DANCERS IN THE SKY STORIES

DANCERS IN THE SKY STORIES Barry Eysman Copyright 2011 by Barry Eysman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means— whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law. ISBN 978-1-257-05256-1 EVERYDAY MAGIC. IN THE MERE LIVING. WE TOO. IN LOVING MEMORY OF JASE, JOSHUA, DIEGO, ROB AND BERRITY— MY FRIENDS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Before the Fall...... 1 Pirouette ...... 5 Late Night Radio ...... 8 Something is Really Wrong ...... 10 My Name is David ...... 13 The Brindling Day ...... 17 Halloween Charade ...... 19 And his Eyes be as Blue as the Sea...... 20 Paul Finally Gets to Play Basketball ...... 51 Doing Time in Tooth Ache Town ...... 52 The Joel Woods...... 57 Of Autumn ...... 61 You Remember Your Name ...... 62 Heading to Winter Winds ...... 65 Wendy ...... 66 Farm Story ...... 69 And in the Middle of the Midnight Ocean ...... 72 Clown Down ...... 74 Bank Caper...... 77 SnowLand ...... 81 The Answer ...... 84 Vladik in Golden Sunshine ...... 88 Cardboard Boxes ...... 92 T Was a Bopper ...... 96 viii

A Doggie goes a ‘Courtin’ ...... 101 Rebuke ...... 104 Rain Story ...... 115 IT: A Comic Book Script ...... 123 The Shocking Death of Huckleberry Hound ...... 126 Manhattan on A Tooth Ache...... 130 On Reading The Muses Are Heard ...... 134 Heading for St. Paul ...... 141 Analysis with a Long Lens ...... 151 Grave Hill...... 154 Tiny Tim: Stave the Next ...... 156 The Witch...... 158 When the Music Stops ...... 170 My Father ...... 178 Blues for a Werewolf ...... 184 My Back Alley Deception ...... 194 And Somehow Winter...... 200 Mad Killer on the Loose ...... 202 An Immensity of Snow ...... 204 Portals: A Love Story...... 209 Incident at Maywood Motel ...... 214 Virtual Bookshelf Blood ...... 222 Dream Along ...... 228 Seems a Little Seam to Me ...... 230 Addendum ...... 234 WHAT COULD BE WORSE THAN ALL THOSE YEARS OF EYE PROBLEMS?…

BEFORE THE FALL

Approx. 7 years ago. I sit, trembling, in the waiting room. Summer. Hot. The afternoon light streaming in the windows through the sheer curtains. The operation is to be out patient. I have had two previous eye surgeries. I see well. But in my left eye is a pattern of raindrops that covers my entire vision. They have been there a number of months. I wear an eye patch. The doctors do not know what causes the patterns. They are sympathetic and more than skilled and patient beyond words. It is not their fault. They will know, too late, these patterns are cells collecting on my lens. One doctor believes they are caused by vitreous fluid, which I am here today to have removed and replaced with artificial liquid, which should take care of it. He is wrong. This operation will be useless. What the problem is will be diagnosed later by a different doctor, which will involve cleaning the lens with a laser ray. I will have to wait six months for this to be done. For the eye must heal from this operation. Shortly after that problem is eliminated, the right eye will develop a mound of circular effects that seem to bubble and will look brownish. I am learning to live with them. Time seems endless. I cannot go out in the sun, without seeing these things, or watch TV, or use the computer very much. Any motion, the slightest, even, will make these things go wild. I will spend one solid year lying down, not moving more than I must, and keeping my eyes closed. This process, the guesses, the quick giving up by a man who is supposed to be the top eye surgeon there is in this country, all of that, is its own horror story, not involved in this article. A nurse comes to me in the waiting room. She tells me to use the rest room. Then, when I return, she uses eye drops in both my eyes. I dab at the liquid under the eyes. I am shortly taken into a pre op room, where I am told to lie on a gurney. Remove eyeglasses, any jewelry, etc. I lie there on the hard surface. The room, I remember, is cold. The light over me shows the gloppy raindrop pattern perfectly. I listen to the chatter of the persons who work there, waiting for the next gurney to be rolled into the operating room. I close my eyes. Try to get drowsy. I suppose the drops are to deaden my eye. I wait for 2 Dancers in the Sky something of some sort to put me at least a little under. The form I received said there would be someone sitting beside me in the operating room. To hold my hand; I was to squeeze if the surgery became in any way painful. Occasionally someone would come over to me and ask how I was. I said I was all right. One person came to me and asked if it was my left eye to be operated on. I said, right. She said, right? I said, no, left. She said left? I said—yes. The Who’s on First? routine I found amusing later. I heard the persons talking, nurses, orderlies, I have no idea their positions, relaxing, unwinding, and complaining about having to work till at least eleven this night. I heard about the cheap prices of bar stools at some local store. There was laughter. I tried to relax. They talked about other subjects. I tried tuning them out. I asked someone who came to check on me, shouldn't I be out or something? He didn't say anything that I remember. I was not in and out like it has been suggested by friends. I was always consciously aware. I wanted to tell everybody to shut up. The drops had to have deadened my eyes, otherwise I would have gone through the roof at the first touch of a surgical instrument. But that was all I had to relieve me of pain. I was wheeled in to the surgical room. No one held my hand. I listened to the doctors. The chief surgeon was telling his fellows that no one in the clinic had ever seen eyes as badly constructed as mine. It was a wonder I could ever see at all. How I had was beyond them. All bets were off when it came to my eyes, and the effects and causes of those effects they had never, for the most part, encountered. That my pupils were pin pricks. They had to dose them over and again to widen them. They are talking about the surgeon who discovered my eyes the oddest ever made when he opened them up. They are right. He is a good man, a kind man, a superb surgeon, the first of the eye surgeons I had. I have no doubt I would have gone blind without him. I still face very fragile eyes. At this point, and till and thru now, I consider myself not a human, but an eyeball. I do not have a spatial sense of myself. I have forgotten my form. I have forgotten I have long hair. I cannot ride my bicycle except at night, and that no longer, because I totaled it missing a curve. I cannot watch TV and I can read only by forcing myself to do so. I have begun to hate reading, it has become so difficult. To see through these various effects of the surgery. I have perfect vision in my left eye. Close to perfect in my right. Before this, my vision had never been this good. Ropy tangles and seaweed thick blackness will Barry Eysman 3 plague me till the end of my days in both eyes. The left eye now. Touched. By something cold. I freeze. I try to run to a place deep in my head where I can't be hurt. The doctors over me. I remember their masks, their eyes. I could feel their fingers on my face. I could smell their breath. I do not know of course what they were really doing to my eye. But I could feel all of it. I guessed that it was being sliced open. I felt that little nicking cut. I guessed that I could feel something put into my eye to drain the fluid out, and then the rush of fake fluid in. I know I felt the suturing. I can't describe the pain. The intense maw of it overwhelmed me. I felt fire and burning and deep agony in my eye that I never knew could have existed. I listened to the doctors talk as they worked. I remember wanting to scream. I remember holding that scream inside me. I remember my entire inner body filled with the desire to bolt. It was like an animal thing in me. A living jagged animal thing. My eye ball felt like glass. I felt as though it were being crushed like silver mercury balls frozen in winter wind and then smashed with a hammer. I felt this—-pressure—and felt I was being suffocated. That I could not breathe. I could not say anything. I dared not move. Had I, what if they had made a slip? I cried inside like a dying man. I cried inside like there was such hurt, like I was being carted into hell. The pain of having snipping in your eye. The pain of having your eye cut on. The pain of something in your eye taking away something. Bringing in something else. I screamed inside JOEL JOEL JOEL OH GOD JOEL NOW NOW PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS THING and though the surgery lasted probably less than half an hour, I don't know, I discovered one thing about me— I am brave. I am gutsy. I am relentlessly heroic. I am not the coward I thought I was. Anyone who could take this pain is not. I have heard of patients waking up on the table in the middle of open-heart surgery…anyone who does not believe them, trust me, and believe it. My eye screamed red. My lungs felt cottoned. My whole body felt like it was shutting down. I sweated profusely. The cap they had put on my long hair was wringing wet. I was finished with. The last of the sutures were in. My eye had been invaded, cut open, infiltrated, debilitated, and I was ready to be wheeled out on that bumpy wheeled stretcher, to the post op room. I lay there under the ceiling light. I opened my eyes. Please let the rain blotches be gone. Oh god, please. I saw the same water blotch pattern I had seen all that time, all those months. The doctor came to 4 Dancers in the Sky me. I said, they are still there. He said give it time. The operation was a success. No, doctor, it was not a success. I now have scars where they sewed the eye up. The scars are a moveable feast. After waiting a number of months, the splotches were gone almost immediately. I had made it. Till the bubbling brown effects in the other eye started. Three years of that ended one afternoon, when fluid that had congealed at the top of my right eye broke loose. Most of it. Made a huge furry thick shaped tarantula horseshoe design, with ropy tendrils, as the coffee brown perking circles stopped because the reflection had changed. You learn to make trade-offs. This was Mecca. I've known kind doctors in these last 11 years with my eyes. I've known doctors who were decent and dedicated and who took a lot of sulking and fury from me. I've known a doctor and staff who rushed me and pummeled my eye and made it infinitely worse, that as far as I'm concerned caused a huge set back. This is basically, briefly, how it has been with me. I've never written about it before in this way. Doctors are like all other human beings and they fail and make mistakes and heal and set right and do damage and some, not these doctors, but others, having nothing to do with my eyes, break the Hippocratic Oath like they never heard of it and do so joyously and they deserve a round sock in their well filled out bay window gut for it too. I almost lost my sight in one eye. Maybe both. I am scared. But I discovered that inside at least the Cowardly Lion and I both got a little of what we never knew we had before, and for that coward that is me, that craven trembling coward that I've always been, the shy lonely sad boy and man I was and am, close always to tears, the eyes are indeed the windows into my soul, and in this compartment of it, at least, my soul has not been found wanting. My eyes, for God's sake, I never could stand to put Murine in them before. THIS COULD BE WORSE. FOR ONE DAY I FELL.

PIROUETTE

Think of it as an eternal pirouette, go dandy through the town on your own musical diagram of watery composition with containment of dandelion seeds ready to burst alit any popinjay moment of internal eternal school girl on a walk through woods made of blue ice with the boy of her choice with love eyes on her side and free gear tumbling down stairs of affairs this gracious ship of valor of the world on wheels as she in canted dexterity etched her in her verity in the blue ice earl from which she came, as cars swerve cartoon sweet dreaming in a beauty her, which the day was a golden distraction as she sacked in summer and breathed in dopily and warm, and the day pressed against her as she was not alone any more as something lodged in her throat of only a minuet ago when she was swallowing just fine and the birds were eerily singing to the announced bone meadows of the guards of fever winds as if she were already in the hands of the need of genuflection while mirrors collided when it was her right as much as theirs to say what was real and stealing a block of ice flow only she could have balanced for it is not the chicken sings off key…and I am a bowl of fruit and she just knew shinier in the bed they are having sex having sex and the flood sun and stunned the earth for she walked along the top of the world and at its bottom too for she was the girl with the goldfish bowl on her head with her bee sting lips for if the four winds call after you must choose your course of beloved of fire sky and time of looking skyward in huge gulps, lord, picture you are floating out there and you are on a straight away vortex that will not lengthen you down to the road of broken gyroscopes sod the 5 and ten cent body full with breakable eggs and not a pirouette at all but a hamster at odds with an upside to the sides wheel all the quadrants of the concessive whirls of the falling through thru ceiling of blue mullions of millennium differed dimensions tilt as the corners you slide down into contrived tear this morning you flung slingshot effect, shooing the brickwork holding on for dear life on the riser go the step down, your body laddering with one foot placed with much concentrating so hard the moon landing had not taken such bravery as the sole of the tennis shoe tentatively in great almost parallel 6 Dancers in the Sky indecisiveness slid o scream no tight wood blue porch the sense of torn knobs will get off your head and the compass will point true north would take the life part of comic adage sad and with terror the finality and you apothecary fallen interminably as the voice over leans down over the crumpled carton of milk, back water, have you seen this missing boy? Backwash of tulle morning light and put up on him the pirouette falling the tiny dancer as she eats massive space and endless time with the graceful curves of her arm angled as she turns on in ready for flight any moment, as if suspended light as a feather or his dream of taking to the skies, for see I am almost a bird already, but clumsy in my harnessing of my wild powers, to drink of the skies with thee, but it was a trick or look at the arteries and veins, ropy, thickly muscled feet firmly clamped ground, present lies of flight, from all their ugliness, giving scissors to gravity while I am capable of flight but I am condemned to earth whose gravity does not conquer my avian heart, while you in your dances skip eternity beneath your regal wingless body while in your swan symmetry do fly in your selfish skilled vanity, you harpies, may your wings turn black and leathery in rainy lightning thunderous sliced night sky, and the cement footed boy tumbled along like the son in LA MERE, just prop him against a wall for the next scene, see if he’s deflated any, only this boy now with the broken gyroscopes in his brain tumbled by as if perpetual winter and ice he carried with him in his igloo world of a life in a serene suggestion of this halcyon just perfect summer day and see the man with the wind milling legs, constant source of amusement, bicycling by without a bicycle, do you need a little help? hold on to me, just going to X ray your chest to see how much you hurt yourself when you fell off the porch, ok, hug the machine, hold on, ok? good. You are doing just fine, take deep breath, hold it, breathe, again, good, now take baby step this way, don’t worry, this same machine, turn sideways, steady?, good, hold tightly to the bars, stretch like a ballet dancer at the bars, getting ready to do a triple pliad or something, here, take my arm, that’s good sir, we will sit in this chair, no, over here, ease yourself down, good, when I was in grade school my mother made me go to ballet class and furious, I went, but it wasn’t ballet I minded, it was having to give up my Saturday cartoons and my freedom, and I stumble, and I was a whirlwind at the keyboard, words flew from me night and day, and the gracious lady seaword goes home with thoughts astray, the summer day blends like magic, and they laugh, come what may, and when I get home, I’ll crawl up the steps to Barry Eysman 7 the porch, otherwise I feel like King Kong atop the Empire State Building with bi-planes firing at me, with the front door my enemy, one step up, be careful now, hold to the door jam, place my hands against the wall, don’t brush off sweat, keep my eyes closed, my ears too, hide in a place in my head, like Dick Cavett wrote in his book, that he was taking a lie detector test, barely heard the questions, just said yes to every one, as he was supposed to do, and passed it, the wrong answers didn’t shake him, he wasn’t listening, turn the door knob, brace my body. OK, fall in a little, not a bad grade. OK trip, grab the bookcase. They can’t see me now. My whole body is bent over. I can’t raise up, but it’s OK, it’s better than it will be soon when I’m in a wheelchair, hey Nonie, nonnie, gonna be happy, till judgment day.. (To Joel, my sky) I WENT THROUGH A MASOCHISTIC PERIOD WHEN BEING HURT FELT GOOD. AMAZING HOW MANY PUT ASIDE THEIR CONSCIENCE TO HELP ME FEEL THAT PLEASURE.

LATE NIGHT RADIO WHERE THE MOOD IS INDIGO

Here it is gals and go fers, I’m jimmy/jimmy, guess u know it’ s almost Christmastime for the blues. so kidde carts, lets check with Ted from TN who seems to be already doing the show—yello to u— —and its kind of fear come round me and I think its just Tuesday and hey tell me –there is this big inflated rainbow I am fighting it, who fights rainbows? rainbows are beloved. It’s not so. They are evil, oh you say he is a writer want to bee. And he’s making this out of thin air. What if the best friend in your life never existed? What if it was the squint sight of friendship that was a delusion? And you come to the stark conclusion, say, one thirty of the a and m bonker lights on you; and you have been kidding you and you are in nuts burg, your thinking is not dark defying or nightmarishly original. And you were out playing tag with him. Both in the middle of ocean and you look up and he is gone, left love prints all over each other, and the whole world has shrunk to the size of an oyster with no pearl inside it. you are strangling in the cellophane S superman threw round the master criminals and sent them to the forbidden zone, to never see they are just a breathing illusion, and you wake up screaming and her claws catch you up like a tooth pick digging in and yesterday had not so much as a bone in it and you remember the happiest memories as the saddest. And she, standing there, flat footed, with strangeness in her eyes at you. And it hits you just tried to strangle her. It comes in big box car sides size letters you vomit up and you scream YOU HAVE BECOME A CLONE OF HER. SHE SCREAMS and you fall to the floor and you give your blood to make him real and you a delusion, key word, you, him her as we all have form, no, she has substantial form. He and you do not. Your head screams insanity, no this was trouble, you are not insane. You were the warm ocean and you got to say I love you aloud and you and he meant it. But this time she looked down at bug u and bellowed from her whole body and came then a strange sour wind. Barry Eysman 9 And you are in a case of metal mental tooth fillings and blood subsumed the tender words and soft summer kisses and being held healing and you were a real boy after all. And now she told you you were you were worth about a dime fifty. Well, soda jerkers and poodle skirt gals what do u think of them apples? O here we are on the conundrum—which is real? Which not? Any? All? A mix? A man of desperate time and actions. He had lobe the first trim time in hid glum glub life. And one day the sea went out to play and never did come home. And they gabbled as they jangled and had a bright and a sunny day. O do u remember me your bloody nose, eons bonded ago when flesh was just flesh was and nothing to do with electronics and such perfect nameless instant image down deep fulfillment you and me, as xmas is replaced by rubble summer in the hot as hell easter basket as I grind a lit cigarette in hr palm springs of my hand, as she sells shells by the sea shore on this brindling day and asks what d you do now in the interspaces of your day and death? Your bidding and I’ll bring you the cream. So he was who again little bracelet charmers? Who cares? Do the bunny hop, HELLO IN PETE, HELLLO AL, I’m your pal on the radio CAR CRASH 74 rock ‘me I WAS HANDED A NIGHTMARE SO I MADE THESE TWO HELPINGS OF NIGHTMARE AIDE

SOMETHING IS REALLY WRONG

Something is really, really wrong. First, there was the bogus bcc saying we sadly regret to inform you….died of brain cancer…and it was sadly sappy and filled with inconsistencies that seemed something of a sick imagination, and later, a limp excuse of how it was a mix up, meant for a class assignment. In summer tag end? What high school English teacher would request such a bizarre thing? Ok, maybe the teacher requested just a bizarre topic and let the students pick. No. Too risky in this age of America the careful so’s not to offend the nut jobs vomiting tea all over us. If he had set up all his friends and not just me….well, there was that story I wrote about it, My Name is David..but it was just a hinge of the thing. Trouble is, I didn’t know any of his friends. We were email and phone friends. He had been working this summer on his grandparents’ farm. Had phoned from there 3 times. He had a rickety out of date computer which was like electronic smoke signals. It had been especially wayward this summer because of where he was. He made so many promises, kept virtually none. Which was the farm. But it had been the hospital instead of the farm, but it was the farm where there was a forest where he did rituals, for he was a witch. All of that was catching hold again. He was not a warlock. That was sexism, so witches, the males, too. I kept remembering on that blazing hot day, the morning of which I had gotten the bcc, the novel I AM THE CHEESE. As in the novel, he was paralleling persons and things from reality to fantasies. Or delusions. And that creeps big time, because it has just occurred that he may indeed have been or is insane. Had he been in the hospital on his death bed, succumbing to brain cancer instead of at the farm or the library in town where he was allowed to go every Thursday afternoon, as a reward for his backbreaking labors described to me in vivid detail, even his words seemed to sweat. where he played D & D?—they still play that?—except for two Thursdays—all played instead at the hospital, where he missed sometimes? Not the library. Because maybe of chemo—why pick brain cancer?—so odd a thing to lie about—if trying for sympathy, from Barry Eysman 11 whom? I felt close to him, so what a too clever, too cruelly and minutely planned thing to do. Unless he had left it to us to come up with our own scripts. He had called me, when he was back home. He had his best friend with him, shouts and laughter in the background. He worked at his family’s bakery, till he started calling it a restaurant. Could be both. Let’s not slide down the paranoia ruler all the way. He was 17. who was of the dreamy imagination of Paris and true romantic love all of his immortal days. He had spent his very young life in French Canada. His mother spoke fluent French as did. Does he. He was, is, convincing about the restaurant where he worked till midnight, detail of how he had to keep every inch of it spotless. The problem with the tense, and I have begun to feel a need to look round and see if he is sneaking up on me with a knife, because the night of the death notice, he was resurrected hail glory. The bcc said the reason he did not return anyone’s calls was because he was in the hospital in his home town in Canada, also the real reason even his new Dell he had saved up for a total of 5 years still had problems, and at this point you might think he lied about his age as well. And indeed I found a personality I had gradually superimposed on him. We do that, being human, but this seemed one profound old soul kind of teen. He could not have found a better person to hurt in very specific ways as though he read the heart of me. But he was not a malefic person. Intelligent and literate. Soft kind voice. The mysterious person writing the sad news, described my friend weak and failing as he said his Seasons in the Sun goodbyes, and when he got to me, with what small strength he had left, he wanly drew a symbol in the air as he said my first name. Did the symbol, the bearer of sad tidings wrote, look like suspiciously like—a—Rose— by some chance? Every email he wrote had a printed rose at the end. Save the last one. I emailed he forgot it. The rose came later by itself, then melodramatic silence. He said he liked to talk with me because people his own age were so melodramatic and unreal. Talk about a roller coaster ride. How do you wanly, or not, make a few hand wafts in the air look like a rose? Especially to someone so conveniently clueless they don’t know the name of his home town where they are, and the hospital and grave yard of final rest also? The bcc had been written by the corpse himself, as Thomas Paine had pointed out apparently so did certain 12 Dancers in the Sky writers of the bible who seemed to know things long after they had died, who also tripped up in first and third person. In truth, it broke my heart he had died and I was overjoyed he was alive. We talked twice more. I asked no questions. I get lied to a lot. The last one, he had taken his cell out of their apartment for privacy and cool air. Sounds backed him up, so all of this was a month and a half ago. He sent an email goodbye to me in French. Including the link to English translation, so in the middle of problems exploding in my face already, I had to learn how to translate a ditch email he signed with a French name. Here he is in effect dead again. I reconsider the malefic thing. And now, I can only get his message machine, he or someone has taken his IM away. I think he had decided shortly before he died, for whatever reason, to pretend he was still alive—but the last two phone talks—definitely him. He could have died after them. I email. I leave messages on his machine. I am become manic. Something about it all makes me so sadly angry. It hurts to hear that long ago recorded voice. That bcc said no call would be returned, he of course in his grave. Hey. He went through this cause you were crowding him, then decided against it. then, decided for it. Hoax? Prank? Not him. Moody adolescent? Yes. But this is more. I want to and do not want to know the answer. I will someday find it, and whatever it will be, I sleep with the lights on, and I have deep dread of coming Halloween. Because everything in me says there is soon one single more ratchet to turn. It will be sickly green and have attached to it the stench of the grave. Looking this over, some months after I wrote it, I am more than ashamed that I had so painfully fallen into his orbit, again, or more so, had never exited it. For I cannot deny his writing came into my possession late one night. Have you ever been writing or doing something with your hands, like mopping the floor, and you notice one hand not as your own, but as someone elses, or for a split second not recognized it as a hand at all? The other was yours, but… If my split personalities have been cured, then which of us is real? Look at this melodrama. Am I him, am I me? Oh God in my dark room on my bed someone reaches out a hand to a vague rose in the air. I would like to scream but I can’t. What if the voice belongs to neither of us? If I keep reaching for that ghostly rose, will I touch it? What will it feel like? More frightening than all. What if I already know? MY NAME IS DAVID

