In Phoenix

Portofino Restaurant at the edge of the desert

Lights twinkled above us like Chinese lanterns.

Candy ordered veal parmigiana, lush and wet.

I had veal piccata—

ooh, your father’s favorite, she slyly said—

thin and unfilling. A tanned singer with tight blue-white hair

did Volaré and Song Sung Blue

accompanied by taped music,

an organ and a snare,

his shirt white with black pin-flowers, his close lips,

his thick voice, his hands caressing the mike. At the next table

two couples stopped eating,

listened, shoulders rising and lowering to the music.

His teeth were ageless;

he flashed them and shook a tambourine

and rolled his hips.

Candy ate intently, and her whiskey sour

made her translucent eyes reflect the lights.

The old waitress with the tall black hair

touched the back of my shoulders

with her breasts

on her way to the kitchen;

“Your father used to flirt with her,”

Candy said, her eyes glowing.

Misfits

In seventh grade I was in a one-act play that was performed for the whole school. It’s title was “Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.” (On the Samuel French Website, you can buy the acting edition for $6.50; it was first presented at the Christodora House in New York City in 1916, but your still have to pay French $45 per performance; how much could they be banking on “the Lentils” a century later?) I played the boy watching his mother boil lentils while a queen and a mime and a milkmaid and a blind man and a ballad singer pass by. The seventh grader who played the milkmaid in a bright-pink woman's dress was named Sheila, and she was almost a pariah, at school and in the neighborhood; her face was terribly scarred and hideously mis-formed. I’m not sure if the director, Mrs. Levy, Diane Levy, my English teacher, who was a hard, teased blond with thick black-framed glasses and leather-tanned skin, cast Sheila as a mean joke. The boy I played was probably nine years old and I wore Bermuda shorts, a dull white button-down shirt, and suspenders, with knee-high black socks and sandals. (I was the up-and-coming actor at Bethpage Junior High School, and would star in Arsenic and Old Lace the next year, playing Cary Grant; a boy named Roy, already an eighth-grader and the school star, who was tall and full-bodied in a middle-aged suit with middle-aged hair and eyes, played the blind man with words of wisdom and pats of affection for me as the young boy; he had white powder on his big eyebrows and lots of age make up, and made great eye contact, at least with me.) It was humiliating, exposing my naked knees to the entire auditorium crowd, and horrible having to kiss mis-formed Sheila as the milkmaid. At the curtain call, I heard only the jeers and the hoots and the whistles, holding Sheila’s sweaty palm in one hand and Roy’s big palm squeezing mine in the other as we stood together on the edge of the auditorium stage. My first time among a troupe of actors, us against them, me and Sheila and Roy and the others, and we showed ‘em, standing right up there and taking our bow.

Medical maintenance

Pills

The two are bright colored,

purple and sea-blue,

cheerful

as the coolest crayons,

tiny tube-shaped

balloons

that swirl off

through your bloodstream

like candied joy

 dispensing happy days on end

to your pounding heart

and your stomach

those friends

you haven’t seen in years

so you remember them

as they were then

undiseased

undecayed

 as if days don’t turn

into decades

and you just know,

your nerves tell you,

that they’re living a languid life

 in a luscious lagoon

and that they must be doing well.

Retiring

Dad Looks Calmer in Phoenix

Got a photo of my father, and nothing else, from Candy, in the mail yesterday. He's sitting up
in his leather recliner as if she propped him up there for the photo. He's near a
wall table with a small reading lamp and many cups on it; an iron with
its cord all askew is visible beneath it. It's a straight-on photo.
His belly, which must be bloated with the passage of time,
appears flatter, and his legs, which are dangling so
his Khakis have ridden up over his sneaks and
white socks so his sapling-thin shins are
exposed, look like they may be short
twigs under those pantlegs. Still,
he's tan, his silver wig well-
combed, with very few trou-
ble lines around that gold-
en clenched jaw.

Off the Avenue

The little girl across the street lives in her house with her mom and dad and some cats I can see in the upstairs windows. She’s the only child on the block that gets a bus to take her to School on the Avenue. We live too close to School on the Avenue so I have to walk, which I don’t mind if my brother walks with me and doesn’t let his friends mess with me, which is most of the time. The girl has a very very very very white face and wears a big sun hat or her mother carries an umbrella, walking from their front door to the bus in front of the house. The girl also has very very very skinny legs and holds her mother’s hand and skips on the sidewalk and almost falls sometimes, her mother yanking at her to keep her skinny legs upright. The lady with chunky arms and cheeks who drives the bus always looks like she just had a permanent, but also looks like she doesn’t have a lot of hair and you can see her scalp. She always wears a blue or green sweatshirt for a football team that she must like, and her arm always hangs out the driver’s window, as if she thought she could if she wanted to stop the bus with her hand along the ground. The windows of the bus are dark but I imagine children exactly like the little girl are already sitting on the seats when she gets on. Most days I like to walk to School, it’s thrilling and there’s a lot to see on the Avenue, around the corner, a lot of smokers in cars driving downtown, puffing hard on their cigarettes, a regular guy named Billy with red eyes who stumbles and sways along the sidewalk holding a paper cup with coffee in it, my shadow as long as a whole block walking in front of me, the tip of my head crossing the street way before my legs reach the corner. But just one day I’d like to take that bus, really see the children who are like her who I know must be seated on it and see if they are at all like me, too.

Birthday girl

It was her birthday. She had bought herself purple silk panties, and she was wearing them under her lime-green slacks walking to work. She rubbed her thighs together and moved her hips to run the silk up and down her stomach. It was starting to get colder out in the early morning, but the bus never came and she could save time having one more cigarette while walking the seven blocks along Delaware, then the long hill down beside Lincoln Park, past the empty playgrounds and the dying public vegetable gardens, the yellowed cement low-rent high rise,  the pre-washed streets half-deserted but bright-lit by the rising sun above the east side of the river, at this time a wealth of rich color and shadowy opportunity. But the day was typical, she passed nobody she knew for she knew nobody, her usual invisible self only more so since it was her birthday and to everyone else down here—the bored crossing guard on his metal stool, the cop smoking on the station steps, the frantic blond, her dress and costume necklaces flying, carrying her small sick white dog into the animal hospital, the school children in brown uniform crossing against the guard’s direction, the grocery shop owner with heavy lids, rolling up the security gate, exposing his sad old produce in the window, it was just another day, she was  just another semi-familiar nonentity from the neighborhood who for them was not celebrating a another year on earth in her purple silk panties, just  simply a day older than she was yesterday.

Next door

Sleeping Spoons

Unenthusiastically,

the woman with the long straight hair

is watering her porch plants this evening

with a white plastic can.

Isn’t she edging toward spinsterhood?

I watch as she moves around on her sore feet.

She bought the house 8 years ago,

our fat new neighbor, and introduced herself;

we soon uncovered her

when, upon leaving alone on a vacation cruise,

she asked us to enter her house,

walk up her stairs,

past the soiled laundry on her bedroom floor,

into her humid, randy bathroom

to feed her emaciated cats.

Now she lumbers with the watering can as if riding,

laboriously, on waves of pine planks.

She looks down—do her eyebrows knit?—

at two plastic chairs, faded and weather-eaten,

adorning the porch, sleeping spoons.