Rumbling

He had no idea why his wife accused him of being a ghoul. The word had shocked him into that silent place he always journeyed to whenever his wife stomped across the floor in her fluffy slippers offering yet another serving of verbal assault.

It hadn’t always been this way. He remembered how he’d been riveted by her rapturous dialogue when she’d discussed the many things that interested her. So wonderful were her words that her interests had become his interests too so that in time he had completely forsaken himself. He had gone home after their first night of conversation and torn apart his vintage “Scarface” poster along with any intentions of ever playing Pac Man again.

He hadn’t told her about what he’d done certain she’d dismiss his sacrifices as futile.

In those days he felt completely inadequate to her and her intelligence, and wondered why she’d chosen him as the one she wanted to spend her life with. There were times in the beginning when he’d walk beside her trying desperately to keep up with her physical and mental prowess. She’d discuss everything from physics to the importance of the pinto bean in ancient long dead cultures as they journeyed down winding syllables and phrases. He worshipped her every step and secretly envied the ground beneath her for having the joy of her repetitious pounding. He longed to dissect her every thought invading secreted places.

And now after all their years together he had done just that.

Now there were no more secrets. He had discovered them all long ago. Now the voice that once intoxicated him with its beauty and eloquence reminded him of sandpaper. Sometimes when she wasn’t aware he’d mimic the awful nasal whine that had replaced the dulcet tones which had meant more to him than music.

She made other sounds now too.

His wife’s once perfectly formed body that had once rivaled cold marble statues standing blind and beautiful in museums had become a heaving mass of folds and flatulence.

They’d stopped sleeping together years ago. He’d lost interest in her almost as soon as she’d let down her walls and let him conquer her remaining reticence.

Now the landscape of their lives had been marked out from coast to coast and room to room. She had allowed him the small bedroom in the back of the house and little else. He was content to have his own space free from the plague of her erratic behavior and constant complaints about his sneakers. He’d worn the same pair since before they’d met and unlike his wife, these had grown into a comfortable fit that suited him more and more each time he’d put them on.

During the rare occasions when he felt inclined to spend time with her because of memories of better times and sentimental longings for something tangible besides remorse, he found little joy. Her previous gift for conversation had been replaced by a steady stream of nagging, gossip and discussions about the latest enchilada or some such recipe that she would inflict on him.

Their life together had been a bumpy ride. At first little dramas and passionate debates excited him, but those had dissipated into a steady stream of thunderous rumblings where nothing was settled except falling dust.

Her words bounced off him like pebbles skipping across the surface of a pond as he read about another unnamed drunk model or runaway found in some forgotten place. The baseness of their deaths sounded exciting and continental to him. He liked to sit for hours poring over the news stories of murdered women while listening to his wife’s heavy stepped tramp over tired floorboards and frayed rugs.

He’d seen one of the murdered girls on the shuttle one morning on the way to work. He knew it was her from the newspaper clipping he’d carefully placed in his scrapbook. She’d smiled at him as she was smiling now. Her smile couldn’t disappear into disappointment and regret.

Passion had been replaced by a baser aspect of itself. He had no idea how it happened, because there had times in the past when he’d spent the whole day panting to get back to her just to see her smile. But those times had died a few short years after “I do.” But he had found something else to replace it now. There were so many scrapbooks; almost more than his room could contain. He barely had a place to sleep and sometimes made a bed of them feeling more at home among and upon the clippings of dead women and girls than anyplace else.

The only thing that could wake him from his reverie was the sizzle of morning bacon along with the realization that there would be more clippings to be found, discovered and added to his collection. Then he’d enter the kitchen as he did every morning where his wife stood over the stove. His actions were the same as they were everyday. He’d yawn kiss his wife hello while waiting for the moment when he would ride the shuttle once again and the possibility of clippings and young girl smiles filtered through his thoughts like grease.

His anticipation rose with every bite as his wife glared at him from across the table while in the distance the low growl of thunder purred.

