C4 Issue 2: Fall 2011

by Chamber Four

  Jumer’s Castle Lodge

  On the long and forking road to Jumer’s Castle Lodge in Bettendorf, Iowa—the suburban enclave barnacled to Davenport’s grime—my father reminded me (for the third time) that the best restaurant in the world was located at Kmart. What meat loaf. “Get the picture, Buster?” I got it. He was not thrilled with the Bavarian-theme birthday dinner spot I had selected after much heart-searching and phone book paging. And more than merely getting his point, I actually knew what he was saying! He was saying he knew I loved cafeteria food more than any other kind, but when it came to a birthday dinner, I always got it into my fool head to try someplace “new” and “unsuitable” and “pricey.” He was saying I was in my own ludicrous 13-going-on-43-way a foul elitist because I could not imagine blowing out a candle stuck in a serving of macaroni and cheese. He was right too. But wrong also, at least wrong about the quality of Kmart cafeteria food. Genuine cafeteria food must be made by old fashioned cooks with access to a kitchen—and there was no kitchen at Kmart and there were no cooks. There were eighteen-year-old soda machine operators encased in smocks similar to straight jackets and a 180-year-old line matron who had no hair but bravely wore a hair net and was so thin that in comparison a skeleton looked fat. The food was trucked in frozen, the carbo blocks and protein shafts and vegetal orbs of iffy lineage re-heated a microwave and served on Styrofoam for amazingly low prices that attracted a crowd which would be better off chewing straws and saving their change. I hated to think of my father driving five miles from his office to eat alone at the Kmart cafeteria in the middle of a weekday. I had to think of it, however, because he did it. He did it because he was, he thought, “a man of the people.” When you have no friends you think quite broadly. In my imaginary family album—maybe the only record with a chance of surviving our domestic maelstrom of illusions/delusions/visions/ vicissitudes—I had appended a scratch-and-sniff photo of a portly law office evacuee seated in the fetid fluorescence of a blue-and-red cafeteria space separated from crap-clogged shelves by a frail greasy brown railing, too small chair and too small table, the wide tie and rumpled jacket teetering over a pale blue cup of tepid fountain cola and liver-colored tray and white tri-well plate. Diarrhea-smooth mashed potatoes. Beans once green and now blue-gray. Meatloaf with the toothy dog breath stink, protein parquet polyurethaned with transparent gravy. He looked around, ready to be recognized by other customers. He was not recognized. No one else was there. Shopping at Kmart was primarily a night act of The People who worked hard during the day to afford luxuries such as nylons and canvas tennis shoes and school supplies. He was alone in the harsh soul-sucking light. Not alone as he could get. If I was seated next to him the aloneness would be perversely compounded—cafeteria isolation plus the isolation of family members who felt farther away from each other the closer they tried to get. But still he was quite alone, lunching in the rear of that cold sprawling store. Drone of loudspeaker announcing BLUE LIGHT SPECIALS! in various vacant aisles. With a plastic fork he picked at the gelatinous flooring he had been served... “At Jumer’s there’s suits of armor!” “Go on with ya. Nothing beats Kmart meat loaf.” Romance, he needed. I’d force it down his throat. He’d come around. He was as romantic as me, only too bitter to admit it to himself, 43 going on 86... but he’d see the suit of armor and want to be inside it! Safe from wildly expostulating children, and safe from his kooky wife, and with a job to do: stand and greet Jumer customers... Neon flashes in the speedway night, zillion electric crayons out there, flailing and failing to draw a coherent picture of Quad-Quint-Illowa-Metro-goulash. “At Jumer’s there’s shields!” To fend off collection agencies and enemies of the Equal Rights Amendment, I imagined. “Zoomer’s has pee-can rolls in the bread basket too!” cried mother, coming to my rescue to sink me. “It’s called JUMER’S CASTLE LODGE!” “Aunt Carolee’s boss took her to ZOOMER’S!” Mother giggled, mocking me. Then she made amends in the usual fashion, thrusting a hand over the seat. I took it. I held it but I could not touch her, I knew. It was like holding a mascot’s cold rubber hand. I tried not to blame her for the word