the journey never ended and continued to foreign cities and museums, somewhere inside him always wanted to return. N jo —** _ . -—■=■-» — ~ " "■ And so he returned and settled in a cabin by the sea, her deer prancing through the high grass and her raccoon starjng over the garbage can, her blue heron nesting in the canyon and then gliding like a paper kite across the lagoon, her egret poised in the low tide and her hills darkened with redwood and madrone, her clouds over Bolinas Bay and her wildflowers by the little Van Gogh cabin that rented for only seventy-five a month and all his watercolors filling with her vulvas and her breasts. All his love of nudes went into her shores and he wanted to fuck her with his brush. She became the image for his longing and like any nude she could be terrible and full of pain. There were only a few others on the mesa in those days and the loneliness was often so painful he wanted to die. The leaves of the eucalyptus were like daggers in the grisly fog on his way to town every afternoon and the post box empty until a letter came from Leo. “Hey, Zeke, what’s it like out there? We’re coming too, me, Charlie, all of us. The rents and the roaches have done us in.” Two more families joining the centuries of migration, your vans puttering across the wilderness of hippy-hating rednecks. You stopped outside Reno where Tony was dealing blackjack on the weekends and fishing the rest of the time. He said anyone who went to California was nuts. He said it was becoming another shit hole and you should stay in the desert. “You can have California and shove it up your ass.” By the time you arrived all the flower children were gone and all the runaways and drunks were littered in Golden Gate Park like refugees from the murderous suburbs. The newspapers were full of bloody faces from Chicago and there were riots in Berkeley and Oakland. You looked for a quiet place with a good school for the kids and yet you didn’t want to be away from the action. By the end of summer the hills were so dry the deer came looking for water by the cabins. The mice chewed the roots of the Queen Anne’s lace and the dry stalks toppled into the long parched grass. Then as usual the rains came around Halloween and the seabirds started to Let tier be called California, the word itself like a woman, her great thighs accepting anyone and her winters always green, her gentle hills like a boys first whore with a gold tooth in her smile. arrive on their way south, the merganser and pintail and bufflehead, the petral circling in the shallows and the pelican gliding with huge majestic wings. They were like angels, the cousins of the chicken we treat like shit. A lonely artist went to watch them and tried to hold on to the musselled rocks and the mesmeric anemones of the tide pools. He longed for his place in the earth and a natural life but it seemed impossible without people and money. He had none left and went back to the streetlights where he found a job at the Post Office in Berkeley. America 1 wonder what I would have become if I was born in this country. •You would have been a movie star. •You think so? •Sure, why not? Your nose is too big but they can fix that. •No one’s going to fix this nose. This is my father’s nose. •I wonder if I could have been a big shot if I were born here. •You already are a big shot. •Remember that Persian lamb coat she had? Only big shots wore those coats. •No, I mean a big shot like Eleanor Roosevelt. •Eleanor Roosevelt was a miserable woman. •How do you know? •I heard it on the television. •All I want is health. •Oh you and your health. You have to enjoy yourself too. •The only enjoyment I know is my children. •You see them once a year. •They’re too busy worrying about how to have a good time. •They have so much and still they’re miserable. •It’s a shame the way they live now. •If everyone lived like you we’d still be in the village. •What’s wrong with the village? •I like it better here. •I go to Las Vegas, I go to Tahoe, who wants to go back to the village? •It was like a village when I first came to this country. •Where you talking about? •In Binghamton, New York. My cousin had a farm there. •I didn’t know any Binghamton. Not a week after Ellis Island Iwas in the factory. Oh, America, everyone said on the boat, as if we were going to heaven. •That’s what Pinocle Nishan said on the boat. He said, ‘Do you think I’m going to America to work?’ •He was a gambler. •He had a cafe. •It’s the same thing. •My husband used to play cards there all night. •All the boys did. •I used to complain, but what else were they going to do, sit in the kitchen? •My mother-in-law’s kitchen was always full. •That’s because she made arak in the bathtub. •I used to hate it. I can still smell the stink of those raisins in the barrel. •People came all the way from Paterson to buy her stuff. •She had a good idea. Maybe I should make arak in my bathtub and then my kitchen will be full at night. •You need more than arak to fill your kitchen with people. •I don’t want mine full. I can hardly keep it clean. •My house is too big for me to clean. •We should all live in our garages. •I lived with my husband and four children in an apartment that was not half the size of the house I live alone in now. “It’s good, Zekey. Ya gist put hot warta init wid lotsa shuga an milk, it’s called Instin Maxwell House. ” The Woman with the Naked Breast In the dark mornings down in the basement of the Post Office there was an old black World War Two veteran who stood by the wall and hummed old jazz tunes while he smoked his pipe and shuffled his letters. He was not really old but his tobacco and his Ellington songs seemed to purl from another age in the golden years. Nixon was