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At first, the dreams were benign; ethereal silent films—running through an open wheat field or climbing a tree in the late September afternoon. I was always an excellent climber. I could reach the top of the old eucalyptus and poke my head through the uppermost branches, a tricky negotiation of balance and weight shift. When the wind kicked up and the branches swayed, I was sea bound, riding the mizzenmast, scanning the horizon for enemies of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.
But then, things got weird. The dreams started talking—whispers in the rustling stalks of wheat, low distorted rumblings from the hazy sky. Even the eucalyptus, once conquered territory, began to talk back. I couldn’t decipher the language at first. There were no words that I could remember, but I knew the dreams were trying to communicate. That it was something I needed to hear.
The last time I left the house was 300 pounds ago. It’s easier for me to measure time this way. Lying in bed day after day, the sun rises and sets with numbing continuity. Who can keep track of time like that? I know that Mom died 430 pounds ago. I’m glad she’s not around to see me like this. I wouldn’t want her to feel like a failure. She always took my weight so personally.
Irina came into my life 120 pounds ago. The county pays her to cook for me, tend to me, that sort of thing. She’s from Georgia. Not Georgia, the southern state, but Georgia, the former Soviet Republic. She tells me stories of how civil war has ravaged her
country, leaving entire villages without water or electricity or phone service for weeks on end. Of the corruption at all levels of government, and the lengths to which people will go to keep their families alive. Her parents were killed when she was fifteen, so she became the personal concubine of some mid-level government lackey until she could afford to come to the United States and eke out a living taking care of people like me. No wonder she never complains when she cleans out my bedpan or gives me a sponge bath.
Before I was bedridden, I was a brilliant kid. I loved school, except the last few years when I started to really load up, but until then, I was unstoppable. English, Math, Science, Latin. I remember translating the first few chapters of Virgil’s Aenied in one night. From the original Latin, not the convenient textbook stuff. I flew through it like I was swaying in the branches again. The Jesuits thought I had a future in Classical Languages, but the truth is, I didn’t know what I wanted. I could have pursued any degree. There were too many choices.
Otis calls me over. He wants to show me his newest move. I play defense, as always, but what’s the point? He’s easily better than me, and he knows it. No one else will play though, so I take my position, feet spread apart, knees bent, arms outstretched, and I try to keep him out of the paint. Otis dribbles the ball leisurely, toying with me, waiting for me to become distracted. I don’t try to steal the ball. I’ve tried it before, and once you commit like that, it’s all over. So I remain poised, staring him down, looking for that tiny flash in his eyes that says he’s going. But he’s even learned to control that little flash. And while I’m looking in his eyes, waiting for any little signal, he’s gone. The slightest feint to the right and, before I can react, he blows by my left side and launches an easy scoop shot. This is a new move. Otis is right-handed, but he seems to have perfected the left-handed version.
“Ain’t no way to guard that shot,” he says.
“Yeah?” I say. “I’m slow and hungry. Try it against Shaq.”
Otis boasts that he could have played point guard for the Knicks, except he kept running into the law. “Fuckin’ cops,” he says. He thinks it’s their fault he’s not center stage at Madison Square Garden. Personally, I didn’t know if the NBA would be willing to take a chance on an unknown 5’10’’ meth addict with a spotty outside shot.
Normally, Otis isn’t one to blame his problems on the world. This is a source of pride for him, standing there in his greasy overcoat with size ten Nikes on his size eight feet, patting his chest. “I’m here ‘cause of me,” he likes to say. “Ain’t no one else, man, just me.” I don’t point out the contradiction, because I know how he feels about cops. I just let it go.
We walk back to the bridge, Otis holding the ball against his stomach like he’s pregnant. He laughs to himself, “Can’t guard that shot.”
This was the last I saw of him.
They compared scars, the biker and the goth chick, while I hovered. This one was from falling through a plate glass window, drunk. Yeah? Well, this one happened when I was 16 and totaled the car. The biker paused, taking the moment to dramatically roll up his sleeve, displaying a jagged line, white with age, which crept from elbow to shoulder, snaking across the grinning skull tattoo. This one, he announced, is from when I laid my Harley down on 50 feet of hot summer asphalt.
That was it. I was out of the running. I had no scars to contribute to the dialogue, no motorcycle wipeouts. I tapped her shoulder one last time and offered that all my scars were psychological. She smiled politely and turned away.
The bar was packed, loud and sweaty. Not my kind of scene anymore, but every so often I’d try to play the game again, pretend I was 25, and see how badly my skills had eroded. Tonight, they creaked with age. I tossed a twenty on the bar and left.
The cool night air and my humiliation at the hand of Mr. Harley Davidson had killed what little buzz I had left, which was fine. Walking drunk through the streets of New York at 2AM wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. In fact, a lot of things weren’t as much fun as they used to be--the job, the vices that, at 25, seemed rebellious and necessary. Even now, walking down Lafayette, my pace was slower, my steps more cautious. I almost might be tempted to sit on a stoop and rest but for the fact that I only saw old people doing that--lifelong New Yorkers who’d born the brunt of the city for sixty years and had no recourse but to rest on the stoop.