Crumbling

She was a spectator in a beauty shop window; pressing her dreams, face and belly against the coolness of frail glass amid the congestion of the city. She admired the marble counters covered with boxes of hair colors, curling irons and other cosmetology items that stood in accordion rows along the wall. The wallpaper was gold foil with embossed flowers that twinkled in the glow of antiquated fluorescent light fixtures.

Someone inside noticed her and she startled suddenly feeling naughty at being caught.

It was just over there on March 25, 1911 that one hundred and forty women either burnt or jumped to their deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building when it caught fire. They were like her, poor immigrant girls trying to make a living in a new land. No one had known until the fire, that the owners had blocked the exits to insure the workers wouldn’t wander off or that the fire escape had been badly installed.

She’d heard the stories about the fire from the grocery clerk when he’d bagged her apples, pears and green beans the other day.

“That’s the building there today. It’s used for classrooms for NYU, but you can go inside and see pictures of the piled up bodies of them girls who fell so hard that they broke holes in the pavement in the display case.”

She remembered hearing about the bone crusher and how it was used to finish the job the crematorium had started when she’d stood with her father waiting to collect her mother’s ashes.

“After they incinerate the body then they use the bone crusher to pulverize what’s left into a fine white ash.”

She hadn’t gone inside the former workplace of disowned and dying immigrant seamstresses and cutters imagining each of them to have her mother’s face. Her mother’s smile lingered as she stood on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. She felt its warmth even as she examined the Renaissance-style architecture of the building that had housed sewing machines on tinderbox floors where worn shoes scrambled to escape unimaginable inevitabilities.

The building was now used to teach classes in the sciences or so the grocer had said while giving her a free sample spoonful of strawberry yogurt.

“My son went there when he was your age. He learned things about the world that no one ever knew, but such is life. Such is life.”

He reminded her of the men back home and their stories. They’d sit at wobbly tables telling stories that weaved in and out of smoke rings and sorrow. Sometimes they’d laugh odd laughs that weren’t born in joy as they rebuilt battles fought and won by those who’d lived and died too soon. She sighed as she considered how her grandfather repeatedly cleaned his shotgun though he’d abandoned the sport of hunting for reminiscence until he descended into dust.

She wondered if the funerals of the dead girls were marked with the old country music of oboe, flute and drum as the city scream grieved the massacre of innocence.

They’d put their clothes on that morning just like any other day. Just like I did today and my mother did until she wasn’t able to any longer. They had gone to work busily creating garments that no one would ever wear without a sign that this was all the rest of their lives was ever going to be. If they had known it was coming, would they have taken the time to do all the things they’d dreamed of doing? Or had they abandoned their dreams like she had without the awareness of what or why?

“Worst tragedy the city had seen until September 11th,” said the amiable grocer, when she’d been distracted by an assortment of Beanie Babies.

She didn’t let any of it in.

It was too soon to be touched by anything outside of herself. It was too soon to consider the consecration of her mother’s ashes or any of the many things her father and her mind plagued her about. Instead she went into the beauty parlor with its chemical smells of perms and perfumes in hopes of finding something gazing at her from antediluvian glass.

Humbling

She was running.

Her feet thumped the pavement like worries. She ran though no one was in pursuit. An echo from some past dream had awakened an urgency that dragged her from the subterranean reaches of complacency to frenzy.

Her heart pounded, though not so much out of exhaustion as joy.

She ran like an outcast from some forgotten place. The sky was yellow when she’d begun and red by the time she realized that the landscape of her life had changed from poised and positioned to free. She ate a lunch of sweet cakes, honey and black olives before returning to the road.

Manna never tasted so sweet.

There was an undertow of exigency like a nagging pulse forcing life blood through tired veins. She was not adroit at running; tripping on rocks and troubles with equal clumsiness. But she always righted herself before tramping on. There was a candle in the window of curious little house that she passed along the Cape Fear Coast.

The odd symmetry of running in circles, though the earth is a circle so we are all running.

There were many who came and went along the way. She had slowed down for some and hurried past for others. It would be a lie to say she hadn’t lost her step on occasion, but she had redeemed herself from the sin of imperfection and returned to her former course, wiser and well trod. She’d loved and been loved though she couldn’t stay put. She was chased by monkeys at a temple in India where the moss grew high among darkened trees.

