How good the coffee tasted my papa made me every morning by boiling.
What a kind man he wasn’t.
A talkative man in no way.
A complicated, devoted, tender father and husband, in the sense of not.
Sometimes it was his merciless German accent, how you could hear in it his heart gone blind from birth.
You recollect nothing of the day he died because even my neighbors couldn’t figure out whether my last name was voiced with soft g or hard, their pronunciation shapeshifting fast as the afternoon weather.
Your papa whipped you even harder when he drank, being a pregnant sentence, particularly when chased by something along these lines: He drank all the time.
Though in all fairness he taught me how to read well enough to skip first and second grade and gave me coloring books for Christmas and birthdays right up until the day he didn’t, at which point I began tracing pictures that pleased me in magazines onto cheap paper and crayoning them in.
Would you like to see where little boys come from? one of the heftig working girls with smudged lipstick and black bodice standing in the doorway of Bert Kelly’s Saloon down the block from the Star and Garter Theater asking.
Me not yet nine.
Where they go? she adding with a croaky red-mouthed guffaw.
…
…
…
The staff at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children carefully folded the towels they choked us with to avoid telltale marks.
…
…
…
Do you ever by any chance feel incomplete of mind?
…
I see.
…
For every child should understand he or she is forever watched over by the Spangled Blengins, horned and half human beasts, tailed and half dragon, wings striped in holy pigments that will slam badness all over the place, black eyes glistening with affection, grins highlighting holy white fangs.
Beautiful boygirls.
Girlboys.
Goybirls.
I—
…
Saints in the trees!
Saints in the—
Being an expression I often holler for no reason I can spell out while sitting here waiting to graduate to the Big Why in the Sky, as old people do, everyone around us busy not taking note.
When I was young I was terrified at what others thought about me.
By the time I was middle-aged I ceased to care.
It has been only recently that I have realized nobody was thinking about me in the first place.
Which confirms the hypothesis that one finds comfort where one can.
Not to mention you should proceed nowhere without your long knife and cane, would be my advice to today’s youth, should one of them ask after it, which is doubtful, I hope, because a little known fact is that Abraham Lincoln pressed hard to send the freed slaves abroad to get them out of his hair.
The baggage that piles up in the head unclaimed being another thing.
Who thought the end of the world would be so stylish?
Is a question I often find myself asking.
Nor can I recall anything about the day my special friend Whillie Schloeder died because Asian flu, the postcard from his sister explaining, two hundred miles west of faithless Glandelinia, where the kidnappers of the guileless live, one hundred forty north of the Abbieannia on most psychic maps.
I fall into worlds.
I FALL INTO WORLDS.
…
Excuse me—the shooting pains in my legs this morning are like electric shocks up across the groin.
…
That’s Henry Darger in a nutshell: bad teeth, bloody gums, bloody bowels.
Fibromas across the soles of his feet.
A canker-sore tongue.
The usual festivities.
On the bright side, I’m pleased to say it was the same for my papa.
Now and again, resting in this lobby, this wheelchair, watermelon-colored blanket across my lap, aimed at one window or another, a different one each day from what I can tell, lemon haze of sun, gray sigh of rain, the staff supplying me hourly with a handful of pills and a Dixie Cup of water to take them with, it is letting sink in the fact that the last word of every relationship will be hello, because it is apparently impossible for people to say goodbye.
The reality being I’ve been shrinking for decades, supposing you were to ask, kicking off my disappearance far ahead of time, though even at my best I never topped five-two.
Nor did I ever enjoy the assumption of a waist.
Henry was a neckless head glued atop a cask with two skinny legs and two skinny arms sticking out, the Tin Man without the tin, you would not be incorrect to describe him as, but I’ll tell you one thing, Whillie Schloeder: For thirty-five years you took me on the most perfect walks through the Riverview Amusement Park on our days off.
How we stepped out of the sunshine and into Aladdin’s Castle, funhouse with the collapsing stairways and huge turning barrel.
What I imagine I’m trying to get at is—
I imagine what I’m trying to get at is do not under any circumstances let in the recollections for in the long run they will kill you.
…
We met in church one Sunday between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, Whillie and me, out of nowhere encountering ourselves inhabiting the very same atmospheric conditions: sun and clouds mixed, high 47, winds SSE at 5 to 10, gusts possible.
