, were here only to make money which they were sending back to “the old country,” wherever that was—somewhere in the middle of Africa or Asia, somewhere inherently benighted, dirty, out-of-touch, where even the rivers and mountains were an odd shape and ran odd ways. The Toottoots were soon observed starting up small convenience stores in nigger town. These family-run shops—natch—sold sour milk, stale bread, dented canned goods and other railroad salvage, off-brand soda, hijacked cigarettes, day-old newspapers, moldy candy, bootleg liquor, and secondhand condoms for more than the going rate. Why do the coons put up with them is what I don’t understand, my father said, shaking an honestly puzzled head.

The Toottoots held parades to celebrate obscure homeland holidays and heroes, where they dressed in native Tootsuits; danced native dances during which they spun around in dizzying circles and the girls showed their thin sallow knees; sold smelly dishes of disagreeable food whose ingredients were unidentifiable—just brown and fatty lumps always in a pool of juice—bits which they extracted and ate with the two fingers custom permitted them to use.

So why shouldn’t my father and his friends resent the Toottoots and their plans? My father hated unions, of course, but the Toots would volunteer as scabs. With crime spilling out of mick and wop slums into decent neighborhoods, why should my father and his friends have to endure still more from the whistlewhinnies, and pay for their poor, and put their kids through school? It’s true that only a generation ago, my father’s parents were immigrants, too, but they were good Europeans, came from its noblest, if almost newest, country, and were never a drag on the national economy. We became Americans, my father proudly said, and that was certainly true, because neither he nor my mother knew enough German to ask for wurst, my interest in the language was another of my obnoxious traits, they drank little beer and hated both sauerkraut and sausage—the culture had certainly been cleaned from their clothes. So I want to see signs, my father said, that these Toots are anxious to disappear into the Stars and Stripes; I want to see them begin to eat decent, put on a little weight, obey the law, stop keeping chickens, making that acrid smoke; I want them to start hating their relatives like regular people, and try to control those hyperactive cocks they’ve gotToottwat’s always got a bun in her oven; I want them to silence their dog, encourage some shortness in their daughters-in-law, put a little color in their cheeks, cease wearing those silly paper hats, start observing our holidays, getting their tall kids on our teams.

They painted the saltbox pink—all in one day—fifty sickly skinnies showed up with rags wrapped around the bristle ends of brooms, and buckets of paint the color of toothpaste spit, which they then swabbed on the shingles quick as a drizzly shit, and before anyone could cry out or object. More slowly, more carefully, the windows were trimmed in a deeper pink, reaching red, although a lot of paint got smeared and spattered on the glass to no one’s concern or care. That’s when my father formulated his plan to pour pigments down the Toottoots’ chimney—by the gallon, first red, then white, then blue, by god, in honor of the country.

I suppose they think pink is festive, I said; I imagine all the houses are pink in their country. There are no pink houses in any country, my father declared, for if one appears it is burnt by the righteous, burnt to the bloody ground. With all responsible inside. Their ashes spread on the beds of plants that prefer an alkaline soil. Why did they paint it pink, a neighbor wailed, looks like a hunk of bubblegum. It’s a box, right? well, I’m sure it’s the color of Toottwat’s twat, my father said, quite losing control of himself and forgetting his child who was present, his little teenage high school kid who presumably didn’t know twat from tootsie.

But mainly the neighbors felt that what was going on was simply and plainly not fair. This was their little town; they had built it; defended it; determined its nature. Now their homes were being threatened, their livelihoods, too, by these tall skinny baboons. This was their reward for being good citizens, patriots, workers. They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first. First, Last, and March in Time, my father chanted.

Later in my life, though not by many years, back in my come-from country, in my grandfatherland, over my rebellion against my father (though not my hatred of his ghost), I came to realize my old man was right to be a bigot. The bigot is a person who has suffered an unmerited injustice, one which hasn’t been put right, and woe to others if he ever has a chance to get his own back, and take what has long been his—property, power, and honor—from those who have traduced his principles and scorned his manner of existence.