Longitudinally speaking she was usually silent except for the huffs and puffs of air she released unconsciously.

An old woman gave her orange slices that were dripping with juice. She ran through terrain familiar to both the Jewish and the Gentile troubling ancient dust with peaceful steps. There were children laughing in Gaza and children laughing in the heartland of America. Effigies of forgotten political figures were hanging from pole to pole with no one lifting up a gun or setting off a bomb in retaliation.

The world revolved as it always had been since before the beginning.

Yet she continued to run past and through consciousness amid cavalcades of recklessness and ruin. She had begun her passage with carelessness as her map maker and ended it when oblivion had closed her eyes. But that wouldn’t be for years yet. Now there was only the road before and after her with nothing between them but eternity.

Fumbling

She hung onto him in silence. A leftover fragment of yesterday’s hangover, last night’s nightmare and the glare of the morning sun. At least that’s what he told himself whenever she’d come and flood everything out of his mind, but sorrow.

It was a trial waking up on days like this as he lay rapt in sweat stained sheets that seduced him to stay just a little bit longer. After giving into temptation to his mistress, he succumbed to dreams returning to her once again. The cadence of rain on his roof gentled him awake from her drowsy embrace.

“Time to get up,” he said wearily to the floor before looking back at his bed to assure himself that she wasn’t there.

The chill of the Philadelphia morning woke and refreshed him after he’d attempted and given up on his morning hygiene rituals and stumbled down the front stoop steps. An eastern fog hung over the city giving a violet cast to the sky.

“Looks like it’s gonna be a late spring this year,” said the guy that ran the newspaper stand on the corner.”

He didn’t respond, but he never did and he left with his copy of the morning news walking past a row of shoeshine men and prostitutes working for their morning cup of Joe. He ignored them equally as he scanned the sports page to see if he’d won anything on last night’s bets. A phone booth afforded him the necessary currency to call his bookie and make good on what he owed and won.

He returned to his room feeling buoyant and relieved to be back in the comfort of solitude. His room was a mess of leftovers of their life together. A porcelain cart and donkey beside an autograph fly ball from the Mets that he was saving to hock lined the mantle. He remembered she’d bought it on their trip to Mexico from a junk shop he couldn’t get her out of on a blistering afternoon. Standing at his window he looked at the empty lot where a building had been leveled recently. He shivered, not so much from the cold which blew in from the lack of calk in his window frame as the realization that the hole resembled a great empty grave. He abruptly pulled down the window shade before kicking off his slippers and pants, and then laying back down on his pillow with a cold beer.

“What took you so long?” she whispered softly dragging her fingernails across his chest.

They’d been together for less than an atom before everything had blown up leaving nothing but fragments and shards of good and bad memories strewn about everywhere. He smiled remembering her alabaster skin in the blue devil dress he’d bought her after an especially good winning streak. Every man in the joint had wanted her that night, but she’d gone home with him. Of course that was after she’d gotten him drunk enough to let an Elvis impersonator bind them for life in a tacky chapel on the strip. She’d been so proud of the ring he’d bought her the following morning to prove he’d have married her sober, that she’d made sure everyone who encountered her had seen it.

He smiled remembering how that was the moment when he’d felt like he’d finally reached the pinnacle. He had it all and no one could take it away. Everything he had lost or missed out on before was his. He’d caught the winning ball, scored a touchdown and dated the homecoming queen all in the span of a slew of well-placed bets and well-played games. He hadn’t expected to catch a losing streak that would never die or see her beauty burnt off with sulfuric acid thrown at them by a mobster who wanted to collect on a debt.

Everything had fallen apart after that. He didn’t have the money or the luck to get her the plastic surgery she needed to restore her former glory. He remembered how she’d tried to reassure him that it was OK, that it was only a little while until he’d catch another winning streak, but it hadn’t come and he watched the hope in her eyes fade with each sunrise.

His beer was cold and biting as he swallowed it down and closed his eyes.

“You know me, I had my morning errands to run,” he answered.

