Tuesday, April 15, 2008

7.) Verrazano Bridge


I don't remember anymore, maybe I never came out of denial. When I tell the story of winning and losing her and I complain, my bitterness is phony. I'm lying.

I'm more likely to smile in the dark, remembering her smiling into my eyes as I got my hands underneath her to pull her panties down her legs and off her feet.

The only problem still, if it's a problem, is her spending more than ten years in my dreams, being either happy or angry with me.

I never believed her leaving me any more than I believed her spending wakeful nights with me. Laughing out the bedroom window when in the middle of the night there were helicopters with spot-lights flying over the prison, then over my porch. Singing every John Prine song we knew by heart.

After I married one of the cafe girls, Laura, (a sprite she was, popping into Mariah's office one day and talking so fast we could hardly understand her, and when she left we looked at one another and laughed, that girl was for me, supposedly! For the writing about her!) Mariah moved to Brooklyn Heights, right across the Verrazano Bridge from Manhattan. She became a gardener of court-yards, and worked at some botanical gardens in the city.

She dated a school teacher who, one inevitable night for the Stupid, remarked with a grin, "You like sex , don't you?"

He sent presents everyday for a week before she convinced him to be gone forever..
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I invited Laura to Iowa, where Mom was widowed and manic, (visiting her priest to ask "why can't I stop talking?").

I started school again, dropping out with "A"s in Latin this time. Then I invited Laura to return home to her parents, because I'd turned her into a shrew with my constant beer-drunkenness.

Couldn't step into certain rooms, missing Laura so much...

Dad's friend Dr. Fanning dropped dead at 55. He was a ruddy faced man and a drunk. His poor little wife had "agoraphobia", which I'd never heard of. But she was so much fun when she came over, I couldn't understand it.
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I moved outside of the university town, near to a presidential library. I got to know the farmers at the "County Quart House", and the drunken proprietor. He hired me to man the bar three nights a week and I'd stay til 4 a.m. alone, watching TV and eating pizza. The place was dark with glom rot and it was past time to clean. It was time to burn to the ground (maybe it still stands now, 15 years later, I don't know or care).
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That autumn the Sheriff sent me a ticket to come visit him for two weeks on the Oregon coast. Mariah heard and sent me a check...money enough so I could spend the trip drinking on the observation car of the Amtrak. There was hulla and hella balloo in New York and Nashville when the Sheriff absently confirmed to people that I was off my rocker.

Then six days in Nashville. Three homeless.

I wasn't invited here, I wasn't lured here Fell in here without welcome.

It's strange how I packed, what I tossed into my bags the night I left. If I needed any reassurance my mind was disordered, why is my two ton dictionary in the night bag.

The hurry when there's no hurry, the driving to the store without an errand or any money. Three days she barely tolerated me but at least I could sleep there. While she worked at the bookstore, I had to be out of the house the first two days, and then she trusted me to stay. Now, though. After being caught actually drinking in her room. After her house-mate Chiu heard us yelling. Eleanor was nice but it was like ten years had passed, not one. At 10 a.m. I went in and had a memorably great time at the bar across the street from Tilly's.

I must have been very uptight, then very relaxed and therefore grateful to God.

Homeless and it's winter. Seems about right. I guess I expected someone at the bookstore to get me re-hired and put me up in the meanwhile. Is that what I've failed to do? But then that means I've nowhere to go but to live with my widowed mother who just broke her leg.

And Laura won't forgive me laughing at her secret that it was that Newsweek Cover-story on Lesbianism, that opened her mind, her heart, but not her legs yet (but soon). Funny how I'm ok with that. Another man, though. If there were another man, boy that'd hurt.

Her heart ---well, to me---so cold since I refused to board the plane. I refused three months before its departure. I refused in October, through November and December, right up past my finals which I skipped, to the crying in the airport as she was boarding.

We drove two hours here, I don't have luggage, and still you curse, beg and cry. Finally saying how would it look to her family, and the church people who saw her wed, that she'd be home for Christmas alone, a bride. Finally that got to me, inside me like an egg beater but I wasn't going to go even if I did have my luggage.