When one has been treated unfairly, not in a single transaction, but in the fundamental opportunities and course of one’s life—when the burgeoning fruit finds a worm feasting on its core—then fairness falls from the vocabulary, as far as the enemy and their agents of disgrace and betrayal are concerned. “They” offend your sight. “It” sticks in your craw. The injustice of “this” or “that” burns in the belly. There has been, it is felt (certainly my father felt it), an implicit promise broken, the social contract itself, for the nation was supposed to reward the industry, lawfulness, loyalty, and sacrifices of its citizens, not some skinny Tootie-come-latelys: strangers with strange ways, parasites, scabs, seducers—jesus save us—chickengeekers, saltyboxers, whistlewhinnies, just to begin the list.

Toottoots were forbidden me. Had I wished to form a friendship with one, say another chap my age (and the Toots who spoke English said “chap”), it would have been difficult and done on the sly. The Toots were leery of us, of course; they called us “gees,” after our habit of saying “gee whiz,” I think, but my father felt certain the name would never catch on. Some people have called us Prots, he said proudly, a term hardly disturbing and of no real currency. Jews say “goys,” but that goes too far, casts too wide a net to catch our character. You will notice that although we have many spoiled young ladies, no one calls them PAPs. No, that is the point. There are no names for us because no one cares if our noses hook or our brows slope. We are the real Americans, Yankees, if you like, natives now, and belong to none of the discarded trash of another country, flag, or skin shade.

But the tall thin gray-green Toottoots had, it was rumored, long, thin, pink-tipped sallow dongs. We Just Knew they fucked a lot, and kept at it for as long as they were tall. Actually, Toots, who had heads of lank hair like dirty wet mops, seemed to fancy fuzzy little blondes whose creamy complexions promised pink nips and honeyed cunts.

In my father’s world, pink became a hated color. A pink handprint, put on a paper or a wall, was a sign of derision, a threat, a cross burned before a house, a growl in the gut. They skin their pricks back so their pricks will look pink, some said. They color their straw ceremonial wine pink on special days, others maintained, the way the begorras drink green beer.

But I have described only the outside of a bigot, the causes of his coming into being, not the internal condition of the mind, the cruelty of the consciousness which such cultural collisions create. Nor have I outlined an ideology, the ideas and arguments which make a racist, for a racist can hate without an object. Niggers are despised in towns which have never been soiled by their shadow. The Jew has been feared, like the bugaboo, by many who will never have paid them interest, or bought shoddy in one of their shops.

The bigot is a boiler building a head of steam. When the bigot is chastised for his behavior, no one takes account of the fire which is burning beneath him. When the bigot blows, only his victims receive sympathy, only the boiler is blamed. More injustice is, that way, collected like logs for the fire. In order to understand a bigot from the inside, you need to know what it is like to have a set of feelings you prize beyond price, and of which you are at the same time ashamed. You prize them because they are all that sustain you: the record of the crimes against you, the history of your years of endurance, the broken promises you have replaced with the one you’ve now made to yourself: a kingdom to come, with revenge as reward. That promise and your continued impotence make you patient, very patient, inside the rhetoric of your wrath; it is a patience which your day-to-day peevishness merely hides.

The bigot cannot simply possess his hatred as he might own a house or car; it is ultimately all he loves, all he cares for, all he tends, and he loves it like an illicit passion, as he loves himself, since it gives him his nature, his name, his opprobrium—yes, as ambiguously as that—knowing how widely he is scorned for it, knowing he will be reviled—he, the unfairly burdened, the unjustly treated—knowing his devotion will doubtless prove vain; nevertheless it will last his leftover life; it will set him, as a bigot, apart (why not? he is someone apart already); he will suffer for his belief, his truth; for the bitter fact is he has been wronged, he knows in his loins; he has been grievously injured, he repeats like a heartbeat; he has been wronged without any recognition of that wrong, a wrong which is denied, as his head says obsessively to his mind—denied, yes, denied at the same time as his suffering is denied, along with his response to his loss, his efforts at restitution, those too—his labor, his loyalty, his love of the land, denied, ignored, rejected by others, who cannot give him an inch, who cannot confess there might be a tittle of truth to what he says, to what he claims, to the loathsome images of others which he projects, because they, too, are consumed by a secret guilt, by an inner admission of the rejected bigot’s plight; no, the bigot is a bore for he has but one subject on which he dwells like a squatter; he is benighted because he is supposed to see nothing but stereotypes, speak in slogans, and conceive only through clichés; he is anathema because—like the Jew—he is a reminder of history’s crimes; he bears witness to what has been taken away, removed without recompense, without a just and adequate reason, only so a problem might be solved, only so some other social guilt can be assuaged, elsewhere a conscience eased, as if he had been forced to yield a kidney to an enemy, to save that life and put his own at risk. Ah, these—the bigots—these are the backbone of the Party of the Disappointed People.

