Winter mornings twenty years ago, I was working on my book On Rainy Days the Monk Ryokan Feels Sorry for Himself. The start of winter in Upstate New York hits me with a nostalgia for those sweeter days gone by. Next week our daughter leaves for a semester of study in Spain. The following words were written while my wife was near term in her pregnancy. What a happy time! By American standards we were pobre pero sano (poor, but healthy). I just quit my job in the restaurant and we were living off a very modest savings while I wrote the bulk of the book. The tone was bitter and joyful, if such a thing is ever possible to convey in literature successfully. I just had the knack to break back and forth, happy/sad, happy/sad, like the artist clown of yore.
We made it through. My wife is still with me, and our daughters don’t hold too much of a grudge for parents who didn’t “toe the line”.
Here’s a sample. Best to look away:
“You should see me laying in bed with Marie at two in the afternoon. I am a scared little boy. Do you see what they’ve done to us with money? I know I’ve been brainwashed simply because it hurts so much to think of the good without a steady income. One wonders if it’s all hopeless. Then one wonders if one’s own family and loved ones are trying to kill him, or drive him to kill himself because they know he’s not employed, yet they go to Walmart and buy jeans. Or they send twenty dollars a month to Rico in Columbia because they want to be good Christians and feel useful by giving, and yet they don’t see their own child or nephew or best friend tying and untying frayed pieces of rope in his teahouse. Yes of course he is lazy! Yes, he doesn’t dare work for a living. He just wants to experiment with his own life to see if these jackals really love him. “Stand up on your own two feet. I picked beans when I was starving. I picked fights when I was bored and picked my ass whenever I found myself standing with nothing to do. Christ, I was always able to make money. What the hell is wrong with you, Hmm? And if you’re going to write... Geez, c’mon! What the hell is this crap? Just a simple whodunit? would do you some good. A novel about a lawyer or a cop. Have the bad guys burp and fart and use foul language. Make the good guys say “important files,” “witness,” and “testimonial.” Or, if you can’t do that, Jesus Christ, drop the damn fries in the oil and count yourself lucky to be alive. I don’t believe a word of it either. At least not since I was ten years old.”
Then give to your alma mater. Some people send as much as a hundred dollars a year. Some give to God on Sunday, but then God gives their quiet daughter double pneumonia probably because three dollars didn’t cut it. Just buying a cup of coffee is a spit in the writer’s eye. Leave the seventy-five cents. You’ll buy from a begging Girl Scout. See, we’re teaching her to beg. “It’s good to ask for money, honey. As long as we give cookies in return.” When I was twelve I participated in a bike-a-thon. They expected me to go door to door asking strangers to become my sponsor. So much money per mile. A total of twenty-six miles. Mrs. Smith sponsored me a quarter. I rode my one speed bicycle up and down hills on a hot day stopping at designated rest stops for a McDonald’s hamburger and sugar juice. I worked hard. The kids with MS got cable TV. The doctors who research MS got a free spinach salad at a lunch paid for by the hospital and money towards a down payment on, yep, you guessed it, a bright shiny new silver Jaguar.
So come over and visit, but please come with a quarter to sponsor me. I’ll work upstairs in my little room for three hours. A quarter an hour. That’s seventy-five cents. Almost a dozen eggs. If you want to stay and visit I’ll fry you one. I can’t cure MS, but I can cook an egg thirty ways. I can pick up my dog’s poop with a quick swipe of a plastic bag. I can string together sentences with poor grammar faster than you. That’s got to be worth some of your old pennies, yes?
Man, everyone is in business taking extra and giving back less. Then what’s the problem? Supply and demand? Oh, c’mon... What do you really demand? A bird feeder? Molding? A pad of lined paper? A magazine? Gasoline? I’m a good man. Toss me a bone. Or pennies. I’ll take your dirty pennies.
Friends, family, worthy strangers... Come to my door if you are in demand of anything which I can provide. A cup of coffee? Come over to my house. I’ll charge you a quarter more than what it’s worth. A hamburger and french fries. A quarter more than what its worth. Stop giving to the faceless corporation. Do you need a pedicure, a haircut, your oil changed? I’ll do it for a quarter more than what it’s worth. Please don’t force me back into line cooking if I can write French fry books instead.
Years ago my golf pro cousin had a sponsor. I thought it was wonderful. So did my family. They fed and housed him week after week in the summertime while he played the New York string of the PGA Mini-tour. His sponsor bought him a used Cadillac and paid for a chunk of his travel expenses. I don’t want a Cadillac. I want to eat. For twenty-five cents a day I vow to win the U.S. Open.
Now for a poem, sort of...
God Please Give Me a Mop Large Enough to Soak Up the Schlop of Xerox
Just look at the awesome size of it!
It takes some time to pass this pile of
squares beside squares next to
little squares, big squares
on top of so many squares
Call ‘em walls
Steel, granite, gypsum
slabs of death-in-a-box
Hard, bitter waxed floors,
more squares, two or three rectangles,
a triangle and a tiny
octagonal shape from the shy zany architect
who committed suicide right after Xerox—
Two minutes to pass
at forty-five miles per hour
All these squares,
two thousand or more and
wires weaving through wire mazes of
small wires, fat wires, long, very long
thin wires and outlets to outlets to
boxes to more squares
Six hundred thousand outlets
with screws and twelve million nails
Six billion screws
Two trillion black top pebbles
crushed beneath
a constant stream of human headlights
going round and round in circles
around the biggest square of squares
O whippee shit
Big sky my ass!
