February 2, 1996 - Arrival on the Docks

I am looking at the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere for the first time in recent history: I have arrived in South Africa. In a few days, I will travel to the docks to begin my research - will I find the legacy of apartheid or will I find a country desperately trying to birth itself anew at its roots, the docks? Will I encounter heroes - quiet, silent, strong - or will I find beaten men working beaten jobs leading beaten lives? My mind and my soul are seething with those inner questions of arrival in a new place, on a new continent, in a new country. There is a peculiar scent in the air that may only be described as: “Africa”. Today, on the bus journey from the airport I saw urban graffiti scrawled across another passing bus. The words proclaimed:
The deep quiet pool, which seems calm,
But drowns a person who bathes in it.

(My grandfather claimed that the pipe
was standard issue
for any meeting between two members of the working class.)

Surprise turned to pleasure
as my resined pocket produced a supple stash of tobacco,
for both of us.

Outside was the ocean
its waters oil soaked, slovenly
heaving against the tired bones of the docks,
enduring the black-skinned push of human merchandise,

waiting for another victim

I was nervous,
being white
surrounded by blacks
with only shredded tobacco
as explanation for my presence.

You will not believe me, perhaps
when I tell you
that I saw the moon reflected in his face.
He is, after all, black
and the moon has a reputation for being yellowish.

But I am speaking here
of the African moon
painfully trudging its part across the Southern hemisphere.
A moon coloured by the soil,
African soil, washed and scrubbed from the armpit of god

And I must say:
This is not the same African moon
that once wrapped itself around
the swollen abdomen
of Shaka, the Zulu crusher
cloaking him in the brittle din
of bleeding glory.

Nor is it the same African moon
that clung to the crown of Thaba Bosiu
to chant the slicing and searing Moshoeshoe
who sat atop his mountain fortress
mixing moon and rock to hurl
upon the heads of insidious invaders.

That was the glinted Moonspear of brittle heroes
soaking, even to the handle,
with the blood and push of medieval Africa.

As Thabo draws at the pipe,
his fingers deftly gauging the smoke,
a new moon waxes over Africa

A moon of smaller matters:
the soil, ploughshares, tired oxen, mine shafts, the African Atlantic (slovenly),
a moon-mining lantern
borne on the weary backs of black South Africa

This is the old African moon turmed over
dark side showing
black, enduring, deeds done in silence.

(We will write the silence, you and I)

Thabo swallows hard in front of me
the wisdom of Sisyphus wooled
throughout the creases of his forehead.
He says: Let us begin, Comrade
(his first compliment)
I am hearing: Nkosi sikelel i’Afrika
Perhaps it is in the furrows of his skin

Calm, yet oddly pooling a mysterious intensity.

July 29, 1996 - Angels in Blue
(written today, on a plane)

one.

last night we danced
at Angels
you and I

in the midst of gays
and you were reaching for my hands

the man behind the bar
in his pink leather
blue suede
and white boa

wanted a picture with you
and I

The jungle house mix
whirred and murmured
mingling with uppers
and certain liquids

just one line of white powder

and you kept telling everyone
how good it was to be spinning

at two in the morning
the door man fades
and the disco ball rotates
to the scent of dry ice

a man is naked with another man
they are slow dancing
and I remember my first high school prom
with the line for pictures
and couples
slow dancing

four in the morning
and I swear that
one blue light will make another

the roof top is languid
after frenetic music
and the moon has turned to ashes
and the clouds have turned to ashes
and my tongue has turned to ashes
my voice to dusk

you swim slowly into view
with one hand, gently
on my ass
we are friends
and you are beautiful

two.

at the very moment before dawn
we descend, again
into Angels

which is still sweating:
blue, acid, orange spice

a strobe light jangles
I am spot lit
and crying

a large black man
gently cradles his head
his body entangled in the music
but his head cradled

I feel like someone should
speak Swedish to me
maybe the woman in the electric blue
(she is beautiful)

I would reply with:
Yog talar endast Svenska
which means: I speak only Swedish

and we would talk the moon around
-the moon is green like apples-
me repeating:
Yog talar endast Svenska

until my clothes became my hands became the sea . . .

