“Hold the phone to my ear,” she said. “Be a help for once.”
I rolled my eyes—those years, this was more or less my only form of communication—and she said, “Hello? Yes? Yes. Yes?” And then, “Oh. Oh no. Oh God, no.” Tears down her face, and if there was any doubt it was over now, I knew, I knew, I knew it was you. My mother clutched the phone, said, “Get a pen.” A grave calm had come over her—the calm that settles on us when we’re burdened with a gruesome task—and she said a few more things, wrote with slippery fingers an address, a number, another number, another. Then she set about the business of calling Pop, calling her sisters. It seemed she was on the phone for days after your death. She was, at that time, married to Walter Adams and therefore not really speaking to her sisters (“Black!” they whispered. “Black, Black, Black!” And from their mouths the word seemed to lose its meaning, was less a word than a sound, an expletive). She was six months pregnant with Shirley, the daughter she would lose. Shirley was a kicker. The day after you died, while my mother was talking on the phone to someone about your death, about the procurement of your body and possessions, I felt Shirley kick. Typically my mother wasn’t the kind of pregnant woman who endured the inquisitive touch, but that day she did, and I walked around for the rest of the day remembering it, quick and soft, I walked around thinking, something was alive in there. Alive.
For some time we didn’t know what had happened, we only knew you were dead. Later we learned the details, how a cleaning lady found you dead in that Brooklyn hotel room, facedown and overdosed, the bed pissed and puked on. You were entirely alone. There was no trace of Mary and Kim. Whether they left you or you left them no one could say. All at once we felt the shame which should have been with us for years, the shame of having fallen out of touch with a loved one, the shame of having turned away from someone who needed us, someone who was alone, a brother.
For a time my mother and Nana and Pop and the aunts made efforts to find your girlfriend and daughter—Mary and her mother Kim! They walked around your Brooklyn neighborhood with pictures, taped up flyers, but nothing came of it. Malinda heard from our cousins that Pop had hired a private detective, and I imagined a man in a trench coat wandering the streets of New York, trailing the smallest leads, until he found your girls. But all efforts failed, and eventually we fell back on the prevailing wisdom of all searching people, eventually we decided that if we stood still, if we stayed where we were, your girls would come to us.
For my part I was preoccupied with the room in which you died. Often in dreams I found myself in the lobby of that hotel, and it was a grand place, the kind of place in which Henry James might have lived, with oak-paneled walls and birch logs crackling in a marble fireplace, with satin-upholstered armchairs. In my dreams the hotel lobby had a black-and-white-tiled floor whose patterns shifted beneath my feet, forming whales and clocks and chess pieces, coming together and breaking apart, kaleidoscopic. A fine place indeed. But when I spoke to the lobby attendant—an old man encased behind glass, glowing yellow in his booth, much like a toll collector—he couldn’t hear me. “I want to see a room,” I said. “I want to see the room where Mike Beaudry died.” But the attendant only shrugged, shook his head.
I wanted to see you again. The thought of you alone in that room was something I couldn’t bear to think about, and yet something I couldn’t help but think about. I think of it still. I see a Cutlass or a red-haired girl, the doorbell or phone rings at a strange hour, I hear a song on the radio (He blew his mind out in a car… ) and it all comes back, all of this in a rush, and how I wish I had been there in Brooklyn with you, calling your name from across the street, how I wish you hadn’t been alone. Even now, across this distance between us, I want to call out to you, how desperately I want to call your name and have you answer. Just once I want to hear you say: Shut up, fool.
Elegy for
Elwood LePoer
(1971–1990)
Elwood LePoer, your head was a brick, a block, a lollipop. You were dumb as a stick, a sock, a bag of rocks. Your lot in life, it seemed, was to go through it unawares, your folly a perpetual amusement to others. In our dead-end school you were the village idiot, and we stood around talking about you, your latest foibles, like the weather. “LePoer, you wouldn’t believe what he just did. Walked right into a glass door, fell over backwards, that dumb shit.” We called you everything we could think to call you. Dipshit, Shithead, Shitheel, Shit-for-Brains. We piled on every last cliché. You were a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a pancake shy of a stack, a board short of a porch. You weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer or the brightest bulb on the tree. Your screws were loose, one of your boots was stuck in the mud, your elevator didn’t go all the way to the top, you were all foam and no beer, you had lost your marbles, your lights were on but you weren’t home. In ironic moods we called you Professor, Einstein, Sherlock, Your Excellency. What a knuckledragger you were, what a mouthbreather, you didn’t know shit from Shinola, your head from your ass, what you didn’t know could fill a book.
