Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  We were not ones to break with tradition. When the guards and teachers weren’t watching, we surreptitiously splashed our coins and made our wishes, wondering if when we were grown, our children wouldn’t one day find an alligator adorned with a piece of a field trip, lost forever for safekeeping.

  That’s what I went back to see. Foolishly, I thought I could spy the coin I dropped fifteen years before as easily as I remembered the wish I’d made. Innocence, innocence. No sense.

  I found instead a sign clearly posted that said: DO NOT THROW COINS . . . THEY CAN DAMAGE THE HEALTH OF THE ANIMALS. THANK YOU.

  So much for innocence. I made a wish without throwing a coin for Jenny Lehman.

  I left the dark, watery calm of the aquarium thinking there is perhaps a place, a pool—where if we cared or dared to, we could find the reflections of our younger faces—and if we stared through a pair of opera glasses, maybe we could count the gleaming eyes of all our wishes that never came true, yet still survive and give us hope, poisonous though they may have been.

  LETTERS FROM OLD GIRLFRIENDS

  Consider this letter from a Marina Del Rey girl named Meg, written on stationery from the Reef Hotel on Waikiki Beach.

  I must tell you what happened Thursday before I left. I was out walking in the residential part of Beverly Hills, going to a friend’s house, when this bird flew really close, then it flew back and attacked my back—then my head! I almost dropped dead on the street from fright! I hit it into a tree with my sweater and ran down the street screaming. All the Mexican gardeners just looked at me like I was insane!

  How many girls write boys about their bird attacks?

  Meg and I fooled around one summer. This was way back in high school. I’m talking way back. She lived with her father, who was in show business and very rich. Her mother was in rehab and then moved to Maui, where Meg went to join her. The strange thing is that I had a pair of her panties hanging on the curtain rod over my bed. I’m not sure how I got them. My mother never said a word. One day another girlfriend noticed them and asked me about them. Did I ever try them on? (I took them down after that.) She remarked that they were very expensive.

  What was I thinking? Why did I have them hanging over my bed? Was I trying to imply that I’d banged Meg? Had I banged Meg? Maybe. It was hard to remember exactly what happened that summer.

  I certainly could’ve banged Meg, judging from the pile of letters she wrote me, all of them signed Love Ya, Babe or Aloha foxy. Stay high and save some for me.

  She had a killer body. Her face was a bit witchy, but knowing what I know now, she was just the kind of girl who would’ve turned into a ripsnorter of a honey. And she really cared for me. I think. Every time I look at your picture I sit down and cry. I just came home from Marie Callender’s Pies, where I ate so much I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  There may have been an eating disorder at work, not to mention a lot of hash smoking, but she knew Warren Beatty (he doesn’t look anything like himself) and she got backstage passes to concerts.

  There are hundreds of other letters I saved, which is suspicious. Did I need to prove to myself that I existed and was desired—that girls wrote to me? Some are scratched in a cramped, careless hand. Others, meticulous and marshaled, character by character. Still others are dreamy and swirly, full of smiling faces and flower sketches. Such earnestness and emotion.

  A girl named Ellen told me some about the secret “lights” we have to give away. Most people don’t give their lights away for the simple fact that they don’t know they have them! I mean, they know that they have love to give away, but not this special love, this secret and beautiful person love!

  Another girl, Audrey, wrote a letter to me on her forget-me-not personal letterhead in her Great Books class. It’s a tease letter. And a damn good one at that. All these years later, you can still see her, line by curvy flowery line, getting off, putting down on her creamy personal letterhead thoughts she shouldn’t have been having, at least not in an Advanced Placement class. She could be dead of breast cancer now, for all I know. And yet decades and dead marriages later I’m holding this forget-me-not, vaguely perfume-scented letter that looks like it could’ve been written yesterday.

  Then there’s this one from Marti—still smelling of muskmelon and Cuervo Gold.

  I don’t want you to think of me as a fickle bitch that can’t make up her mind. If you’ll remember I told you first I loved you. I meant it and I still do. I will always love you. I just wish I met you a little later, when I get my shit together.

