Where The Grapes Of Wrath Are Stored

Both my teams lost in the runner-up to the Super Bowl which proves I looked into my crystal ball through a glass darkly. It’s safe to say that folks could become very wealthy if they followed my picks and bet on exactly the opposite outcome.

It wasn’t always so. In 1949 I became the headline on the back page of a New York City paper for picking seventeen winners out of twenty college football games in a week of many upsets. The newspaper happened to be the Daily Worker and I expect that notoriety rewarded me with a file in J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

Worse still, I believe my prognostications became the breadcrumbs which brought two F.B.I. agents to our front door. When my father stood his ground and would not give names of others to the men in suits, he was summarily fired from his job the following day. His silence was his spine.

As a measure of how far we have come as a country, The F.B.I. have become the good guys protecting our democratic institutions from barbarians at the gate. Hoover has been hoovered out of our collective memory.

Football has become the national pastime edging out baseball which belonged to a more pastoral era when a slower pace was our rhythm. It is basically a board game on grass. Hitting a projectile with a piece of wood must go back to cavemen swatting at tse-tse flies. 

Football is territorial, as befits colonialism. It is trench warfare battling over yards as if their lives depended on it. To reduce the carnage of war to an entertainment of contained violence is both a way of expiating hostilility and legitimizing it. In yesterday’s game the Lions lost which means the opposing gladiators won. It wasn’t always thus.

The United States currently has over two million servicemen and women stationed in bases all over the globe. A staggering number yet a small fraction of the 117 million expected to watch the Stupor, I mean Super Bowl game in two weeks. One hopes we can sublimate our aggression through this most American high holiday which rearranges the great divide for a few hours.

 

Merging

I’m for it. The way column A drifts over to column B. Sweet and sour, hot and pungent.  How Oppenheimer is both a big movie and a small one. And American Fiction is a serious spoof. If you think you know me, you don’t know the half. 

Wouldja-couldja. Couldja-wouldja. Apple-pears and fusion foodja. Hybrid gender. Hybrid cars. Quantum particles Quantum waves. 

Watching the ice-skating championships, I was transfixed by the artistry, the precision of the couples, the lifts and the landings. Awe describes my state of mind yet it is also a sport with triple Lutz and toe loops. The commentators talk about a wobble and bobble. All I see is the sublime.

For the unknowing eye baseball is boring; football, brutal and basketball is swagger. For those of us with arrested development like myself, basketball is balletic, football is chess with stretchers and baseball, life itself. I am now rounding third on my way home; with no clock to be seen this could take years.

When Donald first reared his artificial head I saw Bozo the Clown, P.T. Barnum, then Adolph and Benito, Jim Jones, Richard III and finally Vladimir Putin The question still remains: handcuffs or straight jacket or both? His mouth is a weapon of mass destruction. The calculating manipulator and mindless sociopath have merged.

In the literary world a memoir is likely to have as much fiction as a novel and a book of historic fiction sprinkled with provocative ideas. Some narrative poetry reads like an anecdote.

I started writing poetry about fifty years ago in between labels as a pharmacist. After my work found its way into literary journals, I began to question what made this a poem and not a paragraph. There began the merging. Some words sing; some need line breaks but others shed the stanza and were comfortable as prose or blogs. There may be poetry hiding in the sentences.

My first book is entitled The Marriage of Everything. I see life as a web of connective tissue. The rose with its scent; the rose with its thorns. Petals as life ephemeral; thorns as death daring. The two in a melodic dirge. The streets of Laredo. Mack the Knife. Donald testing the fiber of democracy.

Maybe, just maybe, we needed this historical moment to pause and value what we have achieved and the fragility of its tremble. From the merging comes something emergent. 

Incapable Words

The separation between

squiggles on the page and the actual.

Between the word and the sword.

How one letter turns it to blade,

severed flesh, blood, anguish.

How to write of rage, of parched throats.

