Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

How you going to get dirty here?

Well, it came to me — the message — three days beyond the dream. The message of myself. But the dolphins still sang and the lobsters swayed below the billows and swam a little and in another vein crawled past the old bare tuning-fork fir tree high behind the lake at camp, and in the corners of my eyes swung the father’s garbage cans a loose unit glowing and sparking and clanking like competing anchors with nothing to hold but themselves, one lurching upward to haul the rest, another dropping to drag down those around it, the lids loose and floating off then back on but always loosely so I saw the father, also in each outside corner of my eyes coming but slowly, knowing it would wait, while his physician who I smelled but didn’t see waited to look him over and the Y camp physician was talking like a parent to the kid with white eyelashes who couldn’t go to sleep any more and the prison doctor waiting somewhere in this multiple dwelling to jam me while I coughed, or maybe more a traveling vet who inspected once a month, once a year, everyone will have info re: who when where, but you’ve got only yourself to trust these physicians I knew were there on one point to one side of my nose where I was blind but could smell them round the corner and Miriam she must come walking toward you very clear in what I tell you very tall she was (in junior high, I mean, taller than Ruth Heard), because you have not gotten into asking for all this information about her, like does she drive up here?

So was Miriam why you came? (smile) — father Jewish but mother P.R. (is Miriam Catholic then?), did the father go to Israel? what did Miriam think of your speeches, Foley, through the playground fence? what does she want out of life? (that question you asked didn’t ring true, Jim, yes? but you’ll never master the deeply dumb question Shin the Cambodian asks, like (one on one) Write down the three (or four) heaviest influences that made you what you were at eighteen—) such overly specific "things" prove obstacles to real sharing but for a person in your line of work, you don’t interrogate, you wait — is that what you do?

Miriam, Miriam, you can call her my other half if I had an extra one— Miriam came toward me as if she didn’t see me, she’s walking across my view, her arms swinging at her sides so slowly I would have watched the century out except she was also coming toward me and I had to watch out for her in that quarter also in the other screen where she was walking across and on bended knee I aimed a kiss at her she was going to walk out of sight if I didn’t switch my eyes to another view just as she was disappearing.

Because there was my own voice answering the substitute teacher (What do you want to be?) I still want to be a rich burglar, and somewhere, not on either screen but in between clearer because of my speed back and forth between the screen where I didn’t find her telling how I should come to England where they had the best burglaries like treasure hunts like a team broke into the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Association only to find in the safe not only all the jewels and watches but the keys to another G&S branch practically around the corner only to find, when they got there and broke in, the keys to a third branch, same shit, keys to an associate firm, number four. The class was laughing and the sound was like very great speed, I lost track and the calendar said it was the next day and the substitute teacher wasn’t there n’more and I was thinking I needed help getting over to England and back before they found I was gone.

The obstacles had not been in me, Jim, I had put them out there in front and this continuum that seeing Miriam had left me had nowhere to lead until three days were past and Jackie who smiles a lot and makes you feel you were the guy he was waiting to meet had made my acquaintance observing that a lot of the guys were totally materialistic and I was admitted to the photography program. Admitted so unusually soon that I thought they were out to trip me up but I reached out to claim if not yet unseal the message of myself that had been waiting for me, knowing also that what Jackie would teach I already knew. And they did trip me up. And it might have turned a bad corner for me at that opening of my stay in this multiple dwelling which is far more than the state correctional system.

Jackie — with Juan — in a tunnel new to me — said You want to take the last two on this roll, we’ll run it through now, learn by doing, O.K., George? And we did more than Jackie bargained for. And Juan especially. We passed a guy sweeping and we passed a plumber they knew who was going in the opposite direction, who raised his eyebrows, that was all, it was a long walk, like the prison is really the bigness of this space and you never get to see it. I let them tell me how to turn the shutter speed and roll the barrel. Then I did it my way.

I focused and took the long corridor plus half of Juan’s head up close while Jackie said, You can’t get both, you got to find the optimum, I saw what he meant, and a guard called out down the tunnel behind me, "Where ya going?" and "Better get there," and without taking my eye from the viewer (an expensive camera) I drew back the lever advancing the roll, turned blindly and took a picture of the guard who didn’t like it any better than Jackie who said, "You belong to the shotgun school," but the point of my instruction was to come, Jim.

In the darkroom, an eye on the second hand, an eye on the long strip in the tray-bath filled with what came from a bottle in a box called "Darkroom Graduate." For Juan the one-and-a-half-dozen frames time if not trouble obtained from taxpayers’ surplus income on which we here subsist though monks in their establishment have got it over us they can make a little wine downstairs and move it on the open market, yet if we grew the grapes our correctional wine might command as good a price as the inmate-therapists I have projected in Foleynomics who would work with outside patients by mail like the chess instructors also projected. One-and-a-half-dozen frames taken to be displayed to loved ones and all who care to look and those who read the paper where two or three shots will appear as a record of work made possible by conspicuous leisure, though not equal to the red-rimmed eyes that have viewed those tables of minimum subsistence wage equaling rate of exploitative surplus at one in the morning yet understood more than these, that in the last century a government could decree in the interests of employers that childhood ends at age ten or at the outside eleven — red-rimmed studies which prepare Juan he says for the struggle (though What about the parole board? I don’t say) — studies possessing a fair visibility here Inside while Outside the fourteen, fifteen grand earned and laid away to keep each profile here low if not void is funny money, Jim, I was able years later to explain it to Juan and in return — because effort is returned in this place, guys give and share, you’d be surprised, don’t underestimate us, guys who don’t belong here and guys who maybe do — Juan in return pictured for me his son, and his son’s cousin, Juan’s nephew, helping Juan’s little brother-in-law Manny get a new TV in a shopping cart up a hill from Broadway to Amsterdam at seven o’clock of a cold Saturday evening, I could see how Juan felt, he didn’t explain it, Juan’s kid holding the TV and pushing from behind, windbreaker, wool-lined leather gloves, baseball cap, sneakers with the laces tied).

Which is just filling you in with a little future because Juan and me and Jackie didn’t seem to have a great deal of future on that afternoon three days after the rain vision and here we are in a place they promise you if you fuck up and Jackie is giving an hour of socially necessary labor to the collective phenomenon as the poem says whose author you know, a phenomenon which is, as he says, the human spirit, and but a few minutes of darkroom time had elapsed under the red bulb when — too warm in there — to the amazement of Juan, whose pictures all but two they were, and of Jackie with that broad, pale, about-to-smile face whose pupil I was and who with Juan’s permission let me agitate the film in its bath, agitating the film along the many-tracked continuum of day-night raised the dripping strip, skipped the rinse, and slid it into a waiting pan of hypo and before Jackie and Juan could stop the act which stopped the developing process — or express their surprise at what the haunted fingers had done — the growth of Juan’s negatives had been suspended and that was that.