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Notebooks part 7 by Ron Steinman

Posted by Roger on September 9, 2008
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Have I exhausted everything? Has everything that grew and might continue to grow, flown the coop? I sometimes wonder, especially when I sit damn patiently waiting for inspiration, for something to happen that will move me off the dime. It’s not really inspiration, but creative genius used to its best advantage. Sure. Nothing comes, and all I can think of is passion. Sex. Passion. Getting laid. Of lying in bed with a woman and feeling her closeness, her warmth and achieving mutual orgasm, if only once, only for a moment. Nothing happens. Still I wait. I sit and wait. I tell myself soon the waiting will be over. Then there will be action on all fronts. No matter how good it feels I am tired of jerking off my mind and body.

   Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn--- a neighborhood I rarely enter, a neighborhood I hardly know. I walk down the street looking for the right address. I have it on a small piece of newspaper--- the white part at the top, the empty part. I finally find it crumbled in the pocket of my shirt. In what is fast becoming a habit, a now familiar scene, I walk up the steps to ring the bell so I can get in. Since losing her, or better yet, since I denied her and we denied each other, I have not been the same. I dated, but I hardly took anyone out more than twice unless they were willing to go down regularly, which sometimes but honestly rarely happened. Slowly I tired of blind dates. Trite, yes, they had become a bore and took too much out of me. I lived by my emotions as much as the next guy. There was no one who could feel what I did, who could sustain the self pity, who could give me the understanding I badly needed. The past is long ago, at least for me at my age. I wondered what she is doing, how she is doing---if she is happy. That and other thoughts go through my head, my searching head. I reach the top of the landing and place my finger onto the raised button. I ring the bell. I shuffle my feet. I’m nervous, just apprehensive. I’d become a specialist on blind dates. I’m a seeing eye-dog that crawls on two legs chained by my own desires and feelings of being lost. Hell, I know I am lonely. I straighten my tie, look down at my carefully polished shoes, an event itself, and manage a self-induced, wan smile. I’m practicing. It has become difficult for me to be Jewish-nice, especially when I have to be false, have to be a phony. Good the whole world could exist that way and good that I knew it.

   The door opens and there she stands in all her finery. I have been reading too many Western novels, seeing too many Western movies. All her finery. I, my heart, jumps. No. No. It cannot be. It is impossible. She starts to speak, but she says nothing. It is suddenly a game. She catches my impossible-to-hide signal and pretends she does not know me. We say hello like strangers. We are stiff. I shake her hand like in a French film, not to be formal but only to hold her fingers and feel her warm skin. It has been so long. I say you are pretty. My first words. You have such lovely eyes and your smile is an ad man’s dream. She smiles and says, one moment. She grabs her coat, slams, then locks the door and we fly down the stairs. She hands me her key and says that I should hold it. Everything is formal except those first words from my dry mouth. I couldn’t speak then if my life depended on it. My name is the same but she had changed hers, I thought. Or is it a trick, a game on her part, something I want to believe, knowing her name is really still the same?

   I couldn’t take my eyes from her face.
   I feasted on her once, twice, again and more. She finally breaks the silence.
   It’s been so long, she says.
   Bring me up to date, please, I say.
   I’ve missed you so much. You’ll never know how much I’ve missed you, she says.
   It seems like ages, I say.
   And it was, I thought.
   Good line, she says.
   Ages, I say. Again, to myself. Ages: rock of, concert for. Nuts, I say. Lets say it’s felt like forever.
   Forever is a long time, she says.
   So is love, I say. So is life, I say. If you want it to be, I say. So is infinity, I think.
   Damn them all, we say, almost in unison.

   It hurts. I’m the hurting kind, or didn’t you know, I say. I’m a slow healer. The scars are still red and raw. They remain. They still burn. They sting.
    She looked at me. You’ve changed again. Always changing, she says. Can’t you slow down and catch up to yourself just for once?
   I’d like nothing better but it’s a roller coaster life. My heart is forever in Coney Island.
    My mother always thought you were adorable, she says.
   Out of character for you. Since when do you compliment anyone? Not your style. Not normal for you.

   She moves away just a bit and then smiles her ginger smile. It’s not very hard with you, she says. You are not people. You are just special people. So there. There’s your compliment. Fight me if you can.

   I’ll slap you down, I said---not really meaning it. Not hard, but only hard enough to try and kiss your lips away, to regain what we lost -- if possible, I say. I want to grab your waist and squeeze until you disappear; pluck your eyes out and mount them in platinum; make a silken robe of your long hair; use your teeth for a necklace; smother myself with the gentle fairness of your skin. Perhaps then I will sleep at night.

   Pretty speech, she says. She starts toward me, almost floating. She seems serious, not her usual cynical self. I detect a strange sincerity in her. It is something new. I don’t continue. My voice is hoarse. I am a changeling in puberty, still not twenty-one.

   I know you pretty well, she says. Although I haven’t seen you much these past three years, I think back on all the situations we were in at the time. We didn’t know what to do with each other. We were too young and too much in love. I really wonder how well I knew you? It may not have been that well, after all, but still, some things do remain. Some things don’t ever change. You served me once in a way that frightened me. You were too much for me, wanted too much from me.

   I wasn’t right or ready for you then, I say. We were both so young and as trite as that sounds, it was and is true.

