by Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz
Partial List of People to Bleach
for Thomas Vasko
Foreword
Huffe-snuffe, okay? Right, right, have not the slightest notion what huffe-snuffe means. Know only that, as far as I am concerned, it looks great, has one of those ferociously endangered hyphens in the middle of it, and that it, huffe-snuffe, came up this morning in the course of my reading here and there in Hugh Kenner’s A Homemade World, which book, to my mind, is a pretty swell book, you got me? Look, I’m not saying this has anything to do with Gary Lutz or with his Partial List and so on, or with, unless it’s supposed to be nor with, the publisher of same. Fine, fine, I guess good manners, had that etiquette had the least little control of me, would have called for the distinguishing of this element from that element with quotation marks or some such typological (typographical?) device, setting this apart from that, as per, for instance, nor with — thus: “nor with” or nor with. Are you following me? I am going to take it for granted you are following me, but even if you aren’t, what am I to do about it? Simplify matters? Go about my business here, in Lutz’s behalf, not to mention in probably yours, in a less congested way? Sorry, no can do. Well, I can, I expect I can — but won’t. Fair enough? You bet it’s fair enough. I mean, face it, let’s face it — I was reading Kenner, on the one hand, and struggling to set up a new TV, on the other, when the day’s post came and therein the appeal from Lutz’s benefactor to speak up, introduction-wise, for Lutz. Swell. Am I happy to do that? Yes, I am happy to do that! Also proud, pleased, tickled to death, to affiliate myself with you-know-who and with the reprint of you-know-whose Partial List and so forth and so on. Except, pay attention — there’s the Kenner disquisition for me to get back to and, not unchallengingly, working out the facilitating, wire-wise, of this new TV of mine — a, hey, Insignia. Sure, sure, would have laid out for the Samsung if I had any brains, but figured better to save the bucks and throw in with the Best Buy house-brand, which I did, which I did, but which hook-up — I mean, getting it (the TV) going — I’ve gone ahead and put on hold for a trice (ditto Kenner, ditto the Kenner) while I handle this Lutz thing — not anywhere close to lustrously maybe (I’m distracted, I’m too distracted for luster) — but, you know, officially adequately. Uh-oh, is it not unlikely you’ve been sitting there and forgotten all about huffe-snuffe? I did. Well, almost — I almost did. You think I should hasten myself to the dictionary apropos of this (huffe-snuffe) or, mal-apropos of it, skip it and just keep it (huffe-snuffe) a mystery?
Well, to me, anyway.
Anyhow, that’s, um, it.
Trice over, trice finished, which word I do not, even remotely, know the definition of, either. My golly, all this is starting to seem to me, Lutz-wise, uncannily appropriate. Perhaps even indicative, mayhaps a jot luminescent. If so, if you get something from this you could not have gotten by reason of a reasonable approach, you’re just where it’s best for you to be — at the beginning of a one-of-a-kind experience, at the beginning of the impudently singular, at the beginning of — oh, to heck with it! — beginningness.
— Gordon Lish, New York, June, 2013
Home, School, Office
I remember buying something once — I can’t remember what — in the stationery aisle of an all-night drugstore, something I did not need. All I remember is what the card accompanying it said: “101 Uses for Home, School, Office.” I remember thinking there was a home, a school, an office in my life, so why not? Make the purchase, look alive. This was how long ago?
HOME
The home in this case was actually two homes. First, my apartment, which was just mounds of filthied clothes, newspapers, index cards, depilatories, razors, and paper plates forming a ragged little semicircle around wherever I happened to be crouched on the floor when I was home. (I owned no furniture; I was afraid of heights.) And then her place, a house she rented, a place she vacuumed and dusted, where I slept with her, where she made the bed. She had a name, a job, a kid, a parrot, a couple of ex-husbands, relatives, neighbors she concerned. When she wasn’t drunk, I was her project.
SCHOOL
I taught at a school, a college — actually, a community college. The students hated me, and most who got stuck in my courses eventually dropped. I would step into a classroom on the first day of the term, and a good third of the kids, furious that I was going to be the teacher, would get up and walk out. On those who remained, I got my revenge by ladling out all A’s — even an A for the kid who slept through my entire last term, because I was jealous of his frictionless, rubber-limbed sleep. I would often want to stop talking — there was never any discussion; I filled the room with words for seventy-five-minute sessions, displacing the air with sequences of salival syllables arranged to give one the feeling, afterward, of having heard something like a lecture, something that could survive on a margin-doodled notebook page in a plausible outline of a plausible topic — so that I would not wake the kid up, even though it was obvious he could sleep through disquiets of any kind. (My own sleep was and continues to be a tiresome business — battering, sloppy, unproductive.) Shall I admit that more than once I wanted to share that kid’s sleep — i.e., to be fucked and fucked and fucked by him until I bled?