They wait their time like a disease of the genes. For them, good times are the bad times, when, victimized by war, impoverished by a runaway inflation, wiped out by a market’s fall or some generic financial panic, cheated on one occasion too many by businessmen and bankers, lied to like the last smirk laid on their credulity by some campaigning politician, fired from their job in midlife, or bilked of the savings that were to guard their old age; in tough times, in times which seem to multiply like times, people other than the bigot—the bigots’ judges, who scorned them and poked fun and made up mischief—many people, finding themselves in breadlines, disgraced, abruptly poor, objects of unwanted yet necessary welfare; they who used to dole out the dole themselves from the dippers of their charity, and now receive it; such people, their numbers mounting, finally feel that fundamental disappointment which feeds the members of my party and is the bitter tea they drink, the stimulant that stirs their heart at last: hate, disappointment, loss, betrayal; for what had been offered them, what was their birthright? (happiness is not an answer, far too vague and dim to be a distant aim), what swaddled their spirit as it developed, gave comfort and hope? sure, the pleasures of sex, the rewards of successful work, the comforts of security, the assurances of pride, family, place, respect, now scratched from a shortened future, erased from a disgraced past—what was?—why, all that one had, all that one hoped for, all that one remembered without remorse, yes, it was scraped from the present, as if all one had been, had tried, had done, lay like something left uneaten on a soiled plate, and was thus swept into that pit that holds the forgetfulness and ingratitude of their country.

The bigot is born with a fear of failure; the likelihood of that difficult, unpleasant fate is drummed into him by a tyrannical embittered father, who speaks to him daily of his shortcomings; who punishes his ineptitude, forgetfulness, recalcitrance as he would be pleased to pain the world; who sees, it seems, into his sullen servant’s soul as one looking into a small, dingy, ill-kept, and poorly lighted room; and who rails against conventional reality as his son will later rail, a chain begun; meanwhile the mother is morose and full of self-pity, offering him the vision of his fate, if, losing love, he were also to give up hate; the slope of her life, weighed down by her husband as if he were always pounding her, always on top, perpetually erect, at rape, looks like his is likely to look; and so he lives peering at his feet for his footing, behind him for the shove, ahead of him for obstacles he cannot overcome, while from the sky he expects the betrayal of the gods, and gets it; hence it is natural, one might say it is inevitable, his hold on his worldly position is so precarious that the moment a newcomer appears in his ken, the minute strangeness is encountered, his bladder shrinks, he needs to piss; yes, and then as problems mount, both inside himself and out, the spics, the kikes, the spades, the shivs, the Toots, provide the imaginary agent for his homemade ills, as well as the ills—quite real—they bring about.

That is to say, within the bigot lives, now more closely hoveled than next door, the subject of his scorn, the Toottoot of his interior, but transformed, inside that sequestered environment, into the object of his envy; for the Toot represents the success the bigot was supposed to be, despised by the bigot as the bigot was by his father, yet triumphant in spite of that; because this Toot, as out of form and favor as he is, has done it, is accomplishing the necessary, is clearing his property, building his house, defending a territory, establishing a family, maintaining a life; and how is he doing this, what drives him on to his achievement, if it is not his flight from his country to this new one, if it is not this rebirth of being, this second chance? which in these relentlessly personal terms means the Toottoot’s release from the cell of the bigot’s self, his escape from the soul of his scorner; inasmuch as there is not a single one of these worm-eaten men and women who has not wished to leave themselves behind as though they were a misruled, corrupt, and overcrowded country. My father must have felt hollowed out, rejected by his own hopes, when he looked at these tall, miserably thin and sallow people, nobodies who knew nothing about how to live, bobbing their heads in time to their tintooted music, building within the precincts of my father’s eyes their offensive little box, their first property probably, their first privacy, their only known real home.