games. She was the moonlighting mascot for Roget’s Thesaurus. Betsy blamed her. Howard blamed her. And father. It was too easy to blame her. Someone needed to EXPLAIN her. I could not, so struggled to excuse her.. She was a law school graduate who never practiced law because actually she was a stymied poet who thought having six children was the next best thing to writing six poems. She had a black cotton ball stuffed in her left leaky ear too. The other had oozed out during the scramble to dress and Oil of Olay herself. She wore the same dress as usual, having taken it off and put it on again: her way of doing laundry. The free hand probed the lap purse, seeking clues as to why she (like her husband) was a poster child for the Past Tense, and she reaped tissues and pennies, she reaped sugar cookie fragments—assaulted cookies far from the safety of the elfy boxes kindly foisted on America by the folks at General Foods. Like me, she crazily counted on pee-can rolls to usher in a new era of abundance, understanding. Right? Any logic leap viable as it only need work for a second, then a different thing went wrong to fix with shabby yet sharp thinking that shredded reality like purple cabbage. Before I was teased to death in seventh grade, I should get academic credit for all of my acrobatic fantasies. Developing our brand of idiocy took continual intellectual effort. Wrong must always be right—furiously right—or it was too wrong, too dark. “Haven’t lived until you’ve eaten Kmart—“Father would know, having while alive experienced more mortality than a funeral parlor. “That loaf is A-NUMBER-ONE.” And you are done, with many decades to go! Life too short! Life too long! A condition to revile lovingly! My heart need not go out to him because his clammy ponderous presence already pressed my chest—male tonnage of disappointment, shame, laziness, odd arrogance bred by failure—the fiber of ineptness filling the back seat as surely as his cigarette smoke—as surely as gravel fill. I was buried under pity for his aching bulk and hating too, hating that I could not hate him more for retiring from the family, putting me in the classic disgusting Greek position of father to younger brothers and sisters, and a mother’s replacement husband at school events and free food receptions. “Get left DAVE!” It was peculiarly horrifying to hear her call her husband by the correct name. It fit with nothing else. “LEFT OR YOU’LL MISS THE EXIT!” He got left—dangerously left—farther left than Breshnev!—but the lane split at the right moment and we avoided hitting the pole and the junker plunged then rose, joining zigzagging taillights seemingly engaged in weaving a monumental and redundant incandescent noose around the real estate void. “Tractor trailer!” HONK! “Watch out for the x-rated van!” Spray-painted harem-mobile forced our bald tires onto the wide shoulder and I shut my eyes, tasted guard rail on my teeth like braces, but only a dream, only thought I was visiting the dentist for the first time in years, father cranking cranking cranking wheel, junker whipping across three lanes onto the other shoulder, rough passenger seat seas of bad hair cuts, worse attitudes, dashboard books, purse pens lids combs, glove compartment spitting parking tickets, gusts of snatching candy wrappers and—believe it or not, Ripley—denuding “innie” belly buttons of residual fluff. “TOUR BUS!” “I SEE IT!” “TWO BUSSES!” “THINK I CAN’T COUNT?” “GET OVER DAVE GET OVER OLYMPIC BUSSES ARE” passing in the night like they are not strangers, like they want to wear our crooked bumper like a nightmare tiara, like they want to read what’s scribbled on paper scraps flying out of the bucking lap purse. WHOOOOSH! Hurricane lashing antenna and brave antenna fighting back, thrashing, thrashing. “DROPPED MY CIG!” “KEEP AN EYE ON THE ROAD, DAVE!!” What road? We were not on any road. We were riding the high evening tide of soot and smog over Davendorf—cities blending to create less and less from more and more—zones of frantic abject nuclear-family proliferation, screaming kids and couples in yardless hovels, coffee rings of hell on the kitchen table, sticky cable box, grandmother calling to offer to baby-sit, grandmother not trusted to baby sit, no jobs and food stamps or food
