The kick-drum in his dream becomes the door.

“Come on you guys, we gotta get gas!”

“Fuckin’ shit, man!” Alex awakens to the voices of his friends.

“I’m outta here in five minutes, with you guys or not, so get your asses outta bed!”

The room comes into focus. Cindy Marshall’s bedroom. It will never feel his. He loved this room when he shared it with Cindy on the sly—sneaking in together after midnight, quietly fucking in Cindy’s single bed, hiding in the closet from her father’s occasional morning good-byes, Cindy cutting school, sleeping in and playing house all afternoon. But since Cindy went away to USF, this has only been the place he keeps his stuff and sleeps.

Another dream draws him deep into his pillow for a moment. He panics. Fear and adrenaline force his stinging eyes into the gray light. He absolutely cannot miss another day at work. Get up you fucking asshole. “Now!” he bellows as he rolls onto the floor and pushes himself to his feet. Jesus, feels like I just went to sleep. A crashing reverb box is thundering in his ears. He squeezes his head, palms to his temples, elbows extended, and draws a long slow breath to still the roar. Stoner yoga.

He doesn’t have to recall the music from the night before—just a few hours ago—his body still throbs with it. Did we really sound that good? Will it sound that good on tape tonight? Were we so fucked up we just thought we sounded good?

“Fucking shit, I hate this job,” he groans. But doesn’t really hate his job. In fact, in his brief working life—eight of his twenty-three years—he’s never cared about and enjoyed a job the way he does this one. Alex Conrad is the flow-solder man. The entire computer factory runs through him: that huge over-lit workroom full of Latinas and Asian girls, stuffing circuit boards as fast as their nimble little fingers can move, racked, stacked and lined up for his flow-solder machine; all those techies and ties in the testing department waiting for the clean, solid boards that only he can send them—even Joe-boy and Eddie in chassis & harness go into a holding pattern when the flow solder machine goes down. No, he may not ever say it, and he resists the idea on principle, but in his heart, he loves his job. He just hates going to work on three hours sleep.

Alex hears Joe-boy in the kitchen turning up the volume on his daily frenzy. He’s usually the quintessential laid-back bass player—too cool to hiss more than two words unless he’s talking about music. But he hates to wait and he hates to be late. Since he’s the one with a car, Joe-boy has taken on the job of getting everyone to work on time. “I’m goin’ out to warm up the car.” His voice glissandos up in a reasoned threat that echoes down the empty hall outside the south bedrooms. “You guys better get out there.”

“Hey, man, I been up for an hour, so shut the fuck up!” Alex hears Dave blast in from their studio/garage.

“What?” Joe-boy says, “You been listening to the tapes?”

Silence. Dave is fucking with him. Alex forgets his aching head and perks up, eager to hear what Dave thinks of last night’s session.

“And?”

Dave lets him hang a moment more before exploding, “Pretty fuckin’ good, man!”

“Aw right!” says Joe-boy and Alex can hear them playing each other’s shoulders and skulls like timbales in their excitement. In the pause that follows, Alex’s eyes drift to a distant focus, and he wishes again as he does every day, as he knows Dave and Joe-boy are wishing, the same unsayable wish.

The urgency of the moment intrudes. “I gotta go warm up the car. You better get those guys up—if we don’t get some gas before work we’re screwed ‘cuz there’s not gonna be enough to get home.”

Dave pounds the walls in the hall, “Let’s go, Con-man!”

“Okay, I’m up, I’m up,” Alex croaks, pressing himself to his feet. A wave of nausea and dizziness staggers him. He leans on his knees a moment, then straightening up, he yawns and stretches to fight it off. Trying to rouse his still-sleeping mind, he surveys the trash and possessions that clutter the room: piles of clean and dirty clothes, beer bottles and candy wrappers, an alto recorder and some bongos, an eight-track car stereo complete with naked oval speakers, a jungle of African violets in the window on the chest of drawers he stole from his father’s sister, the mattress he stole from an aunt on his mother’s side.

Still wearing last night’s clothes, he thinks about changing, but hears the front door slam and let’s it go. I just got time to piss.

The pressure in his bladder is becoming painful. Bursting into the hall he hears the bathroom door slam. “Shit!”  Eddie always beats him to it. The other bathrooms are with the other bedrooms on the far side of the sprawling ranch-style house. So, hunched like Quasimodo clutching an early morning erection, he shuffles down the hall toward the backdoor slider in the kitchen. Pulling the slider off its track—again—he stumbles onto the barren concrete patio and scuttles to the edge of the overgrown backyard, wild with fennel and thistle.

Ripping down his button fly, he thrusts his hips and throws his upper body back, relaxing to the verge of falling over. As his erection subsides, the relieving flow begins and he drains himself into a star thistle. Pungent steam rises in the cool morning air, blending with the sweet scent of fennel.

He remembers this yard from years ago when it was a construction site. The house had been built and the quarter acre yard was graded and ready for topsoil and landscaping. That was as far as it got. Like the inside of the Marshalls’ house, it was never finished. But while the floors and the walls remained bare all these years as the Marshall family fell apart, the backyard grew up and filled out on its own terms, like the three Marshall girls, wild and thorny, fragrant, green.

The Volvo’s horn is blaring. He wags his dick and flips it loose into his jeans.

In the kitchen he splashes water on his face and swishes out his mouth. He tries to run fingers through his matted hair and pull it into some kind of order behind his ears and down his back. The horn sounds again and now Joe-boy is racing the engine. “This is getting serious man. I have got to brush this shit pretty soon.” His face still dripping, he checks his wallet, pulls a hair tie from his pocket, and scrambles to the door.

The old white Volvo station wagon is lurching and halting in the street like a dragster at the line. Alex is pulling his hair into a painful ponytail as he runs down the driveway. Music is pouring from the Volvo along with the morning smoke. The vocals are muffled but it’s a tune they cover. Alex knows the lyrics:

I’ll be the roundabout…

The words will make you out-and-out…

He’s never been sure what they mean, but he isn’t thinking about them now—he’s thinking about getting stoned.

Eddie is hanging out the backseat window in a cloud of smoke, bellowing, “You better run, man, ‘cuz he’s pissed. He’s taking off.” As the last one out, Alex knows they’ll make him go around and sit behind the driver’s seat. He also knows Joe-boy will gun it when he reaches for the door. He does. Peals of laughter pierce the music. The Volvo jolts to a stop a car-length ahead. On cue, Eddie kicks the door open, “Well… come on… get in,” they chorus.

Of course, Joe-boy isn’t pissed at all. He’s laughing, stoned and jammin’ with his air-bass to the tape. A glance at the Nokia glued to the dashboard shows that Joe-boy cracked the whip fifteen minutes early. If the gas line isn’t too bad, they may get to work with enough time for doughnuts in the parking lot. Air-bass solo concluded, Joe-boy pops the clutch.

“Here, Con-man, I think it’s dusted.” Eddie hands Alex a black plastic film can and a pipe made of brass fittings insulated at the elbow with wrappings of adhesive tape, blackened and shiny from wear. The familiar warmth and heaviness of the old pipe is reassuring as he weighs it in his palm. Con-man glances up at Eddie and Dave, checking his audience, and fills the pipe with loose flakes from the bottom of the can. Eddie notices Alex using only the shake and calls him on it. “Come on, man—whose money you tryin’ to save. Bust off a chunk and get some real smoke goin’!”        

The Con-man theory is that if you only use the shake and never break the buds you’ll never run out. “Don’t you want it to last?” he asks.

“Man, that only works with hash,” says Eddie

“Well, anyway,” Con-man says, holding the double-shrink-wrapped stem of the pipe in his teeth and grinning like a hirsute Douglas MacArthur, “It’s full, so fire me up!”

Alex is suddenly serious, even solemn, as the flame in Eddy’s hand descends upon the bowl of herb. He exhales through his nose and seals his lips around the stem, preparing for the blast of heat and pleasure—the first hit of the day.

When the coughing subsides and dope is again cushioning his brain, Alex rests his head against the window, gazing through the freeway cars and trucks on the 405 coming into Irvine, and thinks of Cindy. When he called her last night, he knew he’d be waking her in the middle of the night. At first, she sounded warm and soft, like she loved him and she missed him—like she’d been dreaming of him. Until she fully woke.“Are you at the house, Alex?” The question was an accusation.

“Where do you think I’d be at 2:30?”

“Well, who’s paying for this call? Are you using one of those phone card numbers?”

“No, baby, no. I can cover the phone bill.” He knew she’d assume he was lying, which he was.

“No you can’t—you guys never pay your fucking bills.” She paused to hear him lie again and, when he started to mumble, she reamed his ear. “Listen, Alex, the phone guys have already been here asking me about calls on stolen credit numbers. I mean, I can keep playing ‘em off, but if you’re not using a pay phone, they’re gonna know right where you are and we’re both gonna get popped.” She paused for a breath and he thought she might be softening, but she was gathering for her next barrage. “How can you be so dumb? They’re probably listening to us right now!”

“No they’re not. They got better things to do than stay up all night trying to catch some two-bit long-distance thieves. They published those numbers in the fucking Free Press for chrise sake. We don’t have to be that paranoid.”

“They were interested enough to come by and hassle me.” There was a breath or two of silence while the truth of what Cindy was saying settled in. “I don’t know Alex. This thing just isn’t working.”

He sighed. He didn’t know either. He searched for something else to say—to make “this thing” between them work like it always had before. “I was tired of talking to you from a phone booth, baby. I miss you, Cindy. I love you. I knew you’d be in bed. I want to be there with you. I wanted to hear your voice…”

“OK, OK, you heard my voice.” His long-distance pillow talk wasn’t having its usual effect. “What, did you think maybe I wasn’t alone?”  This was new territory. How did she know what he was thinking?

“No, that’s not it. I just…”

She cut him off, “Just quit using those numbers, Alex. I can’t take the stress.” And she hung up. Like a slap on his ear. She’d never done that before. He almost called her back, but instead he lay awake wondering if maybe she did have another guy up there in San Francisco. It would serve him right for not going with her.

At the time he didn’t think he had a choice.

                                    

 

The Marshall house had always been the cool place to hang out for the kids in the neighborhood because the parents were never home. Ellie Marshall, the Finnish ice queen, was out seven days a week in her Caddie with a fifth of Cutty in the trunk, buying and selling Orange County by the standard lot. She was never home before 2:00 AM and was gone again by 8:00 the next morning. She’d worked her way up from subdivisions to malls and hotels by the time she quit coming home all together. Bob Marshall, Mad Man Marsh, was an aerospace engineer and a right-wing hard-ass to be avoided if possible. That became easier and easier as “overtime” evolved into living on his boat with his girlfriend.

The band had been moving in on the Marshall house like squatters for years. By the time Cindy went to college they were the only ones living there. Alex had to stay with the band when Cindy left because it was his band—he was the front man, the singer, the songwriter—but also it was part of the deal Cindy cut with her mother to get Cindy to college and away from the band.