Me nineteen.
Him thirty-two.
Whillie stood thirteen years older and a foot taller than Henry, slim, slicked-back black hair, eyes silverblue nickels, a night watchman at the Rinn Company, the one his papa owned, a streetcar ride away, one more son of one more German immigrant in a neighborhood lousy with them.
His tenderness wrapped itself around you like radio waves.
I took pride in paying for everything at the park—food, rides, games, trams—it should be noted.
It felt good knowing I could, even though I couldn’t.
I didn’t make much. I didn’t spend much. I didn’t eat much. I didn’t hope much. Yet we moved through a commotion of mothers and fathers, prams and balloons, cotton candy and humidity, dating couples and roller skaters and roller coasters, my heart breaking open, maybe him thinking about me thinking about us, or thinking about us thinking about nothing, or seeing himself seeing his oma scoop up one of the chickens in the backyard, cradling it, calming it, fisting its legs, rotating its body so its orange crocodile feet point toward her chest, her thumb and forefinger tightening around its neck, and it was winter, cold, she wants to get this over with but you have to do it right, take your time, be patient, position the bird, wait for it to forget it’s standing on its head, the wind aching your sinuses, only you need to let the bird feel you steady, quiet, everything in its proper place, so it will steady and quiet—then the yank, the pop, the crazy shaking, the flapping, the walking across the yard with the Almost dragging in the dirt by your side.
…
Shoot the Chutes.
Tilt-a-Whirl.
For dessert we would stop at the Casino Restaurant for a twenty-cent vanilla ice cream cone or a slice of cherry pie.
We—
Let me just—
Not unexpectedly, I wanted a dog most of my life.
Have you ever noticed their breaths smell like their assholes?
When I asked my landlord Mr. Lerner’s wife, Kiyoko, kind-hearted Kiyoko with too many teeth and a nearly complete absence of shoulders, about how much it would cost to care for one, a dog, I came to appreciate the extent to which such a notion would stay an abstraction for me, like trying to imagine how other people see the color red, even so, on my fireplace mantel: sundry knickknacks, religious and secular, pictures of the Virgin and the Lord of Rubble and those children most in danger on any given day whose photographs I clipped from Life, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, this or that newspaper found folded on some bench beside some person possibly named Blunk, Blunk or Blank, waiting for the next streetcar.
The walls of my room are, were, who knows for sure, crowded with the me of my paintings since I had come to believe nothing makes you feel safer, cozier, than residing in an archeological dig composed of your own ruins.
…
Have I ever said anything about how I once came exceedingly close to dancing by myself up there?
I’m happy to say the urge passed quickly.
I was much younger then.
Nor do I mind the rain.
Telephones are another matter altogether.
I am less than positive about Jell-O, and on our trips to the cinema Whillie and I watched gigantic factory gears eat Charlie Chaplin.
Shirley Temple’s blond ringlets, her dimples, her bravery, all the things which led my Vivian Girls to become themselves.
Do you recall that scene in The Little Princess when the captain asks her: Are you learning me by heart?—and little Shirley says: No, daddy, I know you by heart. You’re inside my heart. You should have seen Henry cry, hunkering down there next to Whillie in the dark, elbows up by his ears, snot gooping his mustache, for he knew there would always be the Ferris wheel, except at some point it would only be in his head, the carousel at night, the backs of his and Whillie’s hands brushing as they strolled through the zoo to look at the animals gradually dying from human stares.
That was always fun.
Only most of all it was our visits to Betty Lou Williams at The Palace of Wonders, her shiny teenage blackness lounging among the whiteness of sheets and cushions on the wide bed in her tent, her flowered skirt and flowered brassiere, her bare feet, her parasitic twin sprouting from her left side, two chubby extra legs and one undeveloped arm with a lobster claw for a hand, its head buried deep inside her belly like it was too shy to come out and say hello, Betty Lou smiling as we pushed aside the heavy flaps and entered, her smile occupied with the loneliness at being used over and over again, and right away Whillie and I felt the three of us were family, and it was just us sharing that hot murky room despite how many others might have been crowding in there with us, just this little clan of remains that didn’t belong here, didn’t belong anywhere, so Whillie and I found ourselves smiling back at her almost without thinking because we knew what she knew, and she knew what we knew, that we were all just like Betty Lou, who was just like us, only inside out.