“I missed you.”

“Me too, baby. Me too,” he murmured resting his head on her goose down breast before succumbing to another drunken stupor. She’d hung onto him in silence then too, but now it was back in that moment when a Vegas sheriff had questioned them about the mobster amid the blare of sirens and neon lights. He’d known it was bad when she hadn’t spoken. He’d known he’d lost her then even though she was with him still.

It wasn’t the same.

Her giddy joyousness had been replaced by a ruin faced woman holding a torn piece of blue material from her old devil blue dress that she would twiddle and twist by the hour. They’d sit together by the hour doing nothing while waiting for things to improve in a string of motel rooms from Buffalo to Biloxi and Sarasota to Salinas.

It had become routine for him to cover the mirrors with scarves whenever they’d arrive. She hadn’t asked him to, but he’d assumed it was what she wanted. Perhaps it was because in his mind that where he always pictured her; sitting in front of a mirror doing her make-up before they’d head out to the casino.

“You said you’d never leave me, but you did,” she chided him. “You ran out on me.”

“My luck ran out on me and I followed,” he replied.

“You couldn’t bear to look at me.”

“I couldn’t bear to look at anything that made me remember how things used to be. It wasn’t you baby. It was me.”

He had held it all for an instant, and been the king of the world with his queen beside him. But he hadn’t been able to hold it and watched it all run away from him until he started running himself. He’d tried to find her once, twice perhaps, but she had moved on, disappeared or died.

“It was me!” he screamed to the emptiness of his room. “It was me,” he murmured onto the tear-stained pillow bosom that he tenderly clutched in the wake of another day spent just like this. She hung onto him in silence as he sobbed uncontrollably. He was no escaping it now. There was no way back and he was forever damned to the oblivion of memories of lost love and lost luck staring back at him from the bottom of a beer can, and the emptiness of his bed.

Tumbling

She lived an ordinary life and she was furious. Dreaming about blue jellyfish had become her escape while she was doing laundry or picking up discarded pieces of clothing from the mud room floor. Their liquid, lilting, translucent bodies gave her sublime impulses that transported her away from her world of thankless children and unsatisfied wives. Husbands didn’t figure in the mix. They were accessories that were put on for public viewing at school functions and backyard barbecues, and then put away again until needed. They lived in separate worlds under the same roof with nothing between them but Jericho walls of plaster.

Her wedding day was a lie of what her future was to become. There were no perfect white dresses with perfect flower arrangements complimenting every worried over confection and hors d'oeuvres. There were no toasts or dances, and she was not the center of attention or the princess on the homecoming float or anything else but ordinary. Romance had died in dreams and was only reborn in paperback novels, afternoon soaps, phonograph recordings of Sinatra, and commercial jingles for dishwashing liquid.

When her husband wasn’t drop dead drunk he worked at a brick mill moving one stack of papers to another while dreaming about nothing in particular. In the past he’d dreamed about journeying to undiscovered countries and sticking his flagpole in them to mark them as his own. But they’d all been discovered now, so he was left with nothing but his tired eyes staring at him each day while he shaved off another layer of his life.

They didn’t look at each other and hadn’t for years. So he had no idea the hellhound he unconsciously called “honey” hated him. And she had no idea the screaming baseball beer spiller on steroids who had ceased to mow the lawn euphemistically for more than five minutes before rolling over exhausted and spent, wanted to kill her every time he kissed her goodbye.

It was a happy life.

She dressed like everyone else with her string of noose pearls and happy homemaker apron. Her smile was painted on and removed with cold cream each night. Her family would sweep past her after a long day alone spent making their home perfect and ignore her. She made perfect meals and kept a perfect house where specks of dust, wrinkled curtains or unfluffed pillows were as extinct as passion. She smoked cigarettes while reading about sales at Bon-Ton between bottles of pills that calmed her nerves.

Every Thursday she had obligatory lunches with obligatory friends. She hated them and their conversations that began and ended with nothing. She blew smoke rings between bitterness, cocktails and clams casino. They all wore boa constricting underwear that either forced them out or in as they crossed their legs while trying to look carefree. She smiled masking truth unaware of the words she’d pushed all the way back to oblivion.

