A SECTION OF SILENCE

Saturday morning:

     He touched the wall with his foot and let it rest flat beneath the window. The wall was cold and the curtains moved by the circulating warm air scratched his toes. That was a beginning – now he had to remove the rest of is body – and already he wanted to retreat.

     He threw back the cover, the sheet and wool blanket, and lay quietly shivering. breathing softly so that his father would not hear. He lay on his stomach and began measuring counts of controlled breathing. He played around too much – he knew it – didn’t he tell him often enough?

     At the count of twenty-eight, breath exploded from his parted mouth. He turned again, over on his back and stared up at the ceiling – white and pealing and green underneath.

     He reached one hand cautiously – wanting to preserve the delicate balance between full. aware consciousness and the vague. foggy place in his mind where he could hide – over the cluttered surface of his desk and shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack. His fingers stumbled in search of his lighter, a match, some form of fire.

     Bits of light fell on his closed lids demandingly through the window’s thin dark curtains.

     No longer able to deceive himself with timid pacifying gestures, he placed his palm flat and stretched to cover the surface with his arm’s length.

     The lighter fell to the floor.

     “Damn it.”

     He lit the cigarette from a half-crouched. half-lying position. opening his mouth. sucking like a fish breathes – trying to blow rings of smoke – but it only curled weakly. merged. and disappeared.

     “Lee. uh – I’m gone. I’ll see you later maybe?”

     “Yeah. Maybe.”

     He hadn’t moved. He knew he hadn’t. He could almost hear his short, hollow breathing trying to fuse with his own. He heard him moving closer wanting to gain entrance. and slowly. hesitatingly. move away. back. and down the hall.

     Footsteps fading to the outside. And down the stairs. Quickly.

     He uncoiled and sat up in bed. inhaling from the half-smoked cigarette. his face in his hands. elbows on his thighs. Up. slowly. unsteadily. trembling from the dizzying effects of the morning’s first cigarette. walking barefoot to the kitchen satiated with the weak sunlight of winter.

     There were things he knew his father wanted to tell him – ever since his mother died. and before that – to tell somebody. And he would maybe listen through polite inquiries and his own polite replies like people who were once friends but maybe had gone and got himself married and now had two kids; and you are still screwing around. doing the same things that once were a kick but aren’t anymore.

     He looked for an ashtray. found one in the front room and listened to the voices from the outside. from the floor below – voices of children. supposedly childish voices – developed to harshness beyond the years of the participants!

     “Hit it. Go’on hit it.”

     “It’s my turn. It’s my turn.”

     “I wanna play. Tell im to lemme play.”

     He looked at the table: the scattered drops of coffee and the remnants of his father’s breakfast.

     “Get up you ain’t hurt.”

     He poured the last of the coffee from the coffee pot that was always hot and almost always empty watching the screaming child from the window. The game was proceeding without him. Because he was small and meaningless to the endless supply of children, someone would always be around to take his place. The play was rudimentary in this slum and the cries of one child were unnoticed, indistinguishable from the shouting, crying, laughing sounds – the general noises preceding death.

     He grabbed a piece of toast left unconsumed from his father’s plate and dield We 21212.

     “Hey weather baby,” he said. “How does it look outside!

     “Uh huh,

     “Huum,

     “Naw, ya got to be kiddin. More snow?

     “Ya know, you and me could make it, but you just allatime hand me the same line. You is plain jive, baby and we are through. Goodbye.”

     His mouth creased in a quick thin smile; parted in a slow laugh and settled again.

     He brought one hand from beneath his face. fumbled to the desk and brought down the album on top. He raised slightly, looked at the cover and let it drop the short distance to the floor. He picked up another album. looked at its cover. and moved with it crablike to the other end of bed.

     He plugged in the record player and waited for it to warm up; pulled the record from its sleeve and watched it drop down to the spinning rubber disk.

Mose’s voice came at him harshly, plaintively:

Stop this worl

                                   let me off

Theys just too many pigs

                                                             in the

                                                                            same trough

Theys to many buzzars sittin on the fence

STOP THIS WORLD IT’S NOT

                                                                     MAKIN SENSE

Stop this show hold the phone

Bettah days this land has known

Bettah days so long ago

Hold the phone wonchyu stop this show

     Before he could reach to stop the needle the notes of the next cut came at him. Without Mose’s voice but with his piano fingers and (dig it, the bass). He got up quickly so that he could accompany Mose on bass. He sat crosslegged and fingered the taut wire strings. He played it again (the whole side) and again, the second cut (the good one, the voiceless one). He had a solo coming up: he sat barely breathing and waited for it to come. He anchored his thumb to his chest and bent low over the instrument and talked to it and awkwardly manipulated the fingers of his right hand over the fat bottom of the bass.

     “Mose, baby. The great Mose Allison, folks,” he addressed the toes of his left foot.

     He opened his mouth and laughed aloud, his face breaking away. He sat bending low, prying the strings of the narrow top three/quarters of the wooden bass fiddle he pretended he played.