stamps and jobs so low paying and boring that eyes became bloodshot pinballs endlessly batted around by flippers of frustration/dread; zones of equally sad and transient wealth, vacuumed-looking circular drives of employee-axing factory executives and Defense Department apparatchiks and school superintendent-sorcerers—ranch houses bloated to barn girth and equipped with all appliances save the machine that raised children and the children knew it—they knew they were screwed by inauthentic affluence and reacted: turning primitive, plastering bedrooms with Led Zeppelin zodiac posters and getting stoned before attending the fancy local high school with its carpeted halls, A.C. and darling planetarium. America was the story of individuals and yet what did this mass of individuals thrust at the windshield? No sense of human endeavor! Rather blundering streaks of negated or erased stories. The nasty and forever breaking bilge of facelessness... what remained after bubbles burst. I had a vision—as I a budding poet must. I had a vision of the Jumer’s hostess in Bavarian hosiery waiting for us without knowing she was waiting for us—focused on another problem, the canceled reservation for ten, and smiling because she was one of those unfortunate heroines who when flustered exhibited preternatural calmness until you noticed what a frail shiny hinge her long smile was, the face split as if sword-struck... “Look who’s at the Holidome, Benny!” Dickey Doo and the Donuts. And what did Dickey do with or to the Donuts? Appear at 7:30 to find out. That sign and a forest of other signs on stalks rising out of parking lots seeded with magic beans by developer Jack. Ramada Inn. Best Western. Big Boy. Country Kitchen. Gulf seashell. Exxon tiger. Target bulls-eye. The corridor of discounts and fast food. McDonald’s arches glowing like an x-ray of a cave man skull, nothing inside but M for MEAT. Villa of Chicago-style pizza! Bungalow of fried ice cream; duplex of Belgian waffles! Car port of chili dogs, frosty mugs! A-Frame of All U Can Eat Salad Bar starring a mad scientist’s gift to 1976: bacon bits. Crosses of neon to bear, and pulsing plasma of neon—red cell white cell rivers of signage—light streaking as if cities were melting before our eyes, every parking lot and store dripping, sealing residents in wax that never dried, electric commercial morass in which we were increasingly caught but never outright snared. Dearth in all its beguiling treasured varieties—generic and brand name. The blinking forests of DEALS grew into jungle tangles engulfing wallets/purses and shrieking an urgent story stunningly easy for natives to ignore or shortchange or abandon. Out of each errand what emerged? A lot to reject after one taste and a lot to wish for; the faces gone while still here and the other faces curiously alive, feeding off gone-ness: De John, activist-tormentor of superintendent-sorcerers who cut teacher pay; Uncle Eubie, railing against Federal regulations and riding a bicycle to save the environment and studying Common Law, Latin, computers. In the neon nights everything and everyone mixed quixotically. No helping that. What you could control—if anything—was your response. You had a choice to lay down and give up or to remain seated and choosily oblivious or to stand up. And if you stood, you could stand for something humble but concrete like a new children’s health clinic or massive free-floating righteous causes which often quickly drifted into the realm of wanton mischief and mean-spirited static. In this valley hemorrhaging neon, my mother was the carving knife on the loose. She verbally filleted ten-year-old-looking stock clerks until they were prepared to sell their tender souls to give her what she kept on demanding—the sold-out and very much advertised 3 SOCKS FOR 99 CENTS. She haggled over dimes with check-out girls, demanded to see The Manager then castrated DONNIE G. with razorous reasoning. “A dent double the size of a quarter is worth fifty cents off!” And DONNIE G. looked at me as if to ask: Is this an act? And with narrowed eyes I tried to warn him this joke was no joke. She was serious in the way mold on bread is serious—fuzzy supernatural blue born of plain white flour. Vaudeville schtick as vital to her existence as oxygen! Don’t risk a smirk. She has nothing to lose by nine at night. Each morning she rolls off the couch and instantly begins throwing IT ALL away again—family, career, dignity. By nine she is startlingly free of what she cannot escape. Startlingly liberated for a woman with no salary and just a teaspoon of gas in the tank. She subsists only on suspicion at nine at night. She has completely embraced the concept that she is unworthy of decent strong human attachments and