Incapable words, incapable rockets and bombs.

Words scattered

like limbs under rubble.

 

I could talk of weeds sprouting

to flowers, how they bend

toward the sun as do humans

in a kind of tropism of our own

 

but that is nowhere in evidence.

Unlike heads of state

and as yet non-states,

a poem must not lie.

 

There can be no poetry, nothing

that hasn’t already been said

in curses, screams and prayers.

Each day, unspeakable.

 

The Movie Version

Perhaps it has always been thus. The mass audience which got through the Depression on the choreography of bar-room brawls and Busby Berkeley dancing their way out of the dark through the Dust Bowl and unemployment lines.

Didn’t everyone wear tuxedos and sing in the rain? Crooked politicians and con men were dead giveaways by their mustache alone or their corpulence or the fake watches up their sleeves.

If I told you that a scene in the Grapes of Wrath was filmed at the intersection of Sawtelle and National Boulevards or that Atlanta was burned down in Gone with the Wind on the NW corner of Culver and Overland, you wouldn’t want to know. We love our illusions.

It’s not a bad thing. Movies were our letters of transit. Our imaginations got fed and prepared us for the narrative poem we were to live. Our epic lives have made room for many stanzas. Somehow, most of us figured out what was actual from what was just satisfactually part of the myth. Dorothy knew she was not in Kansas anymore.

We lived through our Iliad called Vietnam. Ulysses came marching home and ten years later was homeless with a hole in his arm where all the money goes. (John Prine song, Sam Stone). The working class had the best songs but lost their way down Mean Streets to the slogans of the movie star in the Oval and the red tie with the bogus hair in the tent playing Elmer Gantry.

We left Atticus Finch behind for Tony Soprano and Vito Corleone’s Godfather made Gary Copper's sheriff in High Noon an offer he couldn't refuse. Power is the operative word. Where is Frank Capra to grab the MAGA minions by the collar and remind them why we fought WWII?                       

William Trevor

Raise your hand if you have never heard of him. That’s what I thought. Yet he should be a household name among the literati along with Hemingway and Faulkner. Trevor has been cited by the New Yorker magazine as the greatest writer of short stories in the English language, the equal of Chekhov.

Trevor died about eight years ago. He was born in Ireland but lived his writing life in the U.K. He was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine yet never quite became celebrated in this country perhaps because he didn’t tour the U.S.; at least he never knocked on my door to autograph the twenty-one books of his on my shelf.

Two of Trevor’s many novels were made into movies. But I would say it is his twenty-two books of short fiction that will be long remembered. He started out as a sculptor and his stories have the feel of having been carved from a larger mass with only this shaped block of clay remaining. The narratives are of a piece, scrupulously chiseled yet effortlessly rendered. A back story is presumed but not stated. It is as if we have entered in the middle of a chronicle and what’s to come is only to be surmised. Demands are made upon the reader, an enriching journey.

His people range from the privileged to the impoverished. He seems to inhabit all of them including a homeless man I wouldn't want my sister to marry... though I've never had one. 

My friend Adele and I have started to read his stories aloud taking turns, over the phone. Great fun. We discover the characters as we go along. Trevor is a masterful noticer. He picks up on overlooked or casual details which move a person to new consciousness. His genius is the way the insight slides in without calling attention to itself. Sometimes just through his pitch perfect dialog or a layer revealed between the words.

Here is a poem I wrote after we read his short story Cheating At Canasta.

How he returned to Harry’s Bar as promised

remembering those final days

in her slow decline when,

with a sleight of hand, he cheated at Canasta  

to let her win, eliciting a faint smile

the way waiters changed the tablecloth

with a certain panache

to the delight of those at the next table.

Something overheard, or a glance

becoming an avalanche.

 

Trevor’s characters most often carry predicaments. They may be troubled or lonely and who isn’t. This is something I wrote after a Trevor story which seemed to merge with a documentary I was watching on Edward Hopper. The painter’s wife was his only model. She was an accomplished artist herself who subordinated her work to her husband’s domination.

