Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“I don't even know if I liked it,” Joe said. “Maybe when I finish this poem I'll know.”

“I always thought,” Nelly said, reaching across to touch Joe's arm, “that the weirdest thing about living in Denver was that Rocky Flats and all that plutonium was just a few miles away, and that Colorado Springs and all that death was two hours down the road.”

“Less, when I drive,” Joe said, then he said something peculiar, he said, “The pain-people think God is the god of joy, / the joy-people think that God is the god of pain / the coast dwellers think that love is in the mountains, /and the mountain dwellers think that love is at the seashore so they go down to the sea.”

“What is that?” Nelly asked.

“It's a poem,” said Joe.

“Did you write it?”

“No. I wish. It's by a poet from Israel.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don't know. It means what it says. That wasn't the whole poem, anyway. I just like pain-people and joy-people.”

“You know it by heart?”

Joe grinned. “Heart is essential.”

Nelly was surprised at how little Joe ate, just two slices of a medium pizza. She ate four before she knew it, and felt like a big pig. She picked it up with her hands, but he cut it rather daintily on his plate, and ate it in neat little portions with knife and fork. The utensils looked in his hands as if they'd come from a dollhouse.

“So I guess,” said Nelly, after they finished the pizza, “that you want to learn the computer to help you write your poem.”

“I can't write on a computer. I need to write with a pencil, on a legal pad.”

“Then why learn computer?”

“Because I'm afraid of it.”

The idea that one so big could be afraid of anything was another surprise for Nelly. He could tear a computer in two with his bare hands. A lot of her students were afraid of computers because they had to learn a new language, and they didn't like to look stupid, or maybe they just didn't like to make mistakes. But Joe seemed to mean something different.

“Next time I'll cook you dinner,” she said, without planning to say it. She wasn't even sure he could fit through the door of her apartment.

When Nelly told her aerobics buddy, Jasmine, about how big Joe was, she really got her attention. Jasmine was a tall, muscular woman herself, with good pecs, long, sinewy legs, and small breasts. She fanatically kept her body in shape.

“Just how big is this big man, Nelly?”

Nelly tried to describe him by standing on her tiptoes and forming his body with her arms outstretched. Jasmine's copper-colored eyes opened wide as the circle of her mouth that was changing shape on her face. “O, wow! It really makes you wonder.”

“But despite all his size, he really seems delicate, almost dainty. He's a poet, but he looks like he could tear people into shreds.”

Jasmine pulled the Lycra away from her chest, as if to release steam. “I'd get curious. Don't you get curious?”

“He's a really sensitive person.”

“I mean, do you think he's that big all over? Is everything in proportion?” She made a face.

“He wants to learn computers, but his fingers are so big he can't press just one key at a time.”

“Do you think all his parts are that big?”

“But I think I've got this idea that will solve his problem. When he comes over for dinner I'll… What do you mean, all his parts?”

“Well do you think his, you know… ”

“Jasmine, is that all you ever think about?”

Jasmine shrugged. “I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just curious, like any grown woman; I mean, what if…? You can do the research.”

“I'm trying to help this guy. He's a poet, a writer. He needs to be able to use a computer, and he's almost disabled, computer-wise; at least, he's dimensionally disadvantaged.”

“But you have to take into account his assets, too,” Jasmine said, mischievously.

“I'm a computer teacher,” Nelly said, proudly.

“Well, yeah, but if you find out about that other, just let me know. Send me an email.” They went back onto the aerobics floor. “I would do that for you,” said Jasmine, as she brought a knee to her chin.

Joe's frustration at the computer was eased now due to the special attention and optimism of his teacher. She had assuaged most of his computer angst. His big project, to spell out in rhymed couplets the history of Colorado Springs, would become much easier to revise once he had the skills. And it wasn't that he didn't understand the word processing programs, but that he just covered too much equipment with one fell swoop. He was still a human being, no matter what, and would find a solution. It was for a similar reason that he washed out of dental school, because the picks and drills were too tiny for his hands, and his fingers were too big to fit in anybody's mouth.

He snapped open the case of his laptop and touched the switch with a pencil. It was a colorful, friendly display, that when it booted carried the message, “You're the new whiz, Joe!” Nelly always snuck a motivational message onto his screen. He looked at his legal pad, and painstakingly tapped out with a pencil a few lines from his poem, just to see how they looked:

Of Colorado Springs I sing to you

Where flyboys prance, and cowboys too.

And Zebulon Pike, whose peak is priceless,

Welcomes all hikers, when the trails are iceless.

It was good to see it on the screen. The lines seemed to vibrate there with new energy. He was modeling this poem after an obscure book he found in a library in Boulder, Colorado. It was called THE FUNNY PLACE , which was a history of Coney Island written in rhymed couplets by Richard Snow, and published by an equally obscure press called Adventures In Poetry. Once he finished his book, which he thought he'd call, THE SCARY PLACE , in homage to his model, he was going to send it to Adventures In Poetry, to its editor, Larry Fagin, who was for Joe Gargantus a hero of the world of poetry.

And Joe had new energy from working with Nelly Mishbooker. He wasn't prepared to like someone as much as he found himself liking her. It was as if she had become his muse, personal unto himself. No one could motivate him the way she did. He wanted to tell her he would go to any end of the earth for her.

Dinner at her place had its awkward moments, however, as when she tried not to stare at him stooping and squeezing through her doorway, or when she realized at the table he wouldn't fit into the armchair she had placed there for him. She didn't know what to do. It was her biggest chair. Then she remembered she had a bench in her spare room that she had kept when she sold her piano, narrow but long enough so he could spread out on it, and eat in his dainty way a bit of the curried eggplant and a small portion of turbot poached in Madeira and bayberry oil. The salad going into his mouth looked like bats diving into a nightclub.

When they finished eating he leaned back and said, “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice… ”

She couldn't be absolutely sure, but she thought he was speaking poetry. So when he asked questions like, “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?” or, “Where, then, is paradise?” or “Is there no change of death in paradise?” or “Why set the pear upon those river banks?” ( why, indeed? Nelly thought), she didn't feel she needed to answer. She thought it was poetry because the only time you mention paradise so much is in poetry, or in preaching or advertising, and she knew it wasn't advertising, and it didn't sound completely like a sermon. She liked the music in some of the words he said, like, “We live in an old chaos of the sun.” No one had ever said that to her before, and she didn't see a reason to disagree. And when he said, “At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness on extended wings,” she almost fainted. It must have been the “ambiguous undulations.”