"Buying A Book..."

“Buying A Book” (“For Somebody Else To Read”----by Joe Tex)

(And aren’t we all?)                               

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8JCzOKxKM

I sit on the back porch of Old Times Café feeling the cool wind off the trees in Kurt Brill’s  huge back yard full of  12 and 14 foot tall looming mythological slash Marvel Comic Book pinch clay figures.  They are cast in tons and tons of bronze but still they cry out, I told him once, for reflective pools like Marisol’s River Goddess in the Museum Of Modern Art sculpture garden.  We could have such pools for those sculptures with real fish and plants, I said, and people could sit and eat and talk on the sculptures. The pools would support fish and the fish would support garden plants.  It would make the Café a living work of art.  An architect laughed at me, at the ridiculous scope of my vision for a place where poor folks come to eat.  And so I thought I might have a career in sit down comedy but the joke was on me.  

Evangelos lost all his money and his restaurant up in the foothills because it was too big to handle and should have been four businesses in one building, and because his brother stole from the till.  I heard him play his own compositions of Greek songs on his Bouzouki while his brother and friends danced.  He had a huge garden there where he grew produce for the restaurant. I watched him snaking out the sewer and feeding the javelin that came to the back door of the kitchen.  Things seemed to be so good and natural, but he told me privately business was down.  

“People are scared.” He said.

“What of?” I asked.
"Finances." he thought.
 

I could also relate to the old horse drawn farm equipment he had drug up to line the parking lot of the little café he built by hand.  It was all like the some crime too brutal to believe as the restaurant crumbled and lack of maintenance caused exponential cascades of damage and metal thieves or antique fanciers stole the farm equipment from the café,  one piece at a time.  He and I shared something of farming from our childhoods, he from a Greek Island and I from Olton, Texas. I could sit here and look at the rusty farm equipment after finishing my refrigeration work and see Granddad Dennis driving a four horse team across his dry cotton farm in Olton, Texas, the rich smells of the moist earth, overgrowth of wild plants and cotton plants, hope and tragedy in the air as one and inseparable.  

Granddad was dying in the hospital of diabetes when a nurse named Beulah befriended him, married him and nursed him at home for a couple months and got half the farm.  I was eleven or twelve at the time, and fancied myself a cowboy as I rode a worn out plow horse named Old Roan, bareback, in the dirt roads around the fields.   But even at that age I felt something totally desolate in the all too human heart, something to do with the Dr. Peppers and pecan pies in the icebox, something missing in us all that had to crave a sweetness beyond our reach,  something about Beaulah trying so hard to cry in the funeral service in the little wooden clapboarded church, the cracked voices singing the pathos of the pathless land, boring a hole straight through my heart and keeping time for years to come with the sucker rods of the windmill going thwack thwack through the well pipe at night.  

“On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and pain….”

If only it didn’t feel so empty, if only he had had someone to really care for him, so he could have gone out with the dignity of an informed choice.  I loved him. He used to sit me on his knee while we listened to President Truman talking out of the warm yellow lights in the big console radio, telling us all not to hoard things because it was WWII and we didn’t know if we could survive, all that warmth and understanding for a little boy, and now this, this stupid stuff, was hard to take, where was HIS kind old grandfather guardian when he needed him? Why was I so helpless to give something back when he needed it?

If he was playing her and she was playing him, if they were each just playing themselves, let the games begin, but, no it’s not OK even when someone like a child or childlike says they want to be used that way, it wasn’t a level playing field, and there wasn’t time for playing games because none of us are here alone.  Even a stone dropped in a pond causes ripples that seem to go on forever back and forth, like “standing wave radiation” in radio waves, or like a refrain of a crazy song I wrote,

“And they call it love

And they call it sin

And it starts all over again

With the howling and the banging

Of the screen door in the wind.”

When my sister was dying of the conglomeration of medicines, side effects and strains of insanity running through both sides of the family and me,  I wrote a letter to the doctor concerning when to pull the plug and said,

“Nothing matters except the quality of the consciousness.”

But that was not a line for a doctor to draw, but for each of us on our own recognizance, and even then, the most difficult of bright lines. There are just crimes against consciousness that we live daily for which the law has no remedy and life has no solace.

As dad became more and more incontinent, Mom complained of having to wash the urine out of his pants, and I, at the time, had to go to a pharmacy to get adult diapers, and sent a package.  And he sent it back, with a note,

“You were trying to be kind.  But there are some decisions I have to make for myself.”

He always understood when my thoughtfulness took a wrong turn, and never overcorrected me.  But my mother should have had some freedom of choice and a vote on that, because lonely as it gets none of us are here alone.  Something we do, will be somebody else’s mess to clean up or manage or an empty place in which to do without.  