At Astor Place, I paused by the big, metallic cube. How many times had I spun the cube on nights like this? Stumbling out of Fez or some other trendy East Village club, always stopping to spin the cube. Honoring the ritual that I had established years before, afraid to break it. Afraid that if I didn’t take that moment, that moment of youthful exuberance, age would fall from the sky like an anvil and I’d be resting on the stoop forever. I considered the value of superstitions. I’d read somewhere that man, as a species, required these things for survival. That without them, we’d be rendered hollow, little more than lower primates scavenging for food. That these superstitions occupied a place deep within our collective psyche and to deny them would be to deny our humanity.
I spun the cube.
Immigration, Assimilation & Identity
When Latinos staged protest marches across the country last spring, waving Mexican flags and demanding recognition, my response was twofold: first, I thought, “this movement needs better PR.” This thought was fleeting, although I still think it’s valid. The second thought arose in conjunction with the first: there’s much more to this issue than meets the eye. I live in Arizona, one of the hotbeds of the debate, and am employed in the food service industry, so I work side by side with many Latinos. I view them not as faceless statistics, but as human beings with drive and grit and, indeed, a strong work ethic; and what could be more American than that?
Americans are besieged by media images and political rhetoric: hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the border, stealing jobs, leaching off the system, getting fat off the sweat of honest, legal immigrants and natives. In fact, this particular argument is repeated like a mantra: We are a country of laws, and they are breaking the law! End of story! No mention is made in that argument about the Minutemen, the self-appointed militia who patrols the border and detains, without benefit of Federal or local authority, those trying to cross illegally. We cheer them and their spirit of do-it-yourself defiance. The very name evokes the ragtag spirit of the underdog that won this country its independence and built it into a superpower. We have always cheered for the guy who had to bend the rules a little in the name of the moral high ground—John Wayne and Dirty Harry, two uniquely American archetypes who defied authority in a land of laws. And what could be more American than that?
The Terrorists hate us for our freedom. We are engaged in a War On Terror. We’ve heard it countless times since September 11. Terrorism. Terrorist. War on terror. How generously have those words fallen into the American lexicon in the last five years? While grainy video images of Osama bin Laden issuing dire warnings to Western Civilization may still cause jittery memories, does the word itself inspire the same fear? It has been so overused that I believe we have become desensitized to it, much like repeated exposure to violence may (according to some studies) desensitize viewers to its actual practice. By constantly reminding us of the threat, politicians have deadened in us the very fear they seek to keep aflame.
In his book Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, Leonard Schlain discusses the neurological transition from images to words that occurs in young infants. As the visual image of a bottle is replaced by the word bottle in the child’s brain, the image-based mode of thinking is gradually replaced by vocabulary. As adults, our thinking is so predominantly word-based, we no longer use images when we engage in abstract thinking. Elusive concepts like philosophy and ethics must be articulated with language. We know of no other way.
This reliance on words has, in a sense, mythical roots. According to the Bible, the first task God assigned Adam was the naming of the beasts. In doing so, man would gain dominion over all the creatures of the world. “To affix a name to something is the beginning of control over it,” Schlain states. In her popular series of fantasy novels, The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. LeGuin’s main character, Ged, a young wizard-in-training, learns that a mage’s power over nature comes from knowing its true name. By learning the name of a beast or tree or element, the wizard has gained dominion over it. Much like LeGuin’s mages, humans rely on our power of language to elevate us over the “lesser” beasts. “Words, more than strength or speed,” Schlain states, “became the weapon humans have used to subdue nature.”
“It’s a thirty-ought-six. Here, hold it.”
My father handed me the hunting rifle with an eager gleam in his eye. He hoped that the weight of smooth, cold steel in my hands would trigger some kind of latent male killing response.
“The stock broke about ten years ago. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed, but . . .” Didn’t need to when it was just your mother and sister, but now that I have a son, we can bag us a few deer.
My father had been threatening to take me deer hunting for as long as I could remember. He pulled out the gun at least once a year as if to say, “This is the year I turn you into a man.” I was too young and too puny to hold such a large weapon, but wanting desperately to be the man my father envisioned, I’d cradle the rifle against my shoulder, aiming at imaginary objects and pretending to feel the recoil.
“Okay, Dad. That would be great.”
I’m pretty sure my father thought I was gay. He never said the word—and he never asked me—but realistically, how could he draw any other conclusion? I never played sports as a kid, preferring the library and movies. I didn’t date much as a teenager, although that may have had something to do with my choice of high school. My brother and sisters all attended Washington High, the public school in our district. Not a bad school as public institutions go, but I chose . . .chose, mind you . . .to attend Brophy Prep, an all-male Jesuit Prep school. I chose it for the prestige (and because my best friend was going), but my father, a high school dropout and self-made man, probably saw it otherwise. He was an engineer with the phone company, having relentlessly worked his way up the company ladder by virtue of dedication and hard work. He had no time for these “college kids” who were promoted ahead of him and whose knowledge came from books instead of experience. He railed against the System, the Company, the Man, whatever. He was a shop steward for the local union, and I pretended to be enthralled by his righteous stories of defiance, of telling superiors to “go to hell.” I kept waiting for the movie of his life to come out.
But while I listened, I knew I would never be the man he wanted.