I am a brainy kind of guy, so I decided to have brain cancer. I thought life was tall and I would climb it. I've always been writer of Paris, tree, sky and me somewhere else in inside. I braved my brain every day, because it is a difficult scary thing to do. Why not give it a real test and make me have five days to live. No one would be harmed, everyone would be a maze I could run through with no problems. It was hot, deep Summer. You could barely stand it, it was that hot. I said to my dad's chauffeur, take me around the block to the dairy cream bar. Alfred, not his real name, but I, being Bruce Wayne, made it so. I was licking up the last of the parfait as we got back to our townhouse on the upper East side of Manhattan. Now, I, tummy full, sat at my expensive walnut desk. I will go now to my demise, I thought, as helpless as all life around me. There are brains everywhere, and they know what they are faced with. If a brain can be faced with anything. And I can't say it's not a weird concept.. I opened my Blue Horse notebook next to my comp. I did some mathematical schematics on the paper with my blue ink pen, and the computer will come and take my brain away. I had a medical textbook I was stumbling through. I had the medical words right, the terminology, the amount of time it takes for brain cancer for permission to create itself and to eventually kill me, the thought of which made me laugh, as I looked at the bright blackness of my walls as if they were the walls of outer space. At night, with today gone from my open windows, it was as if I was sleeping in a deep dark nothingness black hole somewhere around, perhaps, the Andromeda galaxy. I liked the bending hello of space and said rabbit me into their wonder, where I do not need gravity or sunlight. The moonlight was an amusing conceit in the night hours as though the blackness could ever be fully conquered. Therefore, I and my brain wanted the beginning of the end of me to make sense. And to fit into that giant thoughts of gray wrinkled ugly looking world to conquer, growth of cancer, the clattering of it in the silent, simply asking for it, chewing gum brain. That just sits there and lets itself be ravaged. I worked on paper and on screen and online until late afternoon and the Sun was himself dying, I mean strongly grasping in death grip on the skyscrapers of silver rocket ship forms out my 14 Dancers in the Sky window; curious words, son, sun, and the way words lay with us in play, meaning us, meaning then, nothing. I took off my Harry Potter glasses, put them on my desk. My dad downstairs was laying out in their specificity words that had the shed wood compliance of terminology that encapsulated somewhere in the vicinity a definition for the device as I was known. As well down farther I called to dad, I will be there in a few minutes. It took me a grand total of seven hours to finish my deadly plan. The plot, every word chosen in calibration of the ending of one small life before it had…. everything of it, complete. I head down below this stands of “honest” me, and make a new boy, terminally ill. I, of course, would have to send these to friends of some sort, far away, who had not seen me for some time. As to reason for this, I really had none. I was not lying. The Sun told me that as it died in the sky and the ground. I might not die of brain cancer, but I would surely die of something. The people I mail these to will be my first childhood friend. When we lived in Farmington, Indiana, his name was Peter. The second person was a teacher I had had in the fifth grade, with the funny name of Miss Ida Onyx. I had no idea why I remember her. She was then incidental, a non-important. The other three were even less memorable. I had to scratch my memory deeply to think of them. And I have a very good memory. And a very good turbine engine mind for its state-of-the-art computer technology for tracking them down. This was not in the form of a prank. It is highly serious, and I went about it without bleeding or glee, for I felt numb to the entirety of it. It somehow did not involve me as I am, David at fame and fortune soon to be, for o brain cancer do not take me first. For all I know, one of them might be dead, or dying, themselves. It was five in the morning when I had everything ready. I would be quiet, not awake my father or the help, among whom I sometimes listed father. Our townhouse seemingly velvety black this time of morning, and in the mourning of something dead. I had the envelopes, letters neatly folded inside each, addresses artistically written, as were course the letters themselves, the stamps attached perfectly, geometrically, straight up, straight down. As I descended the staircase of thick velvet I thought. I'm now going out to mail these letters that will announce my death to people, who, if themselves alive, won't remember me, not because I am not memorable, for I am, it is just they think they know everything. And Barry Eysman 15 they don't, and they forget instantaneously, because their brains cannot help it. They are to be pitied. New York and dark. I love. It seems the pores of my skin drink it in. It is because in my heart, it is deep autumn. Because I am younger looking in my teenage years, and inestimably cute, I am seen as different, but it is my heart and it is, what I do sometimes, like this, without reason. It's even hot, at 5:30 in the morning. It's baking. The asphalt melting. The skyscrapers of all size and the lower tall buildings, as well, as the smaller buildings, as they go along, passing by rich and poor and neither huddled side by side. It is a city of geometrids. It is a city of large economy. I am small boned. I could be easily killed. I have no doubt there are people in alleyways and hiding in doorways who would do me the honor of severing me from this small cluttered world, I think, at the same time, totally not wanting bad at all to happen to me. I am not a bored Richie Rich. I will be CEO of the company as my father is, perhaps the same company. New York blocks are long and shadowy now, as I perspire, wishing having money could make you not have to perspire. I stopped in front of a gray brick building with no windows in it. I feel as if I am in an airless world with the towers of things man-made growing closer around me as if gigantic toadstools, though what I know about toadstools I have no idea. I feel my neck, hot. I look at the shadows as they seem to crawl from the buildings that they had been attached to, and like panthers, what I know about panthers, I have no idea, only that these slinking life beings of the lightness and litheness, smelled somehow of roasted peanuts, as often this means products like the streets far away from him now formed a puzzle. Around him. There was himself as the last piece of the puzzle. He had long before, without noticing, dropped the envelopes that he gathered together in a manila envelope. The streetlights were dim gray. The Dawn had just pushed in that moment of his heavy muscle pains, as David fell to his knees, scraped his forehead on the sidewalk, that very filthy sidewalk, and he thought about Autumn, and Thanksgiving and early snow and Christmas and being able to breathe, the sheer wonder of the ability of the concept of the law of his lungs attaining air and expelling it. He felt a scream, in his face that had nothing to do with his mouth, as he tried to draw every cubit inch of hot sweltering New York City air into him. 16 Dancers in the Sky He never got the letters mailed. And if a writer may be allowed to observe, no, they would not have remembered him. Because he was unmemorable. Because he was of no value to them. Because he was just a boy who had a bad heart, who was never told so by father or doctors, protecting him all the way, who knew somehow this was his last hour. As a conscious intelligent boy, who denied what he knew with all his heart about his heart, he tried to mail immortality. He tried to connect with people. He remembered, but who did not remember him. He was a boy who appreciated irony. But as he lay dying, not remembering the florid deathbed scene in his letters, not knowing, that he had lifted his letters and their scenario from his favorite book, I AM THE CHEESE, the parallels between whom the boy met and their real counterparts and the heartbreaking conclusion. But, there were too many melodramatic movies that he saw late night on TV that diluted the strength of what could be. Had he mailed the letters, as he knew, there would have occurred nothing. If anything, a mild confusion concerning why he had died of a bad heart, instead of brain cancer. But David was beyond irony. He was in his room dark Knight and dark boy of sad number of years alone. And then to die, in his room at the dark walls of space, he floated, beyond gravity, beyond form and void now, of himself. A small boy on an early morning New York sidewalk, lay dead. As someone called for help. The boy was taken away in the ambulance, sheet over him, as later on, after examination and identifying him, his father was told. By that time, daylight had held the sweltering city in its hot jungle grasp for some length of hours. By then, somebody had found that manila envelope, had taken the letters out, and had later on, dropped them in a dented blue postal box on the corner, for no reason other than it is was the city in the middle of a hot sweltering summer, and it was just something to momentarily do. THE WAY I THINK. EVERY DAY STUFF FOR ME. BY THIS TIME, I WAS UNABLE TO TYPE, FROM HAND TREMBLING. I WAS DICTATING THIS STORY WHEN MY WIFE, MYRA, TYPING, WAS SO SHAKEN BY IT, AS IF THE UNDERPINNINGS OF STRUCTURE AND REALITY WERE BEING TAKEN APART, HAD TO SAY, ENOUGH, AND FLED THE ROOM, DEEPLY DISTURBED ME.

THE BRINDLING DAY

In the brindling day, he felt his brain catch fire and broil to brilliant cohesive dexterity, like doing splendid concise marble tricks on the apex of a morning step ladder of willful gray, way up there on the tip top of the tilt-a-whirl, gorgeous sunrise background of me, age twelve, in my magician’s cloak. Tilted at an angle, wheat puffs in his stomach, fake mustache, and his brain burned in cinders. At his hands, the music played, as he fell through church windows, and the thief ran after him, as high dizzy with dream bubbles voice called “stick with me kid, I’ll make you famous.” And he laughed to a crackling insane noon, tilt-a-whirl in his head, falling all over the place. Space ships of diverse cloths a total disaster, wrapped up in the junk pile at the top of the morning sun. He looked down at the carnival rides and something silver tasted on his tongue as the metronome blew upward and he said watch me now. As he sank into the heat of mid December, make it rhyme, come hear kid I’ll tell you a story, I’ll teach you something, they can imagine better than you. You can pull all the carnie tricks you please and they’ll tense and structure you into thinking a brain swap or two will be handed out like toothpicks on days without bonfires in your eyes which are little liquid lies. Like meadows in squares way down there, in cancer write large with this canvass now torn in percale blue half by the last darning needle off from the planet pop. 1. Christmas heart melted and a pit of laminated hot butter in the center, with a Cantinflas of ruffled shirt and quaint mustache faded into star studded history. Drowning in a three million mile waterlogged movie, saying watch the proposal of pin point punctuation as the pick up truck below colored in ice cream donut blue. Carries the team of world class surgeons working a ten cent toy brain and eyes and tremble house eyes of the guess who is the thief of teacher’s pencil or thief of all time, alien you. 18 Dancers in the Sky Turn into doves from your upside down top hat of Clarence the lion cross eyed kind, the dutiful of what scope of marine life coated interior god, and the surgeons extended their silver thin long arms as the boy in magician’s cut-away, leaned down his brain, as the gibbering magpie doctors dipped salad forks and dinner knives into the first sacrifice that he stuck on a Leggo, no go on take it I don’t need it it’s ok what I’ll put you through. But it’ll come to something crazy like this eventually, why the heat rises in the sun sum of big gulp as the boy felt the rat bites which suck up his fingers, but not his prints so he will still have to write freakdom, but will be a prints among men. And burn off my atoms one at a time, the searing billions of worlds inside me. It’s little enough I can do for love as you pull out my eyes and those dock tors with the ten mile long silver thin arms all the way up here, top of the Tilt a Whirl climb, to pop top my eyes Out. Turning them to cellophane to burn to ashes ashes alive alive o! and blind the brindle boy who has learned the brown mud doves in that top hat are stunning higher and higher step ladders perched one atop the other so the kid has to. In his Lord Byron cloak, stumble up and up rickety split to the intervening coach sun of the baseball game of merry melted skull Christmas, dance the tears of bone crumble. Because nothing is good enough for your ball peen hammer right a good slam between the eyes, dead center, for galaxies that died so you would see the nimble agate game and steelies too I have to jumble fest with in the mouse astringents as the boy climbs sticking to the torn sky. And the laughter inside him, a bright Brunson burner is with him not at him which makes the horses fly round in horse fly components. As he with his cape blowing in hot breeze that is swelling with swelter hot city brick sweat, blows nails into scraping red fingernail polish to kid thrumming drum brain. To lactate nails of glitter red, tapping on the cardboard card playing table, in both senses of the phrase, as the boy stick the boy sick all that is left of him comes puking down the side wall skies with fake clouds painted on them as the boy is puked away. And if you won’t love me for that little moment of my life, turn the hurdy gurdy to a different number and I’ll show you what the next second in here feels like on just another jolly roger yo ho ho hum drum of the mill brindling day. THE MOST TERRIFYING COMFORT I CAN THINK OF AND WISH FOR.

HALLOWEEN CHARADE

The bowl was filled with candied apples. The night said Halloween. The party said dance. The pumpkins glowed golden. The windows were open to the cool night. The kids were from high school. The girl Linda was hosting. The music said swing. But in a low voice. Her parents were solicitously upstairs. They had paid some of the kids. Linda was one of those girls not well liked. Her cat was black as all the Halloween nights together, but with white circles round his eyes, had been played with gently, for these were nice kids. Linda sat on the edge of the nubby green couch, delicately drinking punch. A girl, Diedre, was talking to her about nothing really, and listened politely, smiling a bit, tilting her head as if listening. Linda had gotten her cat neutered, declawed, fed, watered, played with, and copiously loved, who slept with her every night, who loved her mightily. She had seen enough horror films, to know if there was an animal, especially small and defenseless, something horrible would happen to it. She touched the hollow of her neck, brushed a hand on her pony tail as her cat propelled into Diedre’s lap as Diedre instantly made over him, as Chip, a nice boy, came to Linda, asked her to dance, her second with a second boy. He kidded her. She was told she was a good dancer. Some boy asked politely if she would like to go to the movies Saturday. He understood that she had to ask permission. Finally the party ended. Everyone said it was cool, ‘night Linda, as she stood at the door, cat of Halloween safely in her arms. Her father came down the stairs, smiling, asking how did it go? She smiled. He nodded sagely and said, see, they’re just like you. Yes, she thought, managing not to scream in horror, yes they are. MY ”UNIVERSITY AT CHRISTMAS” NOVELLA, SACRED MEMORIES, SACRED DREAMS

AND HIS EYES BE AS BLUE AS THE SEA

CHAPTER ONE And he came my way near Christmas Day. I was the last teacher in the building, and the day was overcast, cold, and gray. I sat at my desk, looking at a book I meant to finish over Christmas, which had always been an empty time for me. Books filled me up. They were my friends. I came here three years ago. I taught English Comp. I was surprised every year at how poorly students with excellent grades from high school and fine ACT scores did even in their sophomore year. I was alone. I was like no one else in the world, so it seemed. I was ashamed and at odds with myself. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night in a sweat even when the room was cold, for I loved cold weather and winter, the urgency of the season, the no-nonsense aspect of it, and I would be sweating profusely, and filled with fear that police were to break down my door at any moment. That they were there in their swirling strobe light cars and were walking up to my door and I always waited with fearful breath and pounding heart. Talk all you want about gay lib. That was not how it was ‘round these parts. I thought of Alton often. He was in my first period class every weekday. I thought of his blue eyes that I felt I could almost fall into and swim away to a secret place, a bay of tranquility, I would even endure eternal summer if he were beside me, and we would swim bold as brass, for he was the color of brass and I was the color of winter. He had long hair still and was a boy with clever and mischievous eyes. He smiled little crinkles at the end of his lips, and he had a voice that was Northern that lilted over the Southern accents here. I had a picture of him from the university newspaper I would look at. And feel guilty for. I wished someone would spend Christmas with me. I used to believe how sad those men and women who would hire escorts just to be with them, just to talk with them, or pretend a relationship with, not even sex, just someone to be their momentary dream. I no longer scoff at that. I think it's the only way to survive for certain people. Alton had a girlfriend. Her name was Jo. They walked Barry Eysman 21 down the corridors and sat in the lunchroom and the student union TV room, and shopped at the University bookstore often, always together, holding hands many times, laughing together. She was a somewhat stocky girl with a milky freckled face and hair of brown tied back tightly. She was different from tall, lanky Alton. They would put their hands in each other's back jeans pocket, like most of the other students here, a fad of the times. It hurt me to see this. At home, I still saw their after image. Or when they were in a school play and had a scene when they passionately kissed, I thought I would die. I would never have gone to see the play, had I known. And there was a knock at the door of the classroom. I was startled, jumped a bit, and said come in, knowing somehow it was Alton, because a man has paid his dues often enough, a man has said to himself some people deserve to be alone, some people are happier that way, and there is a sunbeam in the doorway of a cloudy day, and I said to him, without looking, as he had opened the door, come on in Alton. I felt all the cuts of the years on me. He stood by the desk scarred and wounded and he somehow scarred and wounded. It came to me like that. He was wounded. He was scarred. The smile came at a price. The predicament would one day overwhelm him, and I remembered Von Aschenbach's premonition about Tadzio, how it made the man secretly happy, and to pull myself from my favorite movie and one of my favorite novellas, I looked up at Alton, quickly. For if I had been slower in doing so, I might never have looked at all. I'm in trouble, he told me. His voice broke a bit. I told him to sit down. He took his usual chair, the one in front and center. He looked down at his reindeer patterned sweater, plucked an invisible piece of lint from the left knee of his jeans, adjusted his booted feet a bit, and continued to look down. It seemed, after he said it so haltingly, that Jo had found him with another guy, that they had experimented a bit, nothing really, a mutual jerk off, and Alton blue eyes hiding and Alton bronze skin, how?, in winter?, because the winters were usually mild or warm here, blushing a bit. His long gold hair hiding part of his face, upper left quadrant. He told me she thought he hated her, that she thought he was making fun of her, and he tried to kiss her, but she backed away. He said she made him feel he was--unclean and wrong and diseased. I put my elbows on my desk of dark brown, put my chin in my hands, cupped, and looked down at the desk. My heart quickened. He wants me. God. So ridiculous. He wants me. Absurd fool man. Absurd 22 Dancers in the Sky loneliness can do that to a person, and one learns somehow, with some equanimity to live in the absurd. I found myself telling him it was just something guys sometimes do and Jo should give him another chance since this was just recently and you and he were drunk and went back to your dorm and.. . But, said Alton, in a voice that sounded so youngling hoarse, I liked it, I really liked it. I found myself getting excited. I looked out the windows in the back of the room. It had started to snow. I loved snow. It was beautiful and cold and like the sky falling, as Scout observed in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I thought, he's vulnerable now, he is needy now, and then I couldn't believe I had thought such a thing. I said, just give it time, just let her get used to it, and whatever you decide, you're your own free agent, and no one has the right to tell you what to do and with whom. I said it like a teacher tells a class what a story means, or what a mathematical construct is. I said it coldly, bloodlessly. Not unkindly, but just by rote. I was protecting him from me. I was thinking how wonderful this is--I can go home in the snow, and I can pretend with Alton, for that was all I had ever done all my life. Pretend. I had seldom touched another human being in my life. This was a lucky day for me. Shameful as it was. This was lucky because I got to this part of the world finally and that was for me a gift. I was using his sadness to build up private secret forever and a day scenarios in my head. He called my name. I looked to him and away from the snow windows. I was thinking of running through the snow with him, that beautiful music from that lousy film "Love Story" playing in my head and the lyrics of the theme song of it. I saw him as an interloper now. He had left a shadow here for me to play with, with guilty hands and by myself. He had given me a proscenium arch to act out a Christmas world with him. He was asking for help. I heard him as though his voice was coming from down deep in a well. The words kept coming over and over and gradually penetrated my mind, the thought I hope Jo never comes back to you and I hope the guy rejects you as a freak and you have to come to me and I get to say, I get to say, because I love you more dearly than I've ever loved anyone in my life, go away. I find you beautiful as the sun. I then heard him say that he couldn't go to his parents' because they were in the middle of a messy divorce, and he couldn't stay with Jo and her parents as had been one time planned. I felt winter in my heart and I danced in my head and looked at him and smiled and he sort of smiled back, and I thought of my Barry Eysman 23 coming to his bed in my guest room or his coming to my bed one night and the climbing in and the holding together and my sharing with him some momentary joys that he would soon forget, but that would keep me alive for so many years and I asked, you can stay in the dorm, can't you? Some other students are. And the smile tentatively painfully sadly painted that said I am asking you of all people, god I am asking you, that smile even was wiped away and he nodded yes, so I told him, that would probably be best. And inside I was cheered, so horribly, so emptily, so painfully-this is your big chance, don't blow it, I thought, blowing it. I was finally one up on someone. He asked, then in quick desperation, could I come see you, maybe spend Christmas Day with you or something? And I said, my private eagerness overwhelmed by my outward and totally real irritation with him for giving me a chance at a dream that would not happen anyway, I would just wind up making a grasping fool of myself, I said to him in bored tones, no, I don't think so; I will be busy over the holidays. Then I stood up. And he jumped up and put his hands in his heavy jacket pockets and walked out of the room like a machine quickly out of synch. I stood at my desk. I had won. I would imagine him by the Christmas tree, and it would be wonderful, all I would ever need, thank you Alton and Jo, a million times thank you thank you... I started gathering my books together, especially the heavy long involved one I was to read over my empty Christmas. I got my coat. I wondered if Alton was waiting outside the door to ask again, and I might say yes this time, and have the truly most horrible Christmas of my life. It would turn out he was not waiting outside my door or in the corridor or at the exit door or at any of the windows to the outside I passed by. I put my coat and gloves on and prepared briskly to leave darkness here for two weeks. I turned off the lights. The day was early dark now. I closed the door, said good night to the janitor I passed by in the hall. I kept hoping all the way to my car that Alton would be there. I kept hoping I could at least give him a lift somewhere. When I got home, I waited all the time those two weeks for him to call me or to drop by anyway. I thought, he's sick and with a cold and wishes he were with me. I thought he misses me and wishes to call, and hopes I will call him, and he feels close to me being away from me, this way, that we ever could have been together, even having sex, and I felt warm and cozy in front of my wall heater, drinking my boiled custard, reading my book. I kept the phone close to me at all times. I listened 24 Dancers in the Sky especially hard for the doorbell to ring. Sometimes it didn't work. So I listened even harder for the knock on the door that never came. I sat by the phone, ready to call him, I guessed he was at his dorm, unless he had patched things up with Jo--no I would not think of that; I did not want to know if he had. So I saw no one. I saw the holiday in by myself and out by myself. I finished the book. I watched the obligatory Christmas movies and TV shows and I cried at the end of Christmas night. I had opened the gifts I had bought and wrapped for myself. I had bought one that I decided would rather go to Alton. I had wrapped it as well. And left it under the tree untouched. Never to be given to him. In short, actually, it was quite the nicest Christmas I had ever had. I was very fortunate. And his eyes be blue as the sea and he was tawny skinned and his hair was brighter spun gold than the sun, and I loved my Alton. Mine. Forever.

CHAPTER TWO Alton lay on his narrow bed in Ellington 312, of his empty dorm. He was half way through his sophomore year here and wondered with more than a little worry if he was becoming impotent already. It was foolish, he thought. There in the too well heated room. He could dress and go out in the snow. It was close to Christmas. He had lost his girl. He had embarrassed himself before his teacher. He had trusted the man. Who had had no time for him. He had had it made for such a long time now. Girls had been wanting to be with him from grammar school on. He was immensely kind. As much as he was lovely. And he was very much lovely. He had taken it for granted then. When he had sworn long ago he would never do so. They had both been a little drunk, Alton's parents were going through a rancorous divorce, which had torn Alton up, for he loved them both. They were in such pain and he could do nothing about it. Not his smile. Not his upbeat words. Not his finding a place to stand on his own. Yet, he could have anyone he wanted, when the skies grew in from all sides and began to press tightly. And he had thought Jo was to be his for life. And he to be hers. He had told her about himself and Matthew as a kind of "see what I'm going through?" kind of way with his eyes like a puppy dog’s as in let's pay attention. Her face went deathly white, more pale than usual. She had turned from him, gotten off his bed, and walked away. He was Barry Eysman 25 stunned and angry and hurt and baffled. "Guys do it sometimes," he said after her, forgetting to stand up. Doubting if his legs would support him. "They do when they're ten and compare pee pees." And she said it like halls of emptiness she was walking down. She would never get to the end of that hall, which was his memory of her. She would never be out of his memory. Walking out of it second by revered second, but never gone entirely. If she had only shut his room door a bit less quietly. He had wept for a time. As he had wept now. And he now stood up and went to the narrow window at the end of his bed, looking out at the snow. He had brought her a Christmas present, had saved for it for a long time. A necklace golden with a golden heart in its center and her initials on the back of it. Foolish, the whole thing, foolish and goo goo eyes and all of that when he had done nothing to hurt anybody. He had been hurt. Excessively. He had been hurt by Matt who really started the thing with him, and he had been hurt by his favorite teacher who just had no time at all for him thank you very much. He had been hurt by Jo who had understood other things he had told her, and he had done the same for her. She was not a virgin when she met him. Well, he was not gay. He was just still alone.

The snow was getting heavier. He wished his teacher was home alone and sitting there in front of the TV feeling awful. He wished the same for Jo. And his parents could just tear each other to ribbons for all he cared; take the damned case to the Supreme Court. He could kill Matthew. He fell back on the bed and could kill him. He could nail him to the wall with one hand and he could say, hey, let me show you what five minutes of stupid drunken fun can do to a person; you've always been a lunkhead, so let me do it on grounds that you would understand. He put his hands to his head and felt like screaming. So since there was no one around, he did just that. At the top of his lungs. Searing them. At the top most further of his lungs. Firing them. He beat his right hand against the wall and he pushed at the bed and he pushed at his cock that Jo had so loved and in which he had taken such pride, and he said dammit work for me, dammit give me one or two seconds can you do that do you think? He pulled his hands to his sides. And he gave up. Hey, you dork, where the hell did you go to as well? Then he went to his desk, opened the top drawer, looked at the Christmas gift 26 Dancers in the Sky wrapped by a lady at the shop; he never could wrap presents at all; he was wondering now if he could do anything at all right; his high grades, his popularity, his friendliness, his feeling well and centered in himself, his unwavering conviction that he was totally himself, no identity problems, no incessant longings for what and who could never be there. He pulled out the package. The present for Jo. And he tossed it in the metal trashcan by the desk chair. God, it was silly. He sat on his bed. He was tired and immensely confused and he thought he might be gay and what did that portend in this little town in the South? Well, it portended getting beaten up every now and then, and it portended, for him at least, being confused as hell about his sexuality and about every other thing he had ever taken for granted about himself and the world out there, he stopped, taken for granted. He had one failing before all of this crushed in on him, for he was superstitious. Not overly so. Not even mildly so. There were just certain things he had kept in mind not to ever do, and this was the main one and he had broken it, maybe recently, maybe with Jo, but maybe further back. Maybe he was living on borrowed time. He stood up and slapped his face like in the Home Alone movie. God, melodrama and ridiculous stupid thoughts. I'm a clown, he thought. And what he should do is to call up old Matthew's house. Old friend Matthew who he had spanked the monkey with in a night of revelry that was to be unsurpassed in the history of the world. It had been simple. They had toasted to Alton's parents' divorce and the eighty thousand other things adults do to fuck up your life. Then they had left Tony's and they had gone back to Alton's room. Matt had a roomier one, and they had crashed on the bed. It had been late at night. Alton had woken to Matt's jacking himself at the edge of the bed. Alton did three double takes and asked what in the name of God are you doing, Matt? Matt had his jeans off and his shoes and socks. Still had a T-Shirt on. What's it look like, Ace? Matthew had said, stopping. But, Alton asked, why? And Matt had told him he was drunk and he was in love and he didn't know what to do about it except pretend and maybe that that was the only way some people can love is to pretend because they know they will make an ass of themselves if they say it to the person they love and they'll die if that happens, Alton, they'll die if that happens. Matt wept. He hadn't said the words as well as Alton now remembered them, but the message was received. And Alton pulled away as Matt stumbled, still loaded, to the bathroom. Barry Eysman 27 He came back. Alton had gone to his desk chair. He had his back to Matt and the bed. Alton had lit a cigarette. His mouth burned. And his stomach was queasy, and it was more than he had drunk too much. It took Matt a while. Finally his friend sat on the edge of the bed again, said he was sorry, and he would replace the bedspread and sheets tomorrow. Alton managed a wave of the hand that said not necessary. The silence was a massive awkwardness. Maybe fifteen minutes went by. Matt said, well, now you know and now it's good bye hey hey?, with that stupid little Yogi Bear laugh Matt used when he was in a goofy mood, or in this case a sad and desperate one. And Alton said to Matt, who he heard preparing to leave, can you do it again? What? Matt asked. Alton repeated his question. He sounded so silly and so scared and so final. Matt said, you mean? Alton didn't say anything. Just got up. Went to the bed and sat beside Matt. The moonlight was full. A small desk light Alton always kept burning at night even when he slept. Even when Jo slept over. She said it was to keep the night monsters away, and that, she had added, was one of the innumerable endearing qualities about Alton. Alton was still in his street clothes. He unzipped his jeans. Stood up and took them off, pushed them and his briefs down to his ankles and then feeling like the Bozo of the Universe, sat back down, and said, well? And Matt said, you're kidding. Alton said well, Matthew, at this point, you have enough on me to blackmail me for the rest of my life and to make a laughing stock out of me, to boot. Matt said, I would never do that, and he meant it like saying it in a caring way, but he belched then, could not help it. They sat there. And Matt had eased him and said hey, it's not like going to the dentists' for God's sake, relax, though Alton could feel Matthew as tense and as nervous as the first man on the moon must have been. And eventually they had jacked off. Each the other. And Matt and Alton were panting and lying crosswise on the bed, their heads against the wall. Go home, Alton said. Matthew said, see what I mean? See, Alton, it's like--I love you, I've loved you since eleventh grade. I've loved you all the moments in university. My heart skips when I see you. But you're always with Jo. Your hands in each other's back pockets and it kills me, man, it just kills me. Go, said Alton, we were drunk, curious, forget it. Matt was already dressing. He asked Alton if he was really sure and Alton nodded. Matt said, as he got to the door, I've got my reality now and it will be the only piece of reality I'll remember and hide in and if that's 28 Dancers in the Sky soap opera shit, well so be it, because that's the way I feel, don't really know whether to thank you. And Matthew left. He closed the door as gently as had Jo. And now impotent former golden boy sat on his bed, quite alone, and he wondered if he could change course instructors so he wouldn't have to see that teacher he had humiliated himself in front of just a few hours ago. Maybe he would call him and say, hey, you know what it's like? To try to really talk with someone and they don't even half-way look at you? And they can't wait to rush you out the door? Nope. Not you. You're smart and mysterious and strange as in unique, and I love being in your class cause you say things I have never heard from another teacher ever, I mean you really go off the rails at times, off into cloud kookoo land sometimes, but dammit you made me think and now you hate me or worse have forgotten me altogether for a while, teach, he thought, all you people who think you have jolly well got it made in the shade with a spade, holier than thous, and you come down here where we live, we screwed up little farts live—oh fuck it just fuckit— He dressed, put on a heavy coat and went out the door, down the corridor of pale color, and closed forever doors, down the metal staircase, out to the empty lobby. Rotten thing, you get up your nerve, and they throw it back in your face, he thought, as he slammed open the door to the cold snowy night, GOD!!