Every guy in the band had gone out with at least one of the Marshall girls. Alex had started with freshman fantasies of the oldest one, Margaret, but she turned out to be a chip off the old ice queen. Amy, the middle sister, was Alex’s age. She hung around with the band for more than a year before she got around to Con-man. Alex didn’t like the fact that he was the last one she tried, but he didn’t mind at all when she finally led him back to her room. By then, though, he was only going through the motions. He’d already caught Cindy’s eye.

Even when she was a freshman and Alex was a senior with a pick-up truck and a rock-n-roll band, Cindy had seemed like too much for him. She was big and loud and took no shit. She didn’t hang around with her sisters or with the band. In fact, nobody seemed to know where she was most of the time. “Out with her biker friends,” was all her sisters knew. Alex worried about her.

Then, one afternoon Alex saw her climb off the back of a Harley in front of the house. Purple hip-huggers tucked into knee-high boots, braless in a gauzy halter, a wild blond halo of wind-blown hair—she was magnificent. The guy on the bike was about the most dangerous looking freak Alex had ever seen, but she was laughing and punching his arm. And when she kissed him on the cheek and shouted, “See he later man,” he seemed to shrink. She was totally in charge. She was like no girl Alex had ever seen—or even known about. He didn’t worry about her after that. He just wanted her to notice him.

It was Joe-boy who brought her to the band. They were at school together after Alex graduated. Once Joe-boy and Cindy became a couple, the band started practicing in the Marshall’s garage. When Cindy chose Alex over Joe-boy a few months later, there was nothing either life-long friend could do about it.

Joe-boy spent some time sulking and jealous but the band was bigger than any of that. They were turning the garage into a studio. It was important to keep Cindy happy. Her mother was a little harder to please. But Ellie and Marsh had been too absorbed with the real estate market and their divorce to see that the band was taking over their house. By the time they did, it was yet another piece of property in a very complicated divorce. Margaret and Amy were out of the house, and Cindy was a high school senior riding the crest of a teenage dream—on her own, in her own house, with her own live-in rock-n-roll band.

As her part of the divorce process Ellie made one last show of maternal interest. She wanted Cindy away from the evil influence of “all those hippie boys.” She threatened them with the police, but Cindy told her mother, “If the band goes, I go with them.” So, Ellie tried bribery and Cindy made a deal with her. She would quit living with the band if her mother would put her up in an apartment in San Francisco and pay her way through college. The band would stay and “house sit” since there was no way they could sell or rent the unfinished luxury slum the place had become. The Ice Queen probably figured she could sell it out from under them after the divorce settled. Cindy knew the band was relocating to the Bay Area eventually anyway.

Eventually can seem like a long time. Everyone was happy but the Con-man.

                                    

 

Lady finger, dipped it moonlight,

Writing ”What For?” across the morning sky…

Cindy’s song. Alex doesn’t remember hearing it begin. He doesn’t know where they are. Thinking of Cindy, his feelings had faded to depression and self-loathing. She’s definitely got a boyfriend. They are almost out of gas, but the line was too long. Alex takes no part in plans to siphon gas out of swing-shift cars after work.

The car is booming with the epileptic boogie of The Grateful Dead’s The Eleven when Alex rises to the surface and begins to hear the music again. Joe-boy is steering into the parking lot of Computer Automation, Inc.

“That’s what I like about Pete—he’s the first drummer we’ve had that can do 5’s and 7’s smooth. He knows where the one is without poundin’ on it.” Dave is obsessing again about the new direction—the new wave of progressive jazz/rock fusion they all hope to ride to fame and fortune.

“Yeah, well, sometimes I wish he would pound it a little more so I’d know where it was,” says Eddie.

“You don’t gotta hit the top of the measure when you’re playin’ sax,” says Joe-boy. “You just follow me and Pete.” He pauses for the music. “Listen how Lesh brings these guys back to the four beat.”

Talk is suspended as they listen for the eleven-beat jam to change back to 4/4.

“I tell you what, man,” says Joe-boy in hushed reverence, “that’s about the greatest moment in rock-n-roll so far.” Just as Eddie and Dave begin to loll with the music and the dope, Joe-boy punches out the cassette and yanks open the door, “I gotta go to the lumber truck and get some dough. I haven’t had anything to eat since that pizza last night.” There’s general agreement and everyone but Alex flops out of the Volvo. In the silence of the empty car the next two lines of the song ring in his mind’s ear:

Without a warning, you broke my heart.

Taken it baby, torn it apart

Lyrics Con-man and Pigpen can both understand. He rolls out of the backseat, and walks toward the opening in the side of the huge concrete box that is the computer factory.

“What’s the matter with you, Alex?” says Dave as they reaches the entrance ahead of the others. Dave has known Alex since long before he became the Con-man. He’s the only person besides Cindy and his mother who still calls him Alex.

“I don’t know, man, I can’t take this grind anymore.”

“You mean work?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“This is the best work we ever had, Alex. We’re all at the same place, on the same shift, making some money, we’re practicing more than ever and sounding good—hey, we got it made here.”

“Yeah, right, you guys hardly need a singer anymore—pretty soon there’s gonna be no vocals at all.” Alex is surprised at the sound of his own self-pity.

“Look, Alex,” says Dave, softening his approach. “We’re not ready to go to San Francisco yet. And I’m not ready to give up on L.A., either. Cindy’s not going anywhere.” He moves in closer to Alex’s down-turned face, trying to make some eye contact. “And even if she was, you know what the guys’d say—you can’t break up the band for pussy.” He follows up quickly to reassure his friend. “That’s not how I’d put it, but that’s how it gets said.”

Alex is laughing and mad at the same time, “Oh, yeah, right,” punching Dave’s arm, relieving tension, “Yeah that’s all Cindy is, motherfucker, nothin’ but pussy, sure.”

“Nah…but you know what I mean,” says Dave, giving in but holding out.

“Yeah, well, you know, man, I’ll never run out on you guys. Even if you are assholes sometimes.” A snorting laugh, bumping shoulder to shoulder, and they are close to hugging when Joe-boy and Eddie walk up laden with coffee and doughnuts from The Orange County Lumber Truck. They hop apart, casually, and join the listless stream of workers filing in to begin another day of work.

“It’s the happy hipsters! The hippie hapsters! Whad-id-is, bruthahs? Whad-id-is?” As soon as they hit the cool, dry air of the plant, Marvin Lewis, the floor manager is coming at them like a smiling predator.

Eddie addresses him with bored sarcasm, “Yeah, what is it, Marvin?” Marvin seems to go easier on them when Eddie does the talking—he respects the Latino sax-player.

Marvin actually likes all his hippie bruthahs. He considers hippies to be part of The Movement. You’re the only gray-boys who have the slightest understanding of what we have to go through. Marvin is the only black man in management at Computer Automation, and they admire him. They look to him for culture clues and approval, but his bait and cut style leaves the happy hipsters feeling manipulated. He chums the water, then reels them in without a fight, since their freedom to rip back on him is restricted by the fact that he is, in effect, their boss.

“Well, well, well,” he sings, “you got the dough… you got the jo… you boys look like you’re all ready to go.” Marvin is a real performer—a carefully constructed parody of what he thinks white people expect a hip urban black man to be like. He’s got his captive audience laughing so hard they’re spilling their coffee. Now he’s completely got the drop on them from a management point of view. He singles out Dave first. “Well, Mr. D. you can start by goin’ in there and talkin’ to Freeman in sales. He wants last week’s data and I think he’s got some new tests he wants you to run.” A change in Marvin’s face tells them their work day has begun. Dave walks away without a word.

Marvin steps deftly between Joe-boy and Eddie. Putting his arms around their shoulders, he speaks to them conspiratorially. “Foreman says you guys are gonna have a couple-a light days—you must-a been kickin’ some butt last week—so later on I’m gonna pull you off the line for a little while—there’s some stuff in shipping I need you to do.”  He propels them gently by the backs of their necks toward the chassis and harness department, his voice rising, “I’ll see-y’all at break about it.” Eddie and Joe-boy slump away shaking their heads. Marvin turns around to Alex, leaning against a chain-link divider—already exhausted at the thought of the next eight hours. “Come on, Con-man, let’s go see how it’s flowin.”

They walk on shiny industrial concrete down the wide center aisle of the plant.

Alex has heard about “The Plant” since before he can remember. This same sort of floor—the glacier polish of a million tons of forklifts and work shoes—is his earliest memory of visits to the factory where his parents worked. As a kid, the cold concrete, the size, the noise, and the seeming importance of the work, had impressed him with a sense of awe, like the feeling he had in church. But with three shifts going day and night and his parents working 48-hour weeks, the plant was more present in his life than any religion.

Computer Automation is building the new generation of mass-produced “Naked Mini” units destined to be plugged into the new BART train system in San Francisco. It’s smaller and quieter than the massive paper processing factory where his parents worked, but Alex still feels the reverence—something deep in his throat between a heart-throb and a yawn—when he sees the concrete and feels it pound his heels. The ominous scent of ozone has replaced the forklift exhaust, and rather than the metallic din of heavy industry, a murmur of voices rises above an electronic buzz. But the same impression of urgency and importance is here each morning as he walks to his machine.

On their left are the blue-collar benches of the chassis & harness line—rows of work benches cluttered with tools and hollow brown husks of sheet metal—the exoskeletons of pre-natal computers. Silent men on stools with nut drivers and solder guns hunch like industrial monks over the precise routines of their work, ignoring the threat of the overburdened shelves above, that groan with future tasks: multicolored bouquets of wire, tubes and sockets, metal flats, and hardware—the parts and pieces of their jobs.

To their right is the white-collar world of the testing department. To secure against theft, testing is enclosed by a six-foot chain-link fence that gives it the look of a refugee camp. Seen through the fence and dressed alike, the techies lose their personalities. The moving light from the diodes and screens reflecting on their white shirts and eyeglasses is more distinct than their faces. Their hushed voices blend with the hum of hundreds of tiny fans.

Alex and Marvin walk on toward the flow solder machine, smoking and groaning at the end of the aisle. Beside it, a huge square opens in the high concrete wall where the stuffing room seems to have been added on. The cold blue light of the room is bright yet diffuse, allowing no shadows and flattening its features so that it appears as an unreal glow, like a movie projected on the wall, that darkens the rest of the plant by contrast. Though the overall impression is of frenzied activity, no one in particular seems to be moving. There is the musical tinkle of female conversation, but the work is fast and close and no heads turn as they chat among themselves. The tableau of stuffer girls vibrates with the work of their hands and their eyes at a frequency that generates rack upon rack of printed circuit boards, crowded with components and ready for tinning.

“The girls are lookin’ good this morning. Had most of a full crew here two hours ago, so they’re about three racks ahead of you.” Marvin is giving Alex the run-down. The flow solder machine is really Marvin’s baby. He takes it apart and puts it back together every few weeks. But it was his skill with the stuffing department that got him promoted off the machine to floor manager. Somehow the ladies don’t mind being told about their mistakes the way Marvin tells them.

“Put any fresh bars in yet?” Alex asks, starting to let the job take over.