The solitary woman in the automat

could be a wife betrayed

in a suffocated life

as someone crushing saltines

into a bowl of consommé.

Her lover was the catalyst

between the lines

who allowed her to see

beyond her marriage

even as Hopper’s wife

was slowly dying under his paint.

 

 

  

Inalienable Right

Among the inalienable rights Thomas Jefferson enumerated in his self-evident truths I contend that a good night’s sleep should have been at the top of the list. Maybe that is included in the pursuit of happiness or maybe T.J. fell asleep while writing the Declaration of Independence. I doubt his slaves ever slept very well.

Thomas, my good man, how am I to attain life and liberty without a good night’s sleep, I ask you. And how else to dream the American dream without quality shut-eye? After all we spent a third of our lives with our head on a pillow. That adds up to about thirty years for me. 

Here I am at midnight thinking about virulent mutant strains but enough about Trump. I know there are some people who fall asleep as soon as they go horizontal. This is a talent for which I would gladly trade my skill-set except I have nothing much to barter. I can't surf, ski, sky dive or slam dunk and I've never been submerged into a shark tank. If I hadn't slept so many years maybe I could have mastered one or two. The list of non-achievements is enough to keep me up another hour.

The older I get the harder it is. At least I have no memory of fitful sleep as an infant unless an errant diaper pin was sticking into me. And then there was the dreaded colic. No, not colic, please. (Eight decades later that morphed into GERD). 

I logged in my eight hours all throughout high school. In college I had a few nights when I forced myself to stay up cramming for some exam which tested our rote learning. Over the next sixty years I drifted off with all my synapses and neurotransmitters seemingly in sync. And then they weren’t.  

As if in compensation for diminished cognition my brain asserts itself around midnight. I start thinking great thoughts. I know they are great because I can’t remember any insights the next morning. Big ideas call for big erasures. Great thoughts get mixed up with the mundane and shards all of which make for sludge; the kind of sludge that sticks in my craw, wherever that may be.

I lay there reviewing my life, parts of which should be boring enough to put me to sleep. At least they would put anyone else to sleep. Eventually, just as I’m about to nod off I think I may have to pee. Better get up. No, don’t miss the chance to drift away. No, get up you fool! So, I do and now must start all over again. I could try my old mantra: Beaujolais. Beaujolais. Yes, I feel it working. It is an intoxicating potion. If I wake up drunk I’ll know it worked.

However, what works on Monday no longer works by Wednesday. My sleep apparatus is like the coronavirus. It creates variants or more accurately, tolerance. Yesterday’s soporific brew is tomorrow's ho-hum. The subject has me flummoxed. I'm thinking about those rights endowed by my creator. My lids are getting heavy. Don’t speak. I’m off. 

For Crying Out Loud

I was a cry baby, my mother announced to anyone who would listen above the whines of her cranky baby. That probably caused me to cry even more. I don’t know why I cried so much. Maybe I was feeling the pain of the dust bowl farmers or the rise of Nazism or maybe there was an open pin on my diapers. She also said I had chronic ear aches. That news sort of got me off the hook.

The fact is that I was probably late controlling my lachrymal glands. I have memories of tears filling my eyes around age seven when someone would look at me for what seemed to be an elongated moment. It was as if they were seeing into the shambles of my mansion.

I also remember crying over certain scenes in movies. Not over dead soldiers but when news reached the family I shared in their grief. Yet my weeping was somewhat selective. I didn't weep over opponents of Joe Lewis when he beat them to a pulp in the first round. Of course, this was conveyed over radio. 

At some point I learned to control my tear ducts like the rest of my gender. Boys simply don’t cry; we learn to stifle the flow though I wonder if ingesting all that salt erodes the soul.