CHAPTER THREE Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was lovingly, loquaciously drunk. Or something like that, Alton thought, as he saw the bar still open. Its Christmas lights gleaming and gaudy. Its cardboard Santa in the window emptily haughty. Some cars in the parking lot. The snow falling roundabout. And the night late when the cold wind blew. All the seasons of love, Alton decided, as he headed to the parking lot, half tripping over a mound of stones covered by the night snow, are to be forgotten about. What did he ever think he knew? What popularity comes with your girl ditching you, and Matt who used to be a friend, when you can't see straight because you are so sad, it cuts your heart in half? He stood at the bar door. He stood in the night that his fleece lined jacket could not protect him from. He used to love Christmas. Used to love everything about it. All the way back to last year. Things change with such rapidity in love, Barry Eysman 29 such vapidity, so he went inside into the heat furnace where men and some women sat at the bar and in booths and all was red like hell and all was red like a horrible cold; this place was where the smell of booze lay hard and fast, like a grin that had gone too mean all of a sudden. Like a grin that had gone too sure, too fast and left you standing there at about age nine or ten again. The mirror over the bar with the leather padded seats, as Alton eased himself onto one, covered with snow fake foam and covered with reindeer flying to a never to be reached moon. And the man beside him was a talker. Older. Long away from university. Bulbous stomach. Heavy beer in front of him. And he talked. Like lonely people do. And Alton tried to ignore him. Everybody did it to him, why not do it to everybody else. The man was a shambler and he punched Alton on the arm. Alton drew away and tried to hide in his own perfect night, that would come with books to read and hearts to sew together and love to give up, and move away from, because people used people, and to his horror as his beer came from the little bald guy behind the bar, as Alton sipped off the foam, noticing his left hand trembling just a bit, as the night swirled down his throat and kept some remnant of warmth into him, saying it's not the end of the world boy-o and the man beside him, smelling of cold and booze and cigarettes and that particular kind of horrible loneliness that Alton had read Christmas was peppered with for some people, as he talked, Alton ready to move to a booth or another stool, he realized the peculiar need for human companionship. That sturdy little rudder of flame inside himself that said anyone could talk and he could listen if he wanted. There was no law requirement that he had to respond. As if there were other hearts broken and he thought of Matthew and of Jo, and considered the human equation that was all gone and lost and smashed as he seemed to be doing to himself. The man beside him, three sheets to the North wind, was funny really and he said funny things, that came with long greasy hair and a need for a shave, and Alton remembered Matthew like it was long ago, and studded with the need to get back with him, studded with the need to prove to him and to Jo that there were needs and all kinds of needs, that this could be a flower springing to life, blossoming forth in this Christmas coming night and he thought of old friends he could call, and he hadn't meant it, he hadn't meant to throw it in Jo's face, but he knew all the time now that he was with her, if she would give him another chance, he would be thinking of Matthew, and would 30 Dancers in the Sky remember the companionship. Would remember the feel of it, his friend, his best male friend, beside him and them both erect. Okay they were drunk. They were sleepy. But they had touched somehow. And that was it for Matthew. Because who can live a life this long and all of a sudden, whamo, you're gay and you never knew it before. He found himself in the chatter of the bar, in the clatter of the noises, over the country music wailing from the juke box, the man beside him, the interloper, he did not hear the words the man spoke, as much as he felt them, and, true, they might not be the man's words at all, but they scotched memories in Alton's brain, and someone beside him whose name he would never know, whose face he had not looked at, who was incidental to Alton and essential somehow, he thinking this later, at the same time. He wanted to be with Jo. Naked. The last and final night they had made love. He wanted to be back in balance, to kiss her breasts and to feel her underneath him. And he wanted Matthew to get it through his thick head this was what Alton wanted. This being thrown off track was not right. Matthew sitting there beside him. And telling Alton he was in love with him. Where the hell did that come from? Little pitchforks of hurt and anger went down his throat with the booze. He ordered another. The colored lights of Christmas blinking on and off behind the bar and over the mirror that was cloudy like Alton's memory was getting. The man beside him more of a mumbler, more of a revenant, and he thought unbidden and unwittingly, this was Matt lonely on Christmas. Then he thought of his teacher going to fancy parties and reading books and loving quietly someone in his own studious way, not abrupt as he had been with Alton, not rude, because he had been quite a kind man all semester to all his class, and Alton liked to think especially of him, for some reason. So maybe the teacher was gay, he thought, sipping the sour warmth again, and letting his head turn a bit toward the man beside him without the man noticing though he was mumbling something, like for jokes, like for sadness that gets all geeky and gawky and ridiculous because things hurt too much and you have to back away from it, all of it, and try to find yourself which has slipped its bearings and fallen too deeply inside you, so you can never pull it up again, like recalcitrant socks. And Alton laughed in spite of himself at the image. Someone bumped against his back as they went to pay their bill, and Alton hunched over his beer more tightly, and this was the way with drinks, we become children again, and we hunger and it comes Barry Eysman 31 out tear stained and we are embarrassed at the words and what we did, the next morning. And Alton felt the man's words, like shadows on a winter day falling on snow, feeling guilty and not allowed. Feeling the world is stumbling, when it's really only you and the other inhabitants of a planet that must be as scared as lonely as hurt as confused as Matthew and Jo. Okay. And he felt sorry for the teacher and for them and for everybody. Everybody has their loves, and okay, Alton was loved, once, by Matthew and Jo and previous girl friends and maybe other guys who were keeping it secret like Matt before they both got drunk. And he kept getting this insipient feeling this was Matt beside him. A man in his forties maybe. A man who worked with his hands. Alton had glanced at them. They were calloused and leathery looking. A man who had spent his years regretting. Or probably more like it Alton was using him as a mirror to play off of, to say this is Matthew in his cups, this night soon of Christmas when the thoughts get maudlin and foamy as the fuzz on the top of the beer he had just finished off. Think of Jo. Dammit. Think of Jo. How you hurt her, how you threw the news in her face, to make her like you more, to make her laugh with you at Matt, and Matt, I'm sorry, God. I'm sorry you love me. Or loved me. I didn't do anything to lead you on. If you had told me earlier, then I don't have this time warp man sitting beside me. Is he you? Or is he the husband of some other Jo who has been having an affair on him and he has just found out just in time for Christmas cheer? And he thought what is happening to me and why can't I get out of here and call Jo and call Matt and what the hell call the teacher I used to respect till he blew me off, for who knows what reasons, and say look everyone I was the high school golden boy. Okay, I remember one boy in my gym class who was always looking at me surreptitiously in the changing room and one day I saw, and he turned away shy as cat's milk when I looked at him and I was brave and superior-no I wasn't. I have never felt that way. I have never felt anything but eyes on me gauging every move I make, every word I say, I am competing with an image of me and I just want to get out of here, and so thinking, Alton accidentally knocked over his beer right onto the lap of the man beside him who had been affecting him in some really spooky way. Alton jumping up. Apologizing. Really sorry. Really stupid of me. The man said gruffly in a voice that said he had given up and given in a long time ago, forgetaboutit, and got up and walked 32 Dancers in the Sky stumbled out of the heat into the cold wind, as Alton saw all the eyes on him, college boy, the townies thought, stupid drunk college asses, and Alton paid his bill and left after the man. Who was standing by his, of course, pick up truck. Alton stood there in the night, zipping up his jacket, the snow falling less heavily on his hair and shoulders but the cold was piercing enough. The man with too much stomach was leaning against his truck on the driver's side. Pressing his front into it. Alton's family had money. That was not his fault. Matt's family had little money. That was not their fault. Alton saw the man he walked toward unsteadily and he wondered if he had gotten it all wrong in his too smoothed by booze brain, and the man was like the teacher Alton had once had such affection. For In a matter of days and hours everything named Alton was in flux. Alton, was in the bar’s pink lights and that was where it stopped, the last joke, as he stood by the man. The man noticed him in some few seconds, felt Alton, former star everything. Felt the shadows creep up on him. And the man said, without looking up and over at him, let's gets a room, in the sad sorry sodden voice that knew Alton would say yes, and in the same sad sorry sodden voice that knew the man would ask and that Alton would say yes, he did so. They got in the truck. Then Motel Six was a few blocks away. It was all of it awkward and fleshy and Alton thought it was going to be horrible. Thought this is a way for me to exorcize Matt, to say hello to Jo again, not to tell her, God, he would never do that again and the man kept apologizing, the booze heavy on his breath, and Alton stayed outside the office of the motel till the man got the room and in they went, Alton haltingly, the man knowing what would happen and that spelled dejection for him. He held Alton in his arms as he pushed him to the bed with cheap covers in the cheap room with the dim lighting and Alton, to his amazement, held his arms around the man and felt his good warmth in the too cold room. Alton, here and maybe forever, thought especially, of the fear of danger. Who was this man?, Would there be hurt? Would there be pain? And in the innocent still regard of naivety that formed him, he thought he had to do it right, he had to make this man happy as he felt the beard scratches on his face as the man tried to kiss him and Alton reflexively froze, then he pushed away. So the man, knowing always knowing, that booze had to be the template of his release and sorrow was to be his induction into momentary sex, pretend love, as he pulled away from Alton and felt Barry Eysman 33 the young man through his briefs. He looked at Alton, asked, said he was sorry, they didn't have to go through this, and Alton said nothing, just nodded, fearing. Jo had given Alton a blow job any number of times. Matthew would have given him one in an instant of Alton had just said it was okay, and the boy in that changing room too, of the hurt pained eyes, but this man, bearish, scared and scarred too, remember?, had taken down Alton's jeans and briefs and had graced him, had made an art of the thing, the too fleshy lips, the tongue tip touching, the large broken hands, this man became a Rembrandt at this moment of sex, unlike Alton's clumsiness, and the man said, reading and remembering tomorrow was really yesterday warmed over, nodded, it's okay. And Alton, with the man's help, did it to him and tried to please him, but the man said nothing. Alton turned away. Questions peppered the air and he felt the man behind him now. Hugging him like Alton was a little puppy in the arms of some great father like figure. And the man began to weep, sorry he was not for Alton, sorry he was to do these things surreptitiously, quietly, being forgotten as it happened, wondering if there was always to be sadness mixed with sex, wondering if being together if only for a little while was the worst loneliness there was, remembering when he had asked his best friend once long ago, and his friend hit him hard in the face, cutting the man's lip, making him bleed, then laughed at. And knowing Alton was to laugh at him too later on. Wondering if he should put some bills on the bed before he gave Alton a ride back to university or wherever. Tinkly Christmas music touched like soft cotton snow their ears. In the parking lot, all cleaned up and jackets zipped, they got into the truck, having not said a word after. God, these self-abnegating words hateful words jokester words people used to describe sex, when for the man, sex was worship, was a fresco that deserved painting, was a world that needed creating, was re-crafting the sun and the moon and the Earth, putting things to right making things less lonely so a man didn't have to drink his way through Christmas and the loveless marriage back at what was laughingly called home of love long gone, wife hating husband, husband perplexed at where the beauty of it had gone. They had met at university. This very one. Long time passing. He had been with a few guys before. Nothing serious. Just jerking around. And she had caught him and a friend at it. Screamed at them. Made him crawl to her for forgiveness. And he had indeed been deeply sorry and ashamed and he had hurt her terribly, had he meant 34 Dancers in the Sky for her to find out?, especially in this cruel way. So they married. And that was her increasing punishment for him, the war he walked into every night when he came home from work. And trying to recapture his youth and that particular friend she caught him with, the friend who was so embarrassed and would have nothing to do with him again. They drove to the dorm parking lot, sat there for a while, then the boy got out of the truck, closed the door very quietly, and walked into the snow and up to the dorm building. Shoulders hunched against the snow and the cold and the pain that was life. The man looked at him, remembered forever, as he watched the boy enter the dorm. He turned on the radio. Elvis was singing, "it's gonna be a blue Christmas without you." He drove, and the night wind blew cold, and Christmas was coming and these were how things were and are. And children prayed to Santa Claus.

CHAPTER FOUR "Come back to me, girl. I didn't mean to hurt you, But I know I did. I didn't mean to, Yes, I wish you would forgive Me, And put me out of my misery, Girl. Take my hand, girl, It's lonely and sad in my heart, Cause you're no longer there, And I stare at the wall, Bring back your love, girl. I can't wait another minute For you, girl..."

"Hell," Alton said, loudly, as he tossed his guitar on his dorm bed. He couldn't write music and lyrics and he couldn't sing worth a damn either. It was one day till morning. Or one second until morning and he would call the teacher or Matthew or the guy at the bar, but he would not call Jo. Jo had no right to treat him like this. They weren't married. She did not own him. She was just so selfish, she thought of Barry Eysman 35 him as a piece of meat at the butcher's part of the grocery. No, he sighed. She was way better than that. Way kinder. She had given everything to him. But her love was never going to be there again. Never. And he thought as he pushed back his hair from his eyes, this is what they call the forever-alone thing. Even that guy in the bar last night had forgotten him and Alton had half forgotten him as well; and felt grungy at the things they did. It was Alton, his name. He came from a respectable family. He had great grades. He had been the star everything in high school, and here he was with this noid creeping up the back creaky stairs of his brain and he couldn't think anymore because said noid was eating his brain alive and there was nothing but emptiness in his soul. And that were too many ands and he would get downgraded if he turned in a paper like that. Well, so be it. And and and and and. That's how people thought, he thought at least. Who thinks in complete correct sentences with the right punctuation at the end? Nobody, a big nobody, that's who. And that was Alton, who, dejected, walked to the bathroom and surveyed himself in the wall mirror. He had hair that still looked good, even after last night, unwashed since then; he had a kind face and a captivating smile. There was openness and sensitive honesty in his cool blue eyes. Jo had said these things about him, when he was making love to her or walking with her and he loved the smell of her perfume, it was, like, Autumn aroma, rich and inviting and full bodied, as was she and he had loved to hold onto her hips as they had sex because he loved the feel of them as they went up and down in concert with his. How could he have been so mad as to lose her? Telling her about Matthew? Just trying to show her what a hot guy she has on her hands, and bragging a little about it, "even they can't stay away from me." Then he thought, what if she thinks I'm gay? And her world, like mine is now. You break me; I break you. Well, that was a damn selfish ten year old attitude, like she said he and Matthew were acting like they were ten years old when they showed each other their things, and he had wanted to slap her for that, but kept the feeling to himself. And she had slammed the door. He tried to tell himself that last night, and with Matt, he had been thinking of her all the time. But he hadn't. He had just felt good and thought of no one and nothing, but the pleasure. He was here and now and he thought of the guy from the bar and it all made him more than a little ill. How could he have done it with a guy like that? Wait. How could he have done it with a guy, period? Damn, what's happening to me? He smiled into the mirror, certainly 36 Dancers in the Sky not because he was happy, but because he wanted to see the very white teeth of his. Teeth were part of the skeleton; thank you Dr. Morton in Science 101, for telling us that and making teeth seem creepy. But his were white and they almost flashed a gleam like on the TV commercials. He liked his body. Compact. Slim. Long arms and long sturdy legs, though still thin. There were light sun yellow hairs on them, which Jo had liked to stroke with her hand. She said it felt soft and downy like duckling down or rabbit fur. She called him "bunny" sometimes because of that. His skull was a bit long, which made his head not look good in profile, but he had a face to make even girls envious. It looked as though he had added fake eyelashes, but those were real, they were dark and they were sensuous. Jo said she loved to see his eyelashes close and unclose. She said it turned her on. He looked at his hairless chest, and he touched his small orangey nipples, which became immediately hard. The mirror showed a flat stomach, innie navel, and a flat abdomen, V-ing in on his groin, where the mirror stopped right at the top of his wispy faint blonde pubic hair. Again, he tried to make himself hard. But he felt like he wasn't even human. Like he was a plank or the side of an awning out in the summer sun, feeling and being and thinking nothing. He turned on the shower, tested the right balance of hot and cold, and stepped in it, and shampooed his hair, turning his face up to the stinging water--thinking-what if I start to lose my hair when I'm older? like the teacher--how can I live without my hair?--God, it was terrifying--let me not look like that teacher, whose name I shall never write or think or say again, `cause he blew me off when I tried to talk to him about Jo and me, just when I needed someone--hell--he furiously rinsed the shampoo from his hair. Good, maybe teach is gay, maybe he was like me one time when he was young, and maybe that's gonna be me someday. Guess the irony of the thing, and he bet that teach was sitting around his lonely house doing whatever gay people do when they are past their prime, and he's thinking Stupid (not even remembering my name) doesn't realize I was like him when I was young, and I trusted people, and they let me down or they shunned me, and I will take the loneliness over that bitter set of memories every day. Yeah, teach, he thought as he washed his face and chest and legs, sure, teach, you want me, because I'm hot, because you can't resist me. Barry Eysman 37 You'll be remembering me, till Kingdom Come, and I do mean Kingdom COME, and I'm not mean, this is not me, this is one something that has come to the habitation of a body that is not Aaron ever again. Which was when he broke. Which was when he dropped the washcloth and soap. He picked them up again. Which was when Alton began to weep. And he pushed his hands through his wet, stringy hair and he leaned the side of his face on the stall wall beside him and he cried his heart out. He cried because he had not had much sadness in his life. He had never been greedy, but he had always had it made. Terror was on the evening news and in the newspapers and it was way over there somewhere, even here, it was still way over there somewhere. And sadness and suicide and drug overdoses and those little lives that are like tiny, smaller than small boxes people have to live in, and they never dare anything, and try to be happy, being alone, or being not alone but with the wrong person, that had never touched him. He wished he could sing to them. He wished he could buy the world a Coke. Oh great, here is an epiphany, and what comes into his crazed mind? That was over. Aaron was dead. A TV commercial jingle for Coke. And he kept crying hard and hot tears in the hot water as at the same time he was laughing in spite of himself; he had no idea that was possible. It was the weirdest feeling he had ever had in his life. Even weirder than…and Alton enjoying it. God, let me call the teacher and Matt and Jo. I can't call the man from last night, because I have no idea who the hell he was, anymore than he knows who I am- -though he does know I live in this dorm, and that was an uneasy feeling for Alton—I want to call them and tell them you don't owe me anything, you know. And tell them I don't know what my sexuality is. Jo, I love you and I love it when you give me head. Matt, to tell you the truth, I was sorry I sent you away. And that guy last night--the Picasso of sex. And I can see more things now. That's what he would tell them. I can see more things now. I can see more possibilities than I had before. The world just might be opening like a flower, and I might be that flower as well. Opening. And he suddenly felt far less claustrophobic than before. He had stopped crying and laughing. He turned off the shower and wrapped himself in a huge white terrycloth towel, got another for his head and hair, and a hairbrush; he went to the bed and sat on the side of it. After he had dried himself, after he had brushed his hair, and dried it, he dressed and thought about going out somewhere to get 38 Dancers in the Sky lunch. It was almost eleven. Maybe he would never contact any of them. Well, the teacher, cause he had to take that class, but he could ice him out like the teach had iced Alton out, and that might be fun. He would see Jo on campus, but he would let her make the first move, say the first word, if she did at all. And Matthew the same thing. Maybe all of them are already gone. It saddened him horribly. And yet, maybe they aren't. Maybe there is still a chance to, at least, be friends with Jo and Matt. But if they are through with him, perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Maybe I won't be like the teach. Perhaps I can make it, like he couldn't. Maybe he could do it in teach's honor. And Alton thought that would be a kind and good thing to do. Alton had been working for other people too long. He had been what they expected him to be and he had worked his ass off being just that. Maybe that was where the popularity came in. He was beautiful-- he had been told it often; not brag, just what he had come to believe, as he had come to believe he was kind when he was kind to someone, or called out a greeting or asked some average of below-average looking boy or girl to have lunch with him in the high school cafeteria, and made them feel like a million dollars, and the envy of the kids for maybe a whole week or more, well--weren't they kind of using him to make themselves feel better? Like a prop they posed with? As, of course, had he. Maybe Alton was gay or straight or bi, or somewhere in a gray area--hell, who knew? He felt better now, for no reason, for every reason. He put on his coat, looked out the window. Still snowing a little. He opened the window onto the hot room and felt the cold blast on his face that felt so enlivening and invigorating. He half ran to the door and then down the corridor and the stairs to the first floor, then out that door to the quad, and the walkway, with the snow sounding and feeling crunchy underfoot, while the wind was blowing hard from the pure North against him, stinging his nose and cheeks, and pushing him backward a little or forcing him to brace himself for trying harder. He remembered, as he started running again, to a diner off campus, the end words of a novel he had loved since childhood, "The Shrinking Man" by Richard Matheson. It had been made into a beautiful movie too. About a man who begins to grow smaller and smaller until he is almost one inch tall, and then he is 0 inches tall. He had thought, had Scott Carey, that he would not exist as that point. But he did. Matheson wrote breathtakingly, with words of Barry Eysman 39 wonder and majesty, of that first awareness; first moment; first step into a new world "into which Scott Carey ran, searching." So, filling his lungs with cold cutting air, thinking of life now and himself ahead, and the future forever, Alton ran into his new world, searching.