“Oh, yeah. Check it out. It’s topped off and smooth.” Standing next to the machine now, they gaze in silent fascination down into the caldron of roiling liquid metal. Alex and Marvin share a moment of admiration for the simple power of this machine. But Marvin is soon back to business. “You’re gonna have to adjust the fountain your self—I’m can’t do everything for you.”

“I know, man. I can handle it.”

“Yeah, well I wish you guys were doin’ bennies in the mornin’ instead of smokin’ weed.”  He’s jabbing, but Marvin is cool. He’s partied with the band before, but prefers benzedrine.

“Man, Marvin, you know we just take like one hit to get right, so go jack up your stuffers, ‘cuz I’m gonna be caught up with your girls by break.” He will be caught up by break if the de-ionized water holds out. He shouts to Marvin before he disappears into the stuffing room, “How much DI we got?” 

“The Culligan man’s got you covered, Con-man—all you need for days.” De-ionized water is needed for the board washer. Not only flux and oil must be scrubbed from the boards before they go to testing, excess electrons have to be removed as well. Only de-ionized water can do the job.

Like cooling trays of doughnut at a shop, racks of boards wait for the under-glaze of solder. Alex selects a board at random from the nearest rack. If he’s careful he will only ruin a couple of boards leveling the flow. If he’s lucky—and good—it’ll only take one.

The excitement he feels as he starts the work is the same that he feels before he performs with the band. He breathes deeper and faster, his heart pounds, but he’s focused and steady, anxious to put his rising energy to work.

The flow solder machine is shaped like a huge, doorless refrigerator on its back. The solder fountain at the center is formed by a rectangular collar of sheet metal that extends from below the surface of the pool of melted solder to a few inches above it. The operator controls pumps that force the molten metal up through the collar. The solder surges from below, bulging over the top of the constricting frame, but the heavy liquid resists the upward push and pours over the edges, back down into the surrounding caldron. When the pumps are adjusted, the solder welling up through the collar forms a smooth crest like a hot moving mirror over which the boards are drawn by conveyor chains that run the length of the machine. When the fountain is level only the undersides of the boards touch the ridge of sticking liquid, fusing the board’s connectors with the wire legs of the components.

A thin layer of motor oil smokes on the undulating surface of the melt, tinting brown the silvery sheen. Flamelessly burning away, it must be replenished hourly to prevent a layer of sludge from forming on the molten mass. A hood and fan cover the machine like a floating gazebo, but Alex still hacks up a brown remnant of the smoke each day after work. Though he knows it’s poison, he secretly likes the smell of the scorched oil.

He concentrates on the test board. Leveling the top of the fountain sets up his whole day. Too low and some components will remain loose and be lost in the washer—too high and the solder will flood the top of the board and all the components will be ruined.  Once the fountain is level it will only need periodic adjustment when new bars of solder are added. Most of his day will be spent mounting boards on the conveyor chain, watching them slip through the bubbling fountain of pink flux and hit the solder, then moving the warm, solid boards to the washer, and stacking them to dry for testing—fast, rhythmic work that allows him time to think.

But now his goggles are on and Alex’s mind is engaged with the machine. His hands are on the pump controls, crouching slightly, eyes level with the top of the fountain, as the first board moves across the foaming roil of flux and approaches the wave of solder. He starts the solder lower than it needs to be and raises it gradually, his hands moving among three large knobs at his waist. Leaning into the warm weight of the machine with his face as close as possible to the stinging heat, he grins at the sizzle of the flux, like water on a hot skillet, as the leading edge of the board touches the solder.

He’s there. The center pump is perfect. Luck is with him. The slightest torque on the outside pumps and the top of the fountain is a smooth, straight edge of silver. One board is all it will take today.

When the next board comes through perfect, he starts his run—going into a kind of frenzied trance. In his two years of factory work, Alex has discovered a mental zone that keeps the work and the clock moving quickly without noticing the effort. This leaves him long stretches of uninterrupted thought. He’s written some of his best songs during these times. But today he’s worrying about Cindy and the boyfriend he’s sure she’s got, and the phone police and the bills. Even so, his work trance is so effective he’s turning out solid boards faster than they can be stuffed. He’s ahead of the stuffers ten minutes before the break.

The deionized water is in a pressurized tank on the other side of the wall. The washer whines, and he knows it’s time to open the input valve and refill the reservoir.

When everyone else heads to the Lumber Truck for coffee and sugar at break, Alex runs straight to the phone by the john. He can’t go the whole day with Cindy’s disapproval in his ear.

This time he calls collect, but it’s busy. Still busy. And busy, again. Sounds like the same operator every time. He feels like an idiot. Who the fuck could she be talking to at nine-thirty on a Monday morning? He realizes that he knows nothing about her life in San Francisco. Why would she think about him anymore?

On the fifth try it rings. She sounds reluctant to accept charges from Alex Conrad.

“Cindy?  How are ya, baby?” Afraid of silence, he goes on. “Don’t be mad about the phone thing, Cin, I won’t use it anymore and they won’t bust us for that one call.” The silence he dreads is aching. “Cindy?”

“OK, Alex, I’m not mad. But I gotta go.”

“I love you, Cindy,” sounding like a question.

“I love you, too, Alex, but we gotta talk and I don’t have time right now. I’d call you tonight, but you guys never hear the phone when you’re practicing.”

We gotta talk? The ominous words.

“Whadaya mean we gotta talk? We talk all the time.”

“Oh, Alex… What?” She’s talking to someone else, the mouthpiece muffled.

“Look, Alex, I really gotta go.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“It’s my ride and he’s gonna leave without me if I don’t get off, so…”

He! 

Panic. Fear. Nausea. “Who’s your ride? What’s his name?” He tries to sound casual, but emotion thickens his voice.

“Jeff, Alex. His name is Jeff and I gotta go. I’ll try to catch you around five—so be there, OK?  I gotta go now.”

“Cindy?” Nothing. Hung up on twice in twenty-four hours.

He steals an extra ten minutes of break hiding in the corner stall of the john, waiting for tears that do not come.

Alex knows that something is wrong as soon as he comes onto the floor. Everyone from chassis is over by the solder machine. They’re mopping. Marvin is conferring with a group of ties. Though silhouetted by the glow from the stuffing room, he can tell they are all looking at him as he appears at the end of the main aisle, which runs like a creek with hundreds of dollars of deionized water that spilled from the washer after he ran to the phone. Much worse than the cost of the water, it’s also a full day of down time.

He leans against the chain-link, dazed. He hears his own moaning lament, “Oh fuck… oh, shit… oh, fuck… oh, shit…”

On Marvin’s signal, Eddie tiptoes through the water to where Alex stands immobilized. “You fucked up, man, but I don’t think they’re gonna fire you. He wants you to go to his office so he can yell at you in private.”

“He doesn’t want me to help clean up?”

Eddie shakes his head half smiling, “Nah, man, he doesn’t want you anywhere near that machine anymore. He’s takin’ it kinda personal. Says he’s gonna train me on it and put you back in chassis.”

                                    

           

Joe-boy’s car is rigged with a hidden button to start without a key.

Alex did not want to see their faces. Marvin. The guys. Everybody. Looking at him.

He hadn’t thought about what he was doing or where he was going. He had to get away and the Volvo was where he went. After a couple of consoling hits, it seemed to make sense to reach under the dash board, start the car and drive in the general direction of home.

He remembers the gas when the Volvo dies on the 405.

The place he leaves the car on the freeway is close enough to the Marshall house for him to walk. Pocketing the pipe and cleaning the dope out of the car as best he can, he hops a fence into the neighborhood.

Angry curses spitting from his mouth keep his other feelings from surfacing, but he thinks of the phone cops and the weed he’s carrying, and paranoia breaks through. The contraband in his pocket becomes a lump of evil obvious to anyone who might see him. Suddenly everyone in this neighborhood of stay-home moms is looking at the freak with all the hair. He has to get off the street. Cutting through a neighbor’s back yard, he comes down to the Marshall house from behind.

The fennel is warm and oily in the late morning sun. The pleasure of its aroma lifts his head as he slides down the slope at the back of the lot. The fragrant shade at the bottom is familiar. Along its edge, winter runoff from the hill has left a swath of soft, sandy soil where Cindy had planted a patch of lawn, a private place between the fennel and the hill. He can feel her here, and smell her. This is where they first made love. Falling down upon it now, he grasps in desperation to hold it still—to keep the moving earth from turning. The unwatered blades tear from the ground and scatter like chaff in the warm breeze.

We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall

Keepin’ us tied and true, no…

He feels the tears escape his eyes. They fall into the dying grass, unseen.

Thumbing through Los Angeles takes the rest of the day, working his way north. By midnight he is sleeping in the sand at Zuma Beach.

                                                

 

 

No, Madeleine’s silk underwear did not mean she was saying yes, or even wanting to be asked. Silk like cool water warming in my palm, slipping through my fingers, alive with fluid movement; a perfect pairing with the beauty it enclosed. It made no other statement than itself and held no meaning not taken on like body heat from Madeleine. No Andalusian rose to draw me down, her silken works of art were for herself.

                                   

A few years before I met Madeleine, I was an organizer for a democratic socialist fringe group. I’d been a straight-up Trotskyite during the Nixon years. Back then, dialectical materialism ordered my reality. Bourgeois relationships and sentimental attachments were decadent and reactionary. But my stridency faded with my liability for the draft, and when the Democrats got the White House in ‘76 it seemed to make more sense to go with electoral politics. I caught on with a economic democracy group led by a famous radical pol and his movie star wife. A lot more fun than being in the Spartacus League.

At the beginning of a major voter registration drive in Orange County, they threw a party for the workers. There were twenty or thirty of us at a mansion in Hacienda Heights. After a couple of drinks my fellow canvassers and I admitted to hoping the movie star would put in an appearance. As soon as Mr. Counterculture Hero arrived, his people cut the music and herded us into the biggest dining room I’d ever seen to hear him speak. In a pool of light at the end of a long, dark table, he extended his arms, palms down, and leaned forward, his receding chin almost touching the polished mahogany. He looked around at the expectant faces as if about to divulge a solemn secret, making eye contact with each one of us. He seemed to be making sure we understood that he was serious.

He began barely above a whisper. “The work you are doing is very important,” he said. “But I know most of you are here for another reason. And I want you to know that it’s okay.” A shuffle rippled through the room. The closing circle of faces angled forward. Did he really know what we were here for?

“I know that most of you are here to find someone and get laid.” Everyone in the room seemed to hiccough at the same time. A jolt of shock flashed all around and a few chuckles began, but his unmoved face silenced us as he continued. “As long as getting the job done is at least your number two concern, we’ll do just fine.”

So, the night I met Madeleine, the volunteer work at KPFA was priority number two.

                                   

We were on the phones, drumming up money from subscribers before the semi-annual pledge drive. We sat at adjoining desks for a couple of hours, giving the same scripted spiel over and over. I worked the list down from Abbot while she came up from Zymechus.

I’d tried to catch her eye when we were introduced, but she showed no interest. While we worked, she paid no attention to me. That gave me a chance to gaze without the usual pseudo-casual eye-darting men do when they are checking out a woman they suspect wouldn’t appreciate it.