   You were crazy. You asked me to marry you. How would we have lived? We were both still in high school. Neither one of us knew where we were going, what we were doing. So we split up. I found a guy who left me alone. He didn’t know how to touch me, though to give me what I needed. That made my life simple. Then I got bored with him because he didn’t have any imagination, or at least not enough for me. He’s gone. Now I’m back. And though I used dishonest means to see you I hope you won’t run from me the way I once ran from you, she says.

   I look at her, locking my eyes with hers. I want to inflict hurt and not be hurt this time but I also want to take what she offers, if the offer is genuine. Her look begins to destroy me. It destroyed me the first day I saw her when she was only thirteen and I was fifteen. Here it was almost eight years later and we still couldn’t separate our lives. My pride vanished when she left me. Vanquished, I tried hiding it but in doing so I tortured myself. I blamed everything on her. My poor work in school. My lapses into rebellion. My awful relations with my parents. My cynicism. My sarcasm. My drinking. The huge chip that I wore on my shoulder, so heavy it almost bent me in two.

   I blamed everything on you because I loved you so much. Sure, some if it had been there anyway, the amount impossible to figure. Ignore it. Pay it no mind. I have a fear of really letting myself go. You recognized it years ago. I found an easy excuse to build a wall around myself. I always did everything against convention while inside I suffered because everything I did, I did against my Jewish middle class upbringing. Only lately have some things changed enough for me to break what had become my norm and not feel guilty about it. I was in a chasm for a long time but now I’m pretty well out of those depths. My future still is doubtful because I feel there’s nobody to care with me---at least inside my reality. It boils down to being my own boss, to do, think, feel and act as I please. I enjoy it, most of the time. I figure I’m nuts but I’m trying to cultivate it and use it to its best advantage. And of course, my best advantage.

   She looks at me and says, I love you. She says she missed me and wanted me now, sooner than later. I tell her I had missed her terribly. I found her key in her small purse and we turned back to the apartment house in which she lived. We walked quietly, knowing that we were starting something again that this time would have a different middle and end, though the cast of characters was the same as it had always been.

   April 12, 1955. Easton, Pennsylvania. One-thirty in the morning. After that night with Carole I must write her the loveliest of love letters. It is as it is and I am now beyond redemption.

   April 13, 1955. Another day breaks, only this time seemingly more slowly than the last. It is wet and dreary. The rain, though not heavy, steadily falls, playing its floating dance through space as a nymph on a high. Roofs suck in all the lonely water. Roofs allow the water to fall off so the earth can receive that gift from heaven. All things belong to nature---some directly, others indirectly. All things return to nature, even man, even men. But that is a long time away.

   Brooklyn for the weekend and a bad experience.

   I try to keep calm when I look at them. It is too late. That’s all I can say. My head is pounding, my hands are wet and all I can say is no. No. My father blows up at me, becoming more angry by the second, angry as only he could get. My mother sits still, as usual. Very still. She says nothing, but she is thinking, I knew, I told you so, I told you so. Nobody, seems to understand, particularly them, my parents. Suddenly I am tired. Too much thinking, too much beer, too much worrying. I am too young to have this burden. It is unfair. You won’t hear me out, he says. How can I hear anything when he shouts the way he does? Instead I turn slowly, looking at them again and tell them as calmly as I can, no. I open the kitchen door and go up to my attic room. Throwing off my coat, I turn on the wall and kick it. The rotting, ancient plaster crumbles from my heavy foot. I take off my shoe and rub my swelling toe. I hurt badly, but it feels good.

   For some reason I don’t scream. My throat clogs from despair, my head spins. I sweat heavily, it being moist and muggy. Why me? Possibly these are words to a song. How common. How trite. Others may wallow in their own pity but do I have to wallow and slosh around like the rest? I’m different. I am different. I try convincing myself. Can’t they? No. They. All. The world. It is stinking, lousy, vermin-filled, without sight. They are blind. The world is blind. Only I can see. I cry out. God! Then I stop. God? What has he ever done for me? Where is he when I need him? Faith? It’s for fools. That’s it---a slogan: Faith for fools, faith for fools. Damn them all and their weak need for crutches and walking sticks without pearl handles and long blades secretly enclosed in false outer coverings. I have my own crutch---me. I’ve leaned on them, my parents, for too long, making it high time I move to be on my own. Yes. Nice words coming from the mouth of a milk-fed calf who has been all but fattened and ready for slaughter. Be prepared. This calf may just be a bit smarter than the others. I may escape. My only question---is it time? Time means so very much. Time. Measured by clocks invented by lonely monks who had nothing better to do but to measure time. I hate clocks. The crunching noise under my one shoe, the one shoe still on my foot, brings me up sharp, waking me to reality. I move my leg gingerly to observe, all too late, the remains of my crushed wrist watch lying there dead, never again to utter its incessant, terrifying sound. I understand it, time, perhaps the watch, would return, that it would never leave me. I am cursed with time hanging over me. I become indignant. I’m blessed and I am the blessed, a strong man among the meek. Have I done wrong by denying my parents? Was it such a great sin to sever stupid middle class customs and decide what I wanted no matter whether it is right in their eyes? It didn’t mean anything that there is no resolution. I feel like a pioneer, a hero among men, or at least among my friends. In the eyes of many, especially my parent's generation, I am about to commit suicide, morally or otherwise. But for me it is moral rejuvenation.

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Notebooks part 7 by Ron Steinman

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