CHAPTER FIVE Matthew, feeling all his life like an addendum, had followed Alton over to the Humanities building to try to talk to him, but then Alton had headed straight to Maples' room, so Matt had stood outside the teacher's classroom, listening, while Alton was trashing his best friend, formerly best friend, name of Matthew, to Mr. Maples, and Matt's first thought was to get away from the whole damned thing. To stop. Here and now. He had confessed his love for Alton that drunken night a lifetime ago. It had been so wonderful to Matt, pretending, hoping –love please--not that he would not have accepted that. But still, you can pretend, Alton, that you love me; you don't have to say the words. I'll say them all for you. You don't have to say a word. I won't either, if you would rather. I can just hang round you and not cause trouble. I can just kind of be a shadow, and I won't stand in your way. I'm sorry about what this has caused Jo. But you have made it gossip and something evil and stupid; you don't do that to someone who's hurting this much. You don't have the right to tell something this secret and this important to anyone else; like you had killed somebody, and you had to confess to get it off your conscience. Like you took somebody and hurt them so badly and it's obscene in your mind, well, Matt thought, as he walked quietly from the doorway of the classroom and out into the snowy quad, you did kill someone; you killed me. You did it by giving me a favor and then you have to be the star of that favor. Oh what a great guy you are. And oh you are having sexual problems. School stud, who had to make charts months in advance of girls who were going out with you, your lays, for upcoming weekends. Sure, Mr. Sensitive. Well, grab this by the horns, buddy. I've been in love with you since ninth grade. It hurt so god dam much seeing you with girls; you were kind to me, and I pretended you were my friend. And that you cared. They say kids can't fall in love. They are wrong. I did. And I will love you forever. Why did you trash me, man? I was going to keep that drunken moment in my heart forever. I was keeping 40 Dancers in the Sky it like amber under glass and you've turned it to shit and now I'll not get a hard-on for who knows how long? Matt had no family. He lived three towns over with a very distant cousin who saw him through school and now holidays. A very old man named Matters. Matt was more like a boarder at Matters' house than anything else. And driving away fast now from the humanities building parking lot, peeling rubber, screeching to a halt at stop signs, then racing the engine and going way over limit. Thinking I can fake being drunk or high when the cop stops me and I can throw my life away and it's stupid to trust anyone, to hold a longing in your heart all these years and your best bud, your best friend, someone who let you near every so often, but not near enough, discusses me like I'm some sort of horrible problem, and just what is that all about? Matt driving from one town to the next thought of killing himself, and that thought crumbled into remembering his best bud's voice telling Maples about what he and Matt had done, what Matt had lead him into doing. So Alton did it out of guilt and sadness and empathy. No, friend of mine, you did it because you were interested; you did it because you wanted to find out. And so, like a little kid, you decided to do an experiment. You were the stupid kid. I was the adult--for guess what? I was the one doing you a favor. I was the one giving of myself because you would look at me sometimes and away immediately when I caught you. So what Matt did was to stop in the town where Mr. Maples lived. To go to a restaurant, for coffee and chili, and a phone and phone book. When he had the number, he pushed the buttons with a trembling finger. The man, who seemed like shadows of lumbered dead stacked plank by plank. What in the name of God did Alton see in him? For he was rude and petty and irritating, was Mr. Maples, so why did Alton confess to him? And why didn't Alton talk it over with his friend formerly named Matt, now seeming named nothing at all instead? The voice on the phone was like a turret of a house from another century talking. Precise, clipped, all the words and sentences in correct order, spoken by a professional poseur of the English language, university style. Somehow, Matt got out who he was and why he wanted to see the man who hesitated, who deliberated, who equivocated, and finally said, "for a few minutes, nothing else." And Matt thanked him, got directions to the Maple house from the waitress, drank his coffee, and left his chili untouched. He paid and walked back into the howly snowy wind with the wings of dark night all around. It took Matt a Barry Eysman 41 while to find the professor's house. A small little brick place, wisteria vines would be budding on it in spring, a roof of slate shingles, a word-taut tightly knit house with a white fenced gate, immaculate of course and in perfect condition, though the whole place seemed quite old. Matt said to himself, drive on, forget it, why would this man believe Matt, or have any time for him, or care at all? Well, somebody should care. Matt had been holding these quiet trembling feelings inside him ever since he could remember. He saw love and he saw beauty and he saw instances of happiness that could have been his, if only, if only. He thought this would only bring further heartache. If he treated good old star everything golden sun Alton, what would he do to me? And Matthew, like an automaton, made himself get out of his car, and open the gate, walking up the precisely straight brick sidewalk, to the little porch all in green, snow on his hair and his coat as he rang the prissy little door bell that made a prissy little sound, this big strong Matthew, this football player Matthew, this towering Matthew who had started developing some chest hair at about age 9, which made him the laughing stock of the school, they not knowing that some day they would come to envy him that early burly maturation. Mr. Maples opened the door. And looked at Matt's face, way up there. The beginnings were as they often are, horribly awkward, and involved names exchanged, entrances made, coffee offered, chair or sofa to sit on, the turning off the TV, the pouring of coffee, sugar or creamer? So, when all fixed on a tray, Mr. Maples sat down in the chair, turned it round on casters to look at Matt on the couch. Matt tasted the coffee in the dainty little China cup with roses on the sides, found it too hot, put the cup down on the tray next to him. There were butter cookies there if he wanted any. The house was nicely warm, small and cozy. There was Christmas music playing somewhere in the background. He didn't think Maples would have been one for Christmas music, and then, since it was night and the house was filled with shadows, only dimly lit, he saw the Christmas tree over in the corner and believed he could make out packages underneath it. The tree was not lighted. It startled Matthew, like something monstrous had been in the room all this time, and he just now discovered it. He felt foolish and he felt fearful at the same time. How dare this sour late middle aged man should have things like a Christmas tree in his home and Christmas music playing? That was reserved for Matt and his friends and their just vaulted over 42 Dancers in the Sky childhood years. It was wrong. It made Matt angry. And that gave him impetus to be angry enough at Alton, and with Maples for treating his friend the way he did. Go figure--loyalty to someone who was so totally disloyal to him. And it got Matt mad enough to talk. And he did. With force and alacrity and with words that people thought were not of the lexicon of football players, of large men, with short hair cuts, and ham hands, but though Michael was always a second string quarter back in high school, and not even that in this university, he got in because of superb grades and an agile mind. So he talked. He talked succinctly. With point and purpose. It was like he was laying out a new sketch for a building he was hired to construct. All the levels and all the measures blue- penciled as though in watercolors, complex and precise, with not one joint, with not one bevel un-connected and flying buttress in space. He was exhausted after he had talked non-stop for a good fifteen minutes. He was thirsty for something cold and asked Maples if he had a Coke or something. Maples, who had been seemingly asleep in the dark as Matt talked, all but hopped up and said, "Certainly, Mr. Harrison. Just a moment." And rushed into the kitchen. When he came back with the bottle, Matt drained almost half of it. And had to belch. Maples said, "Go ahead. We can't get away from our physiognomy" and thus, Matt belched. He apologized. Maples turned on a bright lamp so they could see each other finally. He said nothing for a moment. He was a taciturn man. He was a man of sorrows. He was a cliché because he thought it better and easier to survive as a cliché. Then bigots could make their clever little jokes and basically leave him alone. He was telling this to Matt. Maples' hands were finger locked at his chest as he leaned over slightly, his facial structure of very fine and very delicate bones. His hair was thinning and was gray. Mr. Maples looking straight into his eyes. Mr. Maples looking determined and sharp and whose mind was working overtime. A man of courage and wisdom, without fear, for a few moments when he was not around others who would be of callous necessity, in their world be ceded to, as he would pretend what they expected. He said to Matt, calmly, while Matt was now nervous, "Matthew, I am gay. I am not happy gay. I am sad gay. I had such dreams when I was your age. There was a boy at my university. But I believed in Barry Eysman 43 miracles then. I believed in lost causes. Who is the patron saint of lost causes?" Matt, remembering a St. Jude Hospital telethon on TV once, the children's hospital, devoted to fighting the worst of childhood illnesses, the hopeless ones, being named after The Patron Saint of Lost Causes, “ Danny Thomas.” "Yes. Saint Danny. Thanks, Matthew." A pause. “He didn't mean to hurt you." (for a second, Matthew thought he meant St, Danny) "Alton is a nice boy. He has to grow some more. You've grown already. So long before him. He got to have an easier road than you did. He got to laugh and be with friends and didn't have to guard every word he said, and re-think every half-sentence before he said it." He drank his coffee. Matt finished his Coke and then started on his now mildly warm coffee, as he took a butter cookie too, and offered one to Maples who shook his head "no." "Matt, I'm an old man, in your lexicon. I still have feelings.." Maples smiled too. a bit. "I know. But I do. I'm not coming onto you. Don't worry. I don't know how to come on to anyone. I asked that someone I was in love with back there..” Matt coughed politely. "Yes, Matthew. You were both drunk, " he said as, he stood up with some unease, stood close to Matt, who did not like the way this was shaping up at the moment, "I’m sorry.” Matt stood and said he had to be going and thanks for the coffee and stuff. Maples and he walked to the front door, ready to open it. Matt was on the porch now. Maples at the glass door, holding it open a bit, shivering. Matthew nodded and said, "We all come to the Puzzle Palace, and the puzzles we never can put together are ourselves." He smiled for real this time. Then, taking a breath, " Does the hurt go away..ever?" "No, Matthew. I'm afraid not." Matthew turned, dejectedly, waked away. "Matthew," Maples shouted in a long heavy voice. Matthew stopped, his hand ready to open the picket fence gate, "The hurt doesn't ever go away. But the love never goes away either." "Which is worse?" Matt asked softly as he opened the gate and latched it closed. 44 Dancers in the Sky "You have to decide. And if you work it just right, each takes care of the other. Each balances the other out, when one gets more hurtful than the other." As Matt got in the car and turned on the motor. "You can love, Matt," Maples said to himself as he watched Matt drive off. "You are young and you can love and be loved." He shivered as he watched the car drive off. Then he walked out of the chill, back to the warm living room, and stood in front of the revolving Christmas tree lights. And Maples hung his head shamefully.. And said a name, to himself. Nobody else ever heard. Except for the person whose name it was. Maples was to never say that name again, expect to himself. Not after the laughter. A comfortingly painful novena.

CHAPTER SIX Jo was back.. The weather had turned warmer. The snow had stopped. She sat in her dorm room, missing the hell out of Alton. She was on her bed and looking down at her hands in her lap. She wore tattered jeans, and a pullover red and white shirt. Her hair was brown and in bangs. In back, she wore it in a pony tail. It looked like an Old Master's rendition of a woman's hair caught in the backdrop of afternoon sunshine in Naples, circa 1840 something. In fact, the all of her looked like a previous time, caught in painter's delicate shadings. Her color was pale, even the freckles on her tiny nose were pale. She seemed to always have these sad, big brown eyes, seeing where she was almost caught, then free again. She seemed like a lovely gingham doll, the kind of person, if you get too close to her, you lose her entirely to canvass strokes and meshes of sheer beauty. Oddly, stupidly ironic, this was in part and in shimmers what Alton was thinking about her as she sat there, as he sat on the edge of his bed in his dorm room. He felt like the end of the world. He felt the monsters of Armageddon should just go be shoved out of the wings, stage right, Snagglepuss, and get over with doing whatever they were going to, then exit stage left, Snagglepuss; for he did not know how he was so wanted. The freedom he had experienced, the new world into which he had, like Scott Carey, gone running, and searching was a great ending for a novel, and a perfect ending for that one. But in real life, endings fray when you try to hold onto them, or when you try to let them go, because life is not writers controlling their characters. Real life doesn't really care, one way or the other. It's up to us. Barry Eysman 45 Had Jo and Alton been aware of it, at that moment, Prof. Maples was in his classroom, getting ready for first period English, trying once again to imagine Shakespeare's histories as fascinating, so he could get them over to the bored restless, just back from Christmas break students. Matt came into the room, as Maples sat at his desk, looking through the textbook. Matt didn't know what to say. So he didn't enter the doorway completely. Someone coughed. Maples turned round and saw the boy. They caught eyes and then looked away again. No one knew it at this point, but this was the end game. It, so far had begun to have the trajectory of going round in a circle, as Jo began to weep and put on a CD of "Don't It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?" as she settled back on her bed with a Snoopy stuffed toy and a blanket around herself, though the room of cinderblock and forced heat was already too warm. Okay, she thought, he told me; Alton told me; and he wanted to let me know because he didn't want to be gay; and he told me because he is gay; and he wanted to let me know because it was his way of breaking up with me. Or, God, she shivered, was he not gay before he met me? Did I have this effect? Great, she slammed her small wrist against Snoopy's stomach, then massaged that stomach and kissed the stuffed dog's cheek and apologized. She held it closer. Do I treat Alton like a stuffed toy? Do I own him? Did I think I did? Then I deserved..No, you have a lover, you owe each other respect. You owe each other commitment. And Matt, taking a huge deep breath, went to Maples, knowing his huge size diminished the teacher and intimidated him. Matt said, "I want to thank you.” Matt took his seat. He said, "Dr. Maples, can I ask you something?" Maples nodded, putting on his act for public, keeping the real him hidden. And looked to the left of the boy. This was not the man Matt had finally seen at his house. "Look, if a person is in love..." And Maples sighed a here we go again sigh, anchors away and remember me to Herald Square, but there was nothing between him and the boy, so why does it hurt so much anyway? "I was at a bar last week. Came back to campus early. And there was this guy there...and...well—" "He picked you up—" Maples added, thinking, why doesn't something original ever happen in my life? But this was Matt's life. And Matt did not know yet how obvious this was. 46 Dancers in the Sky "Ah.." Matt looked at his desk. "Well...I don't even know his name..He doesn't know mine..He's married..And lots older..And he just wanted me for..well, one time..And then he left me off here at my dorm...and I asked him...and he said, well, no...." Jo had had enough. She didn't know if Alton was back or not, but she decided to go to Ellington Hall and find out. She held her Snoopy for solace and courage, then put it on her bed, got her coat and was on her way. Alton had decide to talk to someone. A guidance counselor. No. That was bullshit. They just said things that were idiotic and insulting, put a period at the end of it--get on with your life, move on get over, whatever it is was. "I'm gay, Dr. Maples." Matthew had said it. "And I love Alton." There. He had said it. "And I don't give a damn, well, of course I do, but I don't give as much of a damn as I did before, who knows it. That guy at the bar was really wonderful; I mean he didn't look like much...but" nervous laugh, “he really made up for it." Dr. Maples said, "And what do you want from me?" Making Matt angry, until he remembered Maples and his disguises, and how he could not expect any understanding from him now. Matt said, "I want to talk to Alton. I want to talk to him right now. Before I get any more nervous. I've been thinking about this all the time. I have to ask him. Yes or no. And if no, and we all know it will be no, will he still be my friend? That's what I have to do. I am more mature than Alton, you said so yourself, so I have to confront him. I have to make him grow a little, like you told me he should." So Dr. Maples sat there for a time, then looked at Matt, and said, "go to it." And smiled comfortingly and with understanding. Which Matt was deeply appreciative of, knowing what effort that took. He smiled back at Dr. Maples and took off to Ellington Hall. When he got to Alton's door, he knocked. Inside the dorm room, Alton and Jo had been on Alton's bed, kissing. They were clothed. Jo had her heavy coat off. He had just felt her left breast and he had himself quite a hard-on. Jo had motioned him to ignore the knock on the door. He said, "No, it might be Matt." She had begun to push herself away from him, in anger. He had held her arm. Tightly. "Come in," he said again, his voice tremulous, thinking of what he had had in mind. He didn't want to lose Jo. He didn't want to lose Matt. He had had this crazy idea and might as well. Barry Eysman 47 Matt stood at the opened door. He saw Jo almost off the bed, and Alton still sitting on it. He was angry, was Matt, almost as much as Jo was angry at Alton as well. Alton, who turned suddenly more mature in an instant, thus stealing Matt's blood and thunder, got up and stood between Jo and Matt. He said, "I want to tell you both something. I want to explain this thing as best I can. I have had the most god awful Christmas of my life. I didn't go anywhere. I stayed here the entire whole two weeks break. I had time to think, believe you me. And I am sick of everybody being angry with me. I'm sick of having to be what other people expect me to be. I don't ask that of others. And I wish someone would extend me that same courtesy." As their eyes blazed less fire at Alton. "I LOVE both of you." Alton laughed. Matt and Jo waited it out, trying to figure out which of them he was preparing this kiss off for, if not for both. "I read a lot these last two weeks. I came across a book. A novel. From a long time ago. It was kind of lame and out of date in lots of ways. But the thing is, it was about a sex college. A university where they majored in sex. The thing is, boys were with girls in their dorm rooms, and they got to know each other, and it was expected they would be naked with each other. And free with each other, getting rid of their hang-ups. And they could learn how to have sex. And how to love. These can be different things. They swam naked, all the students, and were required to be totally naked in their room. And they had sex in any combinations. Boys and girls. Girls and girls. Boys and boys. Three or four or five all together. " Matt was looking at Jo in embarrassment, as Jo was looking at Matt the same way. Then both looked at Alton as though he had lost his ever-loving' mind. "I'd—" Alton said, hesitantly. "His mouth dry as rock, " like to make it with you, like from the song of the same name." "Oh," Jo said, "I really don't think—“ "I couldn't get it, no—" Michael said. “That’s kind of wrong.” Looking down and blushing. Nodding as Jo said, “Have respect for yourself, if not for us.” Oh God, stick a fork in my eye and send me straight to hell. It could not be worse than this. His friends' eyes said, "You are nutty as a fruitcake." 48 Dancers in the Sky "Look," Alton said, breaking the needle of the immature record at this point. And he unzipped his jeans. He was wearing no underwear. Both Matt and Jo were fascinated by it, and then turned away. He wondered how he could have a hard on, and still all the blood be in his face to turn it red as a tomato. At least, his brain was dying from lack of it, and at the present time, that was, Alton knew, a very good thing. Just keel over please and bury me deep. "This is way too freaky for me, "Jo said. "Amen," Matt said. Alton said, "Okay. Look. We don't have to. But I figure we've all of us been pretty goddam intimate with each other, so I'm not totally embarrassed, come on, it worked for the free love generation before they copped out and became serial marriagers and liked the idea of working on Wall Street better than grocking.'" Matt and Jo laughed. Tension was breaking. Jo said, "What?" Alton, in mid spinning dervish thoughts, said, "What?" "Look, it doesn't matter. Forget it. We could just play like in “The Dreamers..” Jo and Matt closed the door very quietly. At the end of that incredibly long day, which Alton spent the whole of in his room, crying, sitting on his bed. His nerves were, it seemed, on fire, from being rejected like no one had been rejected in the world. He had had his chance and his stupid little fantasy had killed it. If he had gone about it subtly, if he hadn't come on so strong..oh, fuckit..So as the day began to get dark, he decided a drink wouldn't hurt. Anything to knock him out. “Hello Alton, meet what I turned you into,” then got up, knew he would never be running anywhere again. He put on his warm, though not heaviest jacket, and went outside. The bar was steaming and free of its Christmas decorations, and country music was playing just basic "you took my girl, and I'm going to blow my head off" kind of thing. Forget Christmas had ever happened. Alton never wanted to go through another of those things ever in his life. He had been dumped like too breakable glass out of a tenth story window and he just wanted to get laid somehow by whomever. He sat on a stool beside a shadow in the dark bar. The shadow ordered another whiskey. And Alton recognized the voice immediately. Alton wanted to leave immediately. But Dr. Maples said, "Give him what he wants too." The bartender nodded and Alton ordered a whiskey for himself. Barry Eysman 49 "Did it go okay with Matt?" Maples asked. Then, regretted it. Being a little drunk. Had meant to keep all of that a secret. Alton felt someone had hit him in the gut. "What do you mean?" he asked, his voice not working well. His throat feeling closed up. "He said he was going to talk to you—" Alton all but shouted, "He told you??? He told you too???" God, talk about being betrayed. Being double crossed. Did he tell Maples about what a fool he had made of himself with Matt and Jo? Then Maples said that Matt had come by before first period this morning, and had just mentioned he was afraid he had lost a friend, and wanted to see if he could patch it up. Maples finished his drink. "And that's all?" Maples nodded. Careful not to spill the lie. “He didn't mention Jo, he didn't come back to talk to you later in the day?" "No," Maples answered truthfully. "Okay." Alton finished his drink. And felt nicely warm and cheered. At least that embarrassment was saved from him. Maybe. If Matt didn't tell Maples and everybody else. Alton seriously considered moving to Greenland. He stayed, however, at the bar. He drank some more with Maples. And they talked about things. Incidental things. No importance. Then they discovered they liked the same kinds of movies. And liked some similar TV shows. And before an hour was over, they had gotten just a bit drunk, and were talking like old friends, instead of teacher and student. And so it ended up about two hours later, after Maples and Alton had walked through the night cold, but warmer still than even the day had been, that they came to Alton's room, and Alton let them in. Maples sat on Alton's bed. Alton, feeling flying and warm and happy, felt this was like a movie. Therefore, as Alton made coffee, he told Roger, Mr. Maples' first name, to make himself comfortable, since that was a tried and true movie line. And after the coffee, after the talk, after Alton had to convince Roger that he, Alton, star golden boy, who would never be star golden boy as he had been before, wanted to make love to him. Thus, they were naked with each other. And Roger who had a pretty damn nice looking body that his clothes had disguised.. 50 Dancers in the Sky And in the dim dorm room sounds of other residents returned, songs and curses and doors slammed, and a major miracle came true for Roger Maples, and a redeeming of a hope. Golden, less golden, more human. And for a while, everything was okay. And if things weren't okay later on, and you could make book on that, then happiness would return in one form or another. You could make book on that, too. So Alton and Roger slept in Alton's bed, curled tightly against each other. Early the next morning, before sunrise, Roger kissed Alton awake and told him he had to go before the others in the dorm got up. Alton kissed him in return. And they made plans for the bar and afterwards tonight. And Christmas and New Year's were done. Alton wished Matt and Jo well. They would be ok, he thought. Besides, who said it was over even between any of them? Maybe that would work out. He got out of bed. As he went, still a little looped, to the bathroom, missing the door just an inch at first, then getting it right, he laughed, and for absolutely no reason, other than it was funny and he felt so very good. ME LAUGHING AT ME.

PAUL FINALLY GETS TO PLAY BASKETBALL

Mr. Lefferts looked at shy Paul, sad, alone and trembling Paul sitting in the empty classroom, all the kids long gone, teachers too, save for Paul and his English teacher who sat on the side of his desk, the essay in hand. A book report, all the other kids picking books you would expect., but of course, not Paul who chose The Circus of Dr. Lao. And the passage the 7th grader had honed in on, the fortune teller reading the middle aged maiden lady’s fortune. Which Paul had copied verbatim and had underlined with red ink. “You will never be married…always alone…the phone ringing will always be no one you dream of your whole life long…” The teacher looked at Paul looking at hi\s desk, in shame, and Mr. Lefferts said kindly, “Paul,” which made Paul even more nervous. Mr. Lefferts stood. He went to Paul, who looked as if he might bolt and run., Mr. Lefferts, kneeling. said ”Paul?” The boy, so frightened, looked at the tall, young man kneeling beside him, wiping tears away, ashamed. “What would you like to do, more than anything?” Paul was silent, knowing he would get laughed at. “Come on. Tell me.” Paul mumbled “basketball” Mr. Lefferts smiled and said kindly, “I was pretty good at that in college.” He stood up. “Come on Paul.” Paul looked up at him. Mr. Lefferts stood as Paul got out of his chair. Boy and man walked into the hallway, where the teacher picked Paul up, rolled him into a ball, dribbled him down the hall, gave a jump shot and tossed Paul into the open trash can. Mr. Lefferts walked away. To thunderous cheers. I KEEP COMING BACK HERE

DOING TIME IN TOOTH ACHE TOWN

To start, he had a sore tooth. Which made him not be able to start at all. But he had to. This was the first day of his first job. He would suck the tooth. Use the deadener. Ambusal. Whatever it was. Checked to see it was in the trouser pocket of the suit that he had spent as much as he could on, but it still looked like it folded on him, or he folded inside it, whichever the old joke was. And he had a sore tooth. The world began and ended with that. There was all the alpha and omega in that, and all that came inside the middle of A and Z meant nothing at all. Was desert sand and endless dunes and visions of blue skies out there somewhere, where people flew in no pain and no sore tooth. So he walked from his garage apartment. He walked and he endured the heat of early summer. He knew he would get sweaty on his five block walk to work. But he had never learned to drive. If he had learned to drive, he would be driving with a sore tooth, back row, left side, fifth down, and he would somehow escape the sore tooth that way. He would beat it if he could just drive a car. Ray Bradbury never learned to drive, and look at what a fantastic writer he was. Yeah, he thought, But I ain’t Ray Bradbury. God knows. Still he could beat it. His whole head felt huge as a sick balloon. The tooth made him sweat inside. With cement inside the bottom which seemed to pull his whole aching jaw and screaming pitch forked gum to the ground. The sun shining down on him directly was hot and beastly. It felt equatorial. He wondered if he would find a lion who would be willing to pull his sore tooth. Or however that old story went. Man, he thought, I’m a compendium of old stories I half remember. If I had a good memory, I could remember what it was like before I had a sore tooth, and take that memory and put it in place of said tooth, and thus not have a sore tooth anymore. A bicycle patch of the past. No. That was crazy. He wished he had a lighter jacket. But this was the lightest one he could find. God, his suit, the best he could afford, give him a break after all, he was just out of college, would fall to pieces, like his mouth felt it was falling to pieces itself. Barry Eysman 53 And what if a sore tooth was like a virus and spread from one tooth to another. The tooth and only the tooth, so help me Captain Smile and Bright. Was that a TV commercial cartoon character from some tooth paste ad from his childhood? No, he didn’t think so. He patterned his long legs into a steady cadence which made his sore tooth seem like a huge sore log that pushed up and down with his gait. But he kept the gait going, since it seemed to pinch his tooth as the new leather shoes pinched his feet, and he thought if he pinched his tooth enough with his long legged gait, it would give up and die. Before he had to have a root canal. Don’t even think that. He had never had one before, but he had heard they were horrendous. He wished the houses were not so plush and rich on this street, so close to his crummy garage apartment—not an apartment on top of the garage, like the Fonz’s on Happy Days. No, his apartment used to be a garage. With an apartment next to and above his. He thought if he could sing the title song of the series, he could make the tooth go away. I don’t have to tell the tooth, coppers, come and git me. And if there was not a Captain Smile and Bright ad for some toothpaste, called Smile and Bright?, then he would have to invent one. He remembered one his mother loved when he was very small. Some kid comes to another kid’s door. Knocks. The mother, always the mother in these things, says Johnnie can’t come out and play, he’s got malaria or something. And the other kid says okay, mothers worry, cause mothers are like that, yes they are. Or something. His mom laughed and laughed at that. God, the ad ran for years. And why could he not remember it better? And what was the ad for? No idea. Was he getting amnesia from his tooth? Was his tooth really his whole being now? Maybe it had invaded his brain. Maybe it had become his brain. Maybe it was out to take over the world. Though the world seemed still here as always. Maybe it was reaching its tentacles, invisible so far, into the people and porches and morning coffees in their lead windowed breakfast nooks, and breakfasts all round him. The trees were bright green and full. The sky hurt. The sky ached. The sky said, why me? And why on my first job? And then he noticed. He noticed because his tooth was killing him. Literally. And he tried some of the pain deadener. Stood there still on the perfect sidewalk next to the professionally kept lawn of the large immaculate ginger bready looking house at the end of said professionally kept lawn, and put some of the stinky red stuff on his tooth which cried Uncle. Well, it didn’t really cry Uncle. It just hurt worse. 54 Dancers in the Sky He was building up an immunity. Yippie. The houses around him on this brilliant picture perfect morning moaned in dental pain. The cats and dogs who walked past him, barking or hissing, or paying him and each other no mind, cried and held their paws to their jaws. He had made an appointment for a dental visit. But that wasn’t until his first day off. Saturday. This was Monday. Oh God. The street looked brownish and greenish and under waterish and his tooth hurt mightily and he saw a little girl on a tricycle up ahead coming in his direction. He tensed. People scared him. Children scared him mightily. He always was guessing what to say and what to do around people. Had such a nervous attitude when he had to talk to someone. Therefore being a cub reporter was perfect for him. He wanted to be a writer. They said, what newspaper do you hope to work for? He heard it enough. He hated talking to people. His mind was always elsewhere. Yes, perfect job. Nutsville. He thought since he wanted to be a writer, he had to. End of story. Or rather: 30. The girl on the tricycle approached him and when she got right in front of him and stopped, looking directly at him, with eyes that seemed a blend of Stepford with just a soupcon of Dunwich and a pinch of Village of the Damned, stared right at him, and her mouth opened hugely. More hugely than even the hugest of adults’ mouths could possibly open. It looked like she was eating her head. There was nothing in her mouth other than—you got it, Slick—one huge green big fat screaming pulsating glowering trembling aching angry sick putrid smelling moss growing on its fang of a tooth that would scare Dracula and Christopher Lee played Dracula, the thought of which, thank you, memory for remembering that at least, pulled him back from get the paddles ready and clear! Land, falling, and the little girl’s mouth closed, her eyes normaled up again, she wasn’t looking at him and she glided past him, not noticing him at all.

She was wearing a red sun dress. Red sun dress. Red sun dress. Red sun dress. Red sun dress. He would write it down as soon as he got to work. He remembered and would remember for a long time. Red sun dress. That proved he didn’t have amnesia. Till his whole head felt as though it was caving in and he fell to the shaded chocolate looking hard cool sidewalk, as a woman up the street, hosing down the gutter with a garden hose for some reason, looked over at him. She had blue hair and she had a dress on that said cocktails at seven, I’d come Barry Eysman 55 formally attired, only it was seven thirty in the morning, and she was a dowager without a dowage or whatever a dowager had that made her a dowager, money he guessed and a good lineage. He liked the blue hair. He did not like all her wrinkles, for she had lots of them creasing her face even from here he could see. She seemed to be the call the cops kind of person, so he got up quickly, dusted his seat off, and walked on, and past her with his head down. Ashamed. Tooth throbbing. Embarrassed tooth. Sad he was human. Sad he felt guilty for nothing. Fed the hell up that his tooth hurt. Fed the hell up that he had to go to this dumb job where he would interview people about their two hundred pound watermelons that grew in their back yard and all the same old crap he covered for his high school newspaper and his college newspaper and he wished he did not have this damned sore tooth, because it became a pool of sore and it began to wash up him from the sidewalk, higher and higher, and soon he would be submerged in tooth pool pain and he would be nothing but pain, and he wished this was New York instead of here. But there you go. There was nothing more exciting than the news business. Exposing lies and corruptions and falsehoods and money skimming and thievery and hard core criminals and unfairness in our justice system and not enough men on death row and yackety yackety. And what was his first duty of the morning at the paper? Well, sir, it was to call the local hospitals, to see who had been admitted that previous night, and especially who had died; then to call churches and get their meetings for the week outlined; then that two hundred pound watermelon. And that was the glamorous part. And he wanted to take his tooth out, to dig it out with his hands, his fingers, break through his jaw with a chisel, he could get one at a hardware store, there had to be one, he didn’t know the town just yet, and break through his jaw like a petty criminal and pull out that goddam tooth, ever seen a tooth?, ugly looking boogers. I mean the stuff inside us, it makes you sick to see that stuff inside us that is ugly looking or squishy and ugly looking or bloody and pulpy and ugly looking, and he would just ignore the swelling in the jaw. The swelling had begun an hour ago. He had been brushing his teeth, an excruciating task with that tooth saying hey! Look at me! And he had seen his jaw beginning to swell. Just a little. But it was beginning. And he turned a corner and there was the falling down crumbly brick hay stack that canted a bit to the right that was the old and old newspaper building. His hair sweated. His body sweated. His 56 Dancers in the Sky face sweated. His boss did not know he did not drive. How would he explain that one, he wondered. He did not expect to be here long. He did not know what he would do when he left here. He doubted he would make it in the newspaper game anyway.