I figured her to be about ten years older than me—pushing hard on forty. Her face was plain and strong, round and scrubbed a glowing pink. Cropped, shiny black hair curled in toward round, dark eyes, giving her the old-timey look of a flapper. Her face seemed sad, but settled and knowing; accepting, though with a reserve of hope so deep and quiet that it must have had its roots in faith. I didn’t know the meaning of any of this about Madeleine when I first saw it in her eyes. Much about Madeleine I only understood years later.

She continued avoiding my lingering invitation to interact, so my attention drifted back to the series of short, almost identical phone calls that were supposed to be the reason we were there. At one point I realized we were making a pitch in unison, both pausing the same few seconds for a response. ”Uh-huh,” we said together. Madeleine looked up at me and smiled. In the next moment, we were quoting the same catch line from the list of prompts, in sync and with the same inflection. “Any additional amount will help.” All too much, we started to laugh. Our hand sets hit the cradles together and she turned toward me for the first time. “One of us better change the tape,” she said, “or we’ll both be wasting our time.” Her voice sang high and warm like a kiss on the forehead.

The evening took off from there. As each of my calls ended, I would cheer her on with a smile and a nod. She began to do the same.

I hadn’t shared a bed with anyone for more than one night in over a year. My libido had subsisted on the five sisters of my right hand for the last three months. That in itself sharpened my interest in Madeleine, but she was also just my type.

She seemed like a woman who would be flattered by careful romantic attention. A little heavy by the ridiculous standards of the day, she seemed at home with her body. Bralessness was a Berkeley standard of the decade, and she seemed comfortable with it, but I assumed that, like most women, Madeleine was not satisfied with the way she looked. To me, though, she looked beautiful; big-boned, soft-fleshed, the roundness of her upper arms plumping out from the constriction of short sleeves. Her girlish breasts rounded the fabric above the high waist of the floral cotton dress that spread to her knees around generous, patient hips. She wore no wedding ring. I pegged her as an old-school feminist, ideologically suspicious of marriage, but with a commitment to being single that secretly stemmed from believing she would never find an acceptable partner.

I had dated younger versions of Madeleine before. They were so much easier to take than many of the so-called beautiful women I’d known, playing hard-to-get and militant with their boots and lipstick-butch attitudes, all the while looking for a macho stud with the right philosophical rap and a source of money.

For all their feminist rhetoric, the Movement people I knew—both women and men—still clung to a hierarchy based on beauty. I don’t know what combination of radical-chic, pop-commercial, Euro-art culture informed the aesthetic, but those who adhered to it, enforced it. A straight woman who stuck to her guns on sexual politics could end up middle-aged, single, and celibate not by choice.

I sought out women like that—like Madeleine, as I’d hoped for her to be. I was their male reflection—the unacceptable partner. I wasn’t able—and so pretended I didn’t choose—to make the grade in the competition for women: money, handsome face, toned body, self-assured and capable, yet sensitive and caring (don’t forget sensitive and caring). An average guy with sub-par looks at best, not good enough to be wanted by so-called attractive women at all—not by any woman for long—I had developed a calculating sexual desperation.

Bitter? Oh yeah. Cynical? You bet.

                                   

“Where do you work?” Madeleine asked.

We’d been walking around downtown Berkeley for an hour swapping rumors and gossip about station politics. Now we were eating falafels in a tiny shop on Telegraph Avenue.

“County Social Welfare. Adoption case worker.” The jargon drum-rolled from my mouth. It cannot be overstated what a great come-on line that was for me among women in political groups—even before it was true.

“Oh, really? MSW?”

“No, not yet. Still an intern.” I tried not to sound as deflated as I felt admitting that.

Strolling side by side, talking about other people, we’d kept a certain distance. Her eyes met mine at the right moments in the conversation, but were evasive. Now, as we spoke about ourselves across the table, she faced me with a steady, assessing gaze that challenged me with its honesty.

“So, where do you work?” I asked.

“At home,” she said.

“Okay… so… do you mean you’re a housewife?” I said to tease her.

This seemed so funny to her she belly-laughed. “No,” she said a breath or two later. The high, sweet clarity of her voice touched me again in a way I did not understand. “No way. Never been married.” She smiled at the pita bread she held in her hands as if it were an amusing book. She seemed to be waiting for me to ask the right question.

“OK, so what do you do… at home?”

“I sew.” Her pursed lips hinted at a smile like a secret, holding back a punch line.

“Oh, you’ve got a little sweatshop going.” I glanced about in mock suspicion and whispered, “INS trouble?”

“No, it’s just me. Solemente.”

I questioned with a knit brow.

“Actually, I make my own designs and sell them.”

“Wow.” I said, impressed. But by the way she sucked in a breath in around her teeth I knew there was something more. “But what kind of stuff do you do that you can make a living at it?”

“I work with silk.”

“Silk?”

“Yes, it brings a good price because, well, it’s silk—it’s hard to work with, you know—you need special machines and most people don’t know how to do it right.” Her smile widened, she took in a big breath and let go a rapid stream of words that seemed to have been pent-up. “I’ve gotten really good. I started out doing a lot of resewing for people, salvaging imports that were coming apart, but now I do my own designs, and put them together myself better than any of the commercial clothes mills, and they sell faster than I can make them—I’ve got orders months ahead, but I’m not going to sacrifice quality, or my independence for volume and more money. I don’t want to be an employer, and that keeps my prices low for the quality of the work.” She settling back in her seat, arms crossed, with a self-satisfied smile and a bit of a blush. This display of ego warmed me.

“That dress is cotton, though, right? Do you make, like, super fancy stuff that you’d never wear yourself?”

“No, well, yes, it is pretty fancy, I am wearing one of my pieces, but, you know, it’s all lingerie and underwear.” Her cheeks darkened a shade.

In the span of a breath I read her blush and knew that Madeleine wasn’t thinking of me as a colleague or a client—with whom I know she could have talked underwear without a blush for hours. “Oh. Yeah. Very cool,” I crooned.

We talked of other things for a while, pretending I wasn’t interested in Madeleine’s underwear and that she hadn’t been blushing. As we talked our eyes stopped playing contact tag and we shared a moment when our eyes met and we held them in silence for seconds that seemed like minutes. We were both startled by this and began to eat in earnest, our foreheads nearly touching as we leaned over paper plates on the tiny table between us to bite our dripping falafels.

She trusted me enough to let me walk her home. Enough to invite me in. I drew her trust along by seeing her only to the front door of the subdivided Victorian where she lived. I suggested a time and place for us to meet the next day. She trusted me enough to agree.

                                   

When we got to her flat the next night, the first thing she wanted me to see was her work.

“This is my little sweatshop,” she said, switching on a blare of work lights as I emerged from the top of the pull-down attic stairs. With a stoic crew of dress dummies and mannequins crowding around long, wide work tables piled with shining fabric, it had the appearance of a busy workshop in still-life. Only Madeleine animated this world.

She must have been used to people being dumb-struck when first seeing her attic. My mouth formed a continuous “Wow” as she intoned in a tour-guide voice the name of each strange-looking sewing machine and pointed out the finished products that adorned the mannequins: bras and panties, sleepwear, camisoles and tap pants—from the lightest pinks to the deepest purples and black. I had never imagined silk could have so many facets, like jewels.

“In the last couple of years I’ve gotten ahead enough to invest in top-of-the-line equipment and material. Now I can pretty much make anything I can design—and fast enough to make it worth the effort.” She stood before me, awaiting my reaction.

The musky scent of the silk, the intimacy of the narrow space in the dormer attic, Madeleine’s searching face, the suggestion of the silken shapes, my loneliness—all combined to induce an unexpected arousal.

“Madeleine, Madeleine, this is so…cool,” I whispered, returning her searching look.

It may have been my expression, something in my voice, or she may have noticed the erection distorting my jeans, but she ended the tour without another word. I never entered her attic again.

                                   

Over the next few weeks we spent many evenings together in her living room. The “parlor,” as she liked to call it was a curated mix of craftsman antiques and polished redwood burl. The cozy comfort of the quilt-and-pillow nest on the window seat, a velour-covered couch, and an overstuffed chair—each in its own sphere of warm lamplight—surrounded a black and gold Persian rug at the center. The shelves that hid the lath-and-plaster walls were hidden themselves by blooms of books, their spines obscured in turn by framed family black-and-whites.

We listened to old Bob Dylan records over and over—Freewheelin’, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde—I Shall Be Released, Sweet Jane, Positively 4th Street—songs, we discovered, that had filled both of our lives. Neither of us much liked the newer stuff.

We talked politics and told our stories.

My story was of drug-induced road trips and street life. Our hero survives the post-Viet Nam collapse of phony hippie idealism and emerges as a neo-progressive, pragmatic feminist, ready to fight the good fight but no longer willing to die on the barricades. Her empathy and interest in my shaggy-dog saga heightened my interest in her.

She reeled out an epic of her father fighting in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, of being raised in a community of card-carrying communists, of the political and personal rebuilding required of them as they came to grips with the reality of Stalinism. She told me about Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, about trips to the south with SNCC, and of starting a commune in Sonoma, of farming and textile art. I was enthralled.

I did not speak of my calcifying cynicism, my bitterness, and the emotional dishonesty that led to my loneliness.

She did not tell the more personal stories that I imagined had led to her solitary life—of struggling with the male domination of the movement, of fights with former lovers, or of breakups.

Every evening, after the Dylan and storytelling, we sat on the couch and listened to KJAZ, getting closer in the quiet of the music.

There are times when everything happens with the first touch—when both people know from the start that the preliminaries are just building up the potential they know will explode on contact—when the car, the hall, or the kitchen floor will become the scene of urgent consummation. But I could tell that Madeleine needed me to court her.

We went from listening to snuggling within a few nights, but we never moved on to kissing. I saw in her face a reflection of the anxiety I felt. Who would take the lead? Would our intensity match, or would one of us feel embarrassed, disappointed, and guilty, the other distant, stingy, and guilty? We avoided the problem without words by giving each other massages. Using back rubs and foot massages, we danced around the edges of sex. We became intimate without a commitment beyond the massage itself, keeping an emotional distance. Both of us were excited, but neither wanted it to be obvious; I cultivated her trust, while she took care of herself by testing me.

We avoided conversation while we touched, using only our hands, moving wider and deeper, releasing the will of the muscles, the tension of fear. But each night around midnight, as we made plans for the next day and said our reserved good-byes, our faces were nearer, our pauses longer.

                                   

As Madeleine became more trusting, we shed more of our clothes for our massage sessions. Within a week we were down to our underwear. I stripped to my boxers at Madeleine’s first indication, but accepted a slower process for her—the slipping down of a cotton shoulder here, the drawing up of a silk hem there, some unbuttoning and unzipping now and then—every step taken with silent request and approval. Beneath Madeleine’s simple dresses were the camisoles and tap pants I had seen in the attic. No mannequin wore them now, and the liquid silk, black one night, red the next, tickled my eyes and the backs my hands, my palms and finger tips absorbing her warmth, and more than once by body conspired to give away the excitement I tried to conceal.