And as the evening fades
like distant music
my part will end
and I will take some road
that will drop me off near my hotel

(in my exhausted dreams
your hands are on the soles of my feet
your lips, bright full red, murmur:
remember me . . .)

Afterwards

Remember Joe Slovo,
Remember Stephen Biko,
Remember Chris Hani,
Remember Ruth First,
Remember COSATU,
Remember the SACP,
Remember Umkhonto we Sizwe,
Remember Madiba (27 years),
Remember apartheid.

--John Smelcer

The Master's Return

[Top]

There were more roaches in the Lawson house, now that Emily was dead. She had always kept things tidy, was always careful to keep perishables in the avocado-colored Tupperware she had bought cheap at a tag sale. But Gil didn’t have the time or the inclination to keep things that way, so after two or three weeks the bugs found their way back to the house.

They came a few at a time. One a few days after the funeral, when Gil was spending the weekend in bed. A few more the day Connor fixed himself lunch for the first time, and headed off to school. And when Gil finally went back to working, they had the whole house to themselves.

So when Gil would flip on the bathroom light, there would be three of four of them frozen on the tiles. He would be drunk a little, would look at them curiously. He would creep towards one slowly until finally it ran, and he would let it get away.

Connor took care of himself, pretty much. He had an alarm clock with Smurfs on it that he set for the mornings. Then he would approach the bathroom and flick the lights on and off a few times, to scare the roaches away. A little of whatever was in the refrigerator for his lunchbox and he was on his way.

When he got back, his dad would be at work.

They never talked about Emily, after the funeral. There were four months of cancer and then suddenly, she was gone. There was some talk of suing one of her doctors, but nothing ever came of it.

Gil took tolls on the Throg’s Neck bridge, got fierce headaches from the exhaust fumes. When he returned home, he would find Connor curled in front of the TV, watching talk shows or sitcom reruns. He would fix dinner, usually something from a can, and they would eat quickly.

The neighborhood was decent. Gil wasn’t worried much about Connor’s trips to and from school, mostly along busy streets with attached two-families and dried-up lawns. The school was dark and somehow sinister, Gil would think when he passed it, like a factory that worked with coal.

Connor’s homework was spelling and addition, and Gil would always make sure it was done before Connor went to bed. That used to be something Emily would do. Gil didn’t check to see that the answers were right, like she did.

Sometimes, when Gil was standing in the cold tollbooths, people’s hands would touch his when they gave him their money. That was the part he hated most, people touching him and dragging their dirty fingernails over his palm.

Things went on, bills came and sat. Gil was doing some overtime twice a week, but with Emily gone something had to give. He missed two months of mortgage and gas payments.

He left Connor one night with a neighbor and went to the school for parents’ night, the first without Emily. The evening was falling as the school’s incinerator blew ash into the emptying sky. He found Connor’s teacher and sat in front of her, on top of a student’s diminutive desk. She praised Connor’s behavior and enthusiasm, but said he needed to apply himself more consistently.

“He seems less withdrawn now that he’s met Vaughn.”

“Who?”

“Vaughn. Connor wouldn’t say a word in class for a few weeks after . . . the funeral. But then he said he had a new friend at home. Named Vaughn. And he’s been much less withdrawn.”

“I don’t know Vaughn.”

When Gil got home, Connor was asleep on the couch, the weatherman was talking about the jet stream.

“Get your homework.”

Sleepily, Connor found the workbooks and handed them to Gil. He paged through them.

“Your teacher said you need to be more careful with your answers.”

“Yes sir.”

Gil turned his eyes for a second to the TV. A building was being demolished in Newark.

“Who’s Vaughn?”

Connor’s eyes widened, but had returned to normal by the time Gil looked back from the TV.

“He’s my friend. I play with him when I get home from school.”

“Where does he live?”

“He doesn’t live anywhere.”

“What?”

“He just comes here in the afternoons.”

“How old is he?”

Connor thought. “Fifty, maybe.”

A thin smile spread across Gil’s lips. The next day he stopped by the school and found Connor’s teacher.

