by Mark Slouka
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I started to walk away, then turned. “Why do you do that?” I said, my voice rising into an accusing whine. “Why do you do that? Why do you—”
“Don’t you dare come into this house and—”
“Why do you—”
“Don’t you dare. Just because some little shiksa didn’t smile at you—”
“Why don’t you like me?”
She stared at me like I’d cursed her to her face. Like she’d always expected it of me. In an instant, disbelief turned to rage and we were both yelling.
“You would raise your voice—?”
“I didn’t, I didn’t.”
“Change your tone.”
“You change your tone—why do you hate me?” I was sobbing now, furious. I remember feeling sick—like I was fighting myself somehow.
It got ridiculous. She grabbed me by the collar of my brown jacket and dragged me to the kitchen sink. I didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t know what to do—you can’t hit your own mother. I flapped around like a shirt on a clothesline, trying to get free but not too hard because I was worried she would slip and fall. “Change your tone, change your tone,” she kept screaming, and scared as I was I kept yelling, “You change your tone,” and, absurdly, “there is no girl.”
It was a big, new bar, and it wouldn’t go in. She tried it the other way but it wouldn’t go either, just hit against my teeth. “This is what we raised,” she kept hissing, “this is what we raised,” and grabbing the bar she turned it in her hand a few times, then jammed her lathered hand in my mouth and turned it like she was rinsing out a small cup. I gagged and wrenched free.
Farce. Seen from the outside—and time is outside, I guess—these things are always a farce. I can picture myself standing there in the kitchen but what I see is Dopey after he swallows the soap in Snow White: that same surprised look—hick! hick!—then bubbles popping out, one after the other, and even though I’m sobbing, frothing at the mouth, yelling “I wish I was him, I wish I was him,” even though I’m humiliated, stripped, the shame doesn’t take away from the farce, it multiplies it.
Hick! Hick! She’s burst into tears, her face in her hands.
Hick! I’m staggering around the kitchen, my shirt soaked, my jacket half pulled off. “I wish I was him,” I’m screaming—melodramatic, self-indulgent, beside myself. “You blame …” I start to gag, cough, “You … you …”
And she looks up at me, weeping, wrecked, a bizarre calm like clear sky coming over her face, and says, “Well, you were there, weren’t you?” and goes up the stairs.
I TRIED to make it up to her afterward, to say I was sorry. We ate dinner that night like nothing had happened, the three of us at the table, the little clinks of silverware—“You want more brussel sprouts? No? Potatoes?” She seemed energized somehow, controlled, sitting straight-backed and stiff, holding her silverware just so, even answering something I said while looking right through me, like some contessa who, having just received some terrible news, is determined not to let the company see her suffer.
We never said much after that. There was no going back, though thinking about it, I’m not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there’s nothing more stupid than fighting something that isn’t—a lack of love, a lack of respect. It’s like fighting an empty room. Nobody understands what you’re doing. You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there’s nobody there—just this feeling that there’s something holding you back, that there’s a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you’re not allowed to go there.
IT SOUNDS TOO NEAT, I know: Literature Teaches a Lesson. Still.
I was in the library one day during free period when I decided to find a book I remembered liking as a kid. I never found it. I was going through the K’s when I found Kafka. I’d heard of him. The book was called The Trial and it had weird little drawings like the kind a messed-up kid might make of stick figures trapped inside fences or frames or doors. The fences or windows overlapped and crossed. I sat down at one of the round tables—and I didn’t get up again. I skipped gym, then lunch, then math. Nobody asked.
I didn’t understand most of it. Toward the end a priest tells the story of a man who goes to the law. To get to the law he has to go through a door but there’s a guard in front of it—he’s not allowed in. He tries everything—he can’t get by. Even if he did, he’s told, he’d just find another door, and another guard, and another. So he waits. He waits for years. He grows old. Finally, dying, he calls the guard over and asks him why, if the law is supposed to be meant for everybody, he wasn’t allowed in. And the guard, watching the man’s eyes closing, leans over and yells: “Because this door was meant for you. I am now going to shut it.”
Kafka didn’t save me. He just told me I was drowning. This life, this love—was meant for you. I am now going to shut it.
Which was something.
AND SO, YES, maybe I ran to other things, shallow things. Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn’t seem so dangerous at the time.
In the spring of 1968, Ray and Frank and I had become friends. I couldn’t honestly say how it happened except that it happened. Frank was funny, confused, a Boy Scout with a temper. His parents had come from Poland. Big arms, thick neck, he had a smile like a little kid’s if the joke was dumb enough. He could do voices—Yosemite Sam and Nixon, Mr. Farber and Mr. Falvo and the Smothers Brothers—and the way he’d laugh, like he didn’t want to, like there was somebody inside of him laughing and he couldn’t keep him down, could make you laugh just watching him, and he’d pile it on till the two of you were bent over like drunks, holding your knees, then stop—and he’d get this look like somebody buttoning the top button of his shirt, and say he had to go.