She was gone two weeks and I didn't take my finals and still got a "C" in Latin. Means an "A" if you'll listen. And for two weeks why didn't I ever want to shower or eat or drive to my mom's even for Christmas. Jesus I was lonely. She was coming back, I knew. Maybe to kill me.
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Most of the day here ---what's it like, there is Milwaukee's Best on tap. The women come in for their men and go. Dressed alike, like bikers. I crossed the street to Tillies once and a homeless man was at the mike in the corner. More upscale crowd there and three times as expensive, prohibitively expensive.

Johnny Cash sat here and here and here and here. Christ I'm losing my mind. Then when darkness falls I'm safe to drive the car to one of the big motels where I cand park and sleep behind the wheel. I won't freeze to death because after two hours the sobering up will wake me.

I ate White Castle. I knocked on Laura's door one sorry and timid evening and after showing me the Halloween mask of her fury she slammed the door in my face. Snow was falling in little shakes, not much. I went to Joe's of Happy Memories, and walked out on the tab. From there, directly to the sports bar where I did the same. Eleanor's for a shower and shave but I didn't stay, afraid to ask. She wasn't the same after her car crash and the intensive care.

A Monday night foolishly parked in the empty mall parking lot. In the morning a middle-aged woman arriving to work was kind enough to warn me to get away, since it was obvious I was living in my car.
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Mariah calling Martha to give me money to drive to New York City. Martha telling her of course, and have him come over and get a good night's sleep first.

Holy Moses, one minute you're writing in your journal Wow, This Is It, the next thing you know there's a tug-boat.

Payphone that was like a block of ice held to my ear as Mariah laughed and chatter-boxed about what we'd do together. Maybe a play, eh?
......
To Martha's, family friend to the Maye's. Psychologically Sound, she is. So sound as to be mysterious to me.

Good timing, she said, my son was just home from college and I've been crying, there are Thanksgiving left-overs for you. John, Mariahs told me everything. You sure that car can make it?

Hot bath and a well-made bed with the covers actually turned down for me. Trophies and pennants and other signs of peace and sanity. We sat up a little while watching TV until she claimed exhaustion. When I got up at noon the next day she had the three boxes of her son's favorite cereals out on the counter. I ate AppleJacks while she worked out with a Jane Fonda video. Then she put her own money in the pot and gave me a triple A card as well, I'd mail back.
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Virginia was dark. I might have been in Maryland at some point. Was that the Potomac at 4 a.m.?

On the New Jersey Turnpike I was going ten miles over the speed limit and they still honked at me, so I knew it didn't matter. Not to let anything get to me.

When the city loomed I was well unctioned, when I saw the Verrazano I was relieved and unafraid. Mariah gave good directions but she didn't realize all the freeway signs were obliterated by graffiti. I missed by one exit and then found my way into Henry Miller's neighborhood. As she instructed me, I left my car doors unlocked and carried everything with me to the door of her brown-stone.

I got a hug and and she said "you weren't kidding, you look awful!" But that was soon remedied and by the time her girlfriend came over I was showered and powdered, smoking a cigarette and enjoying a special occasion glass of wine.
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Six weeks I stayed. Across the river, New York City wasn't a dream but instead, simply convincing.


We didn't sleep together, it didn't even cross my mind. I wonder now if it crossed hers. I wonder now if I was supposed be going into her room and fucking her all that time. But there was a man from the U.N. who came to court. She enjoyed giving the details ('we were leaning over one of my drawings') and I was neutral, amused. We laughed most of our time together.

In the mornings, Howard Stern was actually entertaining, trying to bait celebrities into ruining their careers by responding to his baiting insults. After breakfast we'd pick up our shovels and rakes and walk three stories down to the city streets and then several blocks to some magnificent house to work in the courtyard. Then back for lunch and she would sit at her drafting table designing gardens for a class and I would take my indefinite leave , first to my policeman's bar, then the HarperCollins hangout, where the men at the bar talked of David Foster Wallace "infinite jest all right"

Down the subway- way, three stops, four, what did I care, into Manhattan. Laughing along with the general embarrassment as some homeless black man sang "Stand By Me" all too well.