My willingness and ability to be so patient confused me. In the midst of client home visits and intake interviews I found myself yearning for our time together, planning on it as with a lover. But what was going on? We weren’t even sleeping together, and I began to think we probably never would. I had never spent this much time with a woman I desired without a sexual payoff. That’s what I had been thinking of with Madeleine at first, but my feelings changed. I found myself thinking that if we started having sex, she would soon become wise to me and discover that sex was all I wanted in the first place—all I ever aspired to in a relationship—that the rest was just a ruse.

This way of thinking about women had never troubled me before. Just trying to get laid, after all, I played the game in an ethical way, to my mind. But something about the way I felt when we were together made me want things to be different this time. So, I didn’t press the issue as I always had in the past. I’d been pressing the issue since the age of fifteen. I just thought that’s just the way men are, right? Advise and hope for consent. But now I thought somehow things could be different. Maybe Madeleine and I would work out in a way I had always thought could never be.

                                   

Early one evening Madeleine startled me at the end of the massage. Just as she seemed to be drifting into sleep, her eyes slashed and she flipped herself over on her back, nearly toppling me into the antique tea table.

“I want us to read together.” Propped on an elbow, she craned her neck to face me, eyebrows arched as with a brilliant idea.

I narrowed my eyes and tucked my chin in a question-face. Through the music and backstory chats we’d had only the What-are-you-reading, What-are-you-reading exchange—nothing more about literature. She’d mentioned a few titles and authors I’d heard of—Woolf, Lessing, Joyce—but “Hadn’t had a chance to read, yet.” I offered 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World—all I could remember from what I’d skimmed in English classes—finally asserting the practical rationalization that being a full-time student with a full-time job, I only had time for non-fiction. We hadn’t had a book-talk until that night.

Before I could respond to her declaration, she eased back and rolled her face to the side, in the direction of one of her bookshelves. “Well, you don’t have to read,” she said, then locked her eyes on me again. “But I think I want to read to you.”

She lay between my legs in a maroon camisole, eyes darting from one bookshelf to the other, browsing titles. Taking in her elegant beauty and feeling the sexual nature of our position, I lost the thread of what was being said and felt blood flow to my penis as I’d tried not to allow since our moment in the attic. Feeling it move like an independent entity and find the hem of my boxers, my voice thickened. “I’m reading you right now. Am I reading you correctly?”

Certain to have felt me, but without looking down she said, “No, we’re not ready yet,” and elbow-crab-walked out from between my legs.

                                   

The next night, the Sunday before a staff retreat in Monterey, was the last of our ease and comfort together.

She massaged me first, as I lay stretched out on the parlor rug. A blissful half-hour later, Madeleine warm with exertion, I began on her. A sheen of sweat dampened the wisps of hair on the nape of her neck and moistened my hands as I worked her back beneath her camisole. She relaxed just short of sleep.

When I moved down and began firm, kneading strokes up her thighs, she seemed to enliven, moving her legs to the rhythm of my hands. Her eyes closed as usual, cheek against the back of her hand, she raised her hips in a way she’d never had before. Her lips glistened with saliva and her nostrils widened, taking in long, slow breaths, releasing sighs like whispered wind. The sweetness of her breath reached my face, mint tea mingling with warm-body odors that enveloped us both.

Angling her hips still higher, she seemed to draw my hand toward the space between the purple silk and the ivory-pink of her skin. I became aware of the scent of her sex. I held my breath and entered. Eyes closed, the memory in my fingertips I found the edges of her vulva and the pulpit of her clitoris. With her wordless guidance I followed the motion of her body in an easy, quickening rhythm until she came with rain and tremors in my hand. Elated, I finished the massage by stroking her with the tips of my fingernails from head to foot while she drifted in and out of sleep.

At the door before I left, we kissed for the first time—a lingering kiss, parting lips, an exploration without intrusion or urgency. We spoke of where and when we would meet when I returned from Monterey on Friday, then we held each other quietly for a few last moments.

At the retreat I met Julie, the woman I would live with for the next four years. Like something from a cheap novel, we met at the reception, went from casual conversation and a couple of drinks, straight to her room, and blew off most of the retreat fucking whenever we got the chance.

                                   

I had been pacing while I told Madeleine of my misdeed. She did not speak or react in any way. She simply sat on the arm of the couch eyeing me with the same sad, knowing look I had noticed but not understood when we’d met. I still did not understand. 

Then, without a word, she leapt to her feet and walked out the front door. She stopped on the stairs at the flat below. I heard a knock. At the murmur of voices, I thought for the first time of her having an emotional ally, a friend at hand. Something I did not have.

Deflated of the righteous energy of my honesty, I slumped to the floor in front of the couch. I stared at the ceiling, my mind playing a game of strategic ambivalence. I did not consider leaving. On one hand, hanging in there and allowing Madeleine to ream me before she told me she never wanted to see me again would be cleansing penance for my cheating. In fact, the more anger she showed, the sooner I would feel better about having betrayed her. In that case I would be calling Julie when I left. But I also hoped she would forgive me. After all, jealousy is a bourgeois affect—a remnant of patriarchy. As long as I came clean, we could pick up where we left off, right?

Madeleine was gone long enough for me to slide into a dreamless sleep. Into the blank of my mind as I awakened, the old self-loathing oozed like puss from an infection. I was just reorganizing my defensive rationalizations when Madeleine returned.

“I wasn’t at the station that night to meet someone. You were an accident.” She said, standing over me, speaking in a matter-of-fact voice that belied her puffy, red eyes. She was not about to show me any tears.

I started to get up, relieved at my imminent dismissal. She thrust her hand out above my forehead in a gesture like a shove and I fell back against the couch. “Stay there. I’m going to read you something before you go.” She turned and went down the hall to her bedroom—a room she had never invited me into, and one that I would never see.

                                   

I’d heard of it long before I ever knew what it was. I knew of it as something for the record books—like antidisestablishmentarianism; a curio, a road side attraction, World’s Longest. At thirteen I thought Ulysses was The Odyssey. I imagined Kirk Douglas battling the Cyclops in a movie I’d seen on television. Joyce was an older girl who lived down the block. Even that last night in Madeleine’s flat I was ignorant of Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Daedalus.

Madeleine stood above me with a small book, thick as a Bible. On its dark green cover I could see no writing. She held it just below her breasts with two hands, like a prayerbook, elbows at her sides. She began reading in a practiced voice somewhere near the end, a place at which the book fell open out of habit.

“…well I suppose he won’t find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar…” she began. I did not know what I was hearing, but her surging, releasing tone enveloped me.

“… or if the woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and tasty…” Now Madeleine was the one pacing the room as the rhythm of the words expanded to rolling waves sustained through a series of images that overlapped and interwove until they seemed to enter me and mingle with my own memories.

In a dream without time, Madeleine’s voice drew me through a cascade of overlapping déjà vus. “…first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk…”

Scenes and feelings from my past surfaced and receded, riding the power of the unfolding tapestry that filled the room. “…and all the kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh…” I was stealing from my brother, vandalizing a school room, raiding my mother’s purse.

“…I don’t care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering…”

A montage of previous transgressions—moments of decision, error, buried shame streamed by like a highlight reel of moral bloopers, each one familiar and accompanied by its own echoing excuses and compensating lies.

“…and the sea, the sea, crimson, sometimes like fire, and the glorious sunsets, and the fig trees in the alameda gardens, yes…” Madeleine’s energy rose, filling the room above and all around me.

“…and all the queer little streets, and pink and blue and yellow houses…” I began to see images of our brief time together. But they were immediately intruded upon by memories of every girl or woman I ever pushed, prodded, or pressured into compromise. I was the older boy, despoiling freshman girls, supplying the liquor, feigning love for the night, “…where I was a child of the mountains, yes…” a room full of sleeping bags, “…when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used…” ignoring the protests of a girl who had trusted me, “…and how she kissed me under the Moorish wall…” slipping into her bag, hearing her whisper no, into my ear and not caring as I came on her leg in spite of her whimpering pleas, “ …and I thought, well, as well him as another…” feeling the sickness in my stomach that would overtake my life, only after rolling off and turning my back to her quiet sobs in the dark.

“…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes…” Curled up on the kitchen floor, in front of the sink, I recognized the sound of a bird calling from far away as my own convulsive keening. As my eyes began to see again, Madeleine was leaning over me, close to my snotty face. With a low, measured voice, the open book now pressed against her chest, she delivered the final tide of text, “…and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume, yes, and his heart was going like mad, and yes, I said, yes, I will, yes.”

                                   

I saw Madeleine walking toward me on the street the other day. I hid as from a vengeful enemy, though I know she isn’t the kind of person who ever hated anyone. Through the years I don’t believe she’s given me more than a passing thought. But I’d thought of her every day as I struggled—rededicating myself to my work, to the families and the children, to being a good partner to Julie, and reading, reading, reading—to overcome the things she helped me see were true about myself.

Seeing her again was as if I’d seen my light come shining.

I watched through a café window as she passed with two men and a woman. They could have all been single, or any configuration of couples. I couldn’t tell and I’ll never know. She strolled by a few feet away in a vintage summer dress that made the sidewalk glow. The man behind her spoke into her ear. She stopped and belly-laughed, hands on hips, mouth open to the sky. They embraced and were gone. Gratitude swelled within me like laughter. Then something else stilled my heart and drew my breath—something that I now believe was grace.

                                                                       

 

I’d been in love with Colleen Clark since we launched our relationship with exquisite naked-dancing in her mother’s bathroom. It was the summer before first grade. The Platters and The Penguins, humming from the acid green transistor on the toilet tank, echoed off the tile. Behind the button-locked door we felt for the first time the warm ease of skin across our flat chests, our round little child bellies, our inner arms and thighs. The part of me that was different from Colleen remained in place, unnoticed, but our peach-fuzz stood on end as we tingled with delight.

It seems to me now that the most pleasant times of my childhood were spent playing Barbies at Colleen’s house. My mom always busy with my baby brother, Colleen’s with an ailing husband and two toddlers, they left us on our own. We never quarreled or made noise, so they trusted us together. We played and talked and pretended. We came to know the rules. Our little dance was neither spoken of, nor repeated.

For six years there were no other girls Colleen’s age on our block. I had four or five boys to play with, but Colleen was isolated. We played and joked about “when we’re married.” In my mind Colleen was my future wife, but I don’t think she ever believed it. I was her substitute best friend.

As the training wheels came off my childhood, I played Little League and basketball and ran with the mob of boys on the block, but I continued to play with Colleen. I thought of Colleen as “My Girlfriend,” — the label my parents used. Our brothers and sisters and the other kids on the block thought the opposite sex had cooties, but Colleen and I were comfortable together.

The adults loved it when we showed off, holding hands and walking arm in arm. I think now that young parents of baby boomers had a lurking fear of their kids not “turning out right.”  Heaven forbid we should turn out to be “fruitcakes” or “lezzies.” This unspeakable fear was dispelled every time they saw the miniature couple we assumed from their every encouragement they wanted us to be.