And we buried my mother, and then my sister, in a little clearing in a grove of scrub trees, a lone brave soprano sang without accompaniment, and my brother paced back and forth across the head of my sister’s casket shaking his head, at the insanity that sometimes turned her into an animal with the furniture piled up against the bedroom door and her smearing shit on the wall, and all the medicines, the electro shock and drug shock and nursing homes and nothing, nothing left except the bare brute facts.  There was somebody there but behind a chain mail veil that distorted every communication coming and going, just the bare horrible facts that all our love and words come from bodies and bodies come from dirt, and love and war are the same damn dumb hurt.  

Evangelos told me one day his doctor had seen a brain tumor in his head in a scan.  I asked where it was and he pointed to his temple.  I asked which ear he put his cell phone up to and he put his hand up to the same side of his head.  He started talking about how his strongest regret was he might leave his wife with the café to manage by herself.  She had stood by him for so long.  He also said,

“Life is very precious.”

And I tried to balance that with how cheap and dirty and brutal it is, especially on the border.  But that’s just me I guess, always looking on the bright side.  

One day I was working on one of his reach in sandwich prep refrigerators and I was depressed and called him and said I needed his help.  Actually I just needed moral support. He was tired too but he turned his car around on his way home so he could help me.  We finished up and he said he felt dizzy and needed to lie down.  He lay down in one of the booths he’d upholstered himself and then got up and tried to talk to me but his speech was slurred and he couldn’t tell me which hospital he wanted to go to.  I said,

“We’re wasting precious minutes.  We’re going to UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is on the way we’ll go there, but we’re going….now.”

He asked if I could drive his car and I said of course, but made a liar out of myself.  I couldn’t operate the A/C and when I tried to activate the emergency flashers the rear trunk lid popped up but we got there just in time for him to start vomiting on the way in.  That’s the last I saw of him when I felt like he was really there.  

When I came back to the café after he had his operation, he looked at me and started crying,

“You saved my life.”

“No.” I said, “I took you to the hospital.  The doctor saved your life.  Don’t argue with the English Major it just gets him all pissed off.”

He hugged me.  He was hugging everybody.  I think he was trying to say goodbye.  When I asked him questions about what he remembered of his past, he would look at me and then look down at the table and look away, and then this man who used to know seven languages said something that seemed to me to be irrelevant or nothing, but he could have been thinking something too deep for words, what the hell did I know?

The tumor was in the same conical pattern of microwave radiation coming off a cell phone antenna.  The last scan he had was negative for even a trace of cancer, but he died of complications, side effects of the drugs and pneumonia, so it’s just an anecdote.  It will take thousands of anecdotes to make a theory and thousands of blind trials to prove it’s worth balancing our need for something we call communication with our need for consciousness. Ironic though, that the need for communication could turn brain cells into something like an endless subdivision or Israeli settlements on the West Bank? But, like they say on NPR “Marketplace”,

“Let’s take a look at the numbers.”

The numbers say the numbers win.  And money talks but it never says anything except “More.” The numbers left Evangelos’ wife with a 150,000 dollar mortgage on Old Times Café, and an invitation to a painful kind of freedom.  And those of us who share the misfortune of being mechanically inclined, pitch in and work for food or whatever.  We may not be able to fix anything else, but at least we can keep the equipment going.  So many times while I’m doing this I cry and curse him for making all those big deals on the cell phone, deals that some of us told him were just wrong, because his plans for condos were  crimes against nature and therefore crimes against our best chance at really being anywhere, because they involve tearing up more land and giving nothing back.  And that’s buying a book for his grand kids and everybody’s grand kids to read.  And he’d say,

“Well something’s gotta happen out there. Might as well be condos.”

But the argument was irrelevant because the deal fell through and the restaurant was auctioned off for not even enough to pay the taxes.  And he oughta known better, he coulda, shoulda, oughta not been like some drunk hanging limp on your elbow at the salad bar talking about this great deal he just did.  He coulda, shoulda, oughta, and for just a little humility he and we coulda had it all, but all his grand plans and bullshit were just part and parcel of the enthusiasm that let him love me and every other down and outer who ever crossed his threshold.  

I sit and watch the moon go through a few wisps of cumulus until I hear the ice machine dump another load right on time.  And wonder how the time goes, and where it goes when it’s gone.  I think it goes to Cleveland where it gets made into dancing bananas for the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, but I wonder at that huge mass of a moon and all the other masses push pulling each other in the space/time continuum that always feels to me like it must be broken somewhere.  

And then I realize it is what it is.  And at the risk of sounding foolhardy I am still alive.  And he was right, life, for all of its predestined goneness, is precious, from a certain distance that we are charged with maintaining.  It is what it is. And I can’t complain.