by Bruce Meyer
The minister made me take it off when my grandma died. He said: “A funeral is serious and you shouldn’t wear a hat.” I showed him my Stargell stars. She sewed every one of them on. Willie Stargell had about twenty-seven, I think. He got one every time he saved a game for the Pirates. I was only three when they won the World Series but I remember it. I remember the yellow tops and the black pants. My uncle bent down to me where I was sitting in front of the television and said: “You’re a Pirate, aren’t you? Name like Lafitte, you’re a pirate just like those guys.”
Later on when I saw my uncle at my grandma’s funeral he said: “Loyalty lasts a lifetime. I was there the moment you started cheering for the Pirates, and you’re still loyal, but be a good man and take off the hat to remember your grandma.” My head was too full to know what to do. I knew she was dead and that the only stars she’d be sewing on anything were the ones up in the sky where Jesus lives, but Jesus never did any sewing, so I was told when I asked the minister. He just said: “Take off the hat now.”
The Pirates never really won after that. I kept my hat on, and when they were losing I’d turn my hat around. And then they disappeared from Saturday afternoon television in the summer, and the kids down the block told me I was a loser cheering for a losing team. “Pirates do what they want,” I told them, and they chased me home yelling, “loser, loser!” at me the whole time. So, when I got home I stood in the window of my house and took my hat off so my brain power would disintegrate them, and that night one of the boys’ houses caught fire, and the firemen couldn’t get through with the hose because they said the alley between the houses was too narrow, and the boy’s room was up at the back. The street smelled really bad. My brain did that. I know that for sure.
I was really worried when I prayed for my grandma. My hat was off because they said I had to do that for her. I looked down at the stars all over the back of the pill box hat and I thought that heaven must look like that, maybe for her, maybe not because when I asked the minister what heaven looked like he said: “Son, there are mysteries even I cannot answer.” But I know my grandma knows what heaven looks like.
A man came to the house and told me I had to go back to school about a week later, because I didn’t really want to go to school, but instead just sat and stared out the window of my bedroom because I kept thinking about stars and heaven. I asked the teacher to show me some math, and she just laughed at me. I said I had heard about a man in a wheelchair who spoke through a mechanical voice, and he’d said on television that math was the way to heaven or something like that. So, she shoved a piece of paper in front of me. I didn’t know what the squiggles meant and she wouldn’t tell me, so I took my hat off. It was the yellow one with the black peak, the reverse of the one I used to wear because I wanted to do something to tell my grandma I remembered her. And then it all became clear. I knew what the squiggles were trying to say. The teacher looked at me and said: “You’re a bloody little savant, aren’t you!” I didn’t know what a savant was, so I said “no,” and just put my hat back on.
Then someone who said they were a Special Ed person showed up and gave me more math to do. I said I couldn’t understand it until I took my hat off, and she said: “Okay, go ahead.” So I took it off and the squiggles started talking to me.
I kind of have a big brain, but because I keep it under my hat it doesn’t ooze out through my ears like the boys who bullied me one day and told me when they said they were going to hit me over the head until my brains oozed out through my ears. I said: “Don’t hurt my hat.” But they pulled it off and threw it in the ditch beside the road, and the yellow turned dark brown and the lady who was looking after me said: “You don’t want that dirty thing,” and threw it out. That was the hat I wore to remember my grandma. But even when it was gone and I had my other hats on, I could still remember her.
I could see her sitting beside her old radio. It was a big radio that stood on the floor. She was deaf and had the sound up, but it could pull in Pittsburgh on a summer night, she said, and she’d turn the dial and the radio would squeal and sound like sandpaper until we could both hear someone telling us what the Pirates were doing. It was late at night. They were playing somewhere called Three Rivers Stadium, and I said to my grandma: “It must be wet there,” and she giggled then shushed me.
When I closed my eyes I could see the pirates in their ship sailing up and down the river, and the stars above them because they were going to steal something that was important to the other team. She leapt to her feet and said: “He just stole third!” Then there was a pitch and the catcher fumbled the ball and he went all over the place to chase it, and she yelled: “He just stole home!” I miss that old radio. You could hear Pittsburgh. You could hear pirates playing baseball beneath the stars.
I still have most of my hats. That’s good because my brains haven’t gotten any bigger. If they got bigger they’d ooze out my ears and someone would beat me up on the way home, but they haven’t. I miss the yellow one because it kept my brains in really well. Some of the guys at the place where I work call me Pirate. I don’t think they know my real name. They probably don’t care what my real name is. They just say: “Hey, you’re walking around acting strange in that hat again,” and they laugh. I know they aren’t laughing at me. They are sharing a joke. They tell me so.
One of these days they are going to tell me what the joke is. They say the joke has a punch line. I tell them I don’t want any more punches, and they say: “Sure Pirate, keep your hat on.” So I do. They don’t think I have brains and that’s okay.
I play with math at night. I know how the universe began. I have figured it out and even written it down. It isn’t all that complicated. But if I showed someone they’d say: “You stole that from someone,” because everyone thinks that someone in a Pirate hat steals things from other people like their thoughts, or their lives, or their home. I even think I could sum it up in a pretty easy few lines of math. I know my grandma knows it. She’s probably up in heaven stitching more stars on the back of the big hat that is the sky. It is what’s inside the sky that tells the story.