The better you know somebody, the less you can say about them. I knew Frank. He liked Perry Como in 1968 and didn’t care who knew it. His pimples bothered him, and sometimes he’d come to school with Band-Aids over the bad ones. He could annoy the shit out of you—one of those Christian squares who get all red in the face and dig in over nothing—but he wasn’t mean. I think he had a hard time with things because he believed the world was a certain way—because he’d been told it was—and it wasn’t, and on bad days he’d drive that javelin like there was somebody standing on the other end of the field with a target on his chest. I never figured out who. I had some ideas.
I used to like to watch him, the five or six big, bouncy steps that started the run-up, the spear already cocked behind the head, then the slight turn to the right, the legs cross-stepping, faster now, the body beginning to lean back while still moving forward, bending like a bow, then snapping forward into the release, the body balancing, the eyes following the flight of the spear, off to its work—I thought it was beautiful.
So there was no one moment. We just became friends and because of that probably fucked with and fought with each other more than we had to. I figured out early on that girls and God were an issue; if I found him reading the Bible at lunch—he’d started helping out at church the fall of sophomore year, teaching Sunday school—I’d let him alone.
IT WAS A GOOD SPRING. I’d come home late now as the days grew longer, my head full of split times, my spikes in my bag. I’d learned the code: You didn’t showboat, you didn’t put daylight between yourself and the group. You could set the pace, no more, and hope coach would notice. In two weeks I was in the middle of my group; in three I was leading it. It meant nothing—the slowest guy in the next group could have run me down in his sleep—but the day I got the nod and joined the fourth I felt like I’d done something. Frank came over and slapped me on the back. Ray was sitting in the stands, watching.
It had taken us a few months. We’d started slowly, a few words, a nod in the hall, a joke or two at lunch; over time it built into something. I was fasc
inated by him. I wasn’t alone. With his long coat and his dancing brawler’s walk and his black hair which he was always raking back with his fingers, he drew people like something dangerous, unstable—an actual cheetah slouching down Main. He was crazy, people said, actually crazy. He’d walk through Harlem at night. He’d been sleeping with some woman from Carmel whose husband was in the mob. Jumped by three grown men, he’d fought back with a PVC pipe and a garbage can lid, put one in the hospital and walked away. The only reason he was still alive was that he wouldn’t hesitate and knew how to improvise.
I couldn’t figure out why he was talking to me, why he sat at our table, why he asked me what I was reading. It had to be some kind of joke. I didn’t say much, waiting for the knife, expecting it.
It never came. Ray never fucked with me, even when I deserved it. We talked about everything. He’d ask me things and I’d tell him what I knew or what I’d read and he’d listen like it was something he needed to hear. His voice was different when he was with me, with us—he was different. When we ran into others we understood we had to step back from the ring, let him be who he had to be, and sometimes, watching him walk into the arena, smiling, coiled, graceful as a ballet dancer who’d explode at a touch and gently lay your head down on the pavement, there’d be this sense of wonder that this other Ray, who moved like this, who everybody else knew, was him, too.
I remember the day he asked me about Wilfred Owen. He’d been sitting with us a few weeks by then, had dropped the act, pretty much. It had become a routine with us: He’d walk over, sit down, eat. Now and then he’d ask me something about what I was reading—weirdly serious, like he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses. I could see the other kids looking over at us, trying to figure out what he was doing. He ignored them. It wasn’t all at once. Sometimes you’d still see him break off a piece of hamburger bun and dip it in whatever he was drinking—or we were drinking—mold it into a ball of dough, wait, pretending to be interested in whatever we were talking about—“Really? You sure?”—then shoot it with a short, sharp flick into someone’s cup or tray or hair without changing his expression or missing a beat—“I don’t know, sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” even as the screaming started—but more and more he seemed to actually want to hear about things.
I told him. Owen was a poet, I said. He’d been fucked up in the war, in France.
“Which war?” he said.
“First.”
“Pretty sure there was one before that.”
“No, like first—”
“Yeah, no, I know. Jesus.” He took a bite, pointed to the book with his chin. “So what’s that one called?”
“You mean this one?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, that one—the one you’re reading.”
“It’s in Latin.”
“What—you mean the whole poem?”
“No, just the title. And one line. At the end. ”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. They used to do that.” I went back to reading.
“So—what’s it called?”
“Really?”
“I wanna know.”
“Dulce et decorum est.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
I told him.
“No shit. You talk Latin?”
“It says here at the bottom.”
He nodded. “So how’s it go?”
“What, you want …?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m not going to—”
“C’mon.”
“No, fuck you, I’m not—”
“C’mon, read the fuckin’ poem.”
“I’m not going to—”
“C’mon, quit dickin’ around an’ read the fuckin’ poem.” He looked at Frank. “Tell him to read the goddamn poem.”
Frank shrugged.