A number of unfortunate events marked you early, made your reputation, and for better or worse you enjoyed throughout your life a certain amount of local fame. As a toddler you once ran naked through the neighborhood, all the way down to the shops on Plantation Street, and stood smiling on the street corner while a stray dog licked your balls. Cars honked as they passed. People came pouring out of the shops and stood around you laughing, someone even taking your picture, before some kind soul, rare among us, picked you up and carried you home. In grade school you fell into the habit of trapping and torturing small animals, singeing their fur with lighters, something you bragged about at school (You shoulda seen this rabbit, man, it went fucking crazy!) until one day a cat got the better of you and scratched your face, a wound so deep it never completely healed, and for the rest of your life you went around with three vertical lines running down your left cheek. Some years later, on a dare, you went through the ice over Lake Quinsigamond (someone’s bright idea: Hey, you think that ice can hold anyone?) and the group of kids who had put you up to it stood on the shore for a long, awful moment, some of them screaming and clutching one another, others frozen in panic, until you fought your way back to the surface and scrambled and sloshed back to shore and everyone started laughing. There was something funny about it, cruelly funny, your whole life summed up in the way you stood, shivering and bedraggled, chattering, shoeless (you had kicked off your boots and they were waterlogged somewhere at the bottom of the lake, where they remain today…), saying over and over again, Oh man, Oh man, I swear to God there was something under there, some big black fucking monster like an octopus or something. I swear to God it come up to me and it touched me on the shoulder with one of its legs, and that’s when I was like, Holy shit, man, I gotta get outta here, Oh man! In the joke version of this event, as people liked to tell it, you were rushed to the hospital for a battery of tests to determine if there had been any damage to your brain, but the results were inconclusive. As a punch line the doctor threw up his hands and said: “It’s impossible to tell!”
Elwood LePoer. All your life your name was synonymous with a kind of humiliating, pathetic stupidity. You were a walking joke, a sitting duck, a fish in a barrel. That you eventually died in an accident came as no surprise to anyone. When word of your death went through the neighborhood people received it as if a letter they’d been expecting in the mail. The only wonder was, they said, it hadn’t come sooner.
The first time I ever saw you was the first day of third grade. My mother had just left her second husband and moved my sister and me across town to a new apartment, a new school. On the playground, before the day started, Malinda and I sat together cross-legged on the ground, communicating to one another without even needing to speak that this place, this school, was worse than our old school, the grass on the playground burned out and spotty, its swing set without swings, the school itself—a block of brick with grated windows and a flat roof—suggest
ing a prison more than anything else. Younger kids were running around playing games we were no longer interested in playing, though what we were interested in doing we couldn’t say. We were eight and nine and we were defined, that year, mostly by what we had once done but didn’t do anymore. We spent much of our time sitting around taking in the bleak landscape of our new lives as though watching a commercial, waiting for it to end and for the real show, what we hoped would be our real lives, to begin. At our new school yours was the first name we learned. Everyone kept saying it all around the playground—Elwood LePoer, Elwood LePoer—and we wondered who you were. “Elwood LePoer,” we heard someone say, “is wearing a Playboy T-shirt!” And you were pointed out, a stocky kid with blond hair that hung in your face. You stood throwing a rubber ball against the windowless wall of the gymnasium, hurling it as though a grenade, your square jaw thrust out. The ball shot up and sprang back to you over and over, a pattern that seemed to enrage you—every time you threw it, it was with increased force, as though you expected to drive the ball through brick. I kept trying to get a look at your T-shirt. I had some vague notion of what “Playboy” meant—I had heard the word before and knew it had something to do with women—but when I finally got a clear view of your shirt there was something disappointing about it, just a white shirt with the black silhouette of a tuxedoed bunny printed on it. Nevertheless by lunchtime you had been summoned to the school nurse, who kept extra clothes in her office, and made to change into a striped shirt such as little boys were supposed to wear.
In the following years I saw you here and there, around school and the neighborhood. You were always alone. One of the more memorable aspects of your personality was that despite your solitude you couldn’t stop talking, some feature in your brain demanding you dictate whatever you were doing as you did it, whatever you were thinking about as you thought it. Often what you were thinking about was what you had recently watched on television, or heard on the radio. Your head was full of jingles, slogans, mottoes, theme songs, indeed you were a marketing man’s fantasy, you couldn’t get those songs out of your head: Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, you sang, that is what I’d really like to be.
Once you caught the attention of our principal, a WWII purple heart who ran the school much like a basic training camp and who was, that year, embattled in a lawsuit involving a student and allegations of physical violence. His name was Mr. K., and indeed he carried about him all the mystery and absurdity of a Kafka character. Silver-haired, acne-scarred, with the angry profile of a bald eagle, he walked the halls in shining suits and polished, clacking shoes, commanding silence in every room he entered. Often he would walk into the cafeteria and call a handful of kids away from their lunches, line them up on the stage at the front of the room, where he drilled them on the basics of American education—the states and their capitals, the dates of wars and treaties and ratifications, the terms of presidents. Most of us performed badly, stuttering and stammering, at which point Mr. K. liked to give a speech, the same one every time, about the statistical likelihood of our pending worthlessness. “In this city,” he’d say, “the high school graduation rate is well below the national average. One out of four of you won’t make it through. And out of the pathetic rest of you who graduate, only half of those will go to college, and only half of those will finish. Look around your tables,” he’d say, “and ask yourself if you’re going to make it that far.” He’d stop for a moment to let us make our calculations. And when we looked around it was already clear who was who, the handful of kids taking all of this seriously, sitting at attention wondering, Is it me? Could it be me, could it? while the rest of us had already resigned, thrown in the towel, for kids like us there was no point even wondering. “The answer is,” Mr. K. would say, “probably not.” He’d pace up and down through the rows of tables, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m standing here today on behalf of that small handful of you,” he’d say, “who are willing to work hard to become worthy of the resources spent on your upbringing. As for the rest of you,” he’d say, “I hope you enjoy your lives shoveling other people’s shit.”