  Ah me. A brush-off letter. From a girl who tasted like a tequila shooter and whose brother made cherry bombs in the sad heavy metal of his little valley room.

  I can’t bring myself to throw the note away even now—with its silhouettes of two lovers on a beach and all the tender, honest mindless talk of hurt and missing you already. I particularly find it hard not to laugh when I think about the waves breaking behind the lovers, because in a hot and sweaty moment of teen lust, I once reclined the seat of my mother’s silver Toyota Corona (what a choice for romance), pulled down the girlfriend’s jeans and went down on her in the little parking area of Point Lobos. Things were getting very wet and squirmy indeed, when I chanced to glance up and realized that a large Golden California tour bus had pulled in right beside us, filled with wide-eyed senior citizens all glued to the window in shock.

  And then there is the missive that the infamous Kane McNally sent me.

  I am well aware of the fact that I blew it between us last night. I’ve realized 2 things because of this. 1.) Until you hurt someone you love you don’t realize just how much you cared. The 2nd is that when something is valuable to you, once you’ve lost it, you find out just how much it meant. Please, please tell me how you feel. Believe me I need to know. With much of my love, Kane.

  Well, Kane, I haven’t yet made up my mind how I feel. (The fact that you later coaxed the gang of Thai boxers into trying to kick my ribs in at Shakey’s Pizza may have something to do with it.) But I’m honestly still trying to cope with that two-part epiphany of yours. Was that one realization or two? And as to my respect and understanding that apparently meant so much, what about the moraine-blue glitter in your eyes and that fine ass, as smooth and round as a clove of garlic? That’s what I was interested in. I wanted to smell your hair and ride the roller coaster in Santa Cruz with you. Peel off that stonewashed denim and explore the tide pool with a thick length of kelp.

  Years later I saw Kane weaving out of a cheap motel room at the bottom of University Avenue in Berkeley, her eyes vacant with smack. Somehow I don’t think the man she’d been with had showed her much respect and understanding. I couldn’t even gloat. Even if it were possible that you still cared I would probably just hurt you again.

  Right you are, Kane. On a still, gray day, a lifetime later, you can still make me sad again, even though I suspect you’re now beyond all hurt yourself.

  SEX AND DEATH

  A bleak, grim, Boeing day, a slow mist falling like reminder notices for overdue books, and there it is, in the mailroom of Padel-ford Hall, home of the University of Washington’s English department . . . Scotch-taped to the pigeonholes, in simple black felt pen: DOES ANYONE HAVE AN ELECTRIC RAZOR FOR RICHARD HUGO?

  It shocks me, because the Richard Hugo in question is a famous American poet, judge of the Yale Younger Poets series and author of a whole shelf of neat books. I leave without checking my mail.

  Hugo is back home in Seattle, having lived in Montana, Iowa and the Isle of Skye, and he’s dying of leukemia. From his hospital bed, perhaps he can look out over the battlements of I-5 and see the ferries to Bainbridge and Vashon Islands, the red cranes and derricks in the shipping yards—or on the other side of the city, traffic strung out over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. I don’t even know what hospital he’s in. Harborview Medical Center? Does it matter? He just needs a shave.

  He’s a local boy originally, from White Center/West Seattle—a former s
tudent of Theodore Roethke at the university, like James Wright. (I remember feeling so proud that my first poems published in The Hudson Review appeared alongside some of Wright’s last.) Roethke’s reputation still lingers around the campus, even though morale in the English department is appalling. The glory days are gone.

  That Richard Hugo would be dying doesn’t surprise me. What bothers me is that pathetic plea for an electric razor. Wouldn’t an awarding-winning man, a writer of his standing, have an electric razor? Couldn’t someone buy one for him? I wondered . . . should I buy one for him? Should I go down to Nordstrom’s and buy a brand new Norelco electric for Richard Hugo? Shiny stainless steel with three floating heads?

  What about his family? His friends? And then I think that we in the English department are his friends, his family. But how can that be? He’s never given a reading in my time there. Never visited a class or wandered the halls, that I know of. Perhaps he’s a prick, leukemia or not. A boozy technical writer of a trout fisherman who just learned how to con Eastern academics, with images of derelict mining town taverns full of ruptured old-timers and abandoned women who smell of dirty diapers.