I’m sure I must have cried over the decades. There was plenty to shed tears over. The next big cry I had, which stays vivid in my mind, was when my father died in 1976. I literally could not stop. When Peggy died I cried a river. The salinity of those tears was of a greater order than any. Grief is love with nowhere to go.

It isn’t so much sadness or even distress that prompts my tears these days. It seems to be a sudden, raw burst of empathy or spontaneous compassion with a person most vulnerable. There is a point in which walking in the other person's shoes may be counter productive and tears become a hinderence to dispensing needed care. But tears issue unbidden. They come not from the bombing of a city but from the helplessness or humiliation of an individual. It is an outpouring; an identification with anyone being caught emotionally naked. I can imagine having an emotionally intimate connection with a friend, which touches a nerve provoking tears neither from pain nor sorrow.

Not having access to our tears may prove to be a more serious deficit than going through life as a cry baby. Maybe it takes decades to free our crying self from layers of inbitions.  Yet some of us simply do not get teary and that's alright too. Dry tears may be enough. If we cried for all the suffering in the world we might flood the planet.

I cry for you Alabama.  

We've seen your lashings.  

We've seen your lynchings. 

You've lost your compass.

You broke your promise.

What In Tarnation

Early on in my pharmacy days of sorcery and alchemy, I remember compounding something called ichthyol ointment using a slab and spatula. It was a thick black, gooey substance extracted from oil shale and used for eczema, psoriasis, acne and other rashes when the dermatologist had run out of options. At least it made the patient feel as if he were enduring a burden which just might warrant a miracle healing. Fortunately, it was water soluble unlike coal tar.

This came to mind as a roofing company has been at work for the past month applying this sticky, viscous substance overhead while saturating the air with noxious fumes.

At least, with the roof sealed, raindrops won’t keep falling on my head. In fact, they never did since there is a neighbor above me. The machine used to heat the tar was placed just outside my window.

Toxic smoke lifted right into the upstairs living room causing a choking cough and depositing a black film on his table. He even took a photo of the tar-filled cloud in his apartment.

I don’t dare complain. I’ve been living in this rent-controlled apartment for thirty-nine years. Black Lung Disease might be the price I have to pay. 

God and landlords work in mysterious ways. I expect they are both planning a gala bash when I am carted out, feet first. If it rains that day like it does in movies, I can be assured no leaks will drip on my long goodbye.

As for tarnations, the word has nothng to do with tar. It is just a euphemism for damnation which, come to think of it, may be my fate with every inhalation. 

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell's birthday was a few days ago.  (1903-1972) This might be meaningful to only a few of us who share his eccentricities. He was an American original who did surrealist assemblages. 

It seems that the older I get life looks more and more like a Cornelian box with disparate objects and ideas either coming together or learning to coexist. Or, better yet, they are clashing in a way that a certain music is being made beyond our hearing. In my warped mind I imagine some distant connectivity. It is as if the chaos of imagination is seen in its nakedness with a network still in its nascent form . What we perceive as amorphous may contain a form as yet unrecognizable.

The thing about Cornell that is so appealing is the prominence he gives to his intuition. He throws in a pipe or a toy bird or a pocket watch face or a tiny glass container, all without any rational justification. I love that. Life’s junk, unjunked. The discarded, given another go round and each object decontextualized, seen anew.

My late wife, Peggy created over sixty of these. Each was like a visual poem with images juxtaposed and made concrete.

His constructions were always confined within an area about the size of a cigar box. Each one was its own universe. Not unlike the way we try to create our own small world as we live out each day. If our planet were reduced to rubble his shadow boxes might be among the artifacts uncovered by visiting aliens trying to piece our baffling civilization.  

To further expand on this way of thinking it is a fact that he lived his entire adult life on Utopia Parkway in Queens, NYC. Before I was born my father had a drugstore on Utopia Parkway in Flushing so in my mind, I am imagining that Cornell got some of his little glass vials from my father's store. Why not?