so has no stake whatsoever in sustaining the delicate societal conceits of fairness—the completely lawless attorney-at-law. Those pennies trickling from her purse are not the kind you want to put in your shoe for good luck—they’ll burn through the sole. She is meaning not well. She is at your throat for real. She has been at mine all day and I can tell you her playing does not play. What brings her to Kmart? THE GRAND AMERICAN STAGE OF KMART! Should you identify the odor of immeasurable malaise and loss and loneliness you are correct but usually that is accompanied by weakness, not her sort of strength. These charades issue from the gut, the same place as truth, strangely enough. “This torn label is evidence of tampering. Illegal to sell. I get it for FREE then!” Deep breath. I was remembering too much of the present. The key to the present was remembering nothing and firmly attaching to a heritage not your own. Deep breath. Deep breath. I needed C.B.R.—Culinary Bavarian Resuscitation- kraut and potato pancakes and apple sauce and wurst and pee-can rolls—the stucco castle strung with Arthurian banners and spot-lit like the scene of a major architectural accident. “JUMER’S SIGN! GET OFF HERE!” the gluttonous rodent in me roared. Driver got off, jamming on breaks at the bottom of the ramp, re-alphabetizing dashboard library, refreshing windshield hand-print collage. “DAVE I ALMOST WENT THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS!” Driver snarled, disdaining her amateur literary allusions. He had tried writing novels long ago. Remains were filed in the basement in leather caskets. The pen clipped to the shirt pocket might have a vague off-putting veneer, a silver unused thing, but it had blazed—or some pen or typewriter blazed—when he was in his twenties, and the failure qualified him for one thing—to be in charge of family literary allusions. We waited for his. They did not come. Honestly, he preferred the tense silence. He flicked a butt into the autumn under the overpass: the Bishop of Vacant Intersections tending yon pylon flock marinating in shadows and soot and idleness. Bulbous shoulders bunched under his ears. Shirt collar creeping up neck bristles, higher, higher. A larger-than-life figure unnaturally seeping from the smallness of his existence: few clients, no friends. “No one coming! GO!” He did not go. He malingered. He gazed thoughtfully (forgivingly?) at rows of glow-in-the dark brethren, bent, bowing, flattened. He hmmprhed. That was his sermon. Then he slipped another cigarette out of the pack and disengaged the dash lighter, hot tangerine spiral igniting tobacco—aaaaahhhh, male bosom jiggling. “DAVE—BENNY—CAN’T FIND MY READING GLASSES!” Had they fled her mask in fear? Was that a lens glittering on the pavement? “YA NEED A NEW PAIR!” snarled the Bishop. No she didn’t. She needed beloved old ones that her destructive vision had perfectly twisted into optical shrapnel with a shoestring attached. “FOUND EM!” The Hope diamond would not have made her happier. “FOUND EM IN A CUP UNDER MY SEAT! HOW’D THEY—?”Ask some Nobel physicist. “OH!” She grabbed a battered paperback—it but a prop—the flaking entropy scepter to thrust about as she recited poetry from memory, eyes squeezed shut. “THE WORLD SO FULLA THINGS WE SHOULD ALL BE KINGS!” Her favorite line from A Child’s Garden of Verse again mutilated by the tongue’s stomping gray heel, maybe deservedly. Robert Louis Stevenson could be annoying after age eight. “OH—!” She misquoted more poetry I ignored out of love for poetry and her. Blue smoke points crowned the butch of the phlegm-gargling Bishop. And on and on. Then we were in Bavaria’s parking lot! Flung-open gates (attached to no walls, hovering magically in front of the Ford bumper), pinnacles and ramparts seeded with strings of flying saucer lights, arches of a castle too young to harbor a vampire or cast a frightful shadow. Perfect. The cartoon I sought—pure romance, no trouble ever. (I thought then: but at seventeen going on forty-seven I would be taken by a dentist’s window to the new Jumer’s Castle Lodge in Davenport—a