OFFICE
I shared what had once been a large supply closet with a history teacher, a woman who smelled like the exhaust fumes of a bus and who canceled her classes at least once a week. One morning, as I was repositioning books and papers on my desk, an elaborately coiled pubic hair — it called to mind a notebook spiral — slid out of a folder labeled “to be filed” that I had been trying to find a new place for, and landed on the carpet. This was carpet the color of pavement. My officemate was nowhere to be found, and the office door was shut, and locked, so I got down on my knees and sought out the hair. I thought the thing would be a cinch to find, but it wasn’t. I just couldn’t put my finger on anything. I borrowed a piece of cellophane tape from my officemate’s desk (I had never asked for any supplies, but my officemate had a metal tape dispenser — a big thing, a console, really — and a stapler and a hole-puncher and a telephone) and thought that if I dragged the strip of tape, with the adhesive side down, along every square inch of the carpet, the hair would eventually cling to the tape. But after about five minutes, I gave up — not because the phone rang (it was my officemate’s phone, obviously, and it never rang) or because there was a knock at the door (I had signed up for five office hours a week, but nobody ever came by except for students asking after my officemate or dropping off get-well-soon balloons), but because I did not know up to what point, to what extent, I was supposed to keep going along with my life.
Kansas City, Missoula
I moved in with my sister and her girlfriend after my little marriage had started to wear itself to the bone again.
I was twenty-seven, mostly unknown to myself, known best by my sister, who said, “You won’t have to do anything yet.”
But I had always made sad work of persons. Even now, in these later, these punchier times, everything is just modicums of what it once was.
My sister and her girlfriend were, both of them, paralegals. They were renting a house at the confusing end of town. This was out beyond where people still felt any need to mix.
The girlfriend was the tallest of us three. She had lots of that mobile jewelry all over her. Her body seemed to crowd around her life in ways that kept her from being too social with me.
But my sister was the sackier one. There were blurts of blue in her hair.
My first full day was a workday for them. They had me using the edges of one of those disposable-razor caps to scrape away the crud from the insides of their tub. They would be wanting
a bath, a long, lemon-laden, embubbled soak, they had said, after they came home and before they took on the night’s carnal charges.
They would be arriving antsily together in that nonnative sedan of theirs.
I had to shove a brood of soaps aside.
The tub’s guck came off in a powderish gray. This took hours, but what was time to someone with nothing to wait for but take-out pad thai, hoi polloi, potpie, whatever they were calling it?
The house was actually more of a cottage, with bookcases built bluntly into the walls. The books I could not exactly read (I had disorders), but I could land a hand onto a page, spread my fingers, then make out whichever words that showed in between, though these were mostly just ingredients of words:
firt leen bini
aze oli
They shut their bedroom door at night.
Mornings, I went through their drawers — but things were much too plush and tingly for me in there, all that underwear inalienably theirs, plus some shapely drugs, mostly robin’s-egg-blue and dazing.
I took another of the tabs. It was quick to get me feeling renewedly mortalized and minute.
I couldn’t log on to either of their boxy old laptops. No diaries or journals or such for me to see whatever each might have finally dared rue about the other. Those two more likely lacked even a line of wiseacre poetry to their name.
I could have written a poem for or against them right then and there, and tried to, something merrimental and penciled, but it got to be all about my own catchy life and what all had gotten caught in it — the set bedtimes and slant-tip tweezers, any old TV screen with the power off, the less-than-a-year-left stuff that dragged on and on, the chances begged for, the overnight bags that were actually technically for the next day, if you woke up and the world was still looking coy.
I needed to find something better to know like the back of my hand.
The last time I had gone looking, I’d found that woman with the tiny floes of green in her eyes. This was a woman like nothing else floral at all. She had had concussions, and blackouts, and years later was still blinky when she turned up looking ousted from everything peaceable in the species. So, yes, I loved her calamitously and however little. But she was a braggart, a cheat, and a back-stabber. I’ll keep her mostly out of this reminiscent business, though. I’m under orders to tend to just about any other hill of beans.
Regardless, I’ll venture that marriage spreads itself filmily and spherically around two people until you’re doing your best to poke your way back out.
Truth be told, I felt less joined than merely jointed to her in little fiscal fashions.
She would say, “Are we ever even talking about the same thing?”
She hoped to be a guitarist. It would have had to be one of those half-size guitars. The songs were going to be bouncy and sagacious about having a cunt with more mystique than most. For a minute there, in the stairwell, her singing voice got something trapped in it, a real shiver that brought you revealments from afar.
Making her way up the steps was a girl who must have heard. The girl looked to be about that age when instead of places to go there were only worlds to come.
They just shook hands at first, exchanged names hard-headedly, then sniveled until the two of them were kissing.
I didn’t hear from my wife for a while.
I’m not telling you anything I won’t have already one day come to have known about myself, at least the parts about life’s not being right for everyone, and how I’ve no reason to know why; but for a couple of semesters, I’d pushed myself over at the community college, the one they had set up in the older hangars. My fingers kept driving themselves into the books until every binding gave up the ghost. One of the profs, some even-minded soul, took me aside, said, “All work and no play.” I said, “I’ll play when I’m dead.” But it was a stretch, and then I took up with that man who day in and day out looked loveproof and bloated.