Big clouds, big snow
O whippy shoot shit
Big sun my ass!
Big moon?
O whoppee whippy shotty shitty woppa wumpa shit my ass!
Xerox in the middle of a forest by a lake
Deer turn a fuzzy muzzle
“what the hump is that?” They ask
Weasels, wrabbits, wraccoons wonder
the tubby house fed squirrels duck under
logs and sticks they stop
they thunder
“What the crap is THAT!”
This is dawn of winter’s day
Look Mrs. Doe, it’s a Xerox!
If you need copies for no reason,
oh my dear deer, you have
bound and leapt to the wrong place.
Probably have to skin your own hide
and wrap the meat up in a butcher’s bag,
drop in the back of a bearded factory
hairy-faced human’s truck—
He’ll bring you inside to his break table
Throw you on it and say something like
“Here Jack. It makes damn good jerky.”
A Xerox
Jesus, bandit the coon,
the nicest old lady in the place
would stab your pups with silver knitting needles
before giving up her
data-entry job with benefits.
All of ’em, every one
would walk by your head on a post,
over ground
and forest dead and burnt
acid in a stream
clouds raining radium and
constant heavy low moan sounds
rolling across the putrid air.
Any price for squares
cable TV, used boats
fishing poles
shaving cream
bumper stickers that read
“Topless, it’s the law!”and
“Greed is an act of fear”
huge tires
envelopes in the mail
dirty carpets to clean
over and over again,
purple knickknacks
and—
O I can’t write worth an industrial complex today!
Simply put
the absolute truth is this:
Each man and woman to walk through the doors of Xerox would fornicate with a bunny rabbit, if no one knew, and it kept them their jobs.
January 19, 2002
Marie and I attended Rachelle’s Passport Club in the basement of a little church on Main Street in Cato. Happy children sitting in folding chairs with hands folded. Thank you so much Mr. Happenstance, for letting me see the light! Humility. Honorable humility. The smiles. The worry. The happiness I have given. The open doors... How insignificant and wasteful is grown-up land. I want to go to Beauty and the Beast on Ice to see my beautiful child gaze at the wonder of nonsense with a thousand other contented, simple souls. The light shines through the church window. The grownup light is dull, usually blocked by a mail truck or moving van. The skaters are beautiful. Everyone wears woven mittens. Rachelle and her friends Constance and Laurie hold hands. There is light. They are breathing. I know that any father who loved his child, and gave to her, and thanked her, and then lost her, has gone crazy and died.
Her caring hands.
On Sunday Marie was crying. She came into our room and gave Marie a back rub with her small hands. Sad music. We are all so fragile. Tell me how daddies find their way. I sent my poems to a publisher. It appeared his company was friendly, so I also included three books that cost me almost forty dollars because at certain weak moments in the day I am a vain idiot. I never received a reply. No “thank you.” Nothing. I went to his website (he’s a poet, but more famous as a publisher of poems), to see if their was a “Thank you” posted to me. No, nothing like that. Plenty of past newspaper articles about the importance of poetry and news. The words “Zen” and “San Francisco.” Blue phrases that are underlined. Hit them with the cursor and travel to another childless world. Oh man. There is no poetry. How important it looks. You can have some believing, but god dammit there is nothing there! A career of word arrangement. They all want to be rich, and rich can very well mean having a lot of people know who you are. I want nobody to know who I am! Your stupid words! Your bullshit inspiration! How clever! What a foggy special world of your own and your circle of soft-fingered men. You are no better off than a lawyer and friends sitting around a fire talking trash about their one slim chance to be alive on planet earth. It is all the same fake language you speak in the same circles. Leave the poems alone! Why aren’t the children celebrated? I know. Because they are not powerfully clever enough. They weren’t there at the right time—at the rally, in the cafe, on the court, on the march... And they don’t toss in the word “fuck” in their poems about snakes and winding rivers and sunshine glimmering on the mountain lake. Oh the lasting, true beauty of children... How insignificant the basement of the small white church where the homeschooled kids gather to learn about Spain. How dirty and bleak the farming village of Cato, N.Y. in January’s gray dull light. This is a statement to all men, and women who pretend to be men... The following curse I launch is aimed at your kind of spite and self importance that blows its foul stench of words into the prevailing winds, hoping to choke my child and her happy friends before they realize that choking you might be a better time on roller skates.
Ron’s Curse on Mankind
May all your money turn to ducklings
Your possessions burn to stone
May your well full of water
dry up like dinosaur bone
May your dog and cat forsake you
All your food spoil and stink
May your wife run off with neighbor Joe
his rat pee in your sink
May all the hopes you had in life
fall like a Hippo on an egg
May you live a hundred lifetimes
but first you’ll have to beg
( You can listen to me singing it here
You really have to leave the children alone. Stop for a few seconds and breathe in through your mouth and out of your fingers. That feeling running from the heart, through the chest, arms and hands, and finally leaping off the ends of your fingernails...That true, wonderful feeling is all that you need to cope with the wrongness you have practiced thus far. First get the feeling and then work off that. Repetition is what we’re after. The sameness of that wonderful feeling. The children feel it in other ways. You have to feel it this way because it’s the only way you have left. Take in a deep breath and let it out past your fingers. If successful, there is a sunny, tropical paradise waiting for you. Lavish empires to ride through slowly on horseback, dressed in finery and in charge. There is a whole spinning earth to walk around on dizzy with glee, at least as cheerful as the eager children listening to a lecture on Spain, some tired spot on a map called Europe where old people grow up to die.”