A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Entrails, half eaten baby rabbits, and sundry corpses will no longer plague my wife. Maybe like Marquez's book title this pile of carcasses was a chronicle of a death foretold. I was looking into the refrigerator for a sense of well being when Janet came, welling up with tears, into the kitchen. "I have bad news for you." We both said it at the same time. I used his name while all she said was, "He is dead." We wept together. We are stunned; after all, he was only three years old. Although he was with us for such a short time, he touched our family deeply. Death stuns you--it's an expected house guest but generally without invitation. I have heard some say it is more shocking when youth dies rather than the old. Alas, that is clearly just youth accepting the death of the elderly. Agreed, it is the nature of things. I am reminded of the Chinese toast: "May you die before your children."
Death comes in many forms. For some it is a waking death, for some a slow degeneration of passion and desire, for others still a swift neck snapping stop. For the most part we conjure it up as a fearsome devouring. For us it was a senseless speeding car. But in the business of the universe it was always the same.
Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! I didn't see any crows around that day, I just heard them. I did assume it was their shadows I felt crossing over me when I walked around our neighborhood looking and calling for him. Perhaps they were the shadows of my soul's advance knowledge of the outcome. I couldn't help but wonder why we so often deny our inner knowledge, that come to us as premonitions, and call it optimism. Our modern day skills at not being "in the knowing," as the Australian Aborigines so aptly put it, honed to a razor edge, and is as bloody dangerous as Maughm's path to Enlightenment. I am trying not to imagine the worst for him on the third day of his disappearance. I knew those crows were just waiting for the search to go wrong.
Now standing over his lifeless form I see them in the trees. I felt a kinship with him beyond feelings of love. His feral ferocious carnage was kind of a symbol for me of human primal power lost. Although I see nothing glorious or sublime in humans slaughtering each other, or animals, his play and humor as well as his need for affection and longing to be in the warm company of our house and family, led me to see beauty in his natural brutality. I could not deny my attraction to that element of his being. He was aligned with forces of the sublime just as surely as lightning, fire, or annihilating deities are.
Death couldn't have come at a worse time for our family, when our emotions were flying around like overactive electrons whirling away from rather than settling toward the nucleus. All of our thoughts are colliding. We are all looking to unlock the secrets of the universe while muddling in the daily mundane way of things. We are just learning what it means to be a family for the first time in our lives. I asked my son Lucas, who is nearly six if he remembered our first meeting with him. He cried for the loss perhaps more deeply than all of us, certainly for a longer period of time. Lucas's hurt it seemed was magnified by his meger storehouse of loves lost and found. He sobbed that he could only remember the way they played together. My daughter Emma, who had the benefit of twenty more months of experience and the power of a strong intuition, cried deeply and accepted the natural way of it. I wanted to protect my children from the hurt. Parents want to delay the suffering for as long as they can.
Janet and I walked back from the scene of the accident. We never knew whose car hit him. We only saw the tire marks on the road and a lifeless body. "Should we call them at School and tell them ?" Janet asked. "No" I blubbered out, searching for some signs of his life force in the lump of remaining flesh. "We have to tell them together. We will tonight, when I can be there." We agonized over what to say. The obvious protective reflex action jumped at us to shield them from the suffering of life. "Of course we will tell them that he is dead." Janet said with conviction. I thought of her at the foot of her father's bed when he breathed his last. She had given him permission to go. She was strong in ways I had not realized.
That day after school we gathered around the table in the living room. We all held hands and Janet spoke out. " Rah did not come home these past three days because he was hit by a car while playing in the road by the bridge." Emma frowned and moaned
"Is he hurt bad?"
Janet deliberately continued,
"Rah is Dead."
We all cried together. In our minds, we saw him run through the house. Lucas's face screwed up with pain and, tears streaming down managed to pull out a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket
"Poppy, is this enough to buy a new cat for us?"
We all smiled. We were "in the knowing," and Lucas at five knew more than all of us combined.
The End
JAMES BROWN
NYC has a smell the likes of which could curl this paper if properly described. We were trying in our minds to escape it. Nonetheless we made our way uptown from El Cortile on Mulberry Street, both of us overstuffed with rich Italian cooking and well lubricated on a fifty dollar bottle of wine, crumpled into a yellow cab. We stared like puffer fish out the window the driver, a stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorist with a twisted turban and an unpronounceable name tag, uptown we whooshed banging around in the back seat on bald tires filling up with carbon monoxide.
NYC has a color red--but not the bright red of Christmas or the hot neon red of bar signs, not the seductive red of sex... something dark and eerie, an after-the-scene-of-the-crime-dried-blood red.
We didn’t care we were getting heady knowing that James Brown awaited us: James Brown, James Brown, James Brown, like a--like a-- religious mantra: "Save us, Godfather.”
We arrived at Radio City Music Hall, our ETA as long passed as heyday of that venue. It has that NYC red inside, though, I caught the a rife odor of pot and piss spewing out of the corridor. There was mingling crowd of vampires, lost neurotics, New York grunge types, and middle class black folks crowding. "You must be from New Jersey," the waiter had asked us in the Cortile restaurant. Our paranoia flag had gone up. Was it that Apparent? We got that paranoid feeling again in this crowd.
