I remember the abandoned chemical factory, with broken windows like missing teeth and half-burnt walls and graffiti floors, or that now desolate empty pothole spotted parking lot that housed the drugstore I worked at and laid open the imaginary field where I played touch-football with Dean and Felschow and Goobs and grew to over six foot sitting against the paint chipped wall under a winter gray sky with a soccer ball between my feet as I sang to pretty redheads. I want to dream of anywhere but this desert dirt bright white from the sad-faced full moon. Every step I take the world around me expands like I’m standing on the caboose of a train, arms outstretched for a past gone by. I can smell the burning electric of my toy trains as the battery overheats.
The scissor wind cuts through my plaid sports coat. I drift back to my mother’s kitchen, to the smell of potatoes and carrots and ham and cabbage (the same smell of Nan’s kitchen) as I linger in the warm vibrations of safety as the snow piles up outside. I sidestep to the massive driveway in Depew and the early morning work with a bent metal shovel and mounds of snow with nowhere to go, stoned and listening to sports talk radio on a walkman with a missing cassette door and my stinging exposed back aching.
The desert is the moon. As I walk over small dunes and dips, my right leg seems longer than my left. Things blur before they focus, my eyes a cruel, thoughtless lens, a world of blurred photographs. I need to set my mind on something other than the weight of itself. I see a pool of blood before me quiver, dirty blood no longer hidden behind the innocence of skin and tissue. I think of Patrick in Fredonia in the Chinese restaurants raving that he could see the floor breathe.
I get angry at these invading thoughts and lash out at the reality I am in. I try to scream my dizzy head away. I know when I get back to my apartment I will shout, “I’m home”, to an empty cigar box that reeks of desperation and fallen dust. “You didn’t miss much, baby. It was a quiet night.” I can see disease. I have burdening x-ray eyes.
The moon, the searchlight, hangs over me like an interrogation lamp. Accusing white light brings me back to the crisp fall nights playing soccer with the Germans behind the burned out, boarded up buildings of Philadelphia where the Police helicopter’s spotlight directed police cars six in a row down the narrow, dark streets. Those nights we would drink until we were sick and laugh as we carried each other to our beds. The next day Scott would refuse to leave the only couch and bribe me with money for food so he could use the bathroom while I was gone to the corner deli.
I think I can feel the stones through my brown boots, but I’m not sure. Bursts of hot pain on my arches. Each step delivers a long twang up from my feet like a vibrating rubber band. The mountains around me are crooked houses with mad grins slanted and looming but far away. I miss sidewalks and curbs and corner stores. I forsake the present for the past and her warmth. The comfort in knowing you survived.
Luckily my sense of direction is still intact. Off in the distance, a mile or two, I see my apartment nestled in a group of two story buildings standing like bums around fire. With cold hands and a runny nose and sore legs, I march on with thoughts of Jews running half naked in that book I read in high school.
No comments:
Post a Comment