“Is it normal for a boy Connor’s age to have an imaginary friend?”

“Vaughn?”

Gil nodded.

“Well, I’m no expert. But Connor’s so much happier since he met him. It’s probably just a stage. Probably just a stage.”

The tail end of Gil’s dream was horribly wrong somehow, and when he woke he knew something wasn’t right. For a few seconds it was just a feeling he got from the room, but then he realized it was a smell. Like a dead animal, or fish left in a dumpster until it was liquid. But faint, coming in the window that didn’t close all the way.

He was diagonal in the bed, sprawled like he had been falling, the way he slept now that she wasn’t beside him. He ran his hands over his face, tasted the alcohol on his breath, like soft fruit. He sat up, and the slats of moonlight from the half-open blinds caught his naked chest. He went to the window, old floorboards creaking. There was a small backyard behind the house. A few years ago they had tried to have a lawn, but now it was mostly dirt and weeds that brushed your knees. It was tiny, maybe the size of a bedroom.

Someone was out there, a dark shape on the ground that could only be a person. Gil thought it might be a dead body, but he watched it for a while, and it moved.

He decided to go outside and tell the person to leave, and he started to move away from the window. But then he thought of Emily. She had always given change to homeless people on the train, even if it was just a nickel or two. Not a big show of sympathy, just a few coins. She would have told Gil to leave the man alone, he wasn’t bothering nobody.

Gil remembered a poster he had once seen that asked, “How Can You Worship One Homeless Man on Sunday and Ignore Another on Monday?” Gil didn’t go to church anymore, but there was still a reflex buried somewhere in his aging flesh that aroused a brief glow of pity. So he went back to bed, and when he got up the next morning, the man was gone.

The gas was turned off soon after. It was mid-November, and the nights were still warm enough, but soon the cold would come. Gil had a meeting with a banker, and the man explained to him a new mortgage plan that he said would allow Gil to keep the house. The days were shortening, and Gil and Connor were orbiting each other like moons.

Connor shoveled a forkful of baked beans into his mouth. The world was black outside the windowpanes.

“Vaughn came over today.”

Gil turned his face to Connor from the TV. He was more and more uneasy with Connor’s imaginary friend, but it was just a stage, he told himself. A long stage.

“What did you do?”

“We threw the football around. He throws hard. A real tight spiral.” Gil taught Connor to throw, last year. Connor was still too little to really put much muscle behind the ball. It would float and wobble.

“We should practice sometime,” Gil said.

“When?”

“Soon,” Gil said.

Connor also played with boys from the street. Sometimes they just rode their bikes around, sometimes they organized themselves into stickball games that would stop when cars came through.

Collier from down the street rang Gil’s bell one day. He said Connor had beaten up his son Joey. The cold wind swept into the house as Collier leaned against the open screen door.

“That’s impossible,” Gil said.

“The hell it is. These boys are growing up and you’d better keep an eye on yours. He sucker punched him, you know.”

Gil went upstairs, found Connor watching TV.

“Did you hit the Collier kid?”

“He was saying stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Stuff about mom.”

Gil sighed. “You can’t do that.”

“I had to.”

“I know.”

The homeless man came back every few days. Gil would wake and know he was out there from the smell. As the weeks went on the house got colder, and Gil felt worse and worse about the man freezing in his backyard. He wondered about him, as he watched him from the window. He thought of the time Emily gave half of her uneaten sandwich to a woman in Penn Station. The woman stood up and threw her arms around Emily’s neck in a hug. Gil was horrified, but Emily shushed him, and they moved on. All the germs, Gil thought as they walked away. There was a rumor going around work that a new electronic toll collection system was coming, and there would be layoffs because they needed people to fix the computers, not collect the tolls. Gil wasn’t sure if there was anything to it. People like to spread bad news, even if it’s not true. Connor’s birthday was coming up, and Gil didn’t know what to do. A few years back they had invited the neighborhood kids over, and there was cake and pin-the-tail-on-the-Ninja Turtle. (Do turtles even have tails? Emily had asked.) But now that didn’t seem possible. Gil wasn’t even sure what to get Connor for a present. He was getting too old for toys and little kid stuff. He had a bike. And everything else seemed too expensive. They visited the cemetery one weekend. Gil rolled the rattling Oldsmobile to a stop and he and Connor unloaded the flowers and the watering can. When they got to the grave, Gil realized that he had forgotten the trowel at home. So he and Connor dug holes for the flowers with their hands, ripping through the grass with their fingernails and wetting the earth so it was easier to move around.