  And how am I in the English department anyway? I’m only a graduate student teaching rhetoric to pay my way. Why should I feel guilty about Richard Hugo? Just because I was given his best book, What Thou Lovest Well Remains American, for one of the awards I won back in college—and read every word as slowly as I’d sip hot soup?

  I couldn’t understand it then, the gray Seattle sadness of autumn colors running in the rain, and the fact that people die every day, yet the phone bills still arrive. The fact that steaks are still ordered with sautéed mushrooms and none of us can ever really care much about anything beyond our own comfort or suffering—not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t physically forgive ourselves for the selfishness we need to breathe, to fire a synapse, or to use our stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs to raise our glasses in friendship. It’s not in our power to be so free and so dependent on each other. Except in moments of dangerous lucidity.

  If we could but see ourselves—published, awarded, even quietly famous, and still dying a dreadful death in a medium-size city full of gulls and rain, without the simple dignity of a proper supply of toiletries—we’d at least feel the need to read more poetry—or maybe to live more poetically. We’d rush onto a ferry and ride all the way to Bremerton just to watch a cloud of steam rise out of a sawmill, bald eagles unraveling the sky. We’d fling our musk and yearning at a young lover and get ourselves into all sorts of trouble, which we do anyway. And we still might die, lonely, undignified, emaciated, and begging for morphine—but we would’ve lived a little more.

  On the other hand, maybe we wouldn’t have the heart to get up out of our chairs. We’d just sit there, catatonic before the lobster tank. In any case, it’s way too late for Richard Hugo. He died a short time after I broke one of my stiff standing rules and started fooling around with one of my students, an African goddess—not in some net-shrouded four-poster bed by the light of a hurricane lamp, but in the front seat of my then girlfriend’s-and-later-another-wife’s VW Rabbit, in the huge, anonymous parking lot below the campus, often with the rain thundering down on us like lug nuts and bicycle chains, breath clouding the windows (once, her big ass pushed one of my Spanish-language cassettes into the tape recorder when I had the ignition on to run the heater, and while she straddled me, we kept hearing in perfect rhythm, “Por favor! Por favor!”).

  Now I’m sad about Dick Hugo. I think of lines of his, like, “When you leave here, leave in a flashy car and wave goodbye. You are a stranger every day.” Why couldn’t the hospital staff shave him? When I was an orderly, I shaved men. True, it was usually their pubic hair in preparation for surgery, but the point is there were plenty of electric razors around. “You can prune the shrubbery, but leave the standing timber,” one man tried to joke. He was a glum school principal, with a flaccid bratwurst lying sullenly between his legs.

  I’m fairly certain Richard Hugo didn’t have his crotch shaved. It wouldn’t have done any good for his condition. And it wouldn’t have been fair, seeing that no one would shave his face. A famous poet—and how many of those are there? That’s what got me. That’s what’s taken all these years to process. Sure, every once in a while there’s a presidential inauguration and they trot out some vintage champion of the sanctioned word—but outside these dismal ceremonial occasions and the flea market realm of the popular song, poetry has become a sanitized, museumized, dwindling folk art. Not the language of magic, the genesis code of all human striving. A neutered cliché.

  I couldn’t accept that then. In those days, I believed that Walt Whitman spoke to me personally through a battered Sony Walkman. I believed God or the Devil might very well be a brunette who wore red leather Florentine boots in bed and squealed in foul-mouthed conniption when I did her from behind. She had a husky, naughty-sorority-sister laugh and absolutely no idea what to do with herself; I can smell her pussy and her avocado shampoo even now.

  Back then, I believed that everyone, from the Iranian waiter at Broadway Joe’s to the Laotian gardeners beavering around the mansions of Lake Washington, was as impressed as I was by Dylan Thomas’s grave in Westminster Abbey, with the concluding lines from “Fern Hill” laid into the floor: “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  Something in me felt certain that this was more fundamental to our sense of society than sewage management, electricity, antibiotics, frozen vegetables or birth control.

