Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

I think I am terrified. Lionel is not usually a scary person, but I don’t know any other response. This is before I’ve had any martial arts training. I have no hope of taking the knife away from him. I can hear my sweat glands opening. I need to throw up. I never enjoy being hurt, and getting stabbed could be a big hurt. Lionel cheerfully waves his blade in the air, slicing, thrusting.

“Cut you long, wide, and frequently.”

He relishes my reaction, enjoys my sweating. The callboard on the elevator buzzes and buzzes. I say something. “You don’t have to cut me, Lionel,” I say, and then I say, “I think Ozark is freezing, my dog.” A non sequitur, but it is brutally cold in Ithaca this winter. We live in an old stone house near a state park. I worry about my little, shorthaired dog. She stays outside, in her own house. She could freeze.

“That’s alright.” Lionel plays his blade around with his wrist, shakes his head, grins, folds the knife and drops it back in his pocket. He levers the elevator down to the basement, close to the crannies of my shipping department.

“Hello, elevator,” says Ernie who waits for a ride up with a cart of shoeboxes and underwear. Ernie is a simple-minded guy, short, no neck. He stocks shelves. He greets everything with his “hello”. “Hello work,”

“Hello shipping,” “Hello shoes,” “Hello house,” “Hello wife.” He has nothing else to say. He pushes his cart onto the elevator. “Hello third floor. Hello going up.” As he shuts the gate, Lionel smiles at me some more. “Long, wide, and frequently,” he says. “Hello frequently,” says Ernie, as the car rises and disappears.

THEN I sat at an old table, handmade out of wide boards maybe in the twenties, stained traditional ox blood, a knothole punched out of one of the boards. Myles Kehoe sold me this table, at his store called Myles From Nowhere, in Margaree Forks. That it was hand made a generation before me perhaps makes the table more palpable in my memory. Memory attests only in the “now,” and “now” runs continuously forward into the past, reenters only as a glyph of nostalgia, need, desire, disappointment, delusion, celebration. I wrote with pencil on a yellow legal pad, scribbling out many of these Memoirrhoids , and many works previous to these; in fact, much of this “Look Out Look In” was first written from that outpost. I sat on a chair that I bought in Port Hawkesbury at a used furniture store, or maybe at Levine’s Used Stuff in Sydney. Myles said it was of a design called the chicken coop chair, difficult to find any more. While I was writing I often looked through the window that faced Margaree Island, sometimes called Sea Wolf Island. A lighthouse and keeper’s cottage stood on the island. Once a couple tended the light. Alistair MacLean describes their fate as they tried to cross to the mainland on the ice. They were replaced by an automated system, the batteries replenished by helicopter. That light now has been extinguished.

I watched the ocean all the time. The Memoirrhoids seemed to breach like whales. Sometimes the water was quiet, abalone green, transparent as a pool, but often it swelled and its milky froth clamored against the wind. Waves continue to crash in my mind, though no specific wave. The island disappeared sometimes in the mists, or rose like the toque on the head of a jazz drummer (say Art Blakey) in the distant thunder. I lofted with the gulls, especially when commercial fishing was still allowed and fish guts supported battalions of scavenging birds. They flew by my window in long populations in August as fledglings left the nests to practice flight. Cormorants beat and skimmed the water, then clumsied up and away in lines. Acrobatic troupes of ravens tested the wind as trapeze and trampoline. Bald eagle drifted down the shoreline, occasionally beat its wings,

shrugged off the ravens that harassed it. Great blue herons stood in the tidal pools for hours, and waited for a glimmer, a flash of food. Marsh hawk (harrier) skimmed the surface of the trees. The wind in the alders flapped the leaves from dark to pale green. Two yearling bucks, with fuzz on their antlers, and one elder with a wide rack, came up from the shore where they had been licking the rocks for salt. The blackfish, pothead pilot whales, passed in a line, stitching through the waves. Fishing boats, when there still were fish to catch, motored out early in the morning, and returned mobbed by gulls in the early afternoon. I remember all these events, though the mind whites out writing the several books and the gang of Memoirrhoids I wrote at that table. How dreamy and peculiar that the act of writing erases its own moment.

Moments gather as if on a platter of offerings. Memoirrhoids is a presentation of narrative snacks, dim-sum, sushi, hors d’oeuvres, that disappear as I consume them by writing them away. The past can be tasted only in the onward rush of the present. I’ve written a lot of them so far, and sometimes fear I am writing the same Memoirrhoid over and over. My memory of what I have done so far is imperfect. But memory isn’t ever a perfectible mode. It is no disaster if I write something twice. Even J.S. Bach did that. Contradictions can only be enriching.

NOW to work on this piece I sit at my computer in Denver and call up a memory of my situation in Cape Breton as I started to write these thoughts, remembering that table that chair that view, all pleasurable, all gone. I stared out the window at the gorgeous Cape Breton view I claimed as my own, yet somehow found the pencil and the yellow pad at my wrists, and I wrote something. I remember the circumstance of writing the Mem-oirrhoids , looking from the table out the window at Margaree Island, and somehow fetching up more distant past. The difficulty is to remember the remembering of what I remembered. How ridiculous it sounds. Better to leave it alone. Better to be satisfied just with my recall of the satisfaction of first sitting down to watch the ocean and the island, and the birds and the whales, and perhaps to imagine myself to be any bird, that one back then, ready to scatter as feathers into the wind, into the current, the moments of my writing.

On these bright spring afternoons life is all potential romance on the New York City Subway, especially on the D train headed north from 14th Street and Sixth Avenue up to 59th, Columbus Circle. You exit into the light. I am on my way to check the art in the 57th Street galleries. I like to wander East, sun at my back, and then meander North through the galleries on Madison, my leisure a commitment to the naive hope that the art world is cleaner than other commercial realms. The pleasures of art ease the complicated ache of my recent split from wife and family. At three-thirty in the afternoon the train is a mild jostle, crowded but no crush. Old cars, big fans weakly turn, mingling thirty years of sweat, disinfectant, pork skins, cologne.

Our eyes latch. Hers are grey-green and moist, and they look softly into me. Her ash blonde hair rolls in waves down below her shoulder blades. I don’t need the art scene. This Botticellian vision is enough to erase the blues. Neither of us hangs to strap or pole. We are held up by some mutual effervescence that cushions the jolts. Our eyes don’t unhook till forty-second street, where she moves to get off. She empties with the crowd and turns back to watch me through greasy windows as doors slide shut, her gaze an inquiry. Why didn’t I follow her off the train? The D yanks ahead and I watch her ascend to the angelic thoroughfare of sleaze that Forty-Second Street is at the time. I feel suddenly desperate and bereft. She looks back and I imagine she’s crying. I feel the heat of my own tears. I cry so readily anyway these days.