JFK’s Beautiful Sister
1.
I went out to Colfax Ave. for a colonoscopy. Across the street was a bar and a tattoo parlor. As I took off my clothes, I could see them through the blind slits. My eighty-six year old mother had driven me there. The colonoscopy office had sent me a message in red, in capital letters, saying that if I did not have a ride they would cancel my procedure. A taxi was not okay, they said. I didn’t ask what was wrong with a taxi. The nurse-anesthetist stuck a tube in my nose and told me to choose the best dream I could think of. This guy had big biceps. So did the gastroenterologist. I suspected that they were gay and having a romantic relationship. It didn’t matter to me one bit. It was just idle thinking, like most of my thinking.
2.
My books froze in the unheated schoolhouse in which I lived. I was an avid reader, so I tried to unstuck the pages with various tools: tweezers, pliers, both needle-nosed and flat, and screwdrivers. I didn’t use any power tools as those would obviously have been counter-productive, but no matter how I tried, I could not pry any two pages apart to make them readable. It was the kind of disappointment common in my life.
3.
I tried to think of a good dream.
While I was having my colonoscopy done, my mother was in the waiting room reading People Magazine, an article about JFK’s beautiful sister, who’d been given a lobotomy at age twenty-three. I’d once worked in a mental hospital with lobotomized patients. They were the most pathetic group of people I ever worked with, and I worked with some doozies. I wanted to read that article. I had planned to steal it as I left the office, but I was dopey from the drugs and, as my mother rose from her seat and laid down the magazine on an end table, I totally forgot about it.
4.
I couldn’t go to the library to get a book with free pages because the county was so short of money, they were no longer plowing the country roads out my way, which was quite a ways out from the county’s center, a place I thought of as the ass end of the middle of nowhere, not an original thought, I knew, but I also knew that as an uneducated man, I was not expected to have original thoughts.
5.
My gastroenterologist looks into me easily. He sends the scope up and knows the state of my health, at least part of my health. He searches for polyps like an out-of-luck Haitian searches for something to steal or some poor white trash lady, obese and dressed all tacky, scours yard sale tables for something that will be worth a million dollars. I’m hoping my gastroenterologist won’t find any polyps or, if he does, that they won’t be pre-cancerous. I wonder what exactly his expression is as he peers up into me. No doubt focused in concentration, with an underlayment of concern. There’s also some anticipation of paying off his medical school loans and finally being able to get that Porsche he’s always wanted. He’s a Haitian-American and he wants more and more symbols of success. He wants our respect. Everyone does. We should all re-read Abraham Maslow every few years to reconnect with the basic needs we all share, that make us human, and we should all read Orwell’s 1984 about that frequently, as it becomes more relevant every year, as endless war engulfs us, as Thanatos engulfs Eros.
6.
I sent you letters from Iceland. They melted before they could be read. You found little puddles on the ridged floor of your mailbox and were confused. My letters were eloquent, but eloquence cannot survive the heat of Florida’s palm-lined boulevards, where old Jewish ladies spray spite like prehistoric plants that have not evolved for 60 million years.
7.
Regardless of the state of my colon health, I can imagine quite easily ending up in a decaying port on a desolate coast (W.H. Auden) like the one in Haiti where a freighter ran aground ten or fifteen years ago and is still there, rusting away. We sit on the splintered deck of a café and watch contractors supervise their workers shovel sand into pick-up trucks for a cement project. Marcel stands up and screams at the contractors, trying to bully them or shame them into leaving the beach alone. It’s a public beach, not your free Home Depot!
8.
My letters were full of noble sentiments, lyrics from ancient mythology, lost farming techniques, love affairs marinated in bathos, and a cold, stone sea where no one has ever surfed.
9.
Marcel has lived in America and loves Home Depot, loves Costco. He’s spent hours in those places, even when there was nothing he needed to buy. Marcel’s father is the richest man in this little town. Marcel lives in a sort of castle. It’s big and very lonely there. He’s as lonely as a medieval Italian in his castle.
Marcel’s father is the richest man, but there’s nothing he or his father can do to stop the looting of sand. There’s no real law in Haiti. Life’s a free-for-all. You grab what you can.
The freighter doesn’t move. It’s stuck there ‘til the end of time.
10.
Unless we are utter morons, we know that despite our grandiose delusions, our words will not survive. Those that don’t melt are fuel for the incinerator or kindling for a funeral pyre in Bali.
•
Joe’s Black Cow
1.
The farmer’s black cow has escaped. The farmer is my cousin Joe.
An Amish neighbor calls to tell me that one of his cows is in the road. Joe doesn’t like me. I call him anyway. The phone rings and rings but he doesn’t answer. He may be passed out from too much drink. I’m not going over there. I’m not going out in this blizzard.
2.
My mother sat by my sick bed, confused and jealous over the possibility of my dying before her. But she’s like a lot of modern old ladies. She sets her biological clock to tick out the years in slow motion. In one year she ages maybe two months.
3.
Joe once ran into my son’s trailer when it was parked in front of my barn, broke out a taillight, bent a strut, and then drove off as if nothing had happened, but both my son and I saw it. That white trash fucker, said my son.
4,
However, she’s got a moral conundrum. For years she’s been my father’s apologist, reassuring me that he loved me, though he never showed it. That’s why he put away so much money, why he put so much time into studying the stock market and managing his investments, why he was so frugal, why he denied us the pleasure of things that money could buy. He did it for me—to show me how much he loved me, so when he and my mother died, all that money would come to me and I’d be wealthy.
5.
Maybe Joe’s down the road at his mom’s house, I thought. His mother had recently had her legs cut off. It was a diabetes thing. She used to beat their milk cows. I helped with the milking and cringed when she hit them with her two-by-four. They were dumb, submissive animals, sometimes slow and stubborn. I called up his mother’s house but no one answered there either. She’s such a hoarder, I thought. Maybe Joe’s over there and can’t get to the phone. Maybe he tried for a while and just gave up, looking at the endless piles of junk in his way. I let the phone ring and ring.
6.
But now I’m dying before my mother, so the proof of his love cannot be delivered and, to a certain extent, the proof of her love too. She sits at my deathbed, squeezing my hand in a way that makes me uncomfortable, her face set in sadness. I feel like taking out some large print Reader’s Digests and opening them up to the joke pages, to try to cut the tragedy of it all, but I left all those Digests upstairs in the farmhouse, and then I sold the farmhouse. I left the buyers a lot of stuff to sort out, most of it junk, but that seems to be the way of the world—one leaves too much, or too little.
7.
Maybe Joe’s mother died and he just discovered her and now he’s crying secret tears because he never let on that he liked his mother at all. It always seemed that he despised her, almost as much as he despised his younger brother. I called Cowboy Rufus who lived next door to Joe but no one answered his phone either. I figured Rufus was at work up in Manistee at the salt mine down the road from the liquor store that every Autumn lettered their sign: Hello Darkness my old friend. Next to the liquor store the House of Flavors served ice cream all winter but it didn’t make anyone feel better. Even if they went to the casino and won, they didn’t feel any better.
8.
Fuck, I said to myself, going to the closet and pulling on my coat. I walked out the back door and over to my old van, the one the mice had got in last summer and stripped some of the wiring so I had to rewire it. It started. I drove down to my cousin’s house. I saw the cow, black against the snow. I knew that cow, always complaining. She was the biggest complainer of the herd and now she’d gotten out.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, Google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.