  I’m not saying we should’ve given Richard Hugo a parade. I don’t even know how good a poet he was, really—how important he is now that poetry is about as culturally significant as pottery. The truth is I can’t think about him at all without thinking about those lost days of my own in Seattle. The city where Thomas Wolfe died. Where Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee are buried.

  I see the windows of the Swedish Hospital shining in the late afternoon light. A seaplane landing on Lake Union. Skid row ghosts of old loggers and longshoremen wandering somnolently across Pioneer Square. And me going bowling every morning in the basement of the Hub, the student union building, before teaching my composition class. “Zen bowling” I called it, as I wrapped a blindfold around my head (in a nod to my father’s early swimming lessons), swigging espresso and giggling like a maniac.

  Once, I taught a class in the same room where Roethke had held court—the same room where Richard Hugo and James Wright had sat taking notes. I was so excited my first day, I got to class early and then had to sit on a bench, smoking. I said to myself, “This is an important day. This day will set the tone. I will see visions and signs.”

  Then I looked down on the grass and there was this squirrel. Like the mythic squirrel that could cross whole sections of America jumping from tree to tree, just as I’d wanted to leap from roof to roof. But something was wrong with it. I got so curious I had to get up to take a closer look. I couldn’t believe it. The squirrel, it seems, had found one of those little plastic buckets of tartar sauce they sell in the Hub, and had stuck its head in to eat the remains and gotten the tub firmly stuck on its head. It tried clawing the thing off. It tried rolling on the grass. It was hilarious. It was tragic. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t decide whether to help or not. After all, squirrels do carry bubonic plague. (I was once attacked by a squirrel in Battery Park in New York, and that thought was much on my mind at the time.) Then I glanced around and realized that my interest in the situation had drawn a small crowd. People were starting to think that I’d done something to the squirrel, so I fled to class—the same room where Roethke had first read his poem “The Meadow Mouse.”

  All the other courses I taught were in the Mechanical Engineering building. Why English would be taught in the Mechanical Engineering building I have no idea. It was just another of those surreal disjunctions that I perversely savored. To highlight it, I made sure that if there were any equations on the blackboard,
I always left them there, writing my notes and bullet points around them. It amused me that students would have to confront this collage of mathematical symbols and literary definitions.

  I don’t know what my students made of this—and I honestly didn’t care. What I was trying to cope with were all the hot girls, of which I had many in my classes, and not that much younger in the big scheme of things. (The big scheme!)

  It was all I could do to keep my door open during office hours. Many of the babes were literally bursting out of their blouses—glossy lipsticked, big-haired frat-row bombshells hoping for a B, and arty Goths with garage sale hats and black widow’s gloves—all of them with asses as smooth and curving as Edward Weston’s bell peppers.

  I had lovely Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Samoans, Alaskans, and a whole lot of round, fleshy white girls with straight hair. These latter were mostly locals. They came from Enumclaw and Puyallup, Issaquah, Wenatchee, Toppenish, Cle Elum and Snoqualmie. They wore cottontail underwear, chewed sugarless gum, and took showers twice a day. They didn’t care much about English, really. They cared about not throwing up at parties. They cared about their weight and their wardrobe. They cared about not getting pregnant and one day finding a good job—or at least a job. Many I suspect had toy animals in their rooms. Most stared surreptitiously at my crotch when I lectured, and all could be made to blush and giggle like flicking on a switch.

  I had a hook-nosed Persian princess with a 40D cup giving me flowers and books, and a freckle-breasted hourglass redhead from Moses Lake writing me the most ungrammatical and touching love letters. I’d sometimes masturbate over them and burst into laughter and tears all at once. It was terribly flattering and exhilarating, and my manic passion for them drove me deep into my peers in the graduate program. Torrie, a raving feminist with trick legs and a mood disorder. Jacqueline, who wrote sad/funny stories she’d read to me over souvlaki and beer in Gas Works Park—forever debating whether she should go back to her deadbeat boyfriend in Olympia—and then banging me breathless in her studio apartment in Wallingford, filled with books by Willa Cather and Erica Jong.