“You’re going to be buried here when you’re dead,” Connor said. Half the tombstone was blank.

“Yeah.”

“Where am I gonna be buried?”

“I don’t know. That’s a long way off, huh?”

Connor wiped his muddy hands on the tombstone.

Gil walked out one night in early December with an old blanket for the homeless man. He took it from the bottom of the hallway closet, examined it closely for roaches and creaked downstairs in the dark. A streetlight outside was flickering, throwing patterns around the living room. “Hey,” he said to the shape, in the quiet way people talk in the dark, but the man didn’t react. “Hey,” he said louder. He didn’t want to touch the man, so he wrapped the frayed blanket around his hand and poked him. The whites of the man’s eyes lit up in surprise.

“It’s cold out.” Gil said, motioning with the blanket.

“Yeah,” the man said. “Yeah it is. Thanks.”

Gil stared for a minute. The man was wearing layers of clothes, bulked around his limbs like rolls of fat. It reminded Gil of how Connor used to look when he was bundled up to play in the snow.

“This is my backyard,” Gil said.

“Is it?”

“You’ve been coming here a while.”

“Have I?”

Gil noticed that the man didn’t smell as much in the cold.

“Lose your job?” Gil asked.

The man smiled strangely. “Yeah, I lost my job.”

“Listen, this isn’t a homeless shelter. You can’t just come here forever.”

The man sat up and raised his chin. “The Indians believed that no man owned the air, and no man owned the water, and no man owned the land.” He looked at Gil from the corner of his eyes and laid down again.

“Yeah, well. I ain’t no Indian.”

“You kickin’ me out?”

“I gave you a blanket, didn’t I? Try to find somewhere else to sleep. If you need to find a shelter I can help with that.” But the man had closed his eyes again, and Gil walked back inside. He bolted the door’s three locks carefully.

Gil stuck a small candle in a Hostess cupcake and lit it, then placed it in front of Connor.

“Happy Birthday, kid,” he said.

Connor closed his eyes tight and sat still for such a long time that Gil almost said something. But then Connor opened his eyes again and blew as hard as he could. The candle flickered and danced, and went out almost completely, but then flared up again. Connor was almost out of breath, but he mustered what he could and let it out. His breath was weakening, and the candle was too far away. It was going to stay lit.

Gil licked his index finger and thumb and snuffed the candle before Connor’s breath had expired.

“Dad! Now my wish won’t come true!”

“Yes it will,” Gil said, and gave him his present: a new Yankees jacket. Connor immediately put it on and began pitching imaginary baseballs around the living room. Gil smiled and took the candle from the cupcake, breaking it in half with his thick fingers.

Gordon at work said it was true, when Gil arrived. But Gil didn’t believe it until the shift supervisor handed him the memo and he read it with his own eyes. The new toll system was coming, and there would be layoffs. One-third of the staff would be cut, and the specific people would be announced at the end of the week.

Gil worked the whole day with a knot in his stomach, cursing every expensive car that slid past with its owner saying have a nice day and boy, it’s cold out today. He had a GED, but ever since Connor was born he had only worked tolls. He wondered what else he could do, and as the cars turned on their headlights and the dark crept into the booth, he became frightened and began to want Emily. The beams swept around him like searchlights, and things seemed to slow and lose focus.

He pulled the Oldsmobile into a bar near the bridge, a one story concrete building that sat like a bunker beside a marshy field. It reminded Gil of an old motel from the ‘50’s. He sat near a drunk woman, tall and tousled, as though her height exposed her to some disorganizing force not applicable to other women.