date, though I did not realize it until too late—in the Holy Grail lounge Mrs. Goldman talked of her dead husband, the dentist, and offered me some of his fine hardly worn jackets, then mentioned her recent mastectomy and insisted we slow dance...) “JUMER’S!” I genuflected in the sodden back seat. “JUMER’S CASTLE LODGE!” You were not only what you ate, but also where you ate! Father, water-injected Kmart loaf of fragility. Mother, gust of bacterial vapor from the iffiest cafeteria—Shannon’s. And I, chivalric Jumer parapets—the perfect prefab fantasia for a boy born November 5, 1963, last of the Camelot babies, weeks later rocked to the tune of J.F.K.’s funeral dirges (or so I was told, and so I believed—she would despairingly revel in sticking an infant’s face in a stately coffin.) Parents pointed out parking spots too small or near hydrants or just not there. “THERE’S A SPACE!” “EMPLOYEES ONLY!” “I SEE ONE!” “AIRPORT VAN!” “THAT ONE’S FREE!” “TOO SMALL!” “TRY IT, DAVE!” Forward, backward, forward, backward, forward, backward, forward, forward, backward, backward, backward, forward, car seats pitching, cowlicks in new upright positions, litter roiled, what felt like seaweed around my ankles, one black sock, one blue. “TOLD YA! TOO SMALL!” “OVER THERE!” “BIKE RACK!” And on and on and on. Torches flanked ENTRANCE where a valet stood tall, ponytail cobra-ed under martial cap, pensive, thinking? Worthless is a flower power revolution that does not endure... worthless is a flower... Did father throw Col. Hippie the keys? Somehow we solved the problem of Bavaria’s parking lot. We materialized in the lobby of Inquisition blood-red carpeting and timeline flotsam/jetsam: framed family crests, coats of arms, hatched helmetry (mother’s bangs fit right in), breastplates, drop-lighting and push-button phones, the latest thing in Bavarian knight world. But forget about flesh-colored desk phones and wall phones. Jumer’s was ALL ABOUT ARMOR a tit-turreted boy needed to survive teasing... just as The Gourmet House in Rock Island was ALL ABOUT THE PIANIST softly playing “Blue Skies” to calm stormy souls and The Mandarin was ALL ABOUT THE LAZY SUSAN, sharing my heartburn with parents who caused it. I flicked a suit of armor. It pinged in a totally fraudulent but absolutely evocative fashion! For a devious reason mother chose that moment to repeat what Lillian Hellman told the McCarthy Committee of witch hunters: “I WILL NOT tailor my beliefs to fit this year’s fashion show!” I pinged the armor again. How wonderful to celebrate a birthday centuries removed from Sudlow Junior high: shower room towel snappers, playground knives, lunch table of fellow losers—Ronnie already thinking about dropping out, man—and fucking locker padlock I could not master in the five minutes between classes, buzzer-sounding and Gesling, Hall Commandant, rushing over, clipboard in assault position. “Reservations?” Stiletto-browed hostess looked us up and down as if we were a pack of assorted wily dirty towels trying to reenter through the front minutes after being carted out the back. We were on that lobby like a stain with six legs. “RESERVATION FOR THREE!” I squeak-roared. “MILLER!” Hostess brow stabbed Hostess forehead half to death. Lipstick frowned, smiled a slender stressed enamel hinge. “All rightee!” in a tone of polite scorn and she led us into a medieval dining area to die for—die by sword, by lance, by mace—die of laughing at mantle tankards and moose chandeliers. Gas hearth flared. Unicorn bladders, if they were not water pitchers. Businessmen on the expense account rampage. Housewives thanking their mucky stars, no dishes tonight! I spotted Sir. Walter Scott the 16th—goatee, mint toothpick. “Place is hopping tonight!” I tried not to wonder why I saw no German food. I saw apoplexy being served six ways at a table. I saw the ordinary entrees from sea, sky, laboratory. A bread basket robber after our own hearts: more food in doggie bag than ordered! Full frontal disgust of Mrs. Microwave experiencing a radish. Swiftly agreeing couples silently disagreeing. Germ phobic Mr. X whispering to waiter: Ammonia on the side, son. Merry minister whose authority had destroyed his religiosity. Friends and lovers gagged by familiarity: mouths knotted. Words in the air but not said: harangue, chronicle, supercilious, post mortem, feast, banquet, scorch, gall, ho hum, satire, anoint, moribund, conical, repast, sick. Blond woman feeding on the sight of a man feeding on the sight of her lace whatchamhoozie. Steak tragically parked on a dieter’s plate like a Peugeot in the garage of a Sunday driver. Turquoise, toupees, barrier reef wigs, carnations, dentures. DR. MILLER IN DERBY AND DRIVING GLOVES!? No, not him, another pear-shaped sanctimonious Great White Father tottering toward a signature edition Lincoln, wife number whatever on his arm. I spotted the fuchsia scarf of Eleanor Rigby! She had removed