“C’mon, you pussy, it’s not like you have to get on the table and recite it for Christ’s sake.” He was tapping his plastic fork on the edge of the tray, enjoying himself.
So I read the fuckin’ poem. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / knock-kneed, coughing like hags …” I could hear my own voice. I felt embarrassed, nervous—I kept expecting to see him break off a piece of bun. “Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. / In all my dreams, before my helpless sight …” Halfway through he stopped tapping. I finished up, hurrying through: “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”
I closed the book quickly. When I looked up I was surprised to see something in his face I hadn’t seen before. A kind of quiet. He was leaning forward, his head slightly to the side as though listening for something. He seemed confused, troubled. I thought it was a joke.
“What’s it mean again—that last part?” he said.
I told him.
He was quiet for a few seconds. “So what happened to this guy—what’s his name?”
“Owen.”
“Yeah.”
And I told him about the mustard gas, the shell shock, how he’d been hiding in a trench next to the bodies of his friends when the shell came, how he’d been evacuated, recovered in London—the whole thing.
“Lemme see.” He waved the book over. I found the page, handed it over, watched him read it again. He handed it back. “That’s fucked up.” He turned to Frank. “That was fucked up, right?”
Frank nodded. “That was good.”
“Right?” He turned back to me. “So, what happened to the guy?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, like, after the war or whatever.”
“He died in the war.”
“You just said he made it.”
“Hey, Cap,” somebody yelled from the table behind him. He ignored them.
“You just said he made it, that they got him and fixed him up and all.”
“He did,” I said. “He went back.”
“Whaddya mean he went back?”
“He went back. Reenlisted.”
“Hey, Cap,” the guy yelled again.
“You mean like volunteered? After all this shit?”
“Hey, Cappicciano.” It was the same guy. Some girls laughed at the table.
“I mean, I don’t get that. Why the fuck would he do that?”
“Maybe he did it for his country,” Frank said.
Ray turned to look at him. “What’re you, stupid?”
“I’m just—”
“Didn’t you just hear him read all that Latin shit about how sweet it is to die for your country and all that crap?”
“OK, fine.”
“Jesus.”
“I don’t know why—maybe he just had to go back,” I said.
“What for? He knew how fucked up it was. And it fuckin’ killed him?” He shook his head. “Jesus.”
“Maybe he couldn’t stay away. Maybe—”
“Hey, Cappicciano! Jackie says you—”
It happened so fast it was almost like I didn’t see it, didn’t see him scoop the burger from my tray, turn, and with one vicious, beautiful move explode it on the other’s chest like a mortar—it suddenly just was, a quick burst of meat and catsup like something opening and then the guy was being held back by two friends and people were screaming and the monitor was blowing his whistle and Ray, his coat flapping behind him, was already at the cafeteria doors, smashing them with a double crack against the walls like gunshots—gone.
WE STARTED HANGING OUT together, mostly just the two of us. Frank brought Jesus with him and even though he kept him to himself it made things different. For some reason when Frank was around, even though we were friends, I’d always end up pretending to be tougher than I was, to know more than I did, like I wanted to separate m
yself from him, to make clear I wasn’t like him. When it was just me and Ray it was easier. After the first few weeks I stopped flinching, stopped worrying I’d say something stupid that would show him who I was and not who he thought I was.
That spring I’d come by the house after practice sometime and he’d be watching TV with little Gene and we’d sit on the floor with our backs against the couch talking and looking through the stacks of dirty magazines his dad kept in the utility room. He’d bring in an armful and dump them on the carpet between us. One had a story called “Cleopatra and the Snake” with pictures of some woman dressed up in an Egyptian headdress squeezing her breasts together over a boa constrictor.
I liked being there, liked sprawling on that dirty carpet with the cigarette butts and the paper bags and the still-wet towels. Half-empty but cluttered, it felt like a house in the middle of moving out, when the couch is still there so you have a place to sit but the shelves are gone and the pictures are gone and the place where the loveseat used to be is just a shadow on the wall. It’s hard to explain. There was something free about the pile of dust and butts that somebody had swept into a corner. The coffee table was covered with bottle rings like the Olympics gone crazy. A broken table lamp lay on its side by the wall, the wire torn from the rim of the shade.
Early on I’d keep thinking about Ray’s dad coming home from his shift at Sing Sing and finding us there. We’d be sprawled out on the floor against the couch, leafing through Playboy and Swank and I’d swear I heard his car in the driveway.
“Don’t worry about my old man,” he’d say—“he wouldn’t give a shit anyway.”
“Sounds pretty cool.”
“Think so?” He handed me a magazine. “Check this one out.” He went into the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
Behind me I could hear little Gene breathing. He sounded plugged up, his face stuck in the crease of the couch. A can cracked and hissed in the kitchen, then another. I reached behind me and rolled Gene over and wiped his nose with my fingers.
“So what’s it like being smart?” Ray said from the kitchen.
