Steve Katz: The Compleat Memoirrhoids: 137.n

II

I wanted to avoid the possibility that later in life Rafael and his brothers might all be standing at a line of urinals and notice a terrible difference, Rafael with a foreskin, his brothers without. I looked for someone to circumcise the baby. At the time there wasn’t much Jewish (or Arab) culture, not much circumcision in the Salento. Foreskins hang on in the heel of the Italian boot. Lucky for us, Dr. Taurino, chief surgeon of the Salentino Provincial hospital, occasionally attended my English conversation classes, and he agreed to do it. He was a super surgeon, but had never done a circumcision before. During his year as a resident in Chicago he had watched one. He arrived with his assistant, and a bottle of his own vintage wine. He knew what a bris was supposed to be. The dining room became an operating room, and the dining room table the operating table. Everything was carefully prepped and sterilized. Traditionally the moyl, the professional Jewish circumcision practitioner, arrives and the procedure takes a few seconds, zip. He moves on to his next assignment. This project seemed to go on forever, with skin stretched and tied off. The penis is held erect like a tiny flagpole. The baby looked caught in a spider’s web. My job was to hold down the little legs. The assistant laid out scalpels, forceps, all the paraphernalia. The cutting must have gone on for fifteen or twenty minutes. I don’t know. I dropped to the floor at Rafael’s first scream.

When it was over we toasted the experience, even touched a little wine to the lips of the baby. I’ve bought the wine, Salice Salentino, from Taurino vineyards, even here in Colorado, and wondered if it was from the doctor’s vineyard. The surgeon gave himself generously to the afternoon, pro bono , a gracious act, which was very appreciated, since we were so fabulously broke.

III

So it often comes down to who needs the chicken. We were saving our odd Lire to buy a used Bianchi workhorse bike, to make it easier to get to work, get around town, and shop. This was like waiting to afford a new SUV. After Rafael’s birth the Putana suggested wisely that we hire someone for a couple of weeks to clean and look after the baby. She knew of a woman who came from the same village as the woman and daughter she and her daughter had enslaved. These peasant women seemed almost a different species, barely surviving, wild in the eyes, furtive, mistrusting as illiterate people often are when dealing with their literate “superiors.” The Putana instructed me to pay her not more than the going wage, which was less than a dollar a day, in order that we not disturb the local servant economy. This bargain was a relief for me, because even to raise this small amount I would have to tap the bicycle fund, but because of my liberal, egalitarian, New Deal leanings it also laid a load of guilt on my heart each time I handed this woman her paltry daily wage. As visitors and aliens we were fearful of upsetting the local enslavement apple cart, and we didn’t have much more money to pay, anyway. Two weeks of her help was even more than we could afford.

No matter how poor you get you can always find someone with less. Before I bought the bicycle I would sometimes walk off into countryside, often to pick a little arugula that grew wild everywhere. It’s like a gift of edible herb for the poor. One time a young man dressed in rags, shoeless, stopped to watch me, staring at my feet. He spoke only dialect, so we had no conversation. It took me a while to realize he was looking at my shoes, just a pair of sneakers, some Keds I had brought from the states. To him, I think, I was as if riding around in a Mercedes.

She was small and gaunt, her movements quick, furtive as a fox in a maze. Estrella was her name. Star. She spoke only dialect with minimal Italian. It was great to have someone cleaning up better than I could, while Jingle was still weak from the birth. She bathed the baby, washed diapers, made the beds, cleaned the furniture, polished the floors. I decided to tap out some more of the bicycle fund and buy a chicken. We’d been eating a lot of fennel, and some fish, because cooked fennel was supposed to be good for nursing mothers and we rarely had money to buy more than an “etto” of meat. A whole chicken was a great luxury. Fennel and chicken sounded yummy. I brought the bird back from the market and laid it on the old wood dining-room table, the circumcision table. We had no refrigerator, so would have to cook it that night. It lay there bright yellow and plump breasted. I hopped a bus to the school, to teach an English conversation class. The weekend was coming up. A weekend with a chicken dinner. When I got back the chicken had flown the coop, and Estrella was gone too, till the next Tuesday.

When she returned for work I asked her about the chicken. Her eyes narrowed. I watched her assemble a scenario to defend herself. She called the landlady and we waited nervously as heavy Putana slowly climbed the stairs. Estrella tugged me by the sleeve into the dining room, and the Putana translated into Italian from the dialect. “I saw that chicken,” she said. “It was a dead chicken with a nice plump breast.” She described a diagonal line across the table with her hand. “The feet were pointing that way, towards the door. The neck was looking at the window.” She was aggressive, at the top of her form. It was obvious she had stolen the chicken. “A nice yellow chicken.”

I had nothing to say. She had easily doubled her wages with this theft. And her family had a great chicken dinner, more infrequent for them, I expect, than even for us, broke as we were. Good for her! My egalitarian soul contended with my budgeting mind. I dismissed Estrella permanently that afternoon. I had no choice. It was almost a month before we could afford another chicken.

At the &Now Festival in Buffalo I participate in a panel focussed on dreams and writing fiction. And surrealism, of course. When in Buffalo the writer has to float under the storm clouds, but elevate as well to trip on dreams. What persists in the Queen City is the early twentieth century dream of wealth — Queen City rail wealth, steel wealth, shipping wealth, banking wealth. The Louis Sullivan skyscraper, the Frederick Law Olmsted roundabouts, even the great Albright Knox Museum of modern and contemporary art float on a revery of Twentieth Century fortune. Those yesterdays seep through the grime of this dozing depressed city. The old buildings and streets have been ground down by urban decay and unemployment, blasted by economic hardship in the Twenty-First century. It’s both quaint and dreary, charming and grungy. So get up on it, pale writers. Let’s dream away in Buffalo.

Ani DiFranco, a Buffalo native, has big forthright dreams. She bought a gorgeous old church which she leases through her Righteous Babe Records to a venue called Hallwalls, run by Ed Cardoni. It’s a premier place to show art and perform, and by itself can lift the experience of Buffalo out of its apparent dinginess, to make it feel dreamy and thrilling. By comparison our big hotel feels cold and art resistant. At the hotel bar, however, I have some rich conversations with Alan Bigelow, a pioneer of intermedia, of web and computer-based fiction. Without a bar to lean on we might not have talked.

I don’t get to perform at Hallwalls. That’s a little disappointing. The events scheduled there feel like the art has found its home. I expect to disappoint everyone, including myself. I’ve always been mostly indifferent to the stuff of dreams. Perhaps I’ve been assaulted too many times in conversation by people detailing their nocturnal charges, an indulgence of “wows.” No Freudian lives here. I have had a slight, a timid sense of awe around Jungian archetypes. They are an elegant mode of story-telling. I’ve always been more attendant on how to narratize the waking dream. Sleeping dream info interests me mostly for the process that presents it, and how that can be a useful tool for the exfoliation of my narrative bunching. I have a simple theory of dreams and will stick by it as long as it is useful to my work, even if others find it wrong-headed and too simplistic. I am a fiction writer. I’ll use whatever spirit moves the pencil. I’m a poet.