her face from the jar by the door! She kept doing that. I saw her all over the metro area. Twice or three times a day. Just like I saw the old brown shoe the Beatles sang about, and Mr. Mustard, and Maxwell with the silver mustang and Lucy with the diamonds in her skies. The Beatles had cast over the world gusts of melodies you breathed. Rigby’s brooch-crusted dress, battered pink hat, spinster rectory stare! At Jumer’s she was a totally ignored regular known as “Ellen” to no one but herself. My heart struggled toward her. I felt “for her” not because I was any kind of good person, but because I greedily absorbed troubles of other people in a desperate effort to displace or hold-at-bay my own woe. It worked—worked too well. Maybe I would grow up to be a lock-and-dam that regulated the ceaseless flow of sorrow emanating from American lives gone wrong. Did “Ellen” worry about me, The Waddler sandwiched between shuffling parents? She winked sadly, as if to say: Poor thing, you really rate—dinner at Jumer’s! Bus boy glare expanded the theme. Careful, kid. They might stick you with the bill. But I had no fear of ending up in Jumer’s Kitchen, wearing an iron apron and suds. I was the family dishwasher when Plate Mountain got high enough, surely higher than it ever rose in a well-ordered Bavarian kitchen. “Benny! Oh honey! Chain-mail!” Yes, we had arrived. We had. It kept dawning—this new night. The setbacks in the past and fear of losses to come—could, and could not, stop us. We went on, somehow. Failure was a definite path too; it led many places, some fabulous! I had in my faltering way dragged a couple back to Camelot, where they needed to go for a reality check, odd as it sounds. They married into the era of Jack and Jackie. Things weren’t bad then—she bathed regularly and wore jewelry, he was the future County Attorney—bright newlyweds! I had seen one photo. From under couches I had dredged records she sang along to when I was very little—before she became swollen and atonal. Broadway cast recordings now ancient, warped and scratched, covers peed on by cats. My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story. Fourteen years ago and many centuries! We passed empty tables set for service—goblets and linen napkins. Where was Stiletto going to seat us? Next county? On Pluto? Some special place where we would not be seen by the other diners. FLASH! Bavarian waitress clicked a photo of a couple old enough to know better than to strike that unspeakable pose, but there was scant hope for any soul in front of an instamatic. Mother pointed out a table under weapons that might be used on any waiter who did not bring more pee-can rolls. “Afraid that’s reserved!” “Reserved? But this is our BIRTHDAY BOY!” She stroked my head with her warm damp paw. Moby Purse expectorated aspirin and butterscotch hard candies. Lipstick smiled, frowned, smiled at “A Birthday Boy!? How old?” Mother answered in her post-musical whine: “He’s thirteen! A BIG BOY! How I miss the curls! He used to have curls, and...” They were cut off when I was five and she never got over it. She searched my scalp for lost curls. I smelled peanut butter breath, sour sweat. I looked up at the massive ceiling beams. They could not be hollow. They were heavy, strapping, something to think about at night when I could not sleep after the foot rubs—STRUCTURE a more comforting image than loping sheep or cemetery fields of roses which came easily to mind. I filed Jumer’s beams away. Diners stared as if I were an oily museum painting Landscape with Young Gourmand. Did they—did father?—see her fingerprints on my feet, arms, neck, cheeks? With each touch, a voice, always. On the small ship of our porch—framed by the maple tree on one edge of the front terrace, and evergreen on the opposite edge, she whispered: “Someday branches will touch. The branches will JO