And he stood in the parking lot. And he watched some people get out of their sun glaring cars, the glare hurt his eyes, good, give him a bigger headache than he had already, he had forgotten his Anacin— damn do I have a memory at all??-- and wave at him, one or two did, and he waved back, trying to remember their names, from when he was walked around and introduced last week. He was terrible with names. Dates. Facts. History. Directions. Street names. Maps. Oh yeah, I’m eager for this great newspaper racket. Man, what a paring of a job and a man who was born for it. And he pushed his tooth down with his tongue, which he had been doing so often and so mightily the last three, no, four days, that he had not noticed he was doing it. Everything dovetailed into this tooth pain. The whole world could be sucked into the black hole of it. Everything in the universe and all the ones surrounding it could get sucked in there. And then he would have everything inside his sore tooth. And how do you like that? So laughing a bit, oh good, that hurt a lot, he said hello to the bandy legged bald headed bug like little man who held the back door of the building open to him; he had to say hello; it was his boss; his boss took his corn cob pipe from his mouth and pushed back his straw hat, honest, and contemplated this young jerk. This middle aged man who was red faced and scowly, looked at this scared college kid and he said hello to him. Gruffly of course. Perry Whiteish. And the young man tried not to put his hand to his sore jaw, but did, because it was sore, and because he instinctively wanted to hide it from his boss, and the editor stood there for a moment and watched the young man stumble up the dark stairs to the news room. And he smiled to himself. The old toothache thing worked again. Good, he said to himself, tests their mettle. It had his. It had tested the mettle, though he wasn’t sure what a mettle was, of everyone who started work here. No one would tell the young man with the vibrating agony of a tooth. It was an initiation. And it weeded out the losers from the winners. And the editor closed the door and started up the cool dark steps and if anyone ever seemed like a loser, this one did. My, but he was going to have fun with the jerk. Tooth ache, do your stuff. THE JOEL WOODS

We shall race the wild night winter woods, In moon white shingles of silver snow, Caught up in wilder thoughts As the midnight frost begins to blow. Cutting through the tree paths. Pines and conifers. Dancing round the sweet smelling bark, Rogues were the two, We. And music was of fiddles, And mountains far below. Where soft string played For happiness, and sadness tender To go. Racing and young again. Laughter and white breath. Seedlings of our hearts to grow. Coats and gloves to touch One the other Two the one. Dark midnight blue The trails. Winder through the forest, Wiser hearts to prevail. I shall love you always. I never dreamed winter woods Without you. I shall heart your name forever And invisible carve, Save the scars, On the trees that weave our Magic. That put the sky of stars and moon Ladled for our love child. Ladled for the coming noon. And brood no more, laddies, 58 Dancers in the Sky And ladies of the night. Don’t shirk the duties of the woods, Don’t think it not proper and right. And he looks up to me, taller than he, And we hold still, Mittens holding hands, Hands holding hands. And our breaths shake out of us. The fiddle camp below, With smoky old sad songs. From Ireland and Scotland. All so long ago. Let the night live and long. Of clay pipe fiddlers, Beside camp fires of the night. Turned to gray beards along the Way. But love from children of the night. And we lean against the other As young trees learn how to bend, And the feeling is soft and soothing, And material and breath and skin and kisses To each other. Forest roads have paths. They wind and structure their own Pathways, And the world bends in half. Come see my side, my love, And listen to the strings of invisible Dreams. Here in Blue Ridge Mountains. Here in silver dreams. And we two foxes running, Tails bushy full and bright. Caught in Coffee Cream Creek, Forests of ourselves and ourselves The Night. Our boots make prints in the snow, Whited away by more of same. Come to me love and our home of Barry Eysman 59 Pine and cedar and no one finally to Blame. Warm cozy Fires in fireplaces And songs of winds soughing by. No one need we ever again, Save ourselves, And in our eyes the sky. Tend to fly us in the night. Above the needled branches. Tend to fly us to colder stars Which we warm with our love glances. And if you wait for me up ahead, I run as fast as I can. And I hear the sweet old songs When we were young And you took the road to life, And I took the road to sad. Memories keep me going, And promises of deep delight. Love is what we’ve found, dear. Love is a sensual long night. Wear it like clothing, And music fills our chest And old letters new again And Wednesday was the best. Here me, love and turn to fly In my direction once again, And cold brings us to ground again And hold brings me to hope again. And love says friend to friend. And then we walk slowly back home. Cuddled, Nest in nest. And home is soft orange glow. Just over the ridge there. Trees friendly on the way. And fiddles surround us, And music is a blue bubble that Cheers us so. 60 Dancers in the Sky Up ahead my love, Up ahead to you. Speak my name and I speak yours, And winter woods, And forests, And fiddle music, And cold nights of bright Bone moon and stars, And snow whooshing down and From side to side, And all the time there is in The whole wide world, All are words, All words are you. WAS SUCH A WONDER WINESAP AUTUMN, AND THIS WAS WHAT I SAW AND HOW I FELT.

OF AUTUMN

This summer has been a nightmare, but Autumn comes calling and you realize what a singular experience it is to breathe and see that breath for the first time again, and waking up to a chill in the air, just knowing you are headed to your computer to write a ghost story or a memory or romance, and to keep in mind always some thread to make it a little different in direction than I thought headed. And out my window, I look at the school buses stopping and zombie children dazedly marching on. I think of Evan Hunter's novel Strangers When We Meet beginning at a scene like that and how he as Ed McBain painted Isola most lovely color as autumn. So, saddened he is gone, I drink coffee and remember the ultimate writer picture, of Grace Metalious, on the back cover of Peyton Place, and sigh, say the one never forgotten name like a prayer, and start to type, "Think of that young man and the wild jungle heart in him and happy, laughing out loud, on that little mountain road under a darkling sky with skeletons of autumn leaves blown hard at his windshield...... " my days of autumn. In September comes the curious fragility of welcomed heart break. The quiet season of Autumn enters in a circumlocution kind of way, and there are the thready winds of cool and solace where a boy might still be playing a solitary game of pick up or horse in the early dark, the basketball hoop top of his garage. It is a season that has books about it, where diffidence comes inside the leaves soon to leave trees and waft down to russet gold bat wing kite material holding the leaf see through skeleton together in loose knit accordance with your own, the opening of a season of jackets leading to a continued rite of heavier jackets, then coats, in a breath seeing way when the season of loam is as lonely as you are, there is wood smoke already in the cooler then cold air, for there is a dream up ahead and your collision with it will make you tall as a mouse and free as a snow flake on the delicious air which is how I came to be me and make love with words, for I am allowed no other choice. Welcome home Autumn and November with its door to secret golden wonders and so much more. AM TOLD I MUST HAVE BRAIN SURGERY OR FACE TOTAL DEBILITATION OF AN UNNAMED VARIETY, THE SPECIALIST SAYS, TAKING OFF GLASSES, LOOKING INTO THE DISTANCE AND FURROWING HIS BROW. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A PERSON, IN MY PRESENCE, FURROW THEIR BROW. ALL OF THIS AND THE UNFORGIVABLE HORRORS DISPENSED IN DROVES.

in memory of Evan Hunter

YOU REMEMBER YOUR NAME

You wish to keep it to yourself; a plot of land for the growing. It has a nice sound to it; it seems to belong to someone; you are afraid he will divest you of it, and someone else will say this is mine; a name belongs to a person, and you are not a person. But I am; I have height, breath—no—a word that means dimension, no, not breath; that is an expelling and inhaling of air from lungs, and I am lying on something soft. I wish I had a milkshake now; I love milkshakes, chocolate especially; I feel and I hear; could a nothing hear and feel? So I am not air; I am intrinsically woven in here; were I to take a bath, I would displace water and that would prove I have a corporeal existence. ? , ; . which goes where?? I think in writing. I never knew that. There is softness on me; it is subtly different than the softness on which I lie; lay? I always had trouble with lay and lie; and memory; you don’t do the crime if you can’t —there is a fifth dimension— television, warm memories; Jesus Christ god my head is killing me; pain like someone just told the world it is the new year and all the billions of people are dancing the Lindy with eight inch heels; (,.?) and the Lindy? What century am I in and the softness round me is clothing of something, and I hear paging, someone repeating a name, and then stat. Which is a word I associate with, in this word association game, doctor, a PBX board. When I was a child, my mother worked in the central office on the PBX board; I never knew what PBX stood for. It was big and black and had cords and plug in holes and a phone, cord round her neck, phone in shape of a horn she talked into, and she had a thick gray streak left center of her hair, and now in my hospital bed with the sun warm and holy; hell, just open your eyes, fool, there’s the sun coming in my window in this beige room which is a hospital room with a stick Barry Eysman 63 chair over there and I just bet there is a hospital attached to it unless the room has gone rogue like that crazy woman in Alaska and that is one memory I would like to forget, and my head is about to split open and I’m throwing up on myself the pain is like silvery Christmas icicles in my swirling ice cube freezer of a brain and the vomit smells pretty much like you would expect and my head is being pulled in half by some great cosmic force. My body is now in spasms and I am so afraid, let me be in school again, day before Christmas break, it would appear I like cold and Xmas, My brain has the Craziest Ice Cream headache in all known universes and my body seems to be pounding the hospital bed to death and I am going into shock, and I know exactly what that is, and the door slams open and a voice says something and the sound of someone walking fast and three stars will shine tonight and this is my experience, I don’t want it filtered through TV and there is a crash at my door so that’s why they call them crash carts, then the lights blew and my body was like the world on an electric binge. The little boy in school was me, only it was one of those old time one room schoolhouses, way before me, and I was there in class waiting for Christmas break to start in, let’s see, two hours. I hid my modern day watch under my sleeve. An anachronism here would mean death, and I look at my desk and my ink well and books and I try to see their titles, but things are misting, good bye ink well, I will think of you always and the windows are thick with ice and I bet there is 12 inches of snow out there as far as the eye could see, and just as I wanted to scratch myself all over because these wool britches and shirt are scratching the hell out of me…. And my headache was gone as were the creepy shadows that had made up the populous of that school room seem more real than here ever was, the schoolroom which had become my womb they were tearing me from—abortionists—and it had smelled of camphor and my head was at ease, and my name is, no, not going through that again. They didn’t think I could hear them. Feign sleep. “No, doctor is coming in at five.” Woman voice or high strung fag. “Well, we have to keep it secret.” Male voice or diesel drag. God, I just realized, I’m a vermin bigot. Air can’t be a bigot. Another plank for the me being real campaign. Knock on door. I remember to open my eyes this tine as the man and woman leave, and the graying doctor stood by me and took my pulse 64 Dancers in the Sky they just do that to justify the vast amount of money the insurance, and I, were paying, and the doctor had a pained expression and looked at panicked me, patted me on the shoulder and left, when orderlies came in and started opening my closet, getting out my clothes. Going into the rest room and taking out my objects there, and I knew the secret. I looked at the tall young man in white, who was helping me out of the most uncomfortable bed in the world, swaying I, PAIN. Falling, being caught. Cleaned off. Dressed, Bumbling. No words spoken, I am in the breeze of drugs, bandaged skull from where it had been cracked open like an egg, said egg feeling 20 times heavier, and hot like under a warm cloth at the barber’s, but not soothing like that of a warm spring afternoon with the sun shining brightly as I got my crew as a kid till I was old enough to grow it long, . dammit , . I was more concerned with it during all the terrifying tests, the morbid fears, the endless alone weeping nights before; make me 12 again. God. and send me running on my perfectly strong legs and make walking not like being on the Poseidon as it sank, but god would help him me with that as much as he helped him me pass math tests. Which he had studied his butt off for and failed every one of them, and my brain fiddled with—bet the larcenous thieves at the insurance companies were right at the top of the smart ass math team, MONA COME SHOW BARRY HOW TO DO THE PROBLEM ON THE BOARD!!!!!!! who had suddenly discovered why lookie a pre existing condition, and before he, I, could say squat, was summarily dumped in the wheel chair, down the long ammonia smelling, hot busy noisy corridors. To the elevator, another corridor, my arms flapping, this thing pushing me in dead silence, to the office where mother used to work, PBX long gone, computers everywhere and the office cold and sterile, where a very efficient perky woman made me, this is my name? Keep it secret, OK. My name, ME! and sign unread unexplained, these are word? and dunes of who knows what forms. I would be getting the first bill Monday…. thought shouldn’t someone have shaded their eyes a second, been slightly uncomfortable with this? No. Not one. I was finally pushed out in the heat and breath clogging air in a city two hundred miles from home. I sat there, bags of someone beside me, on a bench I had been lifted and placed on in such self--shame and did not know what to do next. Little boys if lucky, run in the summer sun. And live. Little boys did that, once upon a time. What do I do now? The sun tried to eat my eyes in this heat. I now close my eyes, . ; They won’t find me this way. Man, I sure must have tied one on last night. HEADING TO WINTER WINDS

In the Beginning— There was Joel— After him, There was no one. There was no life. There was no world. Come winter. Let me F A L L IT HAD BEEN SO LONG SINCE I HAD BEEN ABLE TO EXPERIMENT IN STYLES AND MANAGED TO DO IT AGAIN. HERE I TRIED.

WENDY

Wendy sat beside the window of the painted night stars. Her gown was of gingham and her hair was long and gray. The children had long gone away. She had never forgotten and she gazed out at the sea of midnight and wished to drink the memory from the stars, to seal it away inside her and never to think of it again. Wendy was not a brave girl, and was old and had been passing her life by as she sat in the children’s bedroom and it was summer. It would not have been so bad, had it not been summer as she sat on the deep window sill over the lights of London town and punishing herself every night, waiting for him. For Peter. When there had been no Peter and there might as well have been no Wendy, for she had become the memory of a ghost. The children had died in the long ago, Nana, and their parents, even longer ago. She, with her left hand, felt the striations on her face of fine ivory, the scrawls on her once proud regal neck, and her head was downward cast like the last lily of the world was finally giving up and preparing for death. She had listened for him in the endless alkaline grouse, and music of memory had played loudly for her when they, these horribly old children, had tried to reason with her. “We talked it all out, Wendy, and we tried to remember what you remember, but don’t, you see, love?” He had held her hand on his dying ones, looked up at her, and his big OO glasses were donuts round bleary eyes that could not see and his name had been Michael, and was no more. His umbrella still by his childhood bed, now his death bed. He had had to splice himself into a comma to lie on it. His nightgown was old man. And he smelled of sick age and paste and he had been the only Darling who had stayed, and had tried to see it through with her. And Wendy shivered. She had colluded with something of a dubious philosophy that Xed out her life in to mordant complexity. Life ran through her to the stars. She wanted to open every last one of them. She believed for some time now they were filled with salt and to make them stepping stones, so she could walk to neverland where there was a magnificent Barry Eysman 67 absence of symbols, and could they not remember flight and Pan in Lincoln green and stars to topple the impossible, which she aimed to get back to, and if she had to find and break god’s elbow, left or right, she would do so. What had Pan and the lost boys been up to all this time in their gingham story book world? They had not aged and died. PETER WITH WRINKLES AND GRAY HAIR!!! She laughed, which made her cough, and she remembered her weak lungs and her immobile legs, as she hauled herself to her wheelchair, “You can come back to me, Peter, I can’t fly or walk or swim to where you are, I can't tie you down, because I am pretty tied down already.” Wendy in a wheelchair as mother of the lost boys when she was more thing than person. It was about this time she started to pray each night, as she remembered, she had flown raven like through clouds. To dreams that were not death forever, but life forever, and she cleaning the tree house, so every thing would be neat and tidy when her brothers and Pan and the lost boys came home hungry for the meal cooking on the stove, as she had to put herself in order, and she had done that quite nicely indeed. She knew Hook too well, and she feared for her blockheaded boys including Pan, as she remembered the arrow of thorn that had penetrated her side and she had for a time died. It had all been pretend, from the first touch down of Pan on the window sill to the sprinkling of fairy dust to Tink and the sewn on shadow. It had taken quite simply the two world wars, the extermination of millions of people, world wide plagues, the deaths of her own family, most of London and more than three quarters of the population on earth for that neverland thing to work. Oh yes, she thought, we were innocent as babes, the lot of us. And my siblings died horrible deaths and Barry came here and stupidly tore the whole thing to tatters. Oh Peter, she thought, the rest of the interstices are ready to be unwoven. and this time it will be you. Hook place your hook just so. Now you betrayer, sit. She could hear the pain. She turned her face to the dark room. No, my beloved Peter Pan, I made all of that happen— out there. I let all that occur, so you would be created out of my heart. It was worth all their misery, worth a world in flames. Why have you betrayed me? How could you do such a thing? Do you not see what I have put everyone through, to show my love for you? As she turned her wheelchair to the window again, as a baleful red light broke over the ruins, as she thought he might be back any moment. Soon. She had 68 Dancers in the Sky stolen his shadow, after all. He would notice it eventually. If nothing else, that he would notice. He was so petty and spiteful. The world and everyone in it were, had been, nothing but time pieces. She had patience, yes, lovely little Wendy had a vast amount of patience. She sat, immobile. Someone, had there been a someone, might have mistaken her for dead. They would be wrong. They would be right. She was waiting, regardless. AND AGAIN, ALWAYS THE SADDEST THINGS GIVE THE BEST STORIES

FARM STORY

The wheat fields were all around them. They were golden and the sin was second best. They held and were time. The day was July all forever. And they forgot tomorrow promises, soft the wind and hot as train track cinder. and noon came round and held the taster of farm and majestic heights if from black raven eyes above pirouetting and caught in try position of human and lacquered in glow that touched the years in barn lofts and hay and such closeness and hands holding in the round red round rim of the circle of the planet that was less wise than summer done with books, of happiness which was the main objective, trajectory and off course and the gables of the farm house over an abiding distance where cushioned the secret the thresher thoughts land fecund, sun stained with the gullies of allotments of chafe spoiled, grog the entireties of life here of neat rows of plantings of wavy gold that over saw the peculiar nature of lavation spine and reach invite this hold the calico shirt strain of sprain of mind, caught in slippery texture of flood as they tapped the tabulating of hold spurs and Diamondhead destination of beach night blaze red charcoaling feast and to feel the measure of small nescient, this economy taut and taught, as if the day was thus planted by them, for a distant kingdom of water logged mur, to the east in hands held back by lithesome strength of minimalist caught in gainful grip the day decor and the companion walk of harvest isonomy and the way that said, us. The ways that the neck feels when its hot and flecked with bites of sun and there are dark lags and these are bruised eyes and the comfort is tied red bandanas and glowworms under the fabric of the oppressive circus tent of late summer laughter dark and the way a day could grow them larger, for the land was an apparent heir and it was caught under very human boundaries and eyes gone quiet as the flies buzz dreamily by and the songs stretched length and deep from CD player screamed metallica oddly to pieces on the back drop of green as grass corn crop on the fields below, as the combine with its sun glinty major silvery shine sun bleed ocean arms racing motor teeth combine through which nothing combines, coming, combing over the wheat stalks, table their heads of the day and lay the dissecting of all the 70 Dancers in the Sky small meek harmless dying things hiding out in a jeans pocket of bleeding gold in an old musty tort, consuming itself faster than the old crumble barn as the CD stopped and the day was eaten at sharp hard noon to seas of mercury the color of her eyes as she watched them in the thrum of a current canned straight from the sun corellas of thirsts and the sign of them fleeing, kneeling, each alone and then gone, as they were an asterisk instead of boy and girl but figures uncombining their bones and tremor of hair afire, as she turned catastrophically away into the dim dun color for hush in the air conditioned parlor of white doilies, with her pallor the only light in the dank stringing dark as she felt her leg go bad, causing her to sink to the love seat, an impossible configuration ion of torture if 2 made ever love there, no worry, for love had been drowned in great big hooplas of circuitous noise that had devoured the 2 small pieces of summer baked breads, lines of circles in the rain summer afternoon air which would have found them drenched there in the barn hiding for shelter in each other, the eating of, monument to the day of summer silent rain that came down too late and found itself against the implacable hand of man one more time. As the combine, silent, sat squat frog there, its combing Cheshire cat huge over pronged teeth quieted, a huge pearl oyster, in the middle of a most peculate salvage yard of peculiar debris, as her withered hand pulled back the isinglass curtain as she keened and leaned pettily like a bee forward to see through the rain soaked glass in now lightning strobes and earth shakers and she loved them with surpass but it was she winged into truth and could never wing out again. As she could not avoid, any more than mortified they, not in the guilty metal pipes, the sudden mock absence as though there were all the worlds of emptiness in the hands hopelessly trying to gather apart all the 4 leaf clovers there, now 3 in the murder scene beginning there in the bulgy ugly frog rivulets of inside rain to make believe they and she were not there, there was no hot summer gush for her boy and their neighbor's girl and she perished at the sight and her skin was no longer her, as she tripped backward on the cold wood flooring as from another sphere, it was not peril but as if the whole world were caught in their clogged and lathered hair, 3 weeks squeaks ago and not a word till today when bold as brass a treason land came calling, something the sheriff would ask her as in after rain they in filial fields of broken wheat which made her more sorrowful than any, as the heaves of mist hot grimy rose incandescently, as they stood beside the ambulance Barry Eysman 71 taking the things away, but the combine got to stay and night came and the cartoon glowworms and fireflies pulled up the hem of the circus night to put on their magic lantern show, not noticing one moment the absence of the boy and girl who had loved them so and at late night, the parents of both finally admitted they could not sleep and turned on their TVs. It seemed that year, summer lasted forever. SOMETIMES PEOPLE WHO TELL YOU HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE DON’T KNOW JACK.

AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDNIGHT OCEAN (to all my friends on shore)

He had been on the ocean how long? The winds had turned to jags, there was winter in the globule blues of rain beating on him, as everyone and everything was distant and aslant to him, as he huddled in the life raft trying to figure out how he had gotten here. and he felt his beard gray as was the thick hair on his head and there was the sick lurch he was already dead. It had to do with the account of him, on earth, his greed and soiling of the lives he had touched. the indisputable harm he had brought to his victims. His obsession with himself. His ears ringing with their words but surely he must been mistaken, for he used them as bored sounding board and just pissed words on them, endlessly never with their permission. Like the cold glob of rain hitting him hard as a train spitting in pain, his waterlogged flesh or its?, he, who had come to this ocean of green glow, always midnight in him. His skin crawling fear and deep horror of scaly green ocean monsters with their dainty little claws screaming up in screeching humongous and devouring steaming, mouths as they raised him taller and breathlessly taller up and above their stupid ice eyes, faces of oak, trumpeting victory as he was split in parts and dropped down leagues from a Ferris wheel ride into the dinosaur ride, after held in those delicate hands, a mouse taunted over sick spew hot rotten seaweed clamped monster breath razor sharp endless rows of hungry rapidity of tossing throat ward, gesticulation and victory trumps as mouse in the hole guts hit bottom, ancient tongues toss to sick gases and bit by bit knife and fork death. Caught in his own trap as he moved people around in his endless muddy mind games, as he remembered people moving him about in their little dramas in their jokes. Did those things really happen? In the middle of them, people said he was wrong, though it seemed so obvious, and he had all those voice prints in creases over him and he would guess what they wanted to hear for fear of honing something Barry Eysman 73 other than they wanted, the reptilian repetition of warm word fear, as was their due; drench you much later. He longed for friends especially the ones who built him up to tear him back down again, he had been this green glow ocean or more like it, a black hole in the caverns of space, for he destroyed every life he touched, but what was that under his breast bone? A melted city or two? Did anyone come by to see if they did a bit of damage themselves? Poor sea serpents, the man thought, poor sock puppets, and he started to rise, almost falling, a claw came out of the glow green. They lined up side by side beds of trust, as they let the man carefully, as if he could hurt them, walk to shore. When he had made it, they as one, addicted to cruelty, dived back down into all that pain, he wept for them and would never stop grieving for them, as landward behind him, something like the sun rose and there would be another day to cross. JUST BEEN THERE, NEVER GO THERE, JUST NEVER—

CLOWN DOWN

(after being “ blewed, screwed and tattooed on the “Camino Real," an old sailor put this MS in a bottle blue as summer sky. He tossed it into cyber space and let fly. Someone younger than young found it one day, read it, and tossed it away, walked down the beach whistling tur a lur a lay and the MS blew winter on the young summer wind that effortlessly went on its open carefree way. ) Places, there had been so many places and it was the circus inhuman where they traveled and traveling in smoky greasy air in multiple midnights secretions with golf ball size breathing pockets where the down clown could reconstitute his lungs every modicum of melted milk ball stale pith stop when he had humiliated hues of his geek personalities and his heart swelled in anger when they dug their hooves in his side, and played with their toy guns, pushing them, in his ribs, till his weeds of words bled to half death quarter meter rhymes to fold your little fannies in creases on the laundry line in thumb pulled back cocks the gun of tarot carded summer of swine hogs of health, Arkham and such, as a freak tabulates midnight and tears strips of blood from the sky, as they screamed in your one remaining ear with wonder circles of meat puppet HUSH SHUT UP YOUR STUPID MOUTH. And the landscape of scrofulous midnights razor nodded in your eyes and cut out the noise and aggravation of the light, vomiting you screaming justified creaming over the lamp posts of yore, when you were a you-bird the laugh of the party when you were just corner sitting, not making any noise no how with the westering wind and the pin cushion resting your head as they threw off the covers and the sand in your eyes to have you usual Tuesday night show with the thieves counting their boodle of your kidney stones as they sassy reached right in, and took ‘em and told you give me 50 knee bends and 20 hail mes and yup u did it all the creaky same, must not utter a discouraging word or they will open you crop to gullet and shout: YOU GOT TO GET A TOUGHER HIDE BOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, and who say such things to you but the ice dead that danced said freak on a string freak missing Barry Eysman 75 one heart but burping in vain an ace of spades run over by a tractor trailer, but the enemy in question, cheek and jolly with your ovation and at Purple Grackle, MO. You were heard to gear this delightful song Hi you little darlings, stage managers and starlings How are you on this bum fit kicking day? I recall when I was three sitting at my mommy’s knee And she said little freak Granddad wanted to toss you in the creek But I said no, life’s a bitch and on the road he’s gotta hitch And nothing he will ever do will ever turn out right And when he complains, society will be a marble oak That will stick itself where it’s not polite Where upon he must say Sir how much can I pay sir Fir a lesson in this reprehensible life, where upon he will slap you Little freak he will zap you and tell you the secret truth of life There’s the beaters and the beaten and if you want to keep on eaten’ son just keep repeaten’ you’re doomed to be either invisible Or on the run. You don’t know what you did to be a carny freak But it’s a noble job my son, love’s a helluva game You’ll have no part of, so relax and don’t pop off “Cause it’s the manners you’ll cling to every midnight when they bring you To the pit of fiddle dum and fiddle dee and you son fiddle three And he laced his head in moon glow as he lost all his stolen words spilling from the hog library tossing him break neck speed little chick little luck wham scram back and forth till in the desert he ascribed a long tall thin long haired man in cloak and dandy minstrel clothes on a rickety wooden balcony in front of a chintzy nailed on black curtain in a university play scared he is cause of the juggle of him by the jungle Jim contraption back stage he must in dark and cloak climb ten musky musty feet to the floor as swaying precarious in your shirt pocket a dulcet letter from childhood jimmy in summers of small town long ago to heavy freak’s solemn heart to Byronic even more so for Tennessee’s Camino Real desert mysterious, which caught love in its finagling in the days when freak did think himself freak with dispensation, episode of hot stove jumping as he felt himself made of rethinking tinkling brass according the tinkling brass all around him, who knew more of his life than did he, as ironic as cast as Byron, he intoned in shakes voice “make voyages, attempt them, there is nothing else." 76 Dancers in the Sky Then the drop down the backward long alley, to the five and dime and the boy freak at the paperback rack, looking through the Michael Shayne mysteries of a summer's day, glancing surreptitiously at the geek in the suffocating sun heat airless window like a bug smashed on the simmer gory day fry windshield of a ‘59 Plymouth in over bright sun heat, boy freak caught forever lashed to the seat of this flying Dutchman perpetually trying to find vacationland Florida for no particular remote reason other than freak's mother's vacation torture every July, so thought boy freak as he looked at the man painted in gray, with neck bolts and big cord down his pants leg to huge socket in wall, stiff herky jerky moving, dressed in Frankenstein monster suit, to the laughing brutally bald jeers of the children out there in summer made just for them, as Frankenstein freak and freak boy at the paperback rack and frightened out there in the alien sun, away from the snarling mob, freak boy stared at their life time work in the here and now under the stomping hobnailed boots and this word of god coming down: DON’T THINK ABOUT IT. Bug on the windshield. Screech. Screech. Screech. NO EARTHLY IDEA WHY.