Her son Billy collected geodes and her daughter Susie collected hair ribbons that she tied to the dying dreams her mother, all mothers demanded their daughters to eat without question. Daughter, wife, mother and on, and on, and on, until eternity where they would all be reunited to ponder their significance in the worlds they’d created. Her son would bear the weight of walking in his father’s shoes even if they were an uncomfortable fit. These too had been passed down from one generation to the next. The only sin was to do what others did not expect of them or for them. They wore their lives like costumes over who they wanted to be. They dreamed in stereotype: he a rock and rollin’ man and she, one of “those kinds of girls” who dates a duck-bill wearing dude and swishes her hips to forbidden instruments. True dreams would come and go later like washed away residue from scraped off plates in a sink.

Sometimes a vein would pulsate in her temple while she was stuck in traffic or waiting in a checkout line. She would ignore it like she did everything else that wasn’t preordained, until the pain would force her to sit on the wobbly kitchen chair her husband had promised to fix. Then she would rise with all the dignity of the movie stars she read about in the latest issue of a movie magazine driving karma away with a cold, icy stare.

Her husband kept a cask of gasoline in the garage. She went out there one night and doused herself before sitting on their perfectly mowed lawn and setting herself on fire. The hoses of her husband and the fire department didn’t come fast enough to save her. So she died perfectly as planned. Only the sounds sirens and barking dogs were out of place as they broke the spell of her screaming. Her light shone brightly in the darkness highlighting the faces of throngs of neighbors who would undoubtedly discuss this for weeks.

Stumbling

It was a starlit night. The moon was partially hidden by clouds creating caricature images of faces and profiles. He could see them all up there from mom to the milkman and the kid who beat him up in the fifth grade.

“Low-life bums that’s what you are. A miserable bunch of bums. Even you ma! Always naggin’ and harpin’ on me. Only thing you were good at was eggs and ham.”

He stumbled almost falling but steadied himself by holding onto a streetlight, then reached into his coat pocket with his free hand retrieving a handful of peanuts. The protein, salt and crunching helped him revive enough to regain his focus. A crowd of gnats attracted by the light buzzed around his head.

“Low-life bums that’s what you are,” he mumbled between chews to the dense swarm of pests.

Finally feeling steady enough to release the death grip he had on the streetlight he staggered away. The weight of his gun in its calf holster made his leg feel clumsy as he padded pavement pocked with gobs of spittle, vermin and filth. Buildings and bridges were covered with a gallery of graffiti marking gang territories or heralding other scavenger societies.

He scoured each shred of decay measuring them out degree by degree with the same answer he’d given before with one addition to his hate-filled brew.

“All the antiseptic in the world would couldn’t clean you all away.”

Eyes peered at him from his reflection of a storefront window at the “Calducci Brothers Florist Shop.” Blooms of all sorts framed his exhausted expression along with a Styrofoam stork used for a baby display. He hobbled away disgusted by the juxtaposition of beauty, birth and gloom co-mingled in a rapture of glorious irony.

Anxiety bullets pierced his forehead as he tried to imagine a high tide sweeping it all away until it, he, everything was as clean and pure as before anything, anyone had touched it, him.

He remembered a time when he was a boy sent to visit his grandfather in the country away from the turmoil of family and city life. The air was fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle, and the only sounds were of his grandfather’s old pooch Buddy and the bluegrass music piercing the air with songs about love lost and degradation.

They would go on hikes through burial grounds and bark wood in search of nothing that mattered until it was found. His grandfather had made him a bear’s tooth necklace that he’d lost somewhere along the way, with everyone and everything else.

Lights from Sam’s Liquors beaconed him with their blinking promise of liquid forgetfulness. He pulled out a few sweat-stained bills hoping to drown out the images of exponential ebbs and flows which plagued him and dragged him from sobriety.

He would kill them all tomorrow when he was steady-handed sober, but tonight was eons away from that. Best to just find an alley or a corner where he could disappear, dissipate and drink.