IN. And we’ll have shade, you and I, all summer!” I worried about that. G-forces—GUILT FORCES—worked me over good on my BIG DAY, during the “dinner out,” as often happened at Sudlow or in our cluttered living room. I felt my face stretching stretching into a doomed and insatiable Greek mask—chin dragging across carpet, nose dangling around knees, mouth contorting to encircle the huge SORRY that need be said to parents and neighbors and teachers, and myself, and God. Couldn’t do it—expel that rennety curd of grief. I imagined dying. I was always prone to death visions on my birthday. I imagined shish kabob skewer impalement. I bumped a vaulted roundtable throne, drew a disapproving look (and snort) from Galahad, car dealer, and my father’s head turned—leprotic lips melting apart. I prayed to the yellow teeth, gray gums: help me deal with her, help push her away, you save her... “Angel! Look!” Hound-in-a-fringe-collar painting. “I’d know him anywhere! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas! You must read it!” I must... when the harassing howl of her recommendation faded. How long had it been since we entered the castle? Was I 14 going on 44 yet? Hostess Stiletto, ducked into a niche in the back of the back dining room: “Okee-dokie folks! Waiter will be with you soon! Enjoy your dinner!” Paranoid translation: Enjoy your freakin’ once-a-year fancy-shmancy blow-out you busted buffoons. We crept into a paneled library that may have been much larger before the flip of a Poe switch caused book-lined walls to squeeze in in in in in... leaving room enough only room for a rectangular table, napkin coronets. Ladders on the twenty foot tall shelving! Uniform editions of ZOLA, DICKENS, CONRAD, BALZAC. Half way up one wall existed the most beautiful thing I had seen in a long time: a decorative balcony too narrow to support any human dilemma. Airy ornate railing! And Arthurian seat cushions! We could each sit in two if we wanted... but we did not spread out, we sat close together, chastened by our luck. Humbled at last. The room belonged to classics: they were fully in charge, and ascendant! For a minute we could not screw it up. We sat in reverent silence, each of us thick with thin surfaces. Father lit up. Smoke marooning air as if a truth were trying to burn through invisible veils of denial. Then a humorless Bavarian waiter entered: vest, forearm fur. He distributed tasseled menus. (Or tasseled in my imagination.) He arched nostrils when we demanded a bread basket only, make it two bread baskets. They came. They did not disappoint. Wonders of wicker and warm linen and carbohydrates! We tore into caraway rye rolls, sesame bread sticks, raison puffs, braided white rolls, salt-pebbled hard rolls, pumpernickel squares, slightly sticky pecan rolls. Had one of us sprained a wrist with our tearing, stiff menus would have served nicely as splints. No one sprained a wrist, though. We were expert scavengers. We emptied both baskets in fifteen minutes, and reamed clean the miniature butter urns. Father lit up again. Mother did her ritualistic things—itching, misquoting, purse-mining, kneading my upper parts. I could not tell her to stop that night, or three years later, or seven years later—as I could not tell Mrs. Goldman I did not want to dance on the Jumer’s disco floor after hearing about her chest scars. Something in me—some irregular cog—dictated that I, while flinching and shuddering, must admire these women for being unfailingly frightful, or who they were, or who fate had made them to be. It was true: I tended to put the interests of others far ahead of my own, quite a miracle, really, given how much time I spent in the caverns of my own head—far from other people. I gazed up at the book walls. Any second shelves might tremble, slide, smash us! Make us pay for massive library fines and wavering allegiance to knowledge! My parents met in the fall of 1962 at a monthly meeting of The Great Ideas Club in Dick Keeley’s A-frame pad in Moline... yet all their reading (and my own) what had it amounted to so far? We remained profoundly afraid of learning and the responsibility that went with. We knew the facts too well to trust them. Our lies to ourselves, and each other, mounted daily. We were farcical wasters of time’s valuable currency. Super 8 family films disintegrated under coats piled on the floor of the closet where Moonbeam cat had her kittens. Desiccated shoeboxes housed snapshots of relatives who appeared to be suspended in a curdled puddles of blue carbolic milk. How could history impact and mold transform each second and yet still be denied with an effectiveness that transformed us into big fat squawking blanks? How? Because our living concealed our lives. In a father’s smoke, and on mother’s breath, a stench of scorned and incinerated evidence. There was much worthy of disowning. And the curse of mendacity and vagueness made the house dirtier and dirtier with zonked-out melodrama—1970s set with 1930s costumes and the Greek plot and Lewis Carroll dialogue. Grave details which could not be buried or undermined—they poked through murk like unscrolling weeds—but we knew how to cut