I came across the Sony corporate offices where my father had visited many times, and it was like falling into a hole. Really a very unhappy mystical experience I wouldn't want to relive.

To Greenwich Village, thinking, was Max Bodenheims' life the most embarrassing ever? The doomed writer should have toured with the Cherry Sisters and sang instead. He'd have benefited from Gertrude Steins work, "Replenishing Jessica" diminished the rest of us. He wasn't a name dropper he was more like a vague stylish idea dropper.

Baroque BoHo to the max, Max. Auto-immune problems no doubt.

And here it seemed these were thieves and fences selling their booty on the streets, just like it was on Ridiculous Day, back home.

Some good pot was offered and sold to me in Washington Square, I met an old friend who'd just received his Christmas bonus (he told me he was a "number cruncher" and I'd never heard of such a thing, it sounded hilarious). At the top of the Empire State Building I told him I was broke and he gave me two hundred dollar bills.

Was I here to stay, nobody knew. Barnes and Noble had my application, that was enough, I thought, I'd just bug them with phone calls. Then a dozen other shops and finally Dunkin' Donuts interviewed me and turned me down so I knew I was going back to Iowa, I'd invited my wife to move to and live away from.

Mariah said I could be a hat and coat-check man, if only I'd stay sober and not get the tags mixed up. Would I like to do some nude modeling, she asked. With my freakishly thin body, I thought well yes maybe they would have me. I didn't get around to it. By the time she was packing for Europe, her last suggestion was to write Laura such a love letter that would go down in history.
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Over Christmas; four weeks alone as she went on a trip to Europe with her aunt. I had Christmas dinner with her downstairs neighbors, a man and his elderly mother talking to me with a mannerly ease and in the holiday spirit.

Those four weeks alone I spent in the apartment, still sleeping on the couch for some reason. I discovered what a readers dictionary was and read and wrote letters. I bought cases of beer from a small warehouse six blocks away.

I found dentist pills in her medicine cabinet. They were nearly expired, she'd never miss them. But I felt guilty. Alarmed with guilt the next morning. Also, I'd started reading her personal papers, the majority of them letters I'd written. I couldn't stop.

I didn't learn anything about her, she'd always been truthful and up front and again, there was nothing to write, about her.
She wanted to get married.

For three years now, it'd been time for her to get married, which brings back my most treasured memory, at last.

It was 72 degrees, a beautiful, half cloudy Spring day. It was not too long before Mariah took over as Inventory Manager, and while I was still too smitten even to talk. Ten of us went to a Nashville Sounds baseball game, "to drink", as one of the Smith brothers always said.

We had good seats, and there was enough of a crowd to make it exciting but not so many that you felt you were at a show or in a theatre. Our group took four rows, and I was down in front with Carter while Martha and Mariah were two rows behind us. This was all so close, any conversation included us all.

Mariah was 24. People teased her now about her pre-occupation, this dread of being an old maid.

But there had only been one proposal, her entire life! The proposal was from the boy who'd had a crush on her since Junior High. Doug. Dougy. Dooogy.

"What does he do now?" Martha asked.

"He's in Russia. He got his Architecture degree and he's studying there now. He writes me all the time, how much he loves me but the one time we tried to sleep together it was just impossible, we're too ...We didn't want to see each other naked! We're children together! I can't marry him."

"Why don't you marry John Jackson, then?" Martha said so I could hear.

People laughed, giving their assent mostly. Or even remarking that they knew there was something between us, though we didn't speak.

I looked back up toward her and she said "Sure. Maybe..."

Our eyes met and mine confessed all. She seemed to allow her eyes to consent and for the second time, this maidenly approval, but now breaking my back and sending morphine all through me.
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I drove out of New York City at 3 a.m. the Monday morning after New Years. On my way out I helped myself to her NY Yankees hat.

The streets and highways were empty. The Verrazano bridge, I was the only one crossing. The New Jersey Turnpike: it's yours, BUB. At noon I was checking into a motel in a small town in PA. with a case of beer and the good news that a Nor'easter was about to hit and give me an excuse to be motionless for two days. Now it was the end, but I could occupy it, you see. And then Iowa would mean dying, or electric shock treatments, was how I figured it.

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