“Here’s to our men in the armed services,” she said when Gil arrived.

“Honey, this isn’t a soldier’s uniform.”

“No. I suppose it’s not,” she said. The bartender rolled his eyes, and Gil ordered straight whiskey.

“So you ain’t a soldier. What do you do?”

“I take tolls,” Gil said into his drink.

“Well, that’s something.”

Gil looked at her. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s something.”

“I’m gonna get fired, though,” he said after a pause.

“Fired?” She was outraged.

“Probably.”

Slowly, she slid herself over the two barstools between them, which squeaked and turned as she passed. Gil found that he couldn’t drink fast enough.

She was leaning her arm against him and saying something about the pressures of making a living, and then she began to talk about her own job. She worked as a temp in various offices in the city. Gil imagined Emily watching the scene from some darkened corner of the bar, but he downed the last of his whiskey and ordered another. The woman had a soft southern accent.

“Hell of a job, being a temp,” he said. “No benefits, no health care, no nothing. Just temporary.”

“All the people I work for think I envy their lives, but I don’t really. I’m happy as I am.”

“I can see that.”

There was a flicker in an eye, and a clink of ice cubes in a glass that signaled the start of a new round of conversation—one which made them lean closer and speak faster. When Gil got home, he rang the bell because he couldn’t find his keys. Connor opened it carefully, thinking it might be a burglar.

“Go play down at Collier’s,” Gil said.

“I’m doin’ my homework.”

The woman giggled.

“I said go play at Collier’s.”

Gil woke later and smelled the woman’s hair in the pillow. She was gone, but he could still smell her, and the room was humid, as though people had exercised in it. He looked out the window, and saw the man was there. He took the bottle of bourbon out of the cabinet in the kitchen and filled a glass, turned on the TV, watched the late night infomercials, finished his drink and then had another. He switched to a nature show, with a British voice softly narrating a nocturnal dispute between two tribes of hyenas. Their eyes were bright rubies in the camera’s spotlight, the way Connor’s eyes sometimes appeared in the family pictures Gil used to take. The dogs screamed and laughed like women, jumping at each other and sinking their teeth into spotted flanks. He kept drinking, and slowly one pack began to win, pushing the other tribe away from the watering hole in question. The losing pack retreated, except for one cub who was stranded among the enemy. Gil turned the set off as the dogs closed in. Then he headed downstairs.

“I told you to find someplace else,” he said, loudly, as he entered the backyard.

The man got up and gathered Gil’s old blanket around him. They stared at each other.

“Now you’re kicking me out?”

Gil thought of Emily again.

“How did you lose your job?” Gil asked suddenly, with the slightest edge of fear in his voice.

“Why you so interested in my employment history?”

“I just want to know.”

“I used to work for the Transit Authority. But I got fired.”

“What’s your name?”

The man smiled and shook his head, like he knew something about life that Gil didn’t.

“Vaughn. What’s yours?”

Gil took a step backwards, opened and closed his mouth, and then went inside. He picked up a wooden bat that Connor had gotten at a Yankee game three years ago, and went back outside.

“Get the hell out of here.” He imagined the woman from the bar watching him, laughing. Vaughn took a stutter step backwards.

“Did you hear me? Get the fuck out of my backyard.” Gil was advancing. He raised the bat stiffly and swung, hitting Vaughn’s leg as he climbed the fence. And then he was alone in the night. Gil went inside and clamored into Connor’s room, turning on the lights and waking the boy.

“Get up. COMEON getup.”

Connor, extremely frightened, stood. Gil picked him up around the waist and began to walk with him. Connor was heavier than Gil remembered, and he clawed with his fingers to keep his grip. Connor was screaming. Roaches scurried wildly across the bathroom floor. Gil set Connor in the bathtub and turned on the shower full blast. Cold water poured down and ran towards the drain.

“You’re OK,” he said, violently rubbing Connor’s body and face. “And there is no Vaughn. Do you hear me? There is no motherfucking Vaughn.” Connor was blubbering and yelling as the freezing water streamed down his naked body. He lunged to get out, but Gil held him there.

--David Czuchlewski