them down—with a cough or giggle or other indulgent blurt. It was the denials—not the truth—that best resisted destruction. Illusions were very deeply rooted in us, thriving on the richness of terror. Other citizens helped with the watering. No one actually wanted to know how bad things had gotten next door. Neighbors had their verdant forms of denial, as we had ours. It was a kind of urban cash crop. It kept assuming new forms—as the truth was incapable of doing. The truth was one thing and one thing only. My eyes did not dare linger long on the stray shoes scattered on the living room floor like tips of islands amid violent currents of mockery that had flushed away everything else. When at my best I could—for a second—want the scattered shoes to fuse and form a leathery tree of wisdom. But would answers heal or crush? We had done things to each other, and to ourselves, that could not be erased, and maybe never forgiven. It was no accident our response to the trouble was to twist and wrangle each day into the monotonous procedure of hoping for less and less, and finally—what? Another bread basket at most! More caraway rolls! Willing yourself into the primitive state of hunching grunting scrap muncher, you were the farthest from, and so most protected from, that faint but inextinguishable hunger for the madness to end, no matter what it did cost. My formative years! Formative years? More like an engine of formlessness fueled by cruel echoes of suffering predating my birth, mysterious grief attached to shameful events only hinted at, hidden in the drawers of moans. Mother: I jumped out of the car, rolled into a ditch next to railroad tracks next to the canal... mother sent me to fetch father from a tavern... went to Bible Camp for the food and it was awful... teacher thought I was retarded, moved me to a special class... jumped out of the car, rolled... farmer wouldn’t let us hired hands eat butter at his table... drafted by the army and they got a surprise when this Tommy reported... found a peanut butter sandwich in a study carrel in the Law School library, nothing ever tasted so good... lived in New York on Jane Street until I got pneumonia, came home... only woman in my law school class... I can’t take it anymore, let’s run away, you and I... listen to the wind chimes, honey... Father: German POWs mowed our lawn when Dad ran the Virginia military hospital... Frank tore up my cartoons, slipped pieces under the locked bedroom door... broke my leg pushing a friend’s car stuck in the snow one night... Dad set the bone in his office downtown, only light on in the building, accusing me of meddling in the affairs of others... didn’t want to be a doctor like Frank and Herb... sang a solo at my high school graduation... dropped out of Columbia after one semester, entered the seminary program at Notre Dame... dropped out of Notre Dame, wrote those novels in the basement... never ran again after Dad set the leg... lived over a typewriter store while studying law at Iowa... had a beer with Wright Morris, went to a reading by Dos Passos... friend’s car got stuck and Had shelves moved? BALZAC, ZOLA appeared inches closer to the table, room felt snugger, nicely so. Library did not have to flatten us, did it? Instead it could teach us lesson, correct? Shelves pressing just hard enough to reshape our horrible attitudes? To sculpt emotions, making them easier to handle, sort, and classify? Mr. Fur entered, cradling the third bread basket. He demanded we order. Sausage names scared me off, a result of over-familiarity with factory scenes in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Pheasant “under glass” beckoned but... it sounded too much like old Lenin in his crystal tomb. I uh, um,
picked fried chicken in honey batter. My father approved: I earned the pleased as opposed to haughty hrummph. He took a wild chance on a cheeseburger. Mother decided the rolls had filled her up. Mr. Fur charged away. Food came. We stuffed our faces... then a candle glided into the room followed by staff—all Mr. Furs, all Ms. Stilettos, and Black Forest cake! I shut my eyes. First I wished to be thin. Then I wished for this inspired and generous ending to endure—the sweetly lit slice of forest never to darken—as happened moments later, when I did what must be done, teeth clenched. Waiters clapped. Hostesses hooted. Parents strained to grin, knowing one thing for certain—wishes could bring out the worst in a person, lead a life astray in a way that mistakes could not match.