Category: Riffs

The experiment with democracy, born in violence, ended in dictatorship — an utterly predictable result. All we got out of it was a new meaning for an old word, stew: corn syrup gravy with mystery meat, which turned into a symbol for the resistance. Newage oracles claimed to know how to read the cracks as it dried in your bowl. They were drawn to bodies, and anything else that stank. They were worse than flies. You couldn’t keep them out, not even with a LED-studded crucifix.

Poverty suddenly became virtuous again. Funny how people will pick at a scab, like a worthless old hen that keeps on brooding a clutch of infertile eggs. We were always glancing at the horizon, listening, quivering in the corners of basements. During the five long years of what the foreign papers euphemistically referred to as social unrest, window glass had become more valuable than heroin. To say nothing of water, or a white picket fence that didn’t quickly darken with soot. A soldier from the last batallion to leave New York had wept and wiped his nose with the end of his turban. Guess I’m headed back to the Caliphate, he said. I’m gonna miss you crazy infidels.

I wake in the middle of the night to the sound of rain on the roof and a dripping nose. The cold must be nursed. I feed it with distractions, reading about an anthropologist in New Guinea and a Russian mathematician. I croak a lullaby of my own invention about a mechanical bird made from pressed sawdust. One morning it came to life when a colony of termites took up residence in its gut. I have a thick stack of recent New Yorker magazines, which I got late last week at the very same time I contracted the virus, I think — their previous owner was dizzy with it. For some reason they are just what I want to read right now, as the virus glides like a slug on a carpet of mucous from room to room in my head. I remember my favorite Spanish word, otorrinolaringólogo — an ear, nose and throat doctor. A tragicomic word, especially with the scratchy bass o‘s one can only make with a cold in one’s throat. Of course, I hardly need a doctor. What I need is some kind of hard candy, such as Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, which I saw advertised as Pure and Good on an old can that a friend of mine uses for something else entirely. Or maybe a nice cup of slippery elm tea, because who can quibble with the logic of drinking bark for a sore throat? But no decongestants or antihistamines. Histamine is there for a reason, I’d say, though don’t ask me what that reason might be. Besides, if I beat back the symptoms, what keeps me from going out and spreading the cold to others? If everyone took drugs every time they got sick, wouldn’t that just make the viruses stronger and more resistant to treatment, thereby endangering the frailest among us? I prefer this age-old notion of nursing a cold. Growing up, I also heard feed a cold, starve a fever, which may or may not be good advice where fevers are concerned, but it is pure poetry. The virus is my guest, like some incorrigible orphan in foster care, and it’s my duty to make it feel at home. It certainly has a healthy appetite.

It’s the back-to-school season, and I wake up with cold knees thinking, shirts and skins. Touch football. Wishful thinking on the part of our high school gym teachers, that latter term. We were not there to touch, much less to be touched — a popular euphemism for insanity when I was a kid. Manliness meant playing rough, rejecting all gentler forms of physical contact. To be a man meant to carry a switchblade in the front pocket and a can of chewing tobacco in the rear, to be always ready with a lightning-swift jab or a stream of spit.

Even for a pacifist such as I was then, showing fear or pain would’ve wounded my pride, that golem, that reservoir of touchiness. I learned to stand still and smile when someone punched me in the chest with all their strength, and to show up at the appointed spot for an after-school fight ready to turn the other, defiant cheek. I got good at it — maybe too good. My skin — I like to say when people wonder whether they should venture to criticize something I’ve done — is a mile thick.

But perhaps the operative measurement is not thickness, but proportion of surface to volume. In which case, I must’ve been nearly as sensitive as one can get, since I was always very ectomorphic — i.e., skinny. Unlike now, when my heart and my gut — that moral lodestone of our president — are much more insulated from direct contact with the world.

Even though I hated team sports, the symbolic aspect of the contest between shirts and skins fascinated me. The Skins: lord, how we white people have always loved to play at savage, stripping for the Boston Tea Party, wearing blackface, getting “tribal” tattoos. Naturally hairy, how we have alternately loathed and adored the shaved skin, the tattooed skin, the pierced skin! And then to make such a commotion about its color, because the eyes at least can hold another at a distance and still take her measure, unlike the sense of touch. Once upon a time in white America, ultimate humiliation wore a thick skin of tar coated with feathers. Soft, sticky, tar-baby-dangerous, it represented everything a man must reject. We need so badly to steel ourselves against the treacherous vulnerability of the Other.

Nakedness in European culture has long been confused with an existential withoutness. The naked savage by definition lacks civilization, refinement, even — yes — sensitivity! But boys’ pick-up sports, even in a school without uniforms, may show the folly of this conception, because in fact it is the shirts who are defined by what they cannot be: nude. In a situation where nakedness is elective and clothing is otherwise compulsive, it is the clothed who are without that most precious of possessions, freedom.

In other situations, of course, the opposite may be true — under slavery, for example. In that case, the skin itself became a uniform, and a single value — blackness — was imposed on a wide range of colors. One way or another, the infinitely attractive and subtle skin challenges those who would enforce uniformity of behavior. For Westerners, and for anyone else who aspires to modernity, your shirt is the one thing you don’t want to lose. However much we fetishize the naked skin, clothed remains the standard, the flag, the team colors that inspire allegiance to the rules of the contest. Clothed and closed.

Sally in the Garden, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Wind That Shakes the Barley, Money Musk, where do these damn tunes come from? They come from this little metal box, from its rows of tongues. From my own tongue and lips and throat. From the in-breath and the out-breath, the wings inside my chest fluttering however the notes dictate. From a change in the weather; from the flicker of lightning behind my eyelids. Fisher’s Hornpipe, the Rights of Man, Off to California, no two refrains come out the same. Grace notes grow into flourishes, flourishes into figures, figures into new tunes — reels, ballads, hornpipes — half the titles vanished from my memory, few lyrics (can’t sing and play at the same time in any case), only the tune, or part of it. I pace back and forth on the morning porch, cupping the mouth organ against my lips. Thunder rattles the windows behind me. The rain pours down.

With apologies to Sonny Boy Williamson. The homebrew made me do it.

She’s my baby. Every time she knocks on wood, it opens, with a soft parting of cellulose.

Her smile doesn’t just light up the room; it can power all the household appliances for a month.

She’s better than a street sweeper, because wherever she walks soon gets a spit-shine from the scores of men rushing to kiss the ground.

She visited Lourdes once, & the abandoned crutches got up and walked away.

The last time she strolled past a cemetery, the dead didn’t stop at coming back to life — several of them danced on their own graves. They were that grateful.

She went to visit her congressman in Washington, & by the next morning, astonished headlines twice as solid as the last Presidential erection were precipitating a nationwide shortage in black ink: CONGRESS VOTES SELF PAY CUT, MAKES SUBSIDIES ILLEGAL.

You say your woman is fine, but mine can actually get you fined in dozens of municipalities where the transport or possession of my baby has been declared a threat to public health & decency.

Six hundred & sixty-six ordained ministers have denounced my baby from the pulpit. Jesus is still O.K. to worship — he’s safely off in heaven — but if this broken stink of a world were ever really healed, how could you tell the sinners from the saved? It’s a dilemma.

That’s why, for her birthday, I’m buying her the second-most expensive sunglasses on the rack — the kind with mirrored lenses.

Not prescription, mind you. Her eyesight is perfect.