What — all that water and blood in him wasn’t enough to drown his sorrows either?
His story was that I was using him just to brush up against myself. But I must have looked redundant even off on my own.
Men, you must know, are behind everything, meaning only laggard, backward, passé.
But I keep coming back to my wife as if she weren’t the one coming back to me standing pat.
This was all in that make-do conurbation between the state’s two hardening and unfavored cities nobody even snooped around in anymore.
We didn’t really tell anybody about the marriage. Whom could we have told?
Her sister was dead, and her parents weren’t the type you would ever once think to describe, and as for friends, there were none left aside from me, though she might have sent notes, potshot postcards, to lorn pharmacists she had leaned on, or mentors long spurned, or pushover crisis-hot-line troubleshooters, or any other sobber who might have once bashfully asked her to piss on him as a finale to something long since finished anyway.
As for my acquaintances, I knew a man who kept daintily to himself in an enlarged house with six sinks and a tub from which the water, he claimed, would never completely run away. It had the plumbers stumped. He was hit with bills you wouldn’t believe. He was thorough-hearted and easily wowed. I called him every now and then to go over the eventualities.
“It’s all been pushed back,” he would say, then hang up, then not answer when I kept redialing, thinking: by which he had meant what — it’s been moved forward or further behind?
I had a dictionary, but it was the kind that hedged on everything.
“Bound, adj.,” or so it said, meant just the opposite of “bound, vb.”
So I tried to keep my wife to the fore and laid off sex.
We lived in the perfect timing of our passions for other people.
Some people, I now see, are idea people. The idea might be only: Eschew bloodbaths.
My mother had never done much besides lose her heart to the dial tone. It must have seemed a threnody of a kind. That was in the times of landlines only. I believe she lived mostly in silhouette.
It was my father who had taught me it would be disloyal to buy another town’s newspaper, even the one from the town just down the road, where the people liked it when the hours finally got themselves all balled up into a day that could just roll itself right off from them.
So my sister’s girlfriend, to let something be known: I did in fact try her out in their bed. It’s no debauch, though, if the other party is mutinous in even the twiddliest way against your own sis. She buttoned her lip. Everything went without brunt. Next morn, she said, “You’re a man still here. You’re a breach of peace.”
But I’ve never been very immediate in things. I’ve skipped out on myself every time.
My wife had married me in a huff. There had been somebody else, somebody before me and later to come back — a man of clean riches. Any affection from me went right through her.
I’ll say one thing for her, though:
She looked for all the world.
Years of Age
My sisters had turned out to be women who wore their hair speculatively, lavishing it forward into swells, or loading it again with clips, barrettes. The younger worked for a store that still had a notions department, a dry-goods department, a toilet with a coin slot on the door. Her affections raced in undaring ovals around co-workers.
The other lived on her own in a safehold of foldaways and one-player card games with crueler and crueler rules. She had a couple of dogs that she wanted to see something of the world.
I was the middle child, but never the central one. I had gone through life as the unencircled son, unfetched.
The three of us were heeders and continuers, yes, but mostly resemblers bent on coarsening the resemblance.
I had been a suggestible kid, senseless in all I foresaw. I’d had that pair of shiftful sisters, and parents: the kind who taught you to tell time, then taught you that time would tell. High school I had liked — the
hourly hallway travel, the breezy hygiene of the girls — and in college most of the profs shook your hand on your happy way out of the amphitheatre. One subject would eclipse another until there was a totter to my grades.
A diploma was at length made out to me, and I was free to apply for openings. I liked the festive attention allowed me at interviews — the questions put to me pointedly but unpersonally. My first job involved scourging printouts with proofreaders’ marks in a metropolis of sorts mocked up for regional commerce beside a thin, palling river. I prinked about the offices in baleful well-being, maybe awaiting ovations.
Or was I already taking the long view — that the world we lived in stood in the way of another world, one where you need not keep backing your way into things with your eyes wide open?
I took to taking things calmly and degenerately.
I moved to the forefront of the city, shared an apartment divided four scarcely distinct ways, now and then brought home discouraged hitchhikers or delicately shaven teenagers — wrathful, facetless kids easily regaled with things neither strange nor true. I thus got roughed up in my roommates’ regard, found “for sale” signs taped everywhere on my car. Then the first, brute months of a new year. I spaced things out in my luggage and hauled it all to the outskirts. I became one of those secretive types who want you to know everything about them except what should most catch the eye.
People, in truth, had got the wrong wrong ideas about me — that I responded well to cosmetics; that I had already come to know most of the disrobers in our town of halfway houses and rehab socials; that my teeth had been sewn tight into my gums with thick black thread.
In awful point of fact, I rewrote my rent checks until the dollar-amount and signatural hurrah was just so, and I called my parents almost any Sunday. I would force myself to talk for exactly twelve minutes, the better to counter criticisms that I could never be kept on the line for more than ten.
