Gabriel
Page 4
But it was impossible for Mallarmé
Though year after year
He labored at a tomb for Anatole
Which he could never complete
An immortality made human
An offering to the absolute
With his son
Transposed by death
Mallarmé was left with fragments
He came by my office for cash
Every Monday Wednesday and Friday
I was good for thirty bucks a pop sometimes more
You only drop by when you want your money
I said but he protested it’s not like that Dad
He didn’t like to think of himself that way
I was usually working at the computer
When he strolled in
Dad you’re the sort of person
Who needs to work a lot
I’m the sort of person
Who needs a lot of down time
He wasn’t doing anything all day long
He just slept in and hung with his friends
And so I tried to convince him to volunteer
For an organization he was contemptuous
He thought volunteering was for stooges
He didn’t like charities either
He told his friends he had once
Attended a six-month training program
In audio production at EWF
He had some skills using Pro Tools
And Reason software he had major skills
In DJing and music production
He told my friends he was going back to school
To finish up his degree in marketing
At the University of Massachusetts
He just needed a few more credits
To collect his diploma
Maybe next summer
From the playbook
Say you get caught lifting eighty bucks
Out of your dad’s wallet or your mom’s purse
Simply deny it deny everything
Never take responsibility for what
You could not possibly have done
The strategy for getting what you want
When you want it is simple
Never take no for an answer
Pump up the volume
Remember that no is not an option
It is just a temporary setback
He wanted us to buy him a bicycle
So he could deliver specialty donuts and ice cream
Concoctions at night in Hell’s Kitchen
It was a scheme we refused
He found an old girl’s bicycle on the side
Of the street and fixed it up for twenty bucks
Take that parents
He never used the bike because the shop
Didn’t bother to call him back Janet still has it
He was determined to get his own apartment
And certain that epilepsy qualified him
For a free apartment from the city
Otherwise he could move in with Tamar
Her dad would get her an apartment as soon
As she went back to school full time
He was finally accepted for Job Path
He could make some real dough at last
And get an apartment after Labor Day
I stood at the damaged site
Across the street from my house
And watched a steel ball
Crashing into the homeless shelter
Abandoned on Dean Street
All the people scattered
It takes tremendous force
To weaken a building
And turn bricks into rubble
It doesn’t take long
The crane swung around
And pitched the heavy ball
Into the guts of the structure
Holding its side
Like a wounded veteran
The hard hats gathered
To watch the pendulum swing
Into the concrete body
Of a building slated for demolition
So there could be progress
I was against the project
And riveted to the wreckage
Time and again the fighter wavered
And finally collapsed
I did not stay to see the building
Broken down into debris
And then carted away
Some nights I could not tell
If he was the wrecking ball
Or the building it crashed into
It’s the way he roared into the house
And started to rant
Against those he did not like
Rude waiters who charged him extra
For stuff he ordered too much
On a whim his appetite vanished
He did not like certain cousins
Preppies fake bohemians in the Village
Spoiled Amherst students Mass-holes
Especially bugged him
Social workers he did not like
Men in tight leggings feminists
Do you even know what a feminist is
Laurie asked him he did not
Like hairy-armed lesbians kissing
On the street in Northampton
All right all right that’s enough now
I said it was hard to calm him down
Once he started to rail
Against boy bands or Hasidic Jews
Or boarding schools those hellholes
Models and snobs annoyed him
He didn’t have much use
For bullies or honor students
Don’t be a hater his friends said
Don’t drink a pitcher of Haterade
But he just laughed
And continued the blast
His parents did not escape his wrath
I wonder if he forgave us
Laurie and I looked around
Jittery and shaken the after-draft
Was like drinking a pot of coffee
And then trying to sleep
It was impossible
To keep track of him at all hours
He spent whatever money he had
Whenever he had it spendthrift gambler
I could never stay mad at him for long
He just shrugged his shoulders
And laughed helplessly
I couldn’t help it I had to Dad
He wasn’t made for a world
Of checkbooks and savings accounts
Stockbrokers investment bankers
Charlie called him a Clown of God
He wasn’t a Monster of Subtlety
Like the two of us
He would try anything once he hazarded
He was sometimes scared
He was never scared enough
Of scoundrels and drug dealers
He thought teachers and supervisors
And psychiatrists were the enemy
Policemen riled him he had rights
A lover a posse of friends
No one could restrain him
King of the Sudden Impulse
Lord of the Torrent
Emperor of the Impetuous
He breezed into the office
With his girlfriend and hit me up
For extra money because of the storm
Pounding across the Atlantic Ocean
He was heading to the store to buy food
So they wouldn’t starve to death ha ha
Love you he coughed and kissed me
See you next week he was out
The door like a thousand other times
Some people were nervous others festive
When we closed for the day
And told everyone to buy supplies
Is this the apocalypse line
Somebody asked the disorderly crowd
Outside the hardware store on First Avenue
The apocalypse line was getting longer
We should forget about power downtown
The
spokesman for Con Ed said
When Hurricane Irene hit North Carolina
And started to churn up the East Coast
The city decided to evacuate
370,000 people from the low-lying areas
Of Manhattan my friends in Zone A
Boarded their windows and stormed out
On the local news I watched some idiots
Sitting on the beach and working
On their tans in Asbury Park
Here comes Irene bearing down on us
It’s time to get out
Of the apocalypse line
He left the house during a rainstorm
Almost impulsively
He rushed out headlong into the night
While everyone else hunkered down
With flashlights and batteries
The city on high alert
The subways closing down
Stay home the mayor said
And only go out in an emergency
But he left the house during a rainstorm
And never came home
Where was he going in such a hurry