How could his hopes be forgiven their treachery, thus to have abandoned him, for he had not left his father’s side, though his father had rejected him; his own son, so far, has not walked finally out the door into another daylight; no, these queer, these alien people, shaped as strangely as his own insides would appear to him were he, in horror, to see them, like organs of his own laid out for scornful evaluation on a cold enamel tray; they had put up their house in his dishonor, next door so as to mock him and his impotence, to remind him every minute of his loss; after all, look around, daddy, dad, father, look at your sexually uninviting spouse, soused to her underwear, look at your family life, your ungrateful rebellious whelp who opposes you at every turn, who shows you less than no respect, who will stand by your grave and pick his nose and drop the pickings like dust on your coffin, or look at that visitor who has auntie’d her way into your marriage and now is wife over everything, who manages your money, who sees to your meals, who lays out your pills, and, why not? take a gander at this relic of a body, what do you see in the ruins? a place of exhumation, a corpse long covered by dry country, white and cramped and withered as a petrified tree; so look then, what is the summary? all you have (can we call it “to your credit”?), all you have plenty of, is pain.

Striking out in despair, striking back in rage. What a pool of energy awaits the right voice.

Bigotry is not confined to the male white race, although, as usual, their practice of it is exemplary. Bigotry is genoid and pandemic. In the first place, it was the bigotry implicit in the Toots which turned my father on—it made him smell their bad blood—and then his own tendencies soon brought out and confirmed those of his neighbors. Bigots beget bigots more readily than sprats beget sprats. Keep in mind that benevolence is a function of security, and tolerance of indifference. So we should expect to find bigots everywhere race, religion, and money continue to matter, and because everywhere the weak are seeking a way out of their weakness. The Spanish Jew is superior to the Polish one, the Swede is contemptuous of the Finn, ghettoed Negroes hate unghettoed Jews who landlord their lives and sell them their shoes, a pale-skinned black, like a shade that’s rolled up in the window, disappears into the white world to the deep annoyance of the more darkly skinned, Baptists lie beneath Episcopalians like dirty paving, among Asians, well, good heavens, who wants to live next to a Korean? and so on. How reassuring it all is.

Because if we were each as identical as twins, I would scratch your face to hate the scratch which spoiled your looks and improved mine, while you would say the scratch set you apart and made you more interesting, and gave you a purpose in life: to scratch me back a thousand times.

Political parties exist to organize and institutionalize human weakness. It is their one success. The Nazi movement was a pinnacle, but it peaked only for a moment. Its remnants may hope for more lasting luck next time, but I am confident that my group, the PdP, already huge, although a sleeping giant, will wake, will rise, will thrive. Als ob . . . als ob . . . ah . . . yes . . . as if it were a great hall, I hear its songs inside, its standards throng my mind.

Maybe I’ll write another lecture on the snob, or on racial ideologies. And there is provincialism, chauvinism, and jingoism to be delicately separated and consumed like flaky layers of fish.

My father was right to hate the Toots. They came, like invaders, unbidden. From his point of view, their every action was a crime. It wasn’t he, however, who set fire to their dog’s house, although my father always hoped for a war between Azjurbazur and the USA, because, in that case, we could intern the Toots, reclaim their property, muzzle their dogs, and sterilize their brats. It wasn’t he, either, who threw paint on their front porch one Halloween, though, as he said, a saltbox shouldn’t have a porch. Even so, Toottoot just left the blobby blue splash dry where it fell as though it were designed. Against people like that, my father said, there is no recourse available in this life.