     I should really be a bassist or a drummer or somethin. A tenor man. But it just wouldn’t do for me to get up on a stage cause ah would just plain act a fool. There would be all them folks infrontofme waiting for me to do something and ah would just act a natural fool like a never had no types of home trainin.

     “Cool it Mose. Suppose somebody was to come in here and hear you carryin on like that.” This: to the toes of his right foot.

it’s too bad you don’t have as much interest

in yourself     in tryin to be somebody     you’ve got so

much of that music     that modern jazz     in your

head     you can’t hear anything else      you can’t sit

there playin     that     the rest of your life

I KNOW IT DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW IT

“Dumbass – what does he know.”

“Lord. Lord. Don’t lemme getaholda no tenor.”

And then: “Lord. Lord. What am I gonna do.”

LATER:

     He reached to the shelf above his bed and picked up the small wooden cup bought at some art store that was going out of business – because it was smooth and fluted and felt good in his hands. It had growth lines like he had never seen – as if maybe the whole tree had only been as big as the brown cup he held in his hand.

     He dumped its contents – pennies (he saved pannies) and a thin brown enveloped wrapped further in cellophane from a cigarette pack – between his legs; one leg on the floor. the other shoeless straddling the bed. The cigarette papers lay on thew shelf beneath thew cup. He unfolded the envelope and shook the flakes of green and brown weeds into two thin overlapped papers. It rolled bulky in the middle; thin at one end. He thought about starting all over again and finally just wet one side and folded back the butts.

     When he had done it the first time it seemed archaic and degrading like his first screw. demanding more of him than he thought he could give or knew he had or wanted to give.

     He had tried it because it was supposed to be

a groove my man     a kick     somethin to turn you on

like nothin ever has

                                they said

Wettin it and slowly handing it to him grinning

not so he could swing with them but so they could

watch his reaction to it     test him     and see if he

was worthy of it -- of them

     He inhaled with a forced singlemindedness of getting high and about-to-be revealed contentment allowing the smoke to go into his lungs and remain captured there. holding it down until he was of necessity forced to breath. sucking air through his teeth and nose as if he were a child with a runny nose and handkerchief.

     His head cushioned on one arm beneath him. The bout between his fingers watching the light bulb: swinging on the green cracked ceiling. I can always get rid of the smell if whats-his-name comes home. And anyway. he’d never come in here.

     Their conversations (if you could call them that because they were never really but knid of constrained, sometimes hopeful, mostly reticent groupings of sounds) lacking any semblance of communication. If we were ants or flies or grasshoppers we would touch feelers only when we bumped into each other.

     They stumbled over. struck out at each other. flaying because they could not recognize each other or their need. But they were not bugs: they were the undigested remnants of a family. They were the same (he and his father) the same blind animal.

     He felt himself loom large and recede to be no bigger than a pencil point. And it was strange being outside himself watching himself grow and recede. He had a presence. A volume. He filled up the room with himself.

     He sang softly to himself (mouth almost open – sounds filtering through) something he had heard nights ago – something soft and sensual and slow-moving and almost mean because of its disregard and aloofness. And lack of love. When he lay in bed and started up at the dark and waited for sleep. with the volume low so that his father would not hear and couldn’t complain if he did but just feel a removal no greater than the way it always was with them.

     He didn’t know enough about himself. what it took to allow a human being to do more than simply. merely exist.

     When the lights blink off and on and the mind becomes dim but not vacous – never completely that: he lay in bed and listened to the crying of the elevated train: clearer. then muffled. then stifled and gone.

     When I was a kid he was never there. but you sort of understood because that’s what fathers did and because of the good times he was.

                                          SHRINE CIRCUS

                                  January 26 – February 9

no kid     that’s not your style     you’re your daddy’s man

aren’t ya     what ya wanna mess aroun with kids for     huh

tell ya what     i’ll take ya     how old are ya now     eight

ten     i’ll – i’ll take ya – uh – i’ll take ya to a ballgame

basketball     yeah     you’d like that wouldn’t ya kid

     Except he never did. He tried to remember someplace – any damn place that went together.

     Now he only ran from his father and succeeded in alienating them from each other. They were all they had. and they ran.

     If he was any good he could rationalize away his luck. But he wasn’t – he wasn’t any damn good.

     What good is he if I can’t communicate my need or my hurt to him? What good is he if I can’t tell him how bad I feel or how great I am? What possible good are we to each other.

     I’ve never looked at your father. Other people look at you and like you so maybe it’s not you. maybe it’s me. My father is an old man. I’m killin my father.

     Watching the light bulb swinging on the green cracked ceiling washing over the wall creating a blocked moving light impression. moving. swaying. like his own body.

     It was so cold. So cold. He clamped his teeth together and felt (allowed) his breath coming in short full-mouthed gasps. His feet and body racked and bent with an inward concentrated rhythm of their own.

the head bowed

its eyes closed

the head – the total scene – interspersed

narrow slashes

wide

An old man. a dead man. a man diseased.

     He clutched at his arms. drew up his knees as protection and brought both arms down to enjoin his legs.

His mouth emitted a low and quiet moan.

To keep from screaming.

 

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