BANK CAPER

They electrocute you when you’re young. Well, where had that thought come from? On the half lip of a dream remembered, the word, electrocute, came dancing in little pink animation, like in happy movie credits, some tricking you into thinking this was a happy movie, but turned out to be sad. Like ALFIE, the original, he had to say “the original” more and more these days, so the otherwise sensible conversation with another person about a movie would not come to a clattering end. Thus he giving antiquity another face, namely his own, as any way the cartoon girls (women) kicking their fishnet stocking legs, should any healer of the mind supposedly ask, but the dancing legs labeled CUTE were dream programmed as real girl’s cuter indeed, than the other’s. Which waked him up the entire way. ElectroCUTE was silly, a doily, with silver tea set on the serving table, beside comfy pink pillowy, drowsy electric by GE warm chair in a manor house of a snowy eve, as you sip tea, lemon honey, and—they electrocuted the cute young ones with candy canes, meaning the executioners executed them by using candy canes as the means of, not the condemned had had candy canes. Though they could have candy canes of the regular kind, electroCUTEions could be traumatic, especially by a candy cane, once-friend, but he never liked them, not a loss, for he had brittle teeth, and candy canes, Leo brand, for his aunty and granny had loved them, and the house was stocked with Leo peppermint candy canes. From Christmas on, long gone ago. He woke in gold. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. The morning sunlight coming in the large, un-shaded window bathed the bank interior, which was already gold enough. He got out of the rickety brown wood chair. He walked away from his desk. He got another cup of coffee. He shook his head. Why in the world did he have such a dopey dream? My name is Hal, he thought. He sugared his coffee and stirred it. Guys named Hal approaching retirement age in a small town where he had lived his entire life, should not have “kicky” dreams. He had fallen asleep while doing the books again. He took the coffee back to his desk, and sat on the right hand edge of it. The sturdy glass in the desk barely budged. 78 Dancers in the Sky They had killed a kid one month ago. Well, he was 17. Not much of a kid. And yes, they had electrocuted him because he had shot up too much heroin and had told too much of what he knew. Hal was an old man. There were things you left alone. Especially if you’re an old man with no one to care for. He did the books a lot in the bank after hours. He fell asleep doing them often. He sipped his coffee for a while. He watched the golden sunshine. It was almost like morning had struck a gong, thus declaring itself. The gold was gold plated. But it looked beautiful. Like being in church. Worship Gold. Worship money. Worship God. Regardless you are in it for yourself. They knew the kid, young man, had not told really. They knew who had. In a city of any size it would not have mattered much at all. But a small town has to have a grasp, on occasion, of a vestige of morality. Hal was not in on any of it. He was just one of those guys you let hang around, because he was part of the wall. He was sort of like on those TV court shows. The judge takes a child into her chambers to talk privately. Of course, on camera. After the commercials. The judge, who yells in court, speaks softly to the child in chambers, keeping it private. He thought he remembered the night it happened. He had been here at the bank. It had been deep summer, not the graceful fall into crisp cold dignified soft gray skies touching down to October vision, which it let you use free of charge so your sight was so clear and smooth and sleek, you could see what Month. Day. Minute. And if pressed to it. Second. Though second was a personal judgment. That the first snow would start. On the configurations on a timepiece, a word not to use, as the phrase “the original,” as in yes Charlie, course, I mean Char leez? oh of course, who else could play Sara? Hal was sleepless that night. The night the girl disappeared though she was not dead, but the kid was the wrong one. Not the banker’s son. Yep, cut a few corners off, sand it off at the edges. So you have it like every thriller on the market today. To the source and to the sleuth, background secrets usually, surprisingly, shocked, we go; but thanks to smarter readers or just experienced ones, comes the epilogue where the solution twists itself round in corkscrew fashion, so nobody understands. But must pretend. Thus, crafty smile, wearing writer in the book photo. They electrocute the young with Leo peppermint candy canes but those were sticks, not canes, but others came in cane shape—why? Sugar melted in the sun. They would fall over if you tried to lean on one, presupposing anyone would go to the Barry Eysman 79 trouble of making a cane out of sugar, forget peppermint. Youngsters, another word to toss in the garbage bin, would be full of glee. To see lots of old men like Esky or the man from Monopoly falling down around themselves, leaning on melting insubstantial canes of sugar. Why didn’t ESQUIRE and MILTON BRADLEY sue each other? It happened when I was 10. I was asleep. It was late. A hot summer night. The windows and doors were open and protected only by screens. I heard the sounds inside my dreams. And I remember now—those leggy chorus girls in my half dream this morning had been a rerun from then. I dreamed him. His name was Chester. A long time ago name. Nobody names anybody Chester anymore. Maybe that’s what Dennis Weaver meant. Chester was in high school and lived next door. He was this great kid. Everybody wanted to be his friend. Especially me. Everything is a rerun, not just TV. The young man caught the girls, like Chester, there is always a Chester, even when his name’s not Chester. Who was and is and will be tomorrow capable of making a hero-struck kid do it for him. Rape. After all who wants to be struck by their hero? That word is the ultimate arch villain, especially when it is defined too close to your face by a suddenly more a human hero, for in his sweat and fear, with his breath smelling like he has just eaten a field of wild onion, you see him as suddenly you. And if that doesn’t convince you of HIS EXISTENCE and that HE is as BAT CRAP INSANE nothing will. Hitler can’t surprise you, but the loony peeking out of the top left quadrant of the right eye of once sane and cool Pete Ross, another name to put on the QT, you’ll do it and do it. Hal knew that QT meant quiet. Though he never knew what the Q T or the arrangement meant. He also never knew why sailors were called swabbies. What was that link between ear swabs (QT brand) and sailors, or if words like seamen or goober peas were meant to do anything other than to hyperventilate grade school children, course they still made him chuckle. He liked Chuckles, decided to keep it, and as the elderly were wont to do, once he had found a place that was comfortable, there he stayed. Once you dream a Chester existed, even when you are an old man, a new Chester, no matter how bored he made you to your drawers, could make you do it again. Once he was shown an issue of Hustler magazine. And as appalled as he was, the thing that stuck with him was a comic strip Chester the Molester. Only his Chester was not. Hal was. Chester 80 Dancers in the Sky taught him how. So, everything on rerun, something of the same had happened now. The candy cane was of course the obvious. Some nights Hal dreamed of a huge candy cane, thick as a brick, and using it on Chester, as he sneaked up behind him. That was where the dream always stopped for Hal. He never pursued it any further. He did not dare. Of course they never committed murder as had this current incarnation. The girls back there, in their shame, left town quietly, never to return or write their parents. Hal took off his glasses, and tossed them to the green carpet floor. With his left shoe he crushed the lenses one by one. It was early Sunday morning still. The town was dead. He was trying to find them again. Every dream of murder. But, if you had been passing by the bank at this moment, and had looked in, you would have seen a very sad, humiliated little boy in the shape and clothes of an old man, head bowed, weeping. Wondering over and again why he too had not left town in the dark of night long ago. What we do for our heroes, he thought, to keep them heroes. IT WAS A HOT AWFUL DAY SO I WROTE THIS, ‘CAUSE THE CHRISTMAS SONG AND IT’S SIMILAR ORIGIN HAD BEEN TAKEN.

SNOW LAND

Running and cold. Savage heartbeat. Season of winter. Hours have passed into seconds. There is daylight in my eyes. My midnight soul. Reaches in. Hands grab. I tear. I rip away. Somebody’s fingernails come with me as I pull and there is a precipitous scream. As I run to white candy snow. Feel legs pistoning. Feel growing heart. Breath belabored. I did it. I did it. I killed him. Her. My whole body gambols. I laugh a huge black O smug and the bitterness is the small hillock I fall on. As my blood warms me in the O temperature. I lunge my hand and remember how he pulled back, genuflected, his eyes gone crazy. The leanness has long ago left him. There were squiggles where once there had been long angel like hair as circles girded his face and lines spider webbed his eyes. Eyes closed. Gun raised. Charts re-charted. And the supreme comfort of this one singular realization. Poetry had left my bones. The longing died breath for breath as did his breath, deep full, then broken SOS, then shallow, then the look of empty on his face, hand uselessly to bloody chest, then the terror on him, oh god, does anything—happen next? Then the fever of life gone as his eyes turned to big black marbles of non-comprehending and never was as his still thin body curved from a him into an it as my gun drank all it could of him. Her name was Nan. She is now an it too. We met five years ago in a Manhattan winter rain, clutching our individual selves together from the sleet and the wind chill that in these steel canyons made our skin bleed heat like victims of a million paper cuts. In the subway, no heat, shiver still, us alone, as the train lurched and clattered madly along, human controlled no longer, we said the usual weather talk people say, the obligatory anything, in this case because we were new here and it was winter, close to Christmas, we had no one. In that case. Simply, other wise, her eyes which were sweet soft blue, would never have noticed me, but this moment, these circumstances, they did notice me, plain me, and eloquent poem her, as we smiled. 82 Dancers in the Sky And said our first names alone. Made up. This was after all New York and we weren’t a couple of dumb bunnies. I lay now in snow. Breathing like a bellows. The taking of a life called human. Was life offended? Was everything now out of whack? Would the gigantic hand of God come thwack me like a fly? The wind blew cold. I had trouble hearing, pressure on my ear drums. Penalty for double homicide: Deafness. There was a laugh for you. Nonsense. I fell in love with her for a life time. She fell in love with me till winter ended and Central Park the first warm day of Spring was where she left me. I had been warmth for winter. And until she got her bearings. I remember how she screamed when her fingernails tore off in my chocolate color coat arm and how naked she was, and him, down there, curled in naked pink crescent, like he was become a fetus and would get another chance not to know Nan or me or the truly poisoned Big Apple. Nan had left me years ago. And he was her latest. I was still a beat cop, the old joke, both ways. I kept tabs on her. As she sank lower. All the way to whore. Drunk. Junkie. Dead/alive from the movie of the same name. Life had left them long before I had made it official. Remember Wil Wheaton in Stand By Me? In memory, the great childhood friend way back when. The hero kid who could do anything and could keep the world from flying apart on you? Or who was just nice, sports star, got girls and was kind to them. Who it was good to just see him in the locker hallway? And what if late in the day, that once kid and your once wife were making it in a crack house we had our sights on, meaning me, and here at a bit after 4 a.m. I had killed them. I had sole watch, natch, and the snow was its usual blizzard. Hard to imagine Manhattan as anything more than a ghost town. The landscape was new planet, alien and distant and far away from that grimy freezing subway car, where she had, so sadly, demurely pulled her wind blown somewhat threadbare coat further over her ankles and half doubled in readiness to run, in case I was a knife wielding maniac. She should have run. I made each watch the other die. After I forced them to continue to have sex, as I stood over them, not to humiliate them, but me. That was what they did? That was what it looked like when we did it? Well, except for the crying and shame and terror as a man who had once been her lover, now had a gun pointed at them, looked on. Cold. Endemic dark. Snow forever. Global warming was here. To stay. We went about trying to make it not so. Pretending. Some still and all, even now. People and doorknobs are sometimes hard tell apart. Barry Eysman 83 I could kill half the city, and get away scott free by the time the cops finally got through all this tundra, melted from the Arctic, to take up permanent residence in Ice Station Manhattan. I remembered the last thing I did before I left them. Before I took the little stash of crack for myself, any escape is a good escape. I kicked him aside. Kicked him hard cross the filthy floor in this land of only deep freeze smells. I held her lifeless body close to me. I lay with her. She was, as was he, already a corpse. emaciated, covered with needle tracks, her eyes still open and creepy looking. We first met in a moment of cold, lonely winter and she stayed with me that season because she was new here and had no one. It was close to Christmas, and even I was warmth and company of a kind. I rise from a snow mounded hillock that may be, in this black Manhattan under a low black sky, in all this thick brocade swirling wind, and me almost deaf for some reason. And that sad coming on feeling of Christmas for the rest of your life, and lonely? My God. three quarters of the people once here are Popsicles. Would I have done this time too, Nan? Would I? Then I pulled her sticky body away from me, dressed, and I ran. I now brace myself for the long, brutal walk in that wind pushing me back 3 ft. for every ft. I gain, to my 20 story penthouse. I live on the top floor. I enter through the firmly locked and closed doors of my terrace. Gun reloaded and at the ready. I need it less and less these days. Good. Running out of bullets. Police department. Who am I kidding. There is no more police department. Those people back there? Who knows who they really were. Just doesn’t matter. Got to fill my time with something after all. I’m only one of the crazies too. MY MOTHER HAD A FRIEND DRIVE HIS PICKUP TRUCK UNDER MY ATTIC ROOM WINDOW…

THE ANSWER

It was simple. Cabals do exist. There are plots. And since there are, there must be those who create the Cabals and the plots and exist within them. Maybe for generations. Her mother maybe; her mother’s mother; this always seemed a female’s job. From sinister to benign, these things do make the world go round. Whether you wear penny loafers once upon a time or wing tips, there were and are opportunities. And it is the cause and the raison dieter of capitalism to take advantage of these opportunities, for someone else will, if not you. She looked at a picture of him and thought she was not getting the best part of the bargain. There was something to do with increments, with notches on the door post, in memories, of him standing there perplexed and somehow not happy with his latest growth spurts as he moved away and turned around and looked at his childhood herein departing. She thought, later that blue sky summer morning, as she sat alone at the wooden yellow kitchen table, sipping Maxwell House “good to the last drop” that a single mother has something no one else in this small Southern town could ever develop if they themselves were not single mothers. Cynicism. For eyes can speak and Cabals can function and allow an entrance where other entrances were impossible. But even here, apart was a distinction only she and Millie could band together and talk in whispers. Millie was hanging out her wash later today, she saw through the windows of the living room of green, leaves and grass sun addled and drenched and looking completely unreal, as if a cartoon into which would enter Daffy, Bugs, Porky, Elmer and the whole WB gang, so, since Millie, hair in net and curlers, could dare be out in cartoon land, she would take a deep breath, open the kitchen door to the outside which was a blast furnace, intruder of the sweat instantaneously to her face and arms and legs and her house dress of brown with white designs on them looking, she thought, as she carefully balanced herself, for she was pudgy, like an amoeba, which was ridiculous, who Barry Eysman 85 would make a pattern of amoebae on a house dress, and carefully went down the three wooden steps to the scruffy small back yard. Millie looked over and bid her with a wave of the hand. She walked to Millie’s back yard, larger and spiffily kept, unlike hers, and helped her wring out clothes from the plastic basket and hang them on the clothes lines with large wooden pins. She was on her favorite subject and Millie said, “Wait. Wait a minute.” She knew what her only friend was about to say and kept putting clothes on the line, including underwear, for Millie was of the unashamed. “God gave us bodies and urges and the stuff—down there—so let him be ashamed.” To which she prayed forgive my friend Millie she’s a smart mouth what can I say? Millie now said in the air which was like a truck of heat that had just blasted into them, “Did we kill Kennedy? Well, I ask, did we? Stop it for a minute,” as Millie turned her friend forcibly to her. “They will get tired. Past does not last. Otherwise they would call it present.” She started back to her own house. Millie put a hand on her friend’s left elbow. She said to her, “The Lord gives, The Lord taketh away. Ok. I’m getting a little grandiose, but the thing is you can’t hold yesterday or Ted or a marriage that was heading south from day one nailed to the ground—to hear you tell it—and you are a woman of perspicacity. Look,” as her friend sighed and looked at her chocolate shadow on the too green ground, in the too bright sun, her throat parched, her eyeballs hurting, needing to go back inside with the too big fan that did too little good. “Look,” Millie said again to her friend who was not looking at her. “Did we make them grow? Did we change the channel? Or make them fall in love with a different girl every five seconds? We did not create pimples. We did not make pimple cream for those pimples. Blame the pimple companies for their own damned Conspiracy—THE PIMPLE COMPANY CONSPIRACY.” “Stop it,” she said to Millie. A bit too loudly. “Don’t use that word. Ever again. Not around me.” Millie looked perplexed and pushed a stray wet curl back in her hair net. “Pimple? I can’t say pimple?” Her friend shook her head mightily, saying “The C word. Never say it again in my presence.” So saying, she stomped back to her back yard, eyes half closed from sun blindness, to the three rickety porch steps and then almost to the third one when she fell and grabbed the railing, rickety as the steps, and hauled herself inside. 86 Dancers in the Sky After some cold tea in the living room, she decided to look at them again. She had been having nightmares occasionally, knowing if she told anyone, they would laugh and consider it a joke, and confused by its meaning and why she would say it, much less why she would pretend to dream it, for no one sane would dream such a thing, and she was considered most sane and practical, except-— expect she lavished many things on her son—as many comic books as she could afford he was allowed to buy at Kroger’s on Friday afternoon, and a paperback or two. Over the years she had bought him Aurora monster models of plastic to put together, records of cartoon shows and TV theme songs, had helped him send away for autographed pictures of actors he loved, had let him see movies till they almost fell out of his eyes, had bought him a small movie protector and all the Castle horror films, cut down to about nine minutes, and a Charlie Chase comedy and cartoons to play in black and white on a curtain they extended over the door less entry into his sunroom/bedroom/sonroom, and bubble gum, board games, Lincoln logs, a Lionel train set. She making mental inventory as she looked at them. As she had climbed those narrow flights of stairs into the miserable cooked heat of the galaxy known as the attic and walked dizzily to them. You can’t kill comic books and besides it would not be all, and besides you say to him you want to keep these for memories and he will shrug, or should have shrugged, or should have just said got a date, got to go Mom, kiss her on the cheek, then out into the world forever the present, but he hadn’t said that, had said instead not anything really, but she had looked at him, her grown son, and knew with an electric sense of awareness she had not had before, he would not outgrow these things, they were his life, they were his fingerprints on childhood and childhood’s finger prints on him. She had paid so little attention to him before this. So little attention she had paid, Professor Pepperwinkle. Sure, Millie’s kid, what the hell let’s set fire to ‘em now I can’t wait to stop being a kid. And she could do it and maybe give her son a commission. She was on the phone now. To the Collectable person. Collectable and conspiracy having the same first letter. She hadn’t known how they got in touch with her those years ago, she buying all those things for her son who didn’t like her, nor did she like him; he later thought she had been trying to buy his love; he was wrong; she was putting money in investments; and had calculated the amount, Barry Eysman 87 which was substantial. She listened to the voice. The voice said money. The voice a rumble lizard voice said threat. The voice said how long now? She said he was gone now, was starting university. The voice said five ok? She nodded, then realized the Collectable person could not see her nod, so she said “yes.” She was not proud of herself when she said goodbye, hung up the phone, and sat, legs underneath herself, on the couch. A person’s got to make do, she thought. In time, she had stopped grieving, looked at the clock, got up, preparing to make herself presentable to the Collectable man. She had not had to keep the things in perfect order, the comic books in plastic, her son had done that for her. She would have to tell him—-something. She had no idea what. This would be ordeal though enough for now. In time the doorbell rang. She walked toward it, getting ready to throw her son away. DC, Dell, Marvel, Mattel, copyright holder of old TV shows and movies. They all got a cut. It was a sweet racket. WHOEVER HE OR SHE WAS, THE MEMORY KILLS SO NEEDFULLY

VLADIK IN GOLDEN SUNSHINE

And young. Golden head of hair, Supple body, Eyes to see everything For the first time. Every time. Sensuality of nature Child. Legs to run fast, And hands to never Fitfully Explore. But smoothly, With patience, And love. Then up and away, With boy fast run Schemes.

Consider the boy of beach, All a giggle, he, And laughs come softly And considered, As if he is forever, Sacred, and His own Christmas tree.

What do you think, Vladik? What is your dearest wish? Dragonfly riding, he might Say. Thus: wish granted-- He on the dragon fly, Barry Eysman 89 And Vladik, in Armor, Swift sword in hand of steel, To banish said dragon spilling Its fire for always from The Boy ruled land.

Wandering in wonder Round boulders, Running with friends To the sea, All in a golden doubloon That is Vladik always For free.

Boy of bubble And ease, Sure of his true heart And the little furnace, That is inside him. Off to find new Universes and stars In the surf, In the touch of water And land scape, For they are there, For boys alone to see.

Boy of Crimean summer. Touch the winged angels, Find the beach warm and Fleecy. Touch and run and find The world sweet and fine. Tickle hands and smile Of butter, Of quiet air, And warm. Blue sea and skies of Childhood, 90 Dancers in the Sky That say, I remember, Please remember me.

Brave as a child can be, Brushing a sweet laugh And smile to the world, Heartily meant for everyone. Which will not live without His being there.

Caught in zephyr, Magical child, Heart capturer, With Fragile shoulders, Like young swift Atlas, Trusting, Holding the whole of love Like a world In an ice cream cone, What in this world could be Wrong, When Vladik is eating ice Cream, There, right there, On a summer warm day?

Running in perfect harmony With himself and his friends. Where summer rules and legends Come in small sizes. Where wheels of miracles come with Eyes of blue sky, Clear and understanding, Fall with kisses on you.

See winter gone for good. See saunas used by choice, Not necessity. See the brilliant glitter bright Barry Eysman 91 Day in the form Of knitted together dreams, Without the inch of even One seam.

That cause arms to hold round, That say dive and swim, That say forever unashamed, For this, Vladik, You own the warm and Kindling day. I WROTE THIS AT THE END OF A FRIENDSHIP. IT WAS THE ONLY TIME A PERSON HAS EVER BETRAYED ME. I WAS HEART SICK. VARIOUS PEOPLE OVER THE YEARS HAVE TOLD ME THEY FOUND IT EROTIC. PERSONALLY, I FIND THAT DISTURBING. I WAS INCREDIBLY NAÏVE THEN.