We searched with a balding red breasted usher shinning a pen light through the smoke “Here ya go”, We check the treasured tickets. Row D Seat 4 and 5 while shuffling to the seat I’m hoping there aren't any chicken sacrifices or vampire rituals going on in seats 3,4 or 7,8 like the kids joke goes, I know why six is afraid of seven, because seven eight nine.We looked up, the band was already on stage. We’ed only left downtown an hour early to get there, and we were ten minutes late. The stage is enormous, and the smoke billowed out of those fake smoke machines . The magic of the theater had not quite caught on--the slightly skewed vision of NYC was at play.Half-naked women danced; one with a fully sheer bodysuit had strategically placed hair falling over her breasts, guys flipping around dancing wildly spinning in a too-small space.I looked up to the stage. The crowd started chanting
Where's James JAMES BROWN, James Brown, JAMES BROWN "Save us Godfather" .A smell wafts over us, hot. It is a cross between urine and sour mildew gym towels. We look at each other, did you do that? It passes only to come again and again with each breeze of hot air ventilation.James finally blasts out "LIVIN IN AMERICA" for 20 minutes
backed by a band with dancers and female background singers. Shining furious red, each having their 250 pound bodies stuffed into way to tight leather outfits. In the middle of the stage was James "Save us Godfather" Brown crediting all his band members. There were so many of them, he repeated himself so many times I can remember all there names.
James is well into his sixties. Living in America many people can't remember there children's names at that point in their lives, but JAMES rattled them off with a quick shuffle.
Then finally he does it, spin drop, mashed potatoes, shakin, rollin, rat tat tatting, mashed potatoes n’ collard greens he turns on!
Genuflect with the golden microphone, offering the chalice of our needs. We are at the alter of our adoration for JAMES "Save us Godfather" BROWN.We are experiencing the sacred ecstatic spin! We leave the mundane world, fly into our own pasts, walk, fall, spin, and drop with James. We mash them potatoes.
Those flaming red girls dancing behind had big buts and towered over James. Their skin was the color of cafe ole',
Actually thinking with my connoli they were the color of cappuccino.
He preaches the soul gospel to us. " Turn to the person on your right! he says! Turn to the person on your right and tell them you loves them,
give em your hand". I turn to my right and there in the flashing sparkle of the lights is a fat bald middle-aged Italian American replete with oversized pinkie ring. I reach out He hesitates, What? Does he think hey this guys a queer, or maybe, he thinks were from NJ , he sniffs at me, thinking maybe I'm the guy that smells that way. I look around and everyone is sniffing at the person on their right. I feel his sweaty chubby hand in mine, ring and all I say, I Love you, he just nods. He is a very cool guy. James announces he visited his buddy reverend AL Sharpton. We all assume it was at the hair dressers. He asks for a round of applause for good old Al and all the white people squirm in their chairs. Then he asks for a round of applause for everyone he ever knew in his entire God Dammed life.
The he hits it " can I get into it. can I get into it can I get up can I get up like a like a
like a sex machine. JAMES "Save us Godfather" BROWN
He rocks the house, he spins, falls, we all fall with him.
" Please please please PLEASE SOME ONE HELP ME" "PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME"
The crowd roars
We are there !
The Godfather of Soul asks us for help.
Save us Godfather!
MARLBORO MAN
Chunks of gold comprised his monogram ring. Dazzling gold surrounded his wrist in a pile of watchband and bracelets. The yellow metal seemed almost as out of place in his mouth as on his knarled hands, tattooed with indecipherably fuzzy blue letters. Each digit's symbol led your eye to the web of thumb and forefinger of his right hand, where the stigmata of a long forgotten commitment read to love Joan forever. If only he'd held onto Joan the way he clutches that cigarette, his life might have been different. Though not necessarily better. Those hands might have been better suited to the simple battered wedding ring of the day laborer or the scarred but unpretentious absence of decoration of a convicted felon. It wasn't until the flash of his smile that I reconsidered. Sparkling gold teeth shone out of his mouth. They lit up his whole face, until a cloud of cynical stories and blue-gray cigarette smoke passed over it. A life of dirty deeds, boonswagles and seductions leapt out of his deep-pocketed blue
eyes.
I tried to focus and breathe in the billowing smoke, the stinking rancid barbecue in the trash and bleak commentary that poured out him. I wanted him to let out his life to me. Maybe he literally was. Continue the interview rang my mantra. "Well, Jack, after half a century of being in the skin trade if you could do it over what would you do differently? How would you have changed it?"
A riotous cough sent him doubling over, his body retching in what seemed a desperate, convulsive cry for help. I was suddenly aware of how tight and dark the waiting room was. "Goddamn-- egh! Emphysema," he gagged out. He started up again "Well you know, son, let me tell ya." Jack prefaced every gem of wisdom with this phrase. I heard it over and over. It was his way of slamming you with a two-by-four to get your attention. It made me think at the moment, of the music in "Jaws. "I've been in the skin trade for as long as I can remember." He sputtered again, spasming into a long cough.
"Are you all right Jack?"
"Yeah I'm fantastic." "Ain't Life Grand," done in a 1930's Texas Swing style, twanged from the ceiling speakers-- Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, offering their ironic commentary here in Arlington, Texas, out of a dark 1990s box. Jack sat up, his right hand tapping the pack of butts in his blue short-sleeve
poplin shirt. He tapped, then again, just to be sure they were there. He took the pack out, tapped it on the counter, pushed the bottom corner up, forcing out several cigarettes just enough so the configuration of filters exactly resembled those in the old Marlboro ads. Out slid a butt. He tapped it on the filter side with his tattooed right hand. He moved so deftly, sliding the pack into his shirt, it seemed one motion to me. I had seen it so many times over the last few hours that I'd become enthralled by the ballet. It was almost a Baryshnikoff move. Again he tapped the pack. He seemed to lose consciousness for the entire period of this dance. He sniffed the butt then lit it so fast I missed it. " Well, you know son, let me tell ya. If I had to do it all over again, I'd've been a preacher."