                                                

Carla Bass moved in around the corner early in our sixth-grade year, about the same time Colleen’s father died. Colleen and I never talked about her father, or sickness, or death.

Colleen latched onto Carla as if to a lifebuoy, and they began spending most of their time together—time I would have spent with Colleen. When I was with them both, walking home from school, watching TV, or acting out Barbie make-believe in Colleen’s room, I felt like we were playing a game with rules only they knew. Exhilarated, confused and too young to understand, I floated along, loving being with either or both of them, no matter my discomfort and confusion.

That 6th grade winter Colleen and I played house on our own a few more times, but it wasn’t the same. Her smile looked harder, firm at the corners. Her eyes gleamed like they held a breathtaking secret. Each of those last times we played in her room, she would strike up an argument on some pretense, and we would end up play-fighting on the bed. We hadn’t been that physical since our naked dance. I remember her strange, wide eyes all the while we pushed and rolled.

As our play changed and took on unexpected tension, my feelings changed as well. I began to feel a need to state my intentions. Unsure as I was of exactly what they might be, I knew they involved going steady, kissing, getting married, and something called sex I’d heard about in movies.

I thought I should start by making our relationship official. As a 6th grade paperboy with a good route, I was a schoolyard millionaire, so one spring day, swept up by some kind of seasonal confidence, I headed for the strip-mall jewelry store, a wad of bills floating atop a pocket full of silver coins chinking against my bike seat. I bought Colleen a stainless-steel steady-ring-on-a-chain just like the ones high school girls wore. Trembling and breathless, I gave it to her on her front porch the afternoon before Easter.

I pulled the weighty bauble from my pocket without preamble.

“Here.” Her moment’s hesitation spurred me on to the babble I’d hoped to avoid. “It’s like what high school girls wear.” She took the chunky ring of silvery metal with its flat, blank square into her cupped hands like it was liquid. I held the ball chain on either side of the coupling, my fingers hovering above her palms. “See this thing? The chain hooks into it like this.”

I showed her again, popping the end ball in and out of the coupling from each side, jabbering about how the wire went through all the little balls and pointing out how they had seams like a baseball and how cool it was that they bent the metal into a ball. There were several other characteristics of the chain that I’d extracted from the jeweler while I whipped up my courage to make the big buy. I’m sure I told Colleen about them all. She was patient if not that interested. I soon ran out of steam, feeling stupid and hot. Whatever romantic delight Colleen might have felt at the initial presentation had been talked out of her.

“Okay,” she said. I let the chain pour into her hands, and in a single motion she popped it over her head and flipped it under her new, longer hair. We watched the ring bounce down her blouse, nearly to her waist—it really was for high school girls. Neither of us found that funny at the time. “Does this mean we’re going steady?” she said casually, like it was no big deal either way.

“I guess so.”

We weren’t ready for kissing, and I didn’t know what else to say but, “Let’s go play!” We both hopped once in place and ran up the street to join the other kids climbing around in the Chinese Elm in my front yard.

Only then did it become real to me that everyone would see what had always been private. I wavered between being proud, wanting all the kids to see, and hoping she would keep her shiny new token hidden in her blouse with her training bra. She ended up taking it off and swinging it around on her finger like a sling. At one point the blurring chain slipped off the end of her finger and the steely chunk flew out of orbit into the blue stucco of my neighbor’s garage. Only Colleen and I noticed. “Oops!” said Colleen, and we ran across the driveway to retrieve it from the flower bed. We giggled at the chip of stucco it had taken out, and Colleen slipped the chain around her neck and dropped the ring into her blouse with her training bra.

The uproar among the kids over Colleen’s steady ring ended up being no more than over somebody’s really cool aggie shooter. After a chorus of “Two Little Lovebirds,” everything went back to normal. I played along, but things had changed. I understood only later how the change involved Carla Bass.

                                                

Carla and Colleen were opposites in many ways. Colleen was round-faced and pink, her bright blonde bangs cut straight above dark eyebrows and clear blue eyes—Carla’s face tawny long and lean, with lank ringlets of nut-brown hair falling about black-almond eyes. They were a striking, mismatched pair.

I got my first fruitful erection thinking of Carla.

We talked on the phone—something Colleen and I had never done. Speaking into my ear as I curled on the floor in the dark kitchen while everyone else watched TV, Carla was not a disembodied voice. As she spoke, her face became clearer in my mind than it ever was in my eyes when we were together with Colleen or other kids. On the phone we had privacy. Her froggy little voice spoke only to me, telling me about problems with other girls, about her parents fighting, her brothers smoking and drinking. The things she told me frightened me some, but she seemed so cool and different and exciting. I would think of her long after we hung up. I would fall asleep thinking of how it would be to make her happy, to stroke her face, to touch her lips.

I began to write her love letters.

When Colleen and I began as friends, we hadn’t learned to write yet, so we never wrote notes to each other. It was different with Carla. By eleven years old I was literate enough to get myself into trouble. I spent one entire truant afternoon with the only picture I had of Carla, in the school portrait of Mrs. Potts’ sixth grade class, filling in the margins with tortured cursive purple prose. I hid it in the deepest recess of my closet.

I had just seen The Pride and the Passion for the third time that week on The Million Dollar Movie and I was moved. I identified with the Sophia Loren character, divided in her feelings between the long-beloved, heroic Spanish revolutionary, played by Sinatra—the Pride—and the dashing Duke of Wellington, Cary Grant—the Passion. I wept throughout the final scene as the Duke carried the limp bodies, first of Sofia, then of Sinatra, back into their recaptured city. I was attracted to the idea of these different aspects of love. Love could be many things. I could be in love with two girls at the same time. I poured my passion out to Carla with my pen.

I never gave Carla the unedited versions of my letters. She got my feelings, watered down to the level of Hallmark Valentines, in the form of tape-sealed notes passed to her through the hands of other girls in class. At first it didn’t enter my mind that Colleen would read the notes. After all, she was in a different classroom, and the girls who passed the notes always promised not to read them. I assumed Carla would never share them with anyone. I didn’t want to think of what Colleen’s reaction might be if she did read them. But when we talked on the phone, Carla pretended she hadn’t read the notes at all. It was all too embarrassing to mention. And besides, in my pre-pubescent mind my feelings about Carla were separate from what Colleen and I were to each other—whatever that might have been.

In the midst of a hormone storm, I was in a warm bath of ignorance. The water would soon be cold.

But as spring approached that sixth-grade year, some kind of awareness grew within me. It could have come from clues I picked up when I was with Colleen and Carla together—the conspiratorial tittering, the under-current of whispers. Or I might have been starting the long haul to catch up with the girls’ march through puberty; getting wise to the world of 1963, taking in the strange new ways by osmosis through the media. However my awareness dawned, my reaction was to panic. Of course! Everyone’s reading my notes! Colleen will be jealous. She’ll hate me. I’m too weird for Carla. She’ll drop me, and I’ll lose them both.

I decided I had to stop thinking about Carla—stop writing dangerous notes to her anyway— and make a commitment to Colleen. By giving Colleen that ring and chain, I chose Pride over Passion.

                                                

Only when Mr. Clark died did I understand how sick he had been, and why Colleen’s mother was unhappy all the time. Soon after the mid-winter funeral, Mrs. Clark seemed happier than ever. As the days grew warm, she cut and colored her dark, curly hair to a bouncy blonde halo. She took to wearing short shorts and halter tops. She would sun-bathe in a bikini in the middle of the back yard lawn, smiling with cucumber slices on her eyes. In April, when Mrs. Clark’s Greek boyfriend, Ilia, moved in, they acted like they’d known each other for a long time.

The kids on the block didn’t like Ilia much. He treated us like the nuisances we were. But he was a warm breeze to the Clarks. He rough-housed with Colleen’s younger brothers and, though he kept a certain distance from Colleen, she bragged about Ilia’s worldly travels and really seemed to like him. I think she liked the way he made her mother laugh. Colleen didn’t know what it was like to have a happy mother.

                                                

On the morning of the day my oblivion crumbled, I’d been mowing the Clarks’ lawn. A Southern California Saturday in May, lawn engines droned and the odors of green grass and blue smoke infused the endless suburban neighborhood. Ilia had been hollering at me about a patch of lawn that looked uncut no matter how many times I ran over it with the mower. I tried to explain that it was because the ground was uneven and there was nothing I could do. The second time I mowed it, Ilia could see I was right, but he made me do it a third time just to show me who was boss.

That afternoon we played in the water for the first time that season in Colleen’s backyard. Colleen and her brothers, Carla and I, and two or three neighbor boys glided on the Slip-n-Slide and lolled on beach towels sucking the juice from late Valencia oranges still falling off the Clarks’ tree, ripe and ready. Ilia rolled out the barbeque while Mrs. Clark, in a brand-new bikini, basked on a chaise lounge in the sun. I remember it as a kind of Eden.

I had gone into the utility room to dry off before going into the house to use the bathroom. Colleen stepped out through the kitchen door at the same time Carla came in behind me from the yard.

“Come’ere, I want to show you something.” Colleen’s strange, hoarse whisper sounded like it came down from the rafters.

Colleen took me by the arm and turned me toward the adjoining garage. Carla was right behind me as we entered the unlit space where Ilia sometimes parked his car. Dust motes hovered in shafts of light around the garage door. The dank odor of fresh-cut grass rose through the stifling darkness.

Carla spoke to me with lips so near her breath tickled my ear. “Do you know what pussy is?” she said. A squeal threatened to break through her whisper. 

My neck twisted and my head spun as I looked in panic from face to grinning face. Their eyes darted back and forth from each other to me.

“Sure I do,” I lied.

My mind scrambled to make sense of what they were doing, sifting through vague knowledge of sex gleaned from children’s apocrypha, movies, and sex-ed films. I knew a pussy was the same as a vagina, but I’d never said the word vagina out loud, afraid of pronouncing it wrong. I had no idea what Carla meant by the word pussy without the article.

“It’s your… thing,” I said, “Where you pee.”

The girls were not yet old enough for bikinis. Their wet, one-piece swimsuits were modest, with skirty frills around their burgeoning hips, but their naked legs and arms glistened in the angled light from the utility room so that the darkened garage became a silvery black-and-white film like one my parents would watch.

Colleen stood next to the trash barrel that held the grass from the morning’s lawn job. Topping the full barrel was a layer of trash from a bathroom wastebasket.

“Look at what we found.”

Colleen picked up an envelope from the trash and offered it to me. Taut with nerves, I recoiled into Carla. She was ready. Her hands were up, pushing my bare torso back toward Colleen and the envelope. I had no choice but to take it.

It was small and square; not like any envelope I’d ever seen. Even in the dim light I could tell it wasn’t white, but purple or pink, and I could just make out, across the front, in sweeping cursive, Ilia.

“Look inside,” said Carla.

Between my fingers the envelope made a crinkling sound. It was not sealed. I lifted the flap and slipped my fingers in. Instead of the nasty note I was sure they planned to make me read aloud, I found a dry, springy substance lining the bottom.

“Did you know it was hairy?” said Colleen with wicked delight.