CARDBOARD BOXES

We live in these little cardboard boxes. Flats they're called. Cardboard coffins I call them. We call them. We can hear everything that goes on in this flea palace. So can the fleas. They can here Jimmy'meboy and they can hear the git upstairs, and the old poofs over cross the way. And it smells in here all over the East End. And we pretend we love in this sty. That Melba up there is not pacing slamming her feet against the floor, round and round the rotten circular rug from of course a flea sale. And smoking like a chimbney all the time. Mad as toast, see I got me humor and wits about me still, at me for being down here with Jimmy'meboy when that's what I want and don't wants at all the same time. Course it's a coarse life. Course its no freedom stand here I'm a'makin. Tells ya the truth, I don'ts particularly like him any better, him with his sour undershirts and his way of mumbling sos I don'ts have know what he's sayings half the time. And its only fun fer me cause I know she's picturin' me and me man here doing the horizontal dipsy doodle like she imagines and its just not so, little sex would be nice, but with another person ins the rooms, not just him and me imagining each of us being someone else, same as her and me for that matter, lord cook a good goose egg and slaps me silly wit it, as thoughs its easy as that and shes me beard or whatever fag talk they use, and its me and Jimmy'meboy here in the kip close together, not that wes aren't a million miles from each other here and now, like she might as well be me and our rooms identical stink of poverty and pain and all sorts of encumbrances, and its just to bleedin' tick her a little. Just to trot her a little fancy like'n she mights be jealous of me if such a thing can be tucked with love letter or a French tickler I be bound. AS though there's not a orgasm I've done had since I was about 14 and still bys meself and I don'ts needs these fake humans being here skitting round as though they ares real and stuff and me not real at all. Think they're so bloomin' desperate. They don't knows the halfs of it. They don't knows how I feels when I comes home from the Barry Eysman 93 greengrocer's and just all in and out and fed up with the ladies and all their ladadas and me gotta be nicen' to 'em and give a fuck ' bout their bleedin' kidney pies and their jokes and just a bit of rum m'dear for the goose or whatever lie they tell, forgettin' to buy the goose, they so happy they got something to knocks them out for a bit, and that's all they had in minds fer the first place. And Jimmy'meboy naked save for that bleedin' undershirt as though it doesn't count, the sex stufft wit' me and the other guys, I'm not an idiot by damn, as though I'm the ghost of a ghost. And they think they gots such a hard knock life. And if he tells me I gotta suck him one more time, I'll take this bleedin' telly black and white jobbie and frankly beet him to death the hell with it, and that will be the end of that and the coppers fer me and they could put me in a cell with Jack D. Ripper and it would be better than this. That Melba raising holy hell, cursing so the Lords Gentry at the Castle could heer her, and its bleedin' hard to get it up with Jimmy'meboy and he says I'm good at it and that's all bleedin' gravy, whats you done with your life Patrick Gray, well, I got this bum bum down here who says I'm as good a cocksucker as he's ever in seen, and that could be on my grave stone, Jimmy'Meboy says Patrick Gray was a great sucker but now all those who read this can go home, the show's over, so cheery bye and that's the end of that. Admit, I turns the telly up louder, gotta drown out that moaning Melba up there, gotta get my head in a gas oven and turns the thing up full quota, in this smelly stink of London mid summer, god, I jump out of the bed, off the sodden sheets and what is wrong with the world and me in it, I ain't the looking back in anger guy after all, see?, I gots meself some bleedin' noggin' culture ain't I after all? And Jimmy'meboy looks at me, his face needed shaving and his eyes were bloodshot as he vaguely passed the bottle me way and I looks at him and I knocks the bottle cross the room. "Hey, what the mother—" And he's out of bed on his bandy legs like a shot, short little half naked poof looking up at six ft. 2 in. me, and he says he's gonna beat the livin' hell outa me and I push him down so easily, like I does Melba, and they both sit there on their asses, while I'm gassed to death in this tinder box and wonder how love ever happened anywhere at any time in the world, I can barely breathe in here. All three windows open and its like I'm an ant on a hot brick in this Mid July night, and I wanna go out, I want to go to a bar or get something to eat or take in any movie at all in the arc., 94 Dancers in the Sky preferably porno and I wants some man or woman or whatevers to sit beside me and I rub them off or put it in their quiff or something in all that blessed cool air when the flesh does not have a stench to it that makes me wanna barf. Ever notice how silly sex is. All that moaning and groaning and it's for someone else most the time, and you just wanna exhibit yourself so the other person can lie about how great you look and reverse the other way round, and it's just for a piddle of white gunk or a rush of fluids and a quick dead for a moment and don't it feel good faking away leaving earth for outer space for a second or two and then down to earth again for all the cleanin'up and all that exertion, and all that humpahumpah and that's all it is, a little coital sneeze and then you have to wait a while older you get to be able to do it again—a freak show really, embarrassing, white butt sticking in the air, legs scissored round you, oh baby you are the one oh baby oh come come baby come with me-can't tell me God don't have a right sense of 'umor. You keep waiting for the applause or something. "Get outa here, NOW!" speaketh the great Jimmy'meBoy getting off the hot linoleum covered floor, and I'm standing there, beating his water weight by a stone almost and I look at this stupid little man and his stupid little dick and his stupid little dirty smelly body and I think my Gawd how can I even come near to him? How can anyone? Melba is better lookin' than that and she has halitosis and all these stupid little veiny spiders in her legs and little mustache on her lip and she looks better than this stupid little man, and he is up and crashes the top of his head right into my chest and knocks me for a loop, and as I falls down, I unintentionally take the little TV with me and we crash glass and me and tubes and all sorts of electronic geegaws and the fame and all, as the picture that had been MacDonald Carey in a forties movie now became light and powder and electric poppings all over me on the floor as I jump and stand up and wipe the white hot off my naked body and I hold myself and jump over the glass shards, or try to, but lots of glass in me soles and all over my body. "Oh great GOD WHAT DO I DO NOW????? GIT OUT GIT OUT NOW GIT YOUR SORRY BUM AWAY" And Jimmy'nolongermeboy cause I broke his damned TV set, the center piece of existence of pretty much everyone, yes, that is true Melba, mostly what we do Jimmy'oncemeboy and me dids down here was whats me and yous do up there when I'm up there in an identical flat to this one, we watches the telly and tries to not scream at each other as we select the programme we can both surrender a bit too, bout the only Barry Eysman 95 diff'rence is he has a cock and she has a slit, and her boobs not great are kinda nice to suck on, when I used to long times ago, likes Jimmy's cock was okay to sucks on now for the past and he's holding the set frame pieces and the screen shards and the electric geegags in his arms likes they're a bloomin' baby of his'n that's gone and a died or somethin' and I hears him scream and Melba heers him fer sure and the other lice in the ant palace toos and I gotta gets away from hers and her and him and it and I scurry to my clothes gets them halfs on and departs the premises afore he remembers he's got a blunderbuss of a gun in the closet, and I can'ts go back up there cause Melba will spend the rest of my life laughin's how Jimmy done got mad at me as a wet hen as mad as she and she'll make me sleep in the park her flabby stomach flapping and her doubly over with the giggles, so I cut the mid part of the adventure out, and half dressed, I rush out the bleedin' pest hole and out the building and into the night hot as hell but cooler than in there. I leans against the wall and I takes a fag and light it and decide breathing deep and hard and wounded though I don't know how wounded just yet, go by the chemists' get some stuff. Then I guess I'll take in a film. Might as well. Could use a good suck right now. Don't think my cock's been hurt. Physically I mean. Needs to get with someone I don't know who'll do me. But then what the 'ell, I've never been with anyone who knows me at all, and they can say the same, so it ain't 'bout to be a big switcheroo or nothin'. HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE OF STRINGS TILL YOU WAKE UP OLD AND GRAY—ABOUT AGE 27.

T WAS A BOPPER—A REAL SHOW STOPPER

Seasons in me and rounding bends where space cannot tack itself to the stars up above, there in the heat of winter come and gone too soon, in addition of cotton feeling nerve endings bling bling I carry my own gold with me in the gold in my teeth and the rings in my nips and the rings in my balls that hung low sweet chariot and my hands turning welts into seasons that were never meant to be before, all that saltz and all that movie world where the screen becomes super porous and there is nothing but the sweet smell of giving in and I never thought I would do that before, little me with the moniker of dignity all over my hands as they sweep the darkness away to make a brand new day and if I wanted to do this for ka-ching ka-ching I definitely could and that would make me the richest little whore mamma in the whole world which exists in my pocket so I can Willy Wonka it out and take my time with it, testing the dials and the dials run the Tv shows I used to dream of seeing, and saw in the silence of my head up here. Dance with me babes and get the KY ready and warm for I was choo-chooing in to town after the cold snap of winter and I need a popper and I needed that train long to be over, all those hours of travel without a mate beside me to tell my troubles to. All saltz and all rings of wine and tequila based. This in the form of a statute and this in the holy hole I once was in all judgmental and such and here now with my m'men and we are having fratuious fun and feebs don't get it and never will. This of my ratty room and my ratty less mates now that wonder is back in town. Feeling fine and floaty fleeing all the old moates that got me down to the oats that served tables of plain brown tasteless bread. This ring of things round my ringading is all the bells they will have to listen to again and m/men and Trinity makes us thee, as the blessings go up me and it is a torch of liberty. This manic throb. This manic sob and the cries are real and the tickles are realer. This me and what could come without the urethra to teach them a thing or two. To get so down and round into party time that it would come with a climb up whoops no bad dude just Barry Eysman 97 had to kill the last of that roach. All spiffle and dinette table which is me and doling out myself as though I am a field of terrible scarecrow bronze ages of the past that all the nubiles want to offer themselves to as something of evil and something of good. Something of Joseph and Mary if they could. And now my back's against the bed as the hands coalesce into something of brown black beetles huge and marrowing and wanting my fame there deep in the heart of me. There deep in the parts of me that get tugged on as I feel electric alive. As I feel more than store bought. All has been worth it and the warm pads of hands and the warmer pads of feet, all there to the me of the dine and the ace as he pushes Trinity off as Sin gets into him as the blues plays gluze in my head and I feel stuck together, ready to go off onto a million tangents, ready to cry me a river of torrent terror gold in this room that smells of sex and high life and low junk and nothing could be better than another popper cracked under my nose, with some coke left on the table, but me the highes high there has ever been. As we sex weave and sex spin and its all up to the doxologies to name the place where we have ever been. Out there into the front of the black night train night as they worshipped me by cell these last two weeks, as they dreamed of my ass in their hands and held and molded it above their simpy little beds, waiting for the time for me to return, and the me returned is the world shot high pitch in the sky as the sun of midnight comes to reckon them away with their own little gimp shots and there own little muffled men while mine straight, so to speak, and true, there for the fun rubber, and we are boinging and spoke wheels as sexuality comes round the table top bend like a Lionel train choo choo and its all with the wizardry of me and my many faces. Watch the grin. Watch them grin back at me. Wiggle the crotch. Watch them wiggle their back at me. Watch me grip. See and feel them grip me and each other. And know the seasons of the day of the monkey brigade. For I am their mirror and their legs are mine. Their eyes will see what my eyes tell them to see for the rest of our lives. And the room smells of linseed oil and polish and smells of old socks still and all and we are making with the rancid in the returned heat to the returned lying winter January, all sweating, the month included, all there with the wrap around toys as we have discovered we boys are in college for the toys and the toys are us studying and studding, Harrad has nothing on us, this in the moment and this in the head floating and them missile like throwing at the ceiling and the pain the pain the bells the bells the bells. And the pain is blow torch and Sin 98 Dancers in the Sky grins as Sin walks in the best way he can walk in at all, and we're about to toss, we've done too much and drunk too much, and the room light is slight and fading yellow and the room walls are dusty dingy peeling wall paper brown, and the floor is green linoleum and there is nothing more bound than the boundaries we have come to take into our gnomed hearts. Our little bings and bangs and on my knees and on his too please, as we make tableau of train porting into station. And this was the wild elation, that made all the other mes in mirrors my rents sees like some other person, who stayed away all day and wept into his hand like a carnal crime kid with the world on the offensive and now its on by damn the defensive. And me and m'men naked as Js and speaking of Js roll me another dream scheme. Write me the o. room right here please and what are you doing to me you callous Sin? What is the mood you are in my friend, with big as the Chunnel now don't you think? And that make Sin grin all over his body and he pushes me like a chariot in a race, we'll beat you yet Ben Hur, by grace. Sin is hairy while ace is harrier, me I'm the young looking one of the bunch, as when the flowers could look at me deflowered over and again, this thin shuttle and where its been, tills the tilt of love in my direction, tills the tilt of love with deepest affection, as though my ass is astro turf and there is nothing more to single out that my private benediction, there and me here and not a voice on a cell from a crib bed some where, opening Christmas Day like a diseased brain of idiocy and strait jacket mentality, while here in the sick and wheezing flicker of the light bulb on the early dark morning of my coming home to my room and my dreams and my schemes and here the boys are having me and I'm having them and their eyes are wide and white. Their mouths breathe beer out and take me in, as the suction brigade comes to the rescue of the fair maiden who is stuck in the top floor not having a ladder to climb down, while the house she, that's me, is in is burning all round, as she, that's me, screams Help me Oh won't some lovely fireman help me please, so ace and Sin can't wait to get in and toss a ladder for her to climb down and the night is the town and the town is when Sin doubles up hard and presses his stomach down to my back and saves me from the fire by making a fire torch the Statue of L. has never contemplated, throw in the Ten Commandments too, and I have never been so fulfilled in my life and never so filled the real bling bling as ace torments me too and rubs my head of hair and sighs moaning with his hands on his hips and his eyes closed and standing there like a Greek Statue with only minimal movements, his face in Barry Eysman 99 some kind of noble profile, like he's the star of this piece but he's got the deed, I've got the need for his seed; so we'll keep him around till we find someone to replace him, something borrowed and something new and something never ever blue….. ….and deep in the night the gay boys play, thinking this is it that the ultimate world orgasm is on its way, but someones heard something and someone going to try to take it to even the skin breaking through of ultimate and that is the reason why ace and Sin figured it all out a long time ago, just not telling me cause on the nod I'd throw every ounce of caution to the wind, and every day I will see the sutures in my behind and think of the days back when the parties stopped, back when the wall came to meet me and there was no popper or chaser or coke or roach to stop it, to stop the deeds that tore the night apart with my mammas nightie in my mind as she knelt down to me and said poor boy poor stupid little boy, as the hospital memories wash over me, as seeds spilled blood recoiled and blood scream as nothing in the world of war all aclimbed to this height making me not five nine but six four it seemed then. The laughter at me like a charnel house as I charcoiled into a world of collapsing boxes cardboard, one right after the other and charcoal and nothing left of me but my ass and nothing left of me but my hollow Halloween pain and the screams of STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT making it go faster tearing me with ace and then Sin's rings, and the tearing and the faultless as my buds got down with this way of teaching me how they would tear up the town which was me of course but on another black horse, with white satin eyes and blows and their trying to be me, which was not the case at all, this was their final crime with me at least, me with my cell and my rockin' good elves, me with the bling bling and the ipod that was even now music playing as they did it to me again and again, just a little love tap from the gay community god bless every fuckin' one of them, and I was bloody and not bold mercifully passed out as I was pulled back to consciousness with ace or Sin or some damned thing with his slong waving back and forth, as he put a shiv to my neck as he held my head up high by the sweaty now bloody hair on my head, "You tell anyone who did it, you die." And off went me to sleep land again and it seemed I was gutted. Off went my m/ men and I was left to scream in my dream, and then scream in my cream and my blood offal on the bed rickety and broken; the memory sickness of their hurdy gurdy seeming made up faces with tons of cream and lipstick and their big rubbery spidery shiny mouths 100 Dancers in the Sky and their huge white insane eyes with no pupils in them, all out of focus all out of proportion just drifting around shape shifter amoebas instead of humans. Till I made it that pain in every cell of me sunrise to the bloody cell to ask for bloody help for my bloody body and my bloody soul, catch me, hold me, stay away from me, who do I trust?, me, hell no, anybody else, heller no, and me heller and seep heaping in the hospital room with the hidden but not quite hidden enuf laughter from the docs and the nurses and my dad and my mom and an old friend I had toileted last Christmas on the cell for the final and last time were sitting in chairs round my bed and they had these oh so concerned crying faces on, we are here to help you, yeah right you self righteous mothers, to help me be namby pamby yet again, well it won't work, I've learned all right, and the learning takes a hard left peers and fritters so when you go to the next movie of me, except me to not have seen the errors of my ways and you may pontificate, just wait oh ye believers in sling loaded love, as you watch me take the victim as I take off my glove, and double my fist for the first reverie— Oh yes, I have learned, just how to be the real me. I ASKED AT KINDLEBOARDS FOR THE MOST OBSCENE STORY IDEA,. THUS:

A DOGGIE GOES A ‘COURTIN’

So Shelia had ditched him. They understood, he told her time and again. He felt the involuntary spasm and put his head down. You can come back to bed, he told her, they would understand, yes, they always understood from the time his mom understood when he was six years old. She had sat on his little bed and had put her arm round his narrow shaking shoulders, saying, don't cry little man. God that infuriated him. He wondered if, when he grew up, he would be called big boy, which was so godawful a thought he wanted to run away from their little farm. Where they had a collie. This was during the days of Jon Provost and Lassie, and if one more bully punched him in the face and called him “Little timmmyyyyyyyyyyyyyy” well one time he got so mad at chief bully, Arthur, he shouted out in the busy greenish hallway of gunmetal gray lockers, feeling spasms coming on, ‘Hey Arthrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ and took a ride on his own shaking body, head first into Arthur, knocking him on his flabby ass, which sent the whole hallway cheering, but it was his turrets was the star, that almighty muscle jerk commanding his body into that fierce lunge.. Even Arthur was impressed. Detention for a week for Thomas and worth it, my name is Thomas, he would think defiantly. He wished Taffy could have seen this. Finally he had some cool creds. Taffy was his beautiful collie. Taffy was his life. His best friend was Johnny who was Black, this was not a good time to be black, was it ever? and yet there seemed a certain dispensation, for most were poor and poverty trumped skin color in East Grove. Both boys had hard scrabble farms. The adult Thomas sat on the side of his bed, an unlit cigarette in his hand as he remembered how Johnny had caught them making love one Saturday morning, but thought Tim was having a fit, a spasm, and Taffy there to protect him. Then the chilly billys took over and his body making like a cement mixer, he ran straight into Johnny, his head flopping right and left and screaming WOO HOOOO, and cussing(he screamed curse words in church, can't help it poor dear, including. as he aged, sex and body parts words, making girls blush, and taking great pleasure in seeing that.) 102 Dancers in the Sky Johnny ran to the house, after he picked himself off the ground, as Thomas was now writhing on ground, and Taffy licked his face with wet scratchy tongue and gaseous breath. They had gotten him to his bed, Taffy beside him, barking Timmy’s mom and Taffy, by his side the night through. Everybody understood, having been close to, say, a chicken on cold wintry nights. Right, Mr. Flynt? So, as Ed Bigelow turned to Thom, no longer Thomas, the farm boy, but Thom, the best-selling writer at his new home Swiss chalet style, in the HOLLYWOOD HILLS. All these people famous and drunk and smelly, so Ed having had 5 or was it 6 martinis? And belched in Thom's face, his hand on Thom's shoulder, propping himself up, asked, you farm boys fuck chickens, s'true? In a rubbery voice. So Thom, to keep from knocking the smirk off that moon shaped face, reflected on the major novel he had spent 3 years writing, TAFFY MY TAFFY, that had climbed to the best seller list and stayed there, and had been optioned by Brooksfilms, and he had Shelia to keep him sane. But people gossip, yes, even here in Tinsletown, and the object of the brunt of it on Thom and Shelia, for she was a lesbian. Yes, there was bigotry here too. HUSTLER discovered her cheap trysts and paid a great deal for photo shoots, where she met a sultry hussy, became a tart, her sweet innocent eyes seeing who knows what godawful things. Oh, there had been the usual tears, screaming, recriminations. Then that how can you be so selfish? goodbye night. The book and movie contract pffttt, replaced, according to two refrigerators wearing shadows and a midnight alley apiece, by another kind of contract, along the lines of why don't you take this and head off to--safely away, and he closed his yes, nodded, eyes close then walking away, expecting a bullet—please. He wandered into the kitchen, thinking all those drippy memories, draped all over like sloppy icky Autumn leaves after a strong wind bitterly crying why me? why me? And thought that was really good, then caught reality again. Oh Taffy oh Taffy!!!! Your girl leaves you, you puppy eye cutie, who had taught me about love, and who had blind sided me with a hay maker tossing me right into Palooka Ville. Another great one, he thought (the reason the book so well was because it was a joke as was its writer) then noticed the unopened bus ticket envelope, opening it.. He never got the laughter he had been after. One crummy animal husbandry joke, please? But there were tons of them, all his life long. Thom was not too swift, then the Barry Eysman 103 lesbian thing topped the dog thing. And he was so bad writer, everything about him was dismissed. He opened the envelope, destination: Safely Away, Delaware. Who would think it? he thought, the famous one way ticket. “That’s why the lady is a tramp” I HATE TV EVANGELISTS—THEY ARE SICK, PARASITIC, STUPID, MEAN, GREEDY BEYOND ANY GREEN STAMP REDEMPTION WHO HAVE NO FASHION SENSE, AND THOSE KITSCH SETS, COLOR COORDINATION AND THAT HAIR!—THIS IS A SAMPLE.