When your turn came for questioning, Mr. K. asked you to name the countries involved in the war of 1812. I dunno, you said, and Mr. K. told you to take your time, to think about it for a moment. I dunno, you said again, and Mr. K. said to at least take a guess.
Massachusetts, you said, and Boston, and Mr. K. stopped in his tracks. He stood for a long moment regarding you, as if seeing you for the first time. The room was silent. “Step forward,” he finally said, and you stepped out of line to the front of the stage, hesitant, sensing that you were in some kind of trouble but unsure of the cause. “Look at those trousers,” said Mr. K. You looked down at your corduroys, which were covered in mud. “I want you to tell me what happened to your trousers.”
You shrugged.
“Did you roll around in mud this morning?” he said. “Are you some kind of pig?”
You stood looking at your feet, seeming to make some kind of calculation. No, sir, you said.
“Because you call to mind,” he said, “with trousers like that, a pig.” Here a ripple of laughter went through the room. “You think you can track mud through my hallways?”
No, sir.
“What does your mother say,” he asked, “when you come home with your trousers looking like that?”
Nothing.
“Nothing?” Mr. K. said, with the thrill of a man looking for a fight.
It dries up, you said, and falls off on the way home. She doesn’t notice.
“It dries up,” said Mr. K., in his rage reduced to repeating whatever it was that you said, “and falls off.” He stood staring at you, smiling, his face gone purple, a man battling to contain himself. “And your mother doesn’t notice.” Then without another word he turned and walked out of the room, through the swinging doors, the silence holding until we could no longer hear his footsteps, and then even beyond that. When we returned to our lunches it was with the grim silence of motorists who had just passed an accident.
What we knew, and Mr. K. didn’t, was that your mother wasn’t the type to concern herself with the condition of your pants, or her kitchen floor, or anything else relating to the duties and comforts of homemaking. Everyone knew your mother. Her name was Irma and she was older than most mothers, with a beehive hairdo and a face as craggy and oblong as a potato. She worked as a cashier at the am/pm and after school kids would go there for candy and soda, they’d empty their pockets on the counter, pushing their pennies and nickels toward her. Aside from her duties at the register your mother was responsible for dispensing slush drinks from a tank that, full of unnaturally bright fluid, pulsed behind her like a bodily organ, and there was a kind of thrill amongst kids our age, watching her fetch their drinks when their own mothers had long since stopped doing anything of the kind. Your mother’s fingers were twisted, arthritic, the knuckles swollen to the size of gumballs, and it hurt to watch her fit the plastic caps onto the drinks and scrape change from the register drawer, in fact it was painful just to stand in her presence. She never, as far as I knew, spoke a single word to a customer or looked anyone in the eye, preferring instead to stare off at one of the convex mirrors positioned in the corners of the store’s ceilings, all the traffic of the store’s life, its drudgery and its petty crimes, encircled there and reflected back to her in miniature. Your mother was known to be religious, a Catholic who attended daily mass. Sometimes while she sat at the register she fingered a rosary. People said she was brain-damaged, that your father had beaten her once to the brink of death and that ever since she had been more or less disembodied, a rumor that was easy to believe. Often she forgot to remove the paper napkin which she had tucked in the collar of her shirt during her lunch break, and she sat all afternoon at the register as though a child seated in a high chair, draped with a bib, some stain or other spotted on it. Given all of this—and also given the fact that your father was an infamous drunk, known for pass
ing out on the floors of bars—your family was thought to be cursed. It was set aside as exceptional and delinquent, which, in a neighborhood like ours, full of drunks and derelicts and deadbeats, where the margins of acceptable behavior had been drawn with a generous hand, was saying something.
The following year a plague of lice went through the school and we were all made to line up in the gymnasium for head inspections. You and I were among the small group brought to the nurse’s office and kept there, largely unsupervised, for the rest of the day. You spent your time going through the nurse’s supplies—pulling apart cotton balls and splitting tongue depressors in half, sticking bandages all over your arms and legs. When the nurse (a child-sized woman named Mrs. Chang who wore to school, every day, a black-belt karate uniform) finally returned to her office she was carrying a set of electric shears. She offered to shave your head and you shrugged, as you always did when someone asked you a question. She turned on the clippers and guided them over your head with the quick, indifferent strokes of a military barber. Your hair fell to the floor in clumps. When Mrs. Chang was finished you sat with your head in your hands, rubbing your palms across your skull, crying.
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 4