just elected and the war raged on, but though there was tension between the straights and the longhairs the old black vet with the kinky white sideburns stood by the wall in his separate world and shuffled his mail as if he were enveloped in a cloud of aromatic My daughter says safflower oil is better. Now your daughter is an expert on oil too. First it’s sugar and then meat and now they want to change the oil. They worry about their health. Let them worry about what comes out of their mouths. tobacco smoke, his letters tapping in rhythm to his songs from Tin Pan Alley. What cancer or transfer awaited him he didn’t know, he just cased his mail and went for his eggs in the cafe on Shattuck Avenue and then continued with his route in the hills. His face becomes the image of early mornings and the good feeling of being warm inside with the rest of the gang, of the world of our childhood when we were paperboys together, a boy waking in the darkness and catching the alarm just before it went off so it wouldn’t wake his mother. He would hold his shoes and walk in his socks past her bed into the kitchen and turn on the old four-legged oven and stand by the flames until the water boiled. Instant coffee had just come out. Big Richie was the one who discovered it. “It’s good, Zekey. Ya gist put hot warta init wid lotsa shuga an milk. It’s called Instin Maxwell House.” Good to the last drop, said the empty cup in the old Lyondekker illustration. He would drink it with a chunk of choreg and then tiptoe down the stairs and try not to wake old Mrs. Barbalinardo who’d be up anyway. Then he’d run to be with the gang in the empty storefront and Big Richie the manager would always be yelling like a foreman in a post office twenty years later. On Wednesdays and Thursdays the paper had to be shuffled together and everyone had to get to the office early for a place on the tables and sometimes there would be a fight for it, Big Richie shoving his way in between with his big jelly belly and getting his glasses knocked off from the flying fists, good old Richie, dear Richie whom everyone made fun of, wherever he is now, his ashes in the wind. Sometimes those who had to wait for a place on the tables would go down the street to the bakery and buy hot buns from the old flour-dusted baker who was their comrade of the dark morning when everyone else was asleep, and then they would all feast on the buns and the turnovers with their lips and noses powdered with sugar and smeared with milk and their hands black from the fresh ink. And when they finished shuffling the papers they would hang around the tables and twist them into flips, each kid checking the other’s as if the long phallic rolls they stuffed into their canvas bags were some kind of weapon or ammunition. Flip after flip in the odor of paper and kerosene and the warmth of being inside and telling puerile jokes more archetypal than lurid, like the one about the little creature who gets caught in a woman’s hole with a big monster coming in and whitewashing the walls. And when everyone was finished they would slowly enter the streets that were dark in winter and rose-tinted in the spring and each boy would be alone with his heavy bag that he balanced on his back like a coolie or a hero, depending on his mood. And he would trudge through the morning weather and bring news to the tribe of grown-ups in the different halls and vestibules, each with its own special odor and a mystery behind the door, the different characters and scenes he would peek into when he went to collect. And he would stop to rest and sit down to read the comics in one of the fancy vestibules with a rug and everywhere would be charged with the power of the dawn and the profound silence of being awake while everyone else was asleep. He loved walking in that silence and listening to the sparrows and pigeons, and then one morning came the shock of the woman with the naked breast, her nipple and areola exploding his eyes like a blinding flash when she suddenly opened the door to get the milk and her robe opened as she bent to pick it up. And when she saw that she was not alone she covered herself and smiled as if she did not have to be embarrassed or have anything to fear from the downy-faced boy wearing his cousin Aram’s old woolen army hat and the fatigue jacket that was too big for him so he had to roll the sleeves. And she was right. For though her breast would fix in his memory and never fade or change, he still lived in that world where beautiful women were only kissed or hugged and she was more vision than woman. She was almost the morning itself and how it glowed in a veil more shadow than light and he tried to hold on to the soft fugitive colors of her open robe as if they were the seeds of all the nudes to follow, her emanation more powerful than the body she prized while he walked on as if in a stream of a throbbing epiphany and wanted more of her, to embrace her and release the overwhelming waves that surged through his limbs and would later become so painful. He kept hoping she would come out again and she began to appear in other places, less a figure than the glowing bricks and poles that would one day blacken, bend and crumble in the warp of time, her swirling veil blazing and searing his eyes in the wound of adolescence and masturbation. He walked on and finished his route with the sun rising behind the skyscrapers across the river, the long golden ray like a spear in his eyes. When he got home his mother would be leaving for work. She would be at the factory all day and once a week he would go there in the afternoon and sweep the floor and clean the ladies room. 38 Clinton St. Quarterly
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