I slowly withdrew my fingers from the envelope, trying not to betray my confusion. Carla’s chin was at my shoulder, a giggle bubbled in her throat.

“Yeah, sure I did,” I lied again.

With a clench of my stomach, it came to me that somehow this was Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair. It was something adults had. I’d seen the illustrations and heard about “body changes” in that infamous film at school. I remembered catching glimpses of it on my mom at awkward moments in the past. How and why Mrs. Clark’s pubic hair came to be in that envelope with Ilia’s name on it, and what Colleen and Carla expected me to do with it were too much for me to consider.

My forehead burned. The water dripping off my trunks splashed my cold feet as it spattered on the concrete. Standing in a puddle of my own making, I started to shiver in the hot and stuffy garage. My bladder ached as Colleen stepped close enough for me to catch the peppermint sweetness of her breath.

“Look at it. It’s my mom’s.”

I nearly knocked Carla down when I dropped the envelope and ran.

                                                

Colleen kept the ring. It was never spoken of. I spent the summer developing a passion for baseball. At the beginning of seventh grade Colleen moved to Anaheim.

I saw Carla only at school and, later, through the windows of older guys’ cars. She saw me but our eyes never met.

I tried once more with Colleen just after seventh grade. I called her on the telephone one lonely night. I don’t remember asking her, “Read any good books lately?” nearly as well as I remember the lengthy silence that followed the question, and the sick feeling it gave me.

Why she agreed to go on a movie date with me, I’ll never know—I guess it was the draw of an Elvis Presley double feature. But I was encouraged. Soon we’d be in high school, and I hoped we’d have another chance to dance. At a prom. In formal wear.

My mom drove us to the Brookhurst. Colleen was wearing strange new clothes—a short skirt with giant cartoon flowers and a clingy sweater that showed off her newly acquired breasts. I wore what I considered dress-up clothes—a white dress shirt tucked in to a pair of black slacks. All her new friends were there at the matinee—the girls in similar skirts and sweaters, the boys in jeans and tee shirts.

Before Kissin’ Cousins and during intermission, Colleen would sit with me for a minute or two while she looked around, then jump up and return a moment later with someone else to show me off to as her old boyfriend. During the movies we didn’t talk or touch. At times during Viva Las Vegas I wasn’t sure if she was sitting next to me at all. I didn’t look.

                                                                                                

 

 

 

 

AMERICAN SILOS

The poem that began—and ends—this poetic polyphony, Our Blue Silo, was written the morning after the presidential election of 2024. I was trying to understand my part in the creation of this immense divide, this national wound, from which the election tore a bloody scab.

Bring down the silos that separate us — burst excluding bubbles — crush the cones of silence

open up the echo chambers of our politics.

I have no illusion of seeing this in my lifetime. These structures took too long to build, and are built of too costly a material — the very human lives, filled with human fault and folly, that have brought us to this painful polarization.

The binary choice in an election

requires a previous binary choice:

To Vote or Not To Vote;

before that choice:

To Care or Not To Care.

Is that a choice? A state of being?

 

“You can do what you want…but you can’t want what you want.”

— Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia

 

Are silos built of forced binary choice?

Quintessentially American?

Built into the sacred Constitution?

Can we get out of them?

How do we invite the neighbors in?

 

“Maybe there are times so contentious or so painful that people simply withdraw to their own silos.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

 

Silos as keeps, redoubts, watchtowers, hoards;

Fort Apache at the edge of conquest

of peoples, nations, homelands,

sovereignty ripped from bodies

    politic      water      earth,

by force of inferior moral arms

to terrorize, dehumanize, to kill

      the people here, in this untitled land.

  Rematriate — Rematriate — Rematriate and free us all.

 

To be woke at my dawn in land studded

with silos, a stubble of towers, red,

black-n-white, blue, with interstitial green,

taller than trees—we burn those in the stoves—

in fruited alluvial plains we claim

to be ours from great-great-grandparents’ sins,

          justifying — forgiving — forgetting—

to look back to where I’m told we have come—

          as documented? — who can remember?

and see the gray silo I was born to,

          two-tone-faded — aged — not yet colorized,

on a ticky-tack suburban cul-de-sac,

and find myself here, in a blue silo,

full of kernels of truth and deep belief

about belief, and wonder

          how far removed I am from red,

                  and how we got so far apart.

 

Silos full of grain. Empty silos, full

          of pain and other kinds of truth; broken

          silos, crumbled, light streaming through the cracks,

                  people dreaming of green, open space

                  to live, to breath, be loved, and find

                          their true natal homes—

                                              places from which we surely all have come.

 

How did we get here,

my neighbors into theirs, red,

my partner and I into ours, blue?

We were all born in black-n-white silos.

We painted them red. We painted them blue.

Now we paint them black

with division and despair.

If we get beyond our differences,

will we become Nowhere Men

with no point of view?

Are we defined by difference?

Are red ones filled with different grains from blue?

Grains of truth in husks of lies.

We must thresh. 

 

Fine grain. Rough grain. Dry grain.

Cracked and sprouting grain.

Wet, rotted grain. Silage.

Digested. Fermented in bags.

In-forming. Shaping who we are

as we grow, age, ingrained in

silos red silos blue.

Media funnels our information,

but we can choose

what fills our silos.

We need green silos, NOW!

Glass houses lit

with crystalline sunshine,

golden green with life—

absorbing CO²

to save the sky.

 

How is a silo like a lighthouse?

—a cannon pointed at eternity

—a canon pointing out uncertainty

Swords to plowshares! Silos to lighthouses!

Beacons blending beliefs, rendering truths,

evolving biology, stores of information;

writhing, naked helixes in silo-bins,

red worms     blue worms

educated, slurping culture-slime,

passing castings on to children, dies

to cast their new-worm bodies in our image.

 

I grew up in a black-n-white silo.

Now I am afraid of red silos; I’ve heard

the people in there are armed and alarmed,

          that they think I am

          what I really am:

                  an atheist, socialist, humanist,

                  scientist, feminist, drug addict, wimp;

          that others in their blue silos

                    are female, lesbian, liberal, queer,

                    people of color, hedonists, vegan;

          that we hate them (I don’t)

                                        and so they hate who we are

                                        and will kill us for being

                                        who we are     who I am.

 

My neighbor raised around the block from me

          in a similar silo—now blood red:

                    FUCK YOUR FEELINGS plastered his walls

                              like a rural ad for tractors on a barn;

                    Let’s Go Brandon meaning

                              Fuck You Biden;

                    Stars & Stripes in black & blue

                              a Thin Blue Line,

                                        of corporate troops in a race war;

 

I thought I could change my neighbor’s mind if I spoke

          Truth to Power, but he had none;

that if I said the right words he’d change his mind—

          and we could be as close as neighbors should—

                    but I feared his guns, and said nothing.

Now I must admit         I wished him dead

          to protect my love, myself, my elders,

          family, my children, my friends, and be

the virtuous vanguard

of a Green Goon-squad.

I am ashamed.

So I hide in my blue silo

woke — asleep.

 

How do we here know our truth is true—

and not the vagaries of belief?

How are we so sure?

Let me count the ways:

They have Holy Scripture, God-received Laws,

Devine Inspiration, Creation, Faith;

we have senses, communication, facts,

hypotheses, procedures, conclusions,

debate, theory, application, and proof.

 

—The Political Rainbow—

From red into purple to blue into

gold into green back to yellow and blue

through to purple and red again, fading

in time and mind to black-n-white.

 

Our black-n-white silo had Walter Cronkite,

Huntley/Brinkley, and Johnnie Carson

          to tell us what was Truth and what was not.

Cronkite made me think Captain Kangaroo

          was behind the news

                    because they were both on CBS.

Huntley/Brinkley brought me Beethoven

          with their intro from the Ninth Symphony.

                    It took years to separate slashing strings

                    and timpani from images of war,

                             to uncouple Uncle Walter from the Captain’s Puffin’ Billie.

                                            Neither     sorting-out     completed.

Johnnie lived in the dark magic hour

          when I was thought to be in bed, asleep.

Glittering, scary glimpses from a boyish grin,

          watched secretly from my Childhood silo

                              through a door,

cracked-open.

Silos, echo chambers, confirmation

bias-bubbles, by their nature isolate us;

Schrödinger’s cats, only self-aware,

we know we may be both alive and dead

but not seeing our Other, quantum selves,

don’t know which we are. Everyone assumes

they and their silo to be the truer version.

We don’t have Lennon’s glass onion to see

how the other half lives and finds the truth.

 

Our Red Silo is safe.

Protected.

We are armed.

Our Red Silo is a smokestack

makes us strong.

We have freedom from fear.

 

Our Blue Silo is smart.

Well informed.

We know things.

Our Blue Silo’s a library

all is taught.

We have freedom to love.

 

Our Blue Silo

          has an infinite zenith.

I can see the edge of the universe from our porch.

          It will take forever to get there, even longer

                    with this latest crushing blow

                              to the world’s collective soul.

                                      In the meantime,

Our blue silo

          has hot running water,

                    a new septic tank with a cute blue cap,

                    a garage, driveway, and stainless-steel fridge

                              with food and drink from the North Coast Co-op.

 

                                        Our power comes from infinity, too—

Our silo’s cozy warmth flows from a pump

          driven by twelve black light-drinking panels

                    lined up edge to edge on our composite

                              tar-shingled roof, glass bodies in the sun,

 

                                        our foundation built of other bodies;

          immigrants forced by hands seen and unseen

                    hands with weapons, arms of false affection

          bodies lined up head to foot, hip to hip

                    in the bellies of banal prison-ships—

                              Trafalga — Hermose — Guerrero — Brooks,

          bound, brood-bred, gaslit, and sold,

                           while others here — as there — and everywhere

                                             women children elders

                                               Renewing the World

                                                 on Tulowat Island

                                      cudgeled in murder-ceremonies

                    by the drunken priests of Christ’s holy greed

                              prancing around the reddening sacred ground

                    with whiskey jugs — axes — clubs

                                             all to a snappy reel of Dixie.

 

Our Blue Silo also has a view!

          a tube of filtered light—no longer black-n-white—

                                      that speaks to us,

                         watches us watching, hears us listening

                         feeds us rations of bull and chicken-shit

                                   until we’re full of it     and empty     blind

                                   and blinded to the musky star-link cloud

                                             that streaks across our opening above,

                                             blurring out stars, a skid-mark on the night,

                                             deaf and deafened to the distant booming

          fire growing nearer every day.

 

My inner silo has an exit

          I would rather not use,

                    though everyone knows in time they must.

          I tried to escape through the lighted tube

                    but was caught in a web of looping roundabouts,

                                             mocking lemniscates,

                         that brought me back to terminal, digital comfort.

          Desperate to be nearer to the zenith, I climbed the walls

                    but got no closer to the sky.

I fell.

Thank you, love,

for bringing me back home.

 

This time I’ll keep my eyes on the zenith,

          close them when the star-link monster screams,

          fix my heart-mind on the starry circle,

          and sing full-voiced so my song might make it out,

                    soft to you of love, and of our children

                              in their greener

                              more transparent

                                        silos in the sun

          and hope to share this place without complacence

        through all the time we may still have as one.