It was almost as if the hurricane
Swept him away in a flood
Swarming over the banks
He left the house
And headed to another town
We had no idea where he had gone
He was a secret
We could not decipher
And no one would help us find him
We called to report him missing
No one would help us find him
For four days and four nights
We tried desperately to track him down
The hurricane carried him away
He rushed out headlong into the night
And I never saw him alive again
Most reckless of reckless angels
Who left the house during a rainstorm
I was at home in Brooklyn
Working on a lyric
About the troubadours
When he left the apartment
On the Upper West Side
Looking for an adventure
I was reading the eleven poems
Of Guilhem IX Duke of Aquitane
The earliest troubadour
When he left his girlfriend
And his mother at home
To meet a friend for a drink
He said he would be home soon
Don’t worry about anything
He texted Tamar
I didn’t know he had gone out
In the rain it was raining steadily
I was at home in Brooklyn working
On a simple poem about nothing
A troubadour song
How nothing came to me
When he took the train to Jersey City
If that’s how he got there
I thought he was at home
While I worked on a song
About nothing
And then went to sleep
Without knowing anything
I startled awake in the morning
I woke up and he was missing
We kept calling his phone
It went straight to voicemail
This is Gabe leave a message
We called 311
We called 911 every day
The police refused to help us
We begged them to help they refused
Because he wasn’t under sixteen or over sixty-five
He didn’t have a life-threatening illness
They said that epilepsy doesn’t count
It’s not that dangerous
They had never heard of his disorder
This happens a lot with twenty-two-year-olds
They said he was probably just hanging out
With the wrong crowd
He hadn’t been arrested he wasn’t
In the hospitals we thought
Maybe he was stranded somewhere
And couldn’t get home
The trains had stopped running
Maybe he had spent all his money
And couldn’t call us his phone
Needed to be charged
This is Gabe leave a message
We said he had never disappeared before
We said he always called home
We said he had a developmental disorder
It didn’t matter his disabilities
Were not on the list
And so the police refused to help us
He never liked it when things closed
It gave him the feeling of being locked
In a room with bars on the windows
He never liked it when the weather
Interfered with plans he hadn’t made yet
He was never too sick to go out
When he was ten years old I had to drag him
Out of the swimming pool in a deluge
He wanted to cannonball off the diving board
He wanted to stop and slash some golf balls
He wanted to soap up the wet car
And let the sky wash it down
I remember the morning we escaped
From Galveston just before the hurricane
We coasted in front of the destruction
One night I came out of a restaurant
In a light rain and started to drive home
But the storm dropped so suddenly
I turned out of the driveway
Into a waist-high wall of water
And floated the car to the side of the road
I sloshed home through the flood
It took over an hour Gabriel shouted
That car is dead in the water
I thought I was the sort of person
Who could get pummeled by a storm
And stagger home to laugh about it
Forget about the 468 subway stations
Wind shut down the Staten Island Ferry
The bridges and tunnels were closed
I couldn’t sleep I never could sleep
I just stared out the window
Into the blankest space
Not thinking exactly
Worrying obsessively
Waiting for daylight
I left the house at five thirty a.m.
And wandered past the drunks
Sprawled out on Flatbush Avenue
I crossed the Manhattan Bridge
Hooded with blue shadows
The first bicyclists of the morning
I picked my way through Chinatown
Thick with fruit stands
And born-again commuters
I steered my way up Bowery
Sliding from Skid Row
Into respectability
I moved past Canal and Delancey
The New Museum the Bowery Poetry Club
The Bowery Mission Cooper Union
I saw people buying coffee from trucks
And ordering breakfast in diners
Exactly as if nothing had happened
Who cares I ended up at my desk
In an office building in midtown
Wondering what I was going to do
All day the subways were running again
The city presumed normal
My son still missing
Joe thought that Gabriel was shacked up
With a Brazilian woman he’d met
A couple of times in TriBeCa
He didn’t know her name he just called her
Brazil all their friends did he said
He had only been to her pad
Two or three times he could remember it
Because it was next door to a club
Maybe on Worth or White Street
We found it after a couple of tries
She lived on the second floor
With a recording studio in the front
We rang the buzzer
For every apartment in the building
No one was home in the early evening
We decided to go a
cross the street
To sit on a stoop and stake out
Five floors of empty apartments
They looked comatose in the looming dark
Suddenly the streetlamp across the way
Began to flicker on and off
It’s a sign Joe said I hope it doesn’t
Go out he was very agitated
It’s just a streetlamp I told him
The light wavered for a moment
And then flicked off for good
I don’t know where Gabe is
Joe said despondently he’s lost
And that’s when he knew
His friend’s life had been extinguished
Gabriel made his last phone call
To a number in Jersey City
Janet and I decided to go there
It was just a subway ride away
We were probably wasting our time
But why not do something else to find him
We took a train ride and a cab
To the West District Precinct
On Communipaw Avenue
We marched up to the desk
And told our story to the clerk
Who requested our driver’s licenses
We sat on cheap chairs in the lobby
And wondered what we were doing
In a cruddy police station in Jersey City
We waited for twenty minutes
For forty-five minutes an hour passed
Why had we decided to go there
The sergeant is investigating it
We were told to keep waiting
What else could we do
We had been waiting for four days
We had a disease no one wanted
To help us it could never be cured
Four men came out to talk to us
And we followed them up the stairs
Into an office where one of them said
We have some bad news for you
Your son Gabriel has passed away
We’re sorry for your loss
Something about Craig’s List
Alcohol a drug called GHB
Someone called an ambulance
Something about emergency technicians
Who hooked him up to an IV