The universe started one night when someone took off their hat because they had such a big idea in their mind it had to get out. But I know if it gets out it would hurt a lot of people. The man who runs the place where I live told me that the truth hurts sometimes. I don’t want to hurt anybody. One of these days, maybe after he is gone, I will take off my hat and think about the man in the wheelchair with the funny voice, and I will share the secret with him.
A Feast of Brief Hopes
I know what was left for smaller men like me.
A feast of brief hopes, a reality of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.
— Czeslaw Milosz, “A Confession”
For his fifty-seventh birthday, Jacob’s wife gave him a scrap book. She told him he could create a record of his life that he could pass on to their children. She had dug a box of newspaper clippings and notices out of the basement. They were from a time when Jacob had been a promising young author.
One Sunday night after his wife had gone to bed and their old lab had curled up beside her, Jacob sat down with a jar of rubber cement at his right hand and opened the book. The blank pages spread before him. The story of his life had already been written. The pages were the confirmation of his failure.
Failure and success are often the same thing. A friend, a wiser, older man, used to tell him during the days of his youth that it would be better if he were a complete catastrophe than a false success.
Jacob had decided to dedicate his life to literature — not just teaching it or explaining it in books, but making it. He wanted to make something real and lasting. As he flipped through the empty pages of the scrap book he realized even false success had eluded him. He was, in his mind, a failed false success.
He stared into the box as if down a well. Somewhere in the murky depths, his own reflection was staring back at him. The clippings we
re yellow with age and had a dank smell. They reminded Jacob of the manuscripts in archives where he had spent so much of his life during his graduate study years. They were wasted years, at least wasted as he saw them. He should have been out chasing beautiful women. He should have been drinking in run-down bars with wise derelicts. He could have been a catastrophe.
Jacob’s meagre collected works languished on library shelves. A chapbook here, a short story in a long-forgotten journal there. Those who knew his work as a poet and short story writer thought of him as a critic, and those who knew him as a critic claimed his writings were too poetic to count for anything.
What haunted Jacob was not the shadow he had become at the age of fifty-seven. It was the ghost of a young man. He saw the face looking at him from the clippings, and he saw it that night peering in the window at him, his hands tapping on the glass of the study. Jacob tried his best to ignore the youth. With the box of clippings open, he could no longer pretend that the shadowy young man could be kept outside.
The youth held up a sheaf of poems and pointed to them. Jacob did not want to answer the ghost, but as Jacob stared at the empty pages, he realized the young man was his own reflection. His past wanted to catch up with him. That night he invited the youth to come in and have a seat.
The young man was cold as he sat in Jacob’s study. Jacob said: “How long have you been out there in the night waiting to be noticed?”
The youth shook his head. “I don’t know. A long time. I’ve been standing out there wanting the answer to my question: Is literature worth it?”
Jacob looked at the lad. “Depends what you mean by worth it. I have a nice house. I’ve put my kids through school. There are men and women out there in the workforce who have jobs because I taught them how to write properly. Maybe that’s literature. I’m not sure I can answer the question let alone have you ask it.”
Jacob poured them both a glass of single-malt from a cut-glass decanter he kept on a small campaign bar. He handed the youth a glass and sat down in his wing chair by the window.
“Nice glass,” the kid remarked.
Jacob said: “Cheers.”
They sat silently together for several minutes. Jacob stared out the study window.
The young man said: “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m thinking about it. Even knowing that such a question exists is heartbreaking in its own way.”
“But you gotta admit, it is a fair question because — ”
Jacob cut him off.
“Damned if I know, kid. Damned if I know,” Jacob said. “If I was your age, yes sirree, I’d be up and at’em. I’d be ready to take on those beasts. Not just the guys beside me in the literary stewing pot, but the dragons. I wouldn’t be hanging around some old fart wondering if literature was worth it or not. I’d be out doing it, doing it anyways. I’d die trying. Succeed or die trying, I used to tell myself.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?” Jacob asked.
“Did you succeed or did you die?”
“Why do you care what happened? In fact, why did you show up at all?”
The youth looked at the floor, then at the bookshelves lined with volumes of red and blue and orange-spined novels, all neatly arranged like soldiers standing guard over a mausoleum. “Because I’m what you used to be. I’m what you used to be before you started wrestling with angels.”
“Dragons,” Jacob retorted.
“Whatever. That’s our stock response, isn’t it? Whatever. We should have that on our headstone because it is the motto of someone who lost the ability to dream. Do you remember that professor we had during our undergraduate days? She was a brilliant poet. She won all kinds of awards. Then she ran away from it. We asked her why she wasn’t writing. Remember what she said? ‘I lost my capacity to dream.’ She started watching horror films as a surrogate for her inability to dream, but the sad thing is she didn’t write them. She just watched them. You’re watching your own kind of films now.”
Jacob glared. “And your point is?”