 

—Fauxmoir, February, 2022

https://fauxmoir.com/spring-2022-1/tag/Michael%20Bickford

 

This wallet is the last

         I’ll ever have

                   if I don’t

lose it. 

I can see it all before me now

         penciled in like a lineup card;

                  as the leather wears

                                               so will I

the rest of the way

         broken in like a baseball glove

                        life down pat

just as the innings all run out.

 

The wallet I lost at fifteen years old

                was like my dad’s

                            shiny black calfskin for a birthday

         but Dad’s was old

             wear-buffed

                            stretched and rounded by mysterious bulk;

         mine so new & light

was it in my pants or not?

 

It fell at a Fox matinee

         out the back pocket

                   of my navy-style white bellbottoms

         as I watched The Happening

                   with the Supremes hit song of the same name.

 

What did I have to keep in a wallet

         when so young & hapless—

                   money from paper routes & mowing lawns?   

 

A picture of a girl with short blonde hair,

         tucked away in dark inner folds

                  leather sex-redolent in warm calfskin;

I see a face

         I hear a name and feel

                   the weekend afternoon

                   the tree we climbed

                   the fort we dug in black suburban soil

         but cannot reach that place in time

                            held deep

in slots & sections of my mind.

 

This last wallet,

         still unmarked,

not-yet-lost,

              never to be back-pocket-worn

                   contains no photographs

                             no currency.

 

She and I and all

         the gloves and innings

         the matinee Supremes

                  their song     the tree     the fort     the afternoon

                                              my father

         all will fall into creases

                   crevasses and wrinkles

                                     of red-grey time

         the convolutions of my dying brain.

 

         The wallet will live on

                  in someone else’s pocket

                            being as it is

already dead.

 

 — in Rainy Weather Days, https://rainyweatherdays.com/afterglow/

 

We’ve said all the things that lovers say when

skin is wet but warm against the sheets;

when breathing slows to deepened sighs of bliss,

our edges merging embers ashed with sheen

of sweat; when language is no longer words.

 

The gravity of our bodies, still strong

enough to spark a star, can no longer

bring forth life from darkness; past the point

of no return to time gone through us on

its way to those we leave behind in love.

 

Yet press our shores together once again

we will when morning finds us finding one

another in its freshened glow as bed-

warmth turns our tides to heat and fire and light.

— Neologism Poetry Journal, May, 2024,

      https://www.neologismpoetry.com/April-2024/#mb

 

When I was green and people asked me

what my favorite color was

I felt like I was lying when I said green.

            I liked all the colors.

                        The greens were lime and sage and olive,

                        Lincoln, tea, and serpentine,

                        jade, viridian, malachite and more—

I didn’t know which was real and envied

                        other colors’ primary certainty.

I said green because I knew it was mostly good:

 

            the wise old calm of modeling clay

                        the earthy Gumby-green scent on my hands

                        when I made snakes and pre-school pancakes;

 

            the accidental chlorophyll discovered

                        when I brushed the yellow tempera sun with sky

                        and wondered how green got there from the tree;

 

            the spring-grass infield with the Dodgers on

                        my acid-green transistor radio,

                        my holey Levi knees no longer blue;

 

            the viridescent dreams and hothouse

                        memories of Grandma with her fuchsias

                        and her glads, the sky sea-green through hazy glass;

 

            the shades on either side of redwood leaflets,

                        a darker, public waxy green on top,

                        the secret water-channel glow beneath;

 

                                    but not the putrid green

                                                of the slimy, overcooked spinach

                                                I choked on to escape the kitchen table,

                                    or the color from some glistening gland

                                                in the car-rent body of the cat

                                                who crawled off under a bush to die.

 

There is no color without light;          

            the quiet of deep forest green

            so quickly dims to black in early evening

but stabs back at dawn,

            the golden red it catches in its summits

            reflecting back its brightest verdancy. 

 

No color is one color:

            each a rainbow unto itself.

            All the colors is no color at all.

 

This poem is not envious

            of the no-color poems

            of black-n-white interminable TV grays

            that shout from either side

            at all the colors they are not

                        neither rosy nor sanguine

                        ultramarine nor umber

                        amethyst nor plum:

 it would rather be chloroplastered in the sun.

 

When this poem is old, and yet still green,

            closer to the white light

            (black as the pit from pole to pole)

                        living the green revelation

                        of our cool green privilege

it will not envy anymore

            but only wish to be

                        like crocuses in snow,

                                    key lime pie on ice,

                        avocado ripe in gator-skin,

                                    green butter on a slice,

                        a grass frog croaking in the dark

                                    before she makes her final leap,

                        an oval emerald on your heart,

                                    a promise I will keep.

 

—The /tEmz/ Review, March, 2024,

https://www.thetemzreview.com/bickford.html

 

They drift through classrooms,

            pass us in the hall

            on the road to their there,

                      our here now,

gather what they will

            from us, the elders.

                                   We gasp in wonder

                        at their innocent ignorant beauty

                        their nourishment from nothing, their streaming

                        surge, raw-ripe rumpled shine, like huge wrinkled

                        hatchlings     glorious     glowing     unknowing

            every sighting a new species ID

                        (Adolescencia prepubencia)

                                    middle school gen zero, twelve and thirteen

                                          that age for me a series of neurons

                                            connecting revenant emo-djinns

                                                         I no longer feel.

 

         I saw a boomer on a screen play

      a boomer in a scene where all agreed

                    things were better

          when and there, then and how.

                      They weren’t.

 

1. 1. 1. Where were you then? Where will you have been?

                     When will you be where you are?

                      Answer in complete sentences.

                               Show your work.

 

Some in their journey join us on the verge

            to ease the pain of smart eruptions

                        with prodigious plants and entheogenic fungi,

                                    grown and dried,

                                    burned and breathed,

                                    sold and swallowed

                                    long before they knew

                                                there was a truth to seek.

 

We mentors lie and say we never cared

            because it hurts too much

            to be ignored when we do.

We watch them as they fall off hidden cliffs

            we lied and said we never saw

            because we didn’t want to be a cause

                        of death predicted     not prevented.

 

1. 1. 2. What can be done

                 when you bare yourself

                    and can’t bear up?

                     Who or who else?

          Complete show in your answer work sentences.

 

Fear is

substrate of

action/inaction

enaction/reaction

substitution       substitute      submission        submit

sublime        subliminal        sublimate

stand-in stand-up

stands and delivers

stands in the river

watches it rise.

Submerged.

Naked.     Drowning.

Poser                   Imposer                   Imposter                   Fake

 

1. 1. 3.       In what way is this

a syndrome?

                               Answer sentences in complete

                                          work your show.

 

1. 1. 4.       Who am I when I am

someone else?

                                             (Who are  you  today?)

                                     Who was I when I was myself?

                                   Who will I be before I am no one?

                        In show   sentences answer   complete your work.

 

Link to publication, The /tEmz/ Poetry Review:

https://www.thetemzreview.com/bickford.html

 

 

Taught to speak then told to be quiet,

I learned to talk and was taught to be silent,

then learned to write with no such restrictions.

Write! they said Write!     Quietly write.

 

Start with white and beige pads of blank paper

from the plant—my mom’s work, Moore Business Forms—

bound with bright red gum on top, the edges

cut smooth to fan against my lips the cheek,

hand-sized pages designed to be ink-lined

in a waitress-apron at a diner

but slightly off-square, unprinted, lopped ends

left at the chopper for Mom to bring home;

 

add pencil or pen from a coffee can,

and look like Mom when she writes a letter—

squint up and left as if trying to see thoughts

on the ceiling and walls through my eyebrows—

then, starting top left corner of the page,

draw shapes like letters scribbled into lines

that look like the words Mom sends to grandma.

 

Later on, the pads had built-in carbons.

When I was very young some blank pads

had a double-long page of carbon paper

that was pulled and inserted as the pad

was used. But in third grade Moore’s invented

NCR^© paper, self-copying sheets;

and every scribbled page      self-published.

—in memory of Randy Roebuck

He was as he so often said

                        a dark skin’ded dude,

but being father, son, and friend

his skin and he were more than that:

deep earth soil live and roiling from his soul

black butter onto which I pressed my heart

and felt the frail-strong softness there within

  take self-sculpted shapes

      of  body    face    mind

Allegany mud in the hands of a black Rodin,

of the person he wanted us to want him to be.

 

As strong winds stiffen up the sapling in passing

            Randy Roebuck reshaped me

                        and privileged me to see

                        the emergence of his selfhood

                                       as what was

became what could be.

 

So, what the fuck, Unca’ Buck!

Ditched us for another fishing trip?

            The obit said you battled hard.

                                    Would that I’d been witness to that war.

 

Instead I see you now as I did then—

            master of the funk, spinning in your chair

            from tape to tape, deck to deck,  

            DJing for no one and the world

            from your turret room above Bloom’s Saloon

            fronting your wall of cassettes

                        a twister in your mouth   

                        that crooked smile, long deep-shining face

                        The Voice a bari sax: Ship Oars!

Oh Noooo! We’re gonna rock down to —

Electric Avenue!

                        easy teeth, goofy grin, linty naps,

                        puffy I-ain’t-had-my-coffee-yet-this-morning eyes,

                                    Gettin’ right, gettin’ tight

Talkin’ ’bout gettin’ dem panties tonight!

Speak into the mo’fo mic!

 

Close, even at a distance, distant

even with your arm around me

rollin’ with the group home boys

scopin’ on da bugs, da purdy trees

a shadow of the little boy you’d been

alive with those felonious man-children

yet diving under the table at a back-fire,

     never trusting anything completely

   after being there in country

    never spoken of.

 

With your charm and looks

            you could have made the velvet hustle pay—

                        the happy gigolo with goo-goo cooing

                        sugar-mommas paying for the ride—

                                                but no.                  

You chose to help,

                        with an MSW you thought was bullshit,

                        the flower-hatted, ruby-lipped church ladies

                                    you mimicked mercilessly

                                                            but whom I know you loved,

the case-loads-full of group home kids,

foster families, moms, grandmas, grandkids, aunties,

generations of cousins, nephews, nieces

happier now because of you

than you could ever make yourself.

 

I don’t know who you were trying to please—

            your wife? Your sons? But it was seldom really you.

                        Like me, I’m sure they were happy to be

                                     teased    annoyed    disarmed

                                    the way you knew how to do it.

 

To a tee you played the part of

            I-don’t-give-a-fuck macho soul brother—

                        but many knew you so much better.

We knew the boy inside the man with arms

            so long they wrapped around you twice,

I knew the warmth inside your leather

            jacket as I clung to you on your motorcycle

                        proud that people thought I was your boyfriend,

                                    down at The Stud dancing with the boys

                                    looking for women at the end of the night

                                                ending up with Jack-n-seven, a joint,

and the long hall between us.

 

Thank you for the smile that said I see you

     and understand the spaces in our hearts

                     that we can never fill.

It’s OK to let it roll, let it ride,

     straight up, beer back,

              cribbage on the side.

You let me see the man you saw in me.

                     Thank you.