Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Ruth Heard thought like that. And that’s how I almost got thrown out of Junior High: attacked the principal and other teachers for pushing her out, this beautiful subversive person. This is about i960 and she took us on unauthorized trips and we would disappear for the afternoon, and a skinny Irish kid who was funny so we all thought we liked him didn’t like her assignments and got his folks after her and she had no teaching certificate and told his parents she was glad to teach only when she was worked up and wanted to make trouble for herself; and in the different ways parents have, no one fought her dismissal and the principal fought me by letting me graduate. First things first, my mother would say, the sweat on her brow; and make dinner that my father would look at the meatloaf and ask very quietly, Where’s the ketchup, and she said, Already in — yet he brought home an electric frying pan for her once not threateningly and you could tell if you looked close he was pleased with himself.

My mother did not imagine she would go to a driving school on the sly and get her license at age fifty-one, but she did. Meanwhile made what trips she could to see me by bus, but has never to this day told me the explosion when the old man found out she had gone out and got her license.

First things second. It’s not a pat on the back I want now much less that brown-and-gray-striped shirt — did you get that in your brother’s store? It was hot in our workshop room that first night. Thank you for filling out the correspondence form. I took your word Friday that you do not know the activities of the South American economist (while we do not discuss him or the American photo-journalist who has pursued that distinguished gentleman’s life for profit that has led him from Florida to this very institution. Which the Foleynomic Plan was to cover, too).

You were part of the life of that good and heroic gentleman South American with an Irish or was it Scottish name but with the foreign and the English accent: hence our constant messenger tooling up through hills which was only one thing I meant when, before I said, "So much for economics," I found an opening in the void.

It was a face I could have pushed in, or inward. You know the type, Jim. One with oddly the same eyes as my girl, sharp behind the mist — a little not there. Reflecting not you exactly. Just secrets seducing you to know them when shit who cares.

But those eyes not my girl’s drew you in by likeness and then you were betrayed and where her eyes were all readiness which you expect of a good person, a fine girl, these similar orbs of her father the super were motion I swear like he’s not all here, and he did marry a Puerto Rican even if she died. Which left him free to go to Israel, which Miriam said her mother never would.

He never missed a thing; looked after the building like it’s owned by someone he looked up to. And he would forsake his bed in the middle of the night to monitor his garbage cans.

Once, the garbage started rising. So he needed a fifth can, and he got it out of the owner, but then found that under the beef gristle and chicken joints, the toothless cobs, lolling eggshells, glistening slicks of tuna cans and here’s a gefilte fish jar and spent tapeworms of spaghetti and tomato sauce and grounds and cucumber curls everything breaded in cat litter, light bulbs like new and angles of toast, was stacks of his old newsmagazines and papers he almost didn’t know he had because he reads them only years late for perspective, but now he wanted them and freaked out that the ones not already mashed by the sanitation-truck paddle-chopper were stinking wet, and what he could sometimes be saying in shock to his cronies who’d stop by the cans to smoke a cigarette, "I don’t get into shouting matches," and Miriam was up in the apartment right there when he came so close to smashing her little Aunt Iris who’d thrown the magazines out you might have thought those old pages and supplements were life savings — papers prematurely leaking cancer cures and showing old infants half-cooked half-eaten in the furnace of your local place of worship. He paid for them with his labor, and he had spent his time preparing to read them, it carried him through the very twilight hours of "local dusk" at which you said the Russians are fond of recovering payload weapons test-fired by retro from orbit in case there should be a future to ply with, which will mean more of the old educated guesses as to actual cash flow in global arms trade because credit arrangements not to mention the grant basis make, as you admitted, major weapons transactions as hard to put money value on as the give-and-take of modern wedlock (laugh). Twin mysteries. But why did you then say we shouldn’t take you seriously? I, at least, saw the connection. And I know the papers make up whatever they find they are missing so the future can be told; but if statistics like last year’s jump in military spending in a certain South American nation will likely be followed in ‘77 by a corresponding drop because the lid is on there now — and even because statistics don’t find it easy to lie, so action after action must be made up — did you sleep in berths in the old Pullman trains? — the father of a kid I know worked there until one day they put him behind a bar selling pressed units of turkey-gobbler in bread wrap — actions as live as that dioxin spread over four misty years of Asian woods and farms maintained its integrity so well that it proved itself as a future area-denial weapon — which you know already, Jim, so well that my being in your head is the important thing, not the information I rehearse there — as interesting, all this, as people, Jim, and as, sometimes, the boredom they make you live with — more events to read about, to carry Miriam’s father, his gray-white wiry hair standing up on end, through local dusk from work to supper even in my thinking and I feel yours concurring, beyond the sanitation tumbril chopper-scrambler (his head borne under it, and disappearing, or segregated and rejected for transplant tumbling back into the street where it is exasperated) while Miriam’s Aunt Iris watches with her soulmate Eddie the printer with friendly ink-eyes and an anvil forehead still unmarried driving a late-model compact.

And Miriam’s father keeps himself going with other consumables besides these magazines and papers which he kept because he wanted the chance to devour them all over again someday, while leaning against his building talking to friends who had retired and didn’t work part-time but are included, free, in his leisure watch over a six-story tenement not far from the East River Drive, from the subway, from my own former home, and from a drop Miriam and I some days detoured to so as to go not right home from school to her house which was a way I couldn’t begin to measure near-sighted though I don’t forget a bit of it, down to the point of a pizza wedge Miriam once fed me across the booth table to shut me up when all I was going to say was, Let’s get outa this dump, let’s go to Jersey, the beach, maybe further out, no one’s there this time of year — whatever time of year it was.

And I am not forgotten by her father, which is the story of my one-time life before I learned to think. But a man who his beloved daughter Miriam said spoke often of settling in Tel Aviv with a friend he had once sat on an East River pier bench with and disputed for hours. But if I am in your mind now and by design, you are in mine and no getting around it and you see I do not hide my light under a bushel.

You said, as if in question, There are no animals here. Got a guilty laugh, running up out of the convicted gut on a string that was then leashed in. I see you moving and me here. Ever-moving. But sometimes moving in one place without ever leaving, yet knowing you could leave. You asked who visits. Well, I have always been pretty selective. My mother borrows Eddie’s car— you don’t know Eddie — and always leaves a little present in it — a bear to hang on the sun visor; a pack of mints. My mother comes. The Visitors Room — what more than an expansion of the seminar horseshoe table where we rap with Death Row chaplain ‘bout everything except that inevitable penalty itself, and the Muslims come and listen and burst out now and then I mean really very intelligently. The meeting’s called "cadre," it’s called "therapy," it’s a rap supposedly though padre does all the talking, urges us not to jerk off — but the cadre’s a way not to get locked up after supper which is earlier than the army but later than the hospital. Not this dentist-equipped hospital, which I don’t go near.