“You’ve already figured out I’m your shadow. I read it in your face. I’m the boy from the bottom of the box of clippings on your desk, a look-a-like from a dark lagoon. I’m waiting there, beneath everything. You imagined me as you stared at the blank pages of your scrap book. You thought of me in the silence of all those nights when you’ve sat here staring at papers you were grading, and trying to make trees out of the sawdust of the English language. I’m that itch you felt every time you read the Saturday book review section and thought: ‘I could have written that book.’ But you didn’t. You still could, and, well, here I am. I mean, don’t be angry at me. Be angry at the distractions.”
“So, if you’re from the past, tell me my past, where did I go wrong?”
“You gave up on yourself. You weren’t prepared to starve. You had talent. What you didn’t have was the guts to let the talent say what you felt. Instead you did the right thing all the time. You said the right thing all the time. Writers, real writers, the Joyces of the world who live on bread and shit in asshole places where a person waits to show up and learn a language they already know — that’s what you weren’t prepared to do. That’s the patience of a soul a writer must have. You probably still have it, but you won’t let go to let the truth of your heart and your imagination rip into the world.”
“But isn’t it all the same thing?” Jacob pleaded.
“Hell if I know. I haven’t been there yet. Remember? I am you before you happened to you, if you get my point.”
Jacob looked at the young man and wanted to admire him, but instead said: “Leave. Leave now. Get the fuck out of my house.”
“So, you’re not going to answer my question tonight?”
“Not now, kid. I’m tired, and I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”
“Will you answer it?”
“Maybe. I just don’t know. Can a person answer that?”
The kid stood up, drained his glass, adjusted the belt of his jeans and nodded. On his way out the door he turned to Jacob. “You know, I’ll have to come back. You need me to come back. I’m all you’ve got if you want a second chance.” The youth stopped on the front porch and again turned to Jacob. “Is literature worth it?”
Jacob closed the door as the kid vanished into the night. He poured himself another whisky, turned off the light on his desk, and sat in the darkened room. The light from the street lamp made his leather armchair appear as if it was a dark, winged angel that had wrapped its arms around him. Slowly, under his breath, a sob came up in his throat, and then another, and another, until his eyes were full of tears, and he had nothing to say to himself.
The next morning, after his wife had put out breakfast for him and gone to catch the train into town for a luncheon, Jacob went back to the carton. He’d had a strange dream. He was on a purple lake, rowing in a small boat. Even the sky was purple and the birds were purple. And he heard a sing-song voice chanting with a deep Irish accent: “I must lie down where all ladders start.” His wife had snored at that point, or perhaps the dog had jumped off the bed. Jacob woke, and stared at the darkness. He heard his heart beating louder and louder, and then closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
He stared into the carton. Once upon a time, there had been a young man who loved words. He loved words so much his mother told him he spoke in his sleep. It was gibberish. It never meant anything, but random words, new and polysyllabic, would roll from his mouth. They were the first thing he tasted when he woke in the morning and the last known thought he could remember when he left the world each night. When he set words to paper or clacked them into being on his father’s old portable Underwood, he’d found the first real love of his life. Words were the window, not just to the soul, but to the world. And he could look from that window and see each day, each small human action not as something to be observed from afar with a cold, scientific eye, but up close, so close that he was a part of every action, every
thought and breath. Literature was life. His life was literature. They hadn’t told him that at grad school. He’d had to find that out for himself. He thought about how he would answer the kid’s question.
Jacob came from a family that loved to tell stories. Sunday dinners around the family table were gatherings where elderly aunts and uncles would not merely recount some event or vignette from the past, but would mimic the voices of the characters. Jacob knew the sound of voices that had been dead a hundred years from the way they were resurrected in stories.
His Grade One teacher asked him to write a story for parents’ night to put up on the bulletin board. The story was to be glued to a piece of construction paper. Jacob smuggled home a sheaf of lined paper and wrote story after story during a long holiday weekend. He woke in the middle of the night to write more and more. He had never felt so alive. He told stories about things he and his friends had done, things they imagined and told each other. His mother found him exhausted with his head on the small desk in the corner of his bedroom. He had written so many stories he had run out of construction paper. When he arrived at school on the Monday morning the teacher called him up in front of the class.
“Jacob! I told you to write only one story, and you could only paste it to one side of each sheet of construction paper.” With that she began tearing every other page off the coloured sheets. Jacob recoiled in horror.
Tears rolled down his cheeks and then he became angry. “You freaking bitch!” he hollered. “You evil, evil bitch!” The teacher walked over to him, slapped him across this face, and sent him to the office where the principal asked him to present his hands. He was strapped twenty times on each hand so that his palms swelled up and his fingers lost their feeling. That night Jacob wrote more stories, better stories. By the next week he had a book. He dared not tell any of his friends or even his parents about his book. They would punish him for it.
When Jacob became a teenager, writing was a sin he loved. He went off to college and sat in the back row of his History classes, pretending to be a diligent note-taker, but instead he was writing poems and stories. A goodlooking girl came in late and sat beside him in the only available seat. His free hand resting on the notebook was cupped around an invisible cylinder he appeared to be holding. She put her finger down the cylinder and stirred it as if it was a cup of coffee. That was how he met his wife.
