Slocombe & co.,
a preface is needed, though. I got rejected from MAcalester, which is a good school--chalk full of beautiful people, esp. the boys who make you think you're gay--but got into a school down the road which is sometimes breathtakingly mediocre, with 1970's feets of engineering such as the cement library that makes me want to kill myself. When I look at my jeans and my sweater, and my petticoat that doesn't fit me and my sad pretensions, I see things, think maybe I was born for it.
This semester I take Portuguese at Macalester and have one helluva inferiority complex on account of that; a Russian friend who works on the school newspaper, name not important, asked me to write an article for Macalester's school paper. And I obliged. This is what I wrote:

dear friends,
first and foremost, set the scene: aceeltrrated elementary portugues wuth david sunderland is offered at macalester, the school for more intelligent kids down the road with millions of dollars of assets in a small safe on the fourth floor of the humanities building, just below the rotating windmill that tock tock tock like a heart under the boards of some poe short story. at night i'll have samba dreams. in the twisted cadence of Capoeira night, I will hear the words whispered to me:

mas hoje tem, amanha nao, mas hoje tem amanha nao.

what a shitty metaphor. perhaps such behaviour is why i was rejected from macalester. i remember the day well: it was spring and it was either marquette loyola or macalester or maybe a school that was named hamline university that flattered me with promises of an american scholarship for a true american scholar; one peat-smoke day in april, a letter in the mail: you have been rejected from macalester. condolences. silence.
four years later, one waits in the grime halls of the the library, stones and a sensor so that one won't steal books; i ooze into the final floor where the fast computers and read poems on the internet. i think about the time i kissed amy on the chin and the beatup shade philosophical. i think about sex, mostly, and someitmes my mindwandering past the fifty-seven chevy computer bank to what i'm going to buy for dinner that night. making small lists in my head of things to do: buy cigarettes and a belpepper, get over amy, buy a bellpepper, honor thy father, deposit your paycheck, quit drinking and eat more bellpeppers. this human condition of mine is horrible, and perhaps the real reason for my rejection from macalester.
around me the great minds of my generation in jeans-torn justright, beautiful boys from all over the earth, and a couple of pouting-lipped real lookers from south st. paul. no bleak visions of death and the maiden, and no edna pontellier tragedies, there are no smoking hookers here, in the redbrick castle. there is only love and solar energy.
my eyes have been failing me, and this becomes important:
lately some trick of the shadow or the jagged line of refracted light will fall on my face and i will think that my house on Marshall is haunted with indians risen--i wonder if there's an old Chippewa with a black painted face under my bed, buried and forgotten on Marshall avenue, and maybe one day he'll suck my soul through the TV set in some wonderful ironic gesture.
on halloween i saw a ghost at macalester. in the swinging glass doors of the humanities building of your college, i saw him. i recognized him from the jaw: two lines cracked with time running from the corners of his mouth to a narrow chin, then came the broad, red nose and the stubble streaked across the jowls like God was impatient, then the clear blue eyes with the bloodshot. my father.
i saw his face there in those swinging doors, and the veins of the arms knotted from twenty years of laying brick, the chest rising and falling under a plaid shirt, and the concrete and plaster hardened around the hands, choking--hanging at the sides with defeat of that peatsmoke day in October, when they told him his back was no good and they'd had enough of him, not to come to work tomorrow. then the hands swinging, the old man drunk at 5pm and the rocking chair splintering.
it started raining, and i looked up at the sky. i don't know why, because i haven't seen my father in three years. the glass door swung to and all focused. It wasn't my old man, but me in the swinging glass doors at macalester college, in this unholy year of our lord, two-thousand and five. I would need glasses.
that day i rode my bike down marshall avenue, got drunk, and masturbated. beneath me, the blackfaced chippewa stirred with memory, was still.

   [ POSTED BY japles @ 10:36 PM ] [ ]