REBUKE

Hagi’s world and body and soul and winter were raw. Beaten raw, striations and bone deep welts clustered in him and on him as though he were lost is a royal grouping of red berries that ran the blood of Christ, and thus made him himself. He was fourteen this winter and composed himself of snow thoughts and broken bones, and the berries were night and they were skull camps sitting just off to the side of his vision. And he lived for those sessions. Lived in the cusp of other skulls that knew the world as it was. Venison fair. And served by bullets that brought the stags to their knees, literally or figuratively, and always, above all else, pain. That seemingly endless vista of it. Like the seemingly endless vista of snow fields outside the window this early morning under the blue flood light of the moon. Destination for Hagi, named for a Biblical character. He, Hagi, himself a Biblical character. Versions of the moon played on his eyes as his thick somewhat greasy and smeared glasses (he read till late at night, the Bible and the Concordance of the Bible, and all of Billy Graham’s books, and Mather and Barnhouse, these human saviors to him). Moons danced as he moved his head. And the stars danced as well. There was this continual show of strength and force in the gray burlap colored thick corded sky. The need of oils in his wounds. The need of pride taken from a fall that had not happened yet, to him, but had just the same. Hagi was short and squat and weighed close to 225 pounds. He was flab, called muscle. He was mollusk dream of squid sainthood someday parsing the entire ocean. Sending it sin black with ink, and then transforming to a huge jellyfish. Catching the night stalks that came even by his window, the sweet beauty of giving up and giving in. The dim sigh that was like a song out beyond the stars somewhere, that seemed to speak to the other wounds. The wounds he did not talk about. Did not even think about. He and father had hunted a lot. Hagi had learned at age five how to load and unload, field strip, and fire a shotgun. Father. Not dad. Not daddy. And mother. Capitalized when he said those appellations. Humbly, to them. When Barry Eysman 105 he considered the blood under their fingernails, and the strike zones and the need to push backward against a wall that will never push forward. And the thing of it was, the blood under their nails was that of their son’s. The blood was the need of sensation. Was the need of corporeal punishment that came for the mere fact of blocks of living breath, and how he had to do better than that. How he had to answer with servility in his voice. How he had to get those Texas diphthongs right, because his father was a man of the cloth. A man who knew the bowl of the world in which they lived. A bowl as though curdled wheat cream this winter, with all the snows that had not happened for years, made up for this winter. And there was the need that went to the boy’s square head and his shaved to the skull hair and his hands and his fat worm fingers that knew windpipes to wrap around in the past, and how he was planning to do that again sometime. To see the bug eyes, the terrified eyes of his victims feeling their very air supply being constricted. He was vast, was Hagi. He strode through school like a King. He was a supreme general. He was a general in Jesus’ army. He was the school bully who took no prisoners, who loved the Lord with all his heart. And who dreamed of his Master’s lashes, this Hagi, confusion of the general principal. That and what it meant literally. What there would come down the road the car driven by God. A Cadillac white and creamy right down the dirt road now covered with snow, to this fallen apart farm, that had three milk cows and when the spring returned a tomato patch and some rows of corn to grow. And God would stop this huge wondrous vehicle, and lean out to the boy, and say, like Abraham Lincoln, "Come, boy, we’ve souls to save." And Hagi would climb in beside God and off they’d go. Raising dust throughout the world. Bleeding down the exhaust fumes of salvation from Heaven and Hagi. And God too. But farms in winter, especially in a winter like this, required little more than subsistence day by day, as best as one knows how. And Hagi, in his winter pjs with the trap door on the back (sadly, even though everybody else in the county had indoor plumbing, his family still had an outhouse, so he knew the chilly decision made on the part of brain and intestines and bowels that said there was a run through ice storm hell to the ice house out house for a quick cheek shivering toss of human waste, and all the while his grubby pale hands lashing this way and that in front of him, to keep any spiders off him, black widows, the kind that bite chunks out of your hand, he had been told, 106 Dancers in the Sky and moving his heavy tree trunk legs back and forth as well, in case any anacondas decided to crawl up him) sat on his chair before the window. And he watched the crawl of ice down it. Steep window, and narrow and pointed at the top like a church window. It needed only painted glass. And the snow and ice battered against it and roiling patterns down it seemed to provide that previous lacking. And he was cold and he hugged himself and felt his large breasts and was ashamed. He was ashamed that he was so huge and ashamed that he could not fast like everybody else in the church. In his father’s church. They were always fasting. And Hagi tried. He tried as hard as he could. But sneaked food was worth whippings and that was all there was to it. He was always wallowing as though he could be the names everybody said he was. He was always wallowing in thoughts, in designs and patterns that the stupes at school could never figure out. And he was a gainsayer. And he was nothing more than the hands that held him down, mother on front end and father on back end. And he was a part of a puzzle that had to do with parabolas of panic. And that terrible heart stopping granite that was in his stomach sometimes when he was punished and the aftermath. And the constant burning of the acrostics on his back and butt. The eternal redness as though those parts of his body were attempting to make themselves into a rainbow and escape that way. Hagi was hungry. He was hungry for things that he shouldn’t have. He had dreams of that smelly outhouse and the snakes he knew lived there though he had never seen one before, maybe. And he was fearful of the rats that were tapping on the tip of his brow now. He had to make amends, he had to make the cloth verifiable. Because that was how it was. With his bloody underwear and the cloth they made him sit on after it was done, after the arm of the man who was his father reached far back and then whammed him with the school paddle with the holes in it, to make it hurt more, the cloth and underwear of age old beatings and new ones, like abstract paintings, which they made him look at each morning before he went to milk the cows, and each evening when he came home from school. The secret screed of God in the chicken tracks of blood and the broken and bruised chunks of flesh. From the paddle and from the whip that had once been a buggy whip in his father’s father’s time. This was a destination. These whorls of black and scabs. These Barry Eysman 107 suggestions that runes could be read in a holy way. In a way that only the true and just and chosen should be chosen. And this was the prerogative of it. In this small house, with the stamp small living room and the heated fireplace, but the rest of the house cold, the rest of the house a death trap for colds and flu bugs. And other extremes as though when he was being beaten, the thoughts came. When he was being torn to shreds, when he felt his innards scorched and flayed as though someone had taken match and machete to them, he couldn’t help the thoughts. The flat out contradictory thoughts, Christ naked on the cross, Christ, and Hagi standing before him, his eyes drawn constantly to Christ and watching the blood coming from the thorns on the Savior’s head, the nails in the wrists and ankles of his Savior’s body, Christ writhing on the cross, moaning, arching his back, his chest heaving, and Hagi wanting to give himself to Christ with every paddle hit and every whip lash. Hagi and what the black blood of Golgotha could reveal. Could rely on. As though there were certain circles of egress in the sky of storm and flame and God’s righteous wrath, that he could find, Hagi personally and only could find, and thus escape the flame of his torturous thoughts and dreams. And screaming, "Hit me harder, Father, hit me harder, draw the devil out of me!" and his father, a bandy legged smallish man with a thick too large for his body head, and his father getting into it and slamming Hagi’s naked cringing mauled stupid butt hard like he was trying to slam Jesus into the entire world, into the entire force of unnatural gone even more awry, his son’s butt torn and bruised almost beyond recognition. And Hagi knowing the devil was hidein’ down there in the secret places and in the ripped tissues that were crevices and hillocks and places where his scavenger hands, and woke up to find himself doing these things. Forgive me, he would weep, falling almost out of the bed, to kneel, I was asleep, it doesn’t count. It CAN’T count that way. Hagi of ice. Hagi of where the winter sheep run when the dream can’t find them. Hagi who was in awe of his father’s huge bass rhetorical voice in church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and Friday night for pot luck. This small man with the hand of God in his throat that pulled and jabbed at vocal chords, not possibly his. That played them like the most beautiful church organ there had ever been, this man who spoke for Jesus, who knew it, and so did everybody else. Even Timothy. Even so. And Timothy poor as 108 Dancers in the Sky were all in this district, this county far in the middle of Texasnowheresville. This distinction as though a certain whoosh of pain could seal it off. As though the caves could be silenced of their rumblings, and Hagi did not have to go to the outhouse, though of course he did. Desperately. But the ice of the outside world and the chilly terrors of death in all conceivable and inconceivable ways in the outhouse were betting he would rather run his drawers and be whipped within an inch of his life. But these thoughts were counterfeit. Long time ago. But he kept forgetting on purpose. He was just using them, trying to draw away from those times he had thought of Jesus on the cross--that way. And how Hagi had wanted Jesus to have his pain, Hagi’s, you come down here and do it for us, you see now the fun, but you will forget, you will forget and not care and desert us. I am humbly sorry for those thoughts. I am truly repentant. For that and the times he had dreamed those dreams, when had been Timothy nailed screaming to the cross, and not Jesus. And Hagi put his hard work hands together and he bowed his head and he felt tears running down his pillowy cheeks. And he wished he were dead, but that was a sinner’s wish--to kill yourself is to murder one of God’s children. The thing is to go through the trials of the day, no matter how icy, no matter how slippery, and dwell therein in gratitude for trials and tribulations even more than for the happy things that happened. Timothy soft. And Timothy two years older than Hagi, but younger as well, in an odd to define way. Timothy of the sad silkiness and the eyes that smiled when Hagi was around, when he came to visit Hagi that one time, and Hagi so glad to see him--but his father ordering Timothy out of the house, out into the crisp fall air, and screaming at the boy, screaming at the indigo eyes and the face that was so fair and so full of sadness it seemed the happiest thing that had ever happened in Hagi’s world. Not the texture of Scriptures. Not the flogging of the hunchback which was a movie he had seen once at school. Sadness that was good. A broken heart that felt better for the breaking. The thing was essential, that tableau. The frozen forever in the eyes of the old boy, of Timothy who seemed so very young, especially then, cowering under Hagi’s father’s wrath and that stern furious voice that was like a flock of sea gulls shot at in the center of the group by a canon, and all madly flying in all sorts of insane directions in brains Barry Eysman 109 that had gone mad and wings that had forgotten course and possibility and never would regain them. Timothy with the voice that had been kind. Timothy the abused because of what he was and everyone knew. Hagi smiled with rue now at that. But, back then, the way Timothy had entered into life and turned this corner and then another at school, but was thin and short and easily bullied, but never by Hagi, for some magical reason, and who actually liked Hagi, and came to him, of all people, for protection when the other school bullies, ranked far below in file, were too much for him. And if Jesus-Timothy could get off that cross. And if they both had eyes of blue pools. And if they knew things Hagi did not, and never wanted to know. And if they would come to him and be his friends, for, save for Timothy, he had not had one before. Save Our Lord. Which is all we need. And all we need to know. Who will not desert us in our hour of adversity. Who will remain true to us while men turn false and away. The guilt of meeting Timothy after school. The unused fallen down barn on the otherwise vacant lot a mile down from Hagi’s. All of this in straw and mites and sun orbs tiny and turning and happy and dancing from the openings in the rotted boards of the barn slanted roof down which sometimes rain ran. Here where nothing untoward happened. Here where Hagi taught the boy Scripture. Where he taught Timothy that he had to repent, he had to stop being an abomination, that Hagi was only here at the bequest of a dream--he dared not tell him the gist of that dream, or remember it at all, but horribly he remembered it in detail--because the boy was on a straight road to hell. Or as his father and Hagi and everyone else here pronounced it--hail. Or sometimes to scream to the back row and get a round of hand clasps and shoutings and more than the usual dump of money in the collection plate, of Holy Lord coming Mighty, HAL--U- LAAAAAAAAAAAA. Hagi sick at the sight of Timothy. And terrified of the thought of being without him. Hagi stock shock in longings to get away from the queer. There. The word. The need of it. The need to get away from being flattered by one of them. The need to set Jesus in the back of his head and strop himself or hit himself in the barn, with his fist over and again in his face, to bloody his nose, to ram his head into the cow stalls. To become a dervish, to become the dust of time and virtue, and to remember and dissect where and when he had come from. The needless desire of it. The needless fix of it. 110 Dancers in the Sky For he was both sure of himself and hopelessly insecure at the same time. And those fifteen minutes or so he stole away from the day, from the Lord, with Timothy Mouse, what Hagi called him secretly, and the giggles in spite of himself in his friend’s presence, the need of doting, the need of proving what was himself, wherever he had lead, with the plates of his feet and his shoddy fallen apart shoes and his burlap sack like shirt and pants, and the need to hide Timothy in the folds of his bulk. The need to scrape the pain, the stupidity of Timothy off himself. Like a bug on the side of his shoe. This was the only way he could justify the thing. This was the only way he could move further into the cross by looking at Timothy’s eyes, straight into them, close to the emaciated boy’s bony face, seeing like the moon up close, the pale little ribbon of lips, the throbbing of the vein in the boy’s left temple, the chalk white sick look of the flesh of the face, the dust of freckles across the nose bridge, close to the smell of dry milk on him, close to the smell of even more poverty than that which Hagi in pride wore. Close to see the stormy sea churn of sky. Close to see the huge baleful monstrous furious Eyes of the Great God Almighty Himself. To prove that was what he saw in his dream mountains that he climbed exhaustedly and wastefully every night it seemed, and woke up drained and feeling as though parts of his body had been closed off to his blood supply. And his heart beating grandly and hard and feeling pinched like it had been played in a tight pair of vices during his sleep. And to keep the boy from getting the wrong idea, Hagi put his hands on Timothy’s bony shoulders, on the dirt of the boy’s bony neck and shirt and arms, an attempt at keeping Timothy at arm’s length, to say without saying he didn’t want the boy getting the wrong idea, and Hagi saw in the eyes maybe a fawn who had gotten lost and wandered into a steel teethed trap his father sometimes set for deer and rabbits and other animals that would patter their blood down on the ground and become grainy almost black and white drained images of an old photograph, drawn in on themselves at being shamed by their betters, and dotted with maggots and flies by the time father or son or both came to see what they had collected in the night. And in Timothy’s wise wide do with me what you will eyes, electric charged they seemed, Hagi saw indeed the usual European painting of Christ, blond hair, close cropped hair, blue eyes, fair white skin on the cross. And at that point, this had happened more than once, but the last time, and it would not happen again, Timothy had turned Barry Eysman 111 from Hagi, had grimaced and closed his eyes in shame, then pushed his friend away--with an odd strength Hagi didn’t know the boy had possessed. And had run from the barn, did Timothy, because suddenly Timothy knew. Suddenly Timothy had seen it come to pass, like he had become some Old Biblical Scholar who had written a Revelation Hagi didn’t understand. And Hagi lay there, pushed over, his shoulders hurting from where Timothy had pushed against him, on the ground in the barn, the hard fall ground with the smell of feces from all kinds of animals that had huddled in here from rain and snow and heat of day and night. And he was covered with muck and some mud, for it had rained earlier that day. He had always been careful before. Always lay on the straw, sat on the straw really, and always careful to dust himself off before heading home. Always afraid his father might find them here. Might get the wrong idea. Might get the right idea. So Hagi the SINNER wallowed in the muck and the mud and the shit of the barn floor. In the dead smell of it. The cul-de-sac smell of it. And there was nothing keen in the boy’s wisdom anymore. Nothing he could do about anything. He had found his Christ on the cross, and had lost him, and now he had to run home as fast as his tired legs could carry him. And all the way home, he screamed out all the curse words, the cruel names for queers he could think of. He screamed them to the deaf heavens. He screamed them like noxious sick blue fumes to the few cars that passed by this crazy boy. Cars that then put on some extra speed. This boy of dirt and sweat and cuts and sores that he reopened in his run. As he ran for his ultimate beating by the hands of mother and father. As he rushed to home, where he would let them look at him, at how dirty he had gotten his threadbare clothes, the clothes his mother always washed and ironed and sewed and patched to a fare-the-well, to make up for the poverty of them. That alone was enough for a whipping, the biggest whipping Hagi would ever experience. And he slammed through the once chicken yard, and into the screen door at the back of the house, and into the kitchen, his mother turning from the stove to him, shocked, and into the eyes of her, he slid, and as he slid and she saw what he looked like, she somehow saw what he had done as well, somehow saw the things of his brain that were tendrils of night at the bottom of the River’s pond over across the way, the weeds in them, and the seas caught like bugs in them all swirling down and down to all the midnight rooms of stark black 112 Dancers in the Sky rooms with no lights or ideas or meditations or readings of the Bible, not ever, that no man or woman should ever have to see. Except for the homos and the blacks and the Jews. All their kind. Though we got to be quiet about what we say about the Jews and blacks these days. In public, at least. And the woman with the square face and the ache of having to live in such a squinted afraid given up a long time ago face, and bundled broken heaved over body, slapped the living Hell out of her son, and almost knocked him over, but he came back for more and more and she gave it to him more and more. And his father came over the little wood rise, through the curtain that separated living room from kitchen, instead of a door, he came into the kitchen with its smell of fatback cooking and its oily greasy smoke from the wood stove, and he watched his wife, his woman, his helpmeet, bash their son all over the kitchen. Fat Boy Hagi. Pig boy Hagi. With the pig eyes. Snort for us, Fat Boy. And the laughter roared in like sickness into his head, the memory of those boys laughing, before he tore them apart and got suspended for three days and got what had been, up until this last fight, the champeen of all donney brooks. But this thing that had happened, this thing that did not have quiet Timothy in it, nor Timothy’s wild fanciful dreams of outer space and outside this county and this state and this country, Timothy, gone with the wind, forgotten Hagi already, Timothy Mouse of the world already ingested in him even though he, like Hagi, had never been 20 miles away from their homes, Timmy who would go into the world and seek his fortune and never think of Hagi one more moment of his life. Hagi, in the reverse of the story of the Prodigal Son, in the bone blasts of his father’s lilly-white small hands. Here in his mother in her gingham dress, pushing him against the wall, hitting his stomach over and again with her own hands and scouring his face with her wedding band of gold. All the blood in Hagi coming out. All the blood in the boy, exiting. Because he had gone to the table with the lepers. Because he had gone to the barn with an abomination and had tried to convert him to Jesus. Because he had done more than stand in the pulpits of three country churches, like his father did three days a week, and pounded words, non existent things, sounds, mellifluous yes but meaningless without the deed, without storming the portals of Hell for the damned in order that they might be saved. And then his father stropping Hagi. Barry Eysman 113 His father whipping the boy across the face and breaking his nose and his mother holding him down on the dirty wood kitchen floor and all that greasy smoke making it impossible to breathe. Impossible to do anything but die. And mother ripped off her son’s flour sack pants down to his shoes and socks and she pulled down his old boxer shorts that had once been his father’s, preparing to turn him over and whip him within an inch of his life, And in his ache and in his knowing they were going to kill him, he screamed out, TIMOTHY, OH GOD TIMOTHY. And knew, in the sad sick portals of himself, in the stark stopping, like they were frozen, of his mother and father, he knew that the reason Timothy had run away from him, when Hagi looked into his eyes, was because Timothy wasn’t…that…and he thought Hagi was, and that meant Hagi was worthless, nothing, an evil, not worthy of being spit at in the face. Hagi made Timothy’s skin crawl now. And Hagi could not hide in memories of himself and Timothy, because it was all ruined and filled with broken glass shards of hurt and harm, cutting into Hagi a million places on his so ravaged so already sore body. But where else, other than those memories could he live at all? And his whole quivering lonely deserving to be held in love body was trying to draw in on itself, was trying to in-curl into itself like a blossoming spring flower in a film run backwards. But it made him feel, in the midst of all this agony, a little happy for his parents to see him like this, and to see how their son was so hopelessly screwed up and it was their fault!, yes, and then the man and woman proceeded to kick him again, and his mother’s pointed toed shoes broke out his left eye and fractured his glasses and ground the lens into the bleeding screaming eye ball. And his father fell on him and had a butcher’s knife in his white Jesus hands, the hands that had gesticulated unceasingly from the pulpit when exhorting the sheep out there to get right with God, to turn back to the Bible, to turn away from this world getting increasingly and hopelessly sin ravaged. And the shiny bright sharp edged butchers knife and the knife was drawn back to strike in its arc, and the boy screamed and screamed, YOU SICK SADISTIC OLD… It was God who did it, of course. Not Hagi. As the boy sat in his little bedroom, watching the sky getting gradually lighter and the snow and ice storm easing up a bit. Not me. I didn’t kill them. I don’t know how it happened. They were still in the kitchen. This had been some 114 Dancers in the Sky months ago. Father and mother, rotting, decaying. Pieces of them here and there in black blotted bloody clumps. Hagi didn’t go in there often. There was a grocery story five miles hence and he went every so often to get supplies. He bought things that didn’t need to go in the icebox in there. His father had a credit with the store. And his father had said to the owner of the store, in so many words, Our Father will send you hell bound if you make me pay for this stuff. Ever. Thanks--pop, Hagi said, and then shuddered, involuntarily. It had been some months since whatever had happened had happened. Hagi had put a note on the door and had written a letter to the church boards and the school boards, purporting it to be from his father, and telling them that the family had had to move suddenly to be with the man’s suddenly very ill sister in some city or other, Hagi didn’t remember which he had mentioned, and it has been nice living here, we do plan to come back home next spring to get out belongings we didn’t have a chance to take, so please leave the house as it is. Some people had come by. Knocked. Tried the locked doors. Went away. There was no phone. Hagi sat in his room then. As now. Remembering. Thinking. Reading the Bible. A great book for revenge, he had been discovering. He subsisted as people do on winter farms. As children of people on winter farms subsist. Certain children, especially. And he looked now at his hands, still torn, with claw marks, and fingernails still broken to the quick, still in pain, from when God used him to tear his parents apart. And when God would next use him, as soon as He figured out the most painful and slowest way, and how Hagi would get away with it, to do the same to Timothy. Hail Glory. TRIED HERE TO EXORCISE SOME GHOSTS—FAILED.

RAIN STORY

Rain, and his choirboy face, bed shadows, temptations in the joining of ourselves and midnight ticking to eight a.m. when he would go off on a plane and we would be apart for seven weeks. Love, he told me again and again, it's only seven weeks, can't help it, it's my big break, it's the shot at the golden ring I've always wanted, you wouldn't begrudge me that, would you? And me, no, of course not, I can't tell you how happy I am and in time, if it works--no--when it works--I'll come out there and we'll be together in happy southern Californ-i-a. And we hugged and he went to sleep peacefully. I had no idea how to tell him he wasn't himself. I had no idea how to tell my love that he was not even me. But something less, something apart. I held him against my left shoulder, feeling him dizzy and drugged with dreams, the ones that perpetuate, the ones than incubate inside a person who is adept at being an adaptee, who is adept at being a psychic morph, who is himself as long as it is formed of pieces of others, an empath who is not at loggerheads with self or with this formless identity that hides in the shells under eyelids that do not see, shells that pretend at eyes. And in the raven dark night, in the tapping politely of raindrops, I see nothing but the mottled pebbly ceiling of our bedroom. I feel the warm of him. I feel the characters he portrayed to keep me happy, to keep me with him. His name this week is Julian. Last week it was Joel. The week before that, Daniel. Then back and forth. There is nothing of time in him, in my friend whose real name I can no longer remember. We lie in a cubicle, a surrender that is made of plywood and plaster and longing and an inability to heed the past and move from its cradle, all nailed in by ten penny gleaming silver staubs. He thinks he is a would be actor. I think I am a would be writer. He thinks he is a would be human being who fell in love with a man who had never laughed, for that was to be his job, his duty, his one life goal, to make me laugh. To break the stone face. I tricked him. He thinks he did make me laugh, but I made me him and he was the one who felt the lightness of soul, the feather giddy tickle of happiness, but I in him felt nothing but the 116 Dancers in the Sky stoniest of silences. He is no one. I am him. I am the dream in him that is not his dream. This is the last night of winter. The cold is in rags, has been for some weeks, little snippets of winter whir in and then warm weather beats them back and into submission, they fall without whimpering. Julian was a man who hurt me, therefore Julian last week hurt Daniel, while Joel looked on, and in the body of one was the body of four, the fifth one, the man beside me, in the dark, whining, while we played larks inside his body that was no longer his. I am a thief. In a way I am a murderer. I didn't intend to be. We thought we would have some fun. The Village has always been a nice place to me. Always been colorful and filled with bright lights of brass dreams that can come true on sidewalk easels under the artist's palette, while strolling couples with their handkerchiefs in the correct back pockets of their tight blue jeans stroll past, eating a hot dog or drinking a cup of warm beer. The sun on the shanties of the mind and strollers become minstrels, while there always seems to be music about from radios in apartments of open windows and from cars and from stores with doors open for the noon day sun and people in their peasant clothes that seem inviting and cool. At least they did when my love and I met at an outdoor cafe, as he found me frowning, sitting at a metal oval, drinking a glass of wine, as he sat down sinuously, like a carved snake, coiling down into the wicker chair next to mine, but his face was kind and unscarred, his eyes were friendly, his voice sounded like it had butterscotch in it. Mostly in the past what I have attracted is pain, but that early Fall afternoon with the blue and green and magenta and orange marmalade colors all around us, with the music soothing us in upbeat, and the sidewalk crowded with people who had found someone at least for a time, a world of no shutters or screens and the calling out of first names met with cheer, met with the wave of hand and the touch of lips to cheek that gives me even a heartening feeling, he sat there and he put his elbows on the table of circle, his cambric shirt with its sleeves rolled up past those elbows, as he put his somewhat pointed chin in his hands and looked at me, it made me feel good. It made me feel that he knew and it didn't matter at that point, that he knew he would be a sacrificial lamb. Not to the slaughter but to my airy room with its wide opened windows and the linen curtains blowing in the cooling September breezes, as we lay on my bed, as he put my Snoopy doll to the side, as he leaned over to my face, as we began our celebration of the day and how it would be. He didn't become the first of the pain Barry Eysman 117 until mid October when he became Daniel. He never knew. He never knew he was an empath or that people loved him and would have always loved him because he was the second chance that really came. In himself. But bogus nonetheless, because most people have little imagination and began to resent his power after a time. It made them feel cheated. Like they had been tricked. When what was needed was a torque on their own imagination, in order to meet his. I saw Daniel Green Eyes in him when he first looked at me, this man here, once named Mark, beside me in bed, after he had kissed me and we had held each other and dusted each other with love and sexual teasing, and then as we lay perspiring in the cool room with the wave of cresting and receding voices outside that reminded me somehow of milk deliveries in the early morning city in old movies I had seen, and how nice it had seemed to imagine lying in bed when it was still dark and the clinking of the milk bottles being put on the front porch or inside the hall, the door opened and closed furtively, and then the carriage or the truck moving away for its next delivery down the silvery little misty morning streets. Daniel Green Eyes always for a laugh, always for a joke, always for a need of being approved of, and I would approve of him for a time, watch him preen against the blue skies of his dreams, till he believed it himself, till he knew he could make it with better goods, had gotten his patter down, had tested and utilized and then had gone into the world to make his fortune. For we are not talking about dead of night here. We are not talking about fights and squabbles and who is dancing with who too close to the boom box last night at Freddies' Steel and Girder Bar and Lounge, no, we are talking about the little turns eyes take when they want out, when they feel the fever that is brought in waves of something not quite right. A look not quite interested enough. A touch not tentative and appealing and suggestive as it once was, but, instead, too familiar, not shadowy, too possessive even in the slightest sense. There is a Daniel Green Eyes in everyone's life. A fabric of pattern and crosses and arms akimbo leaning out on the window ledge just as you get home from work, the body turning away from the window too quickly, the face too surprised, if only a bit, enough to throw the scales off, and you know he hasn't been chatting with Mrs. Grady across the street about the block's new launderette. And that first night of Mark's and mine, he slept, and I said hello Daniel Green Eyes. Though I hadn't figured it out yet, he was already more to me than a desire to have sex, to be with someone attractive, to have on my 118 Dancers in the Sky arm at the spring soiree or whatever, he was not Mark, he was Daniel and in time I saw that he was Julian the personable but with the knife hidden behind the polite words, the bite in the eyes looking for a way not to hurt but to have, and if it meant having me for a time, then he had put up with that, because there is more than a certain season with one person, there is always an admixture, there is always a knitting skein that connects everyone. I would think later on it might be funny if Mark once Mark no more Mark were to meet any of the triumvirate who had changed my life and embittered me and captivated me and filled me with such rueful love, if he met them while he was still him, would they know the difference? They were years from me and were not themselves anymore, as neither was I, and neither was Mark. That is the human condition and since nature sets it up that way, I had decided I was not to be blamed for my little games with my loves' empathic abilities. But then what was not funny was if they did not see themselves in him, if it could be close enough for them to recognize, and they would not, what about me in Mark? Would I recognize me? Mark had been in several off Broadway plays, loft plays, cause it got Dustin Hoffman "Midnight Cowboy" didn't it?, he would say endlessly. Mostly though he liked the light stuff, the Neil Simon and the old musicals, he loved to sing and dance for he was lithe of limb and almost as tall and willowy and graceful when dancing, as Tommy Tune who Mark had met once and could not stop babbling about to me, and in his babble as I fixed coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches, the room cool in October night with the winter grip just in the wings to flay down on us unfettered in canyon reverie, I saw Joel, my Joel, sweet and young and wide eyes and supple and boy enough still and open for anything and everything because he believed the whole world was a playbox of toys made just for him in mind. A boy who loved to be tauntingly giddily babblingly naked and loved to do all the sex things and see the raunchiest videos and then imitate them, making them somehow sweet and endearing, on the projector of his body which was filled with gold and silver currents and which took me to the mountains of winter and left me quite adrift when the snows came and went and Joel went with them one fine early Spring day and left me huddled and more scared than I had ever been in my life. He had been the center of me and when he held me and kissed the nape of my neck, I had never known how alone I had been before him. And Mark became them, one at a time, slowly, subtly, clumsily, because I was slow in learning how to work Mark, how to use his Barry Eysman 119 powers for my own purposes. We always had fun and we were together as often as our day jobs let us be and his nighttime plays and afternoon run to auditions a million of them each week it seemed, allowed us. I saw Mark disappearing in others, the memories gotten wrong, the puzzles gotten badly put together, the pieces some of them jammed into the whole of it because they wouldn't snugly go down at all though I racked my memory trying to get it correct, and Mark was not a Frankenstein monster in any of this, and we were warm and caring and we ate cheese and crackers in bed while watching TV and listening to Mrs. Abbertone in the apartment below us say, in one form or another, to her cat, "Anton, if you would like to live elsewhere, then you are given the freedom to do so, but if you would like to live with me, I would prefer that you not play polo in the sandbox every day when I am at work." And we would laugh and we would listen to that thick Italian accent, and Mark would dream his dreams of being in a European film, being a huge important European star of the CINEMA and he would not forget the little people who made it possible and he would tap me in the center of my chest with the holding end of the cheese knife and we would giggle and tickle and wind up of course making love. And all this time, he was from S. Fulton, he was from New Jersey, he was from London, and he was so rarely himself, and yet there was more of him there than I had thought, because I believe he had always been prismatic, had always been not himself, because everybody used him, and this is the thing--not to steal from him, but to add to him, not to make him yearn for what he could not have, but to give him their greatest gifts, until they realized that he had been turned not into a projector of their second chances come again, but into a trash sack in to which they had tossed their left over dreams, making him something of a sin eater, and thus their disillusionment with him steps up to a deeper level of discontent. But I knew him somehow almost from the start, so when I added Joel's boyishness and cuddly toy sex, and mixed it with Julian's proper very stable very reasonable and logical way to everything, adding that subtext of the silken knife ready for my chest at any moment ("my real friends stab me in the front"--Ambrose Bierce) and when I touched them up with Daniel Green Eyes' obsession with his looks and his appealing qualities and how he could make them more appealing, his coquettishness that had calculation like a dress pattern all over it, I did not take away from Mark. I was not disillusioned. 120 Dancers in the Sky I was enthralled. Then I put me inside him, to chase after those other ghosts and I put Mark in me to be alone in vastness and fear and doubt and more than a little shame, and tonight, I lie inside him and he inside me as he dreamed his dreams of Californ-i-a where I would be heading tomorrow on the great silver bird in the sky and he would be left back here to live in the illusion that I would be living in reality. I had lived in my illusions of others, now it was my turn to have someone live in mine. It is a terrible thing to always have someone as a dream and that alone even when they are with you, why not, for once, let me be the dream? I would let Mark live in me in L.A. and when he would be seeing studio secretaries who would show him the door out to the glittery sidewalk with the stucco palm trees and the toy yellow/red smoggy sun, he would think it was him in actuality, but he would be hooked up to me instead. I would not leave him alone and flat, and that would be an important thing for me to keep reminding myself of. He stirred in the night, and there was laughter down the corner or round the corner and there was some music over in a distance, the always traffic sounds of course, the flash of lights on our bedroom wall, the flash of cold shivering me making me climb under the percale sheet with Mark, sushing to him, putting my head on his chest, hearing the rapid heart beat, remembering going with him to auditions where there were maws bigger than the lofts, like huge other dimensions, to drown and gasp and swallow dozens of actors or legions of actors who trooped through with their "Dramatists Play- Service" or "Samuel French" gray bound plays in their hands, the covers half worn off, the pages dog eared, the books open to the passage they would read to the director, their favorite Odets or Inge or Williams or whatever, the speeches and dialogue marked with pencil and sweat and fear, their knees knocking and their voices trying oh so carefully oh so actorly, which is what it's all about, being someone else, being more than someone else all at once, that is acting par excellence, and that was my Mark who would take me into worlds I had never heard of before, who would put me before film cameras and make me 40 feet tall on the silver screen, and I would be rich and live in a mansion and I would be able to see the tallest building around and know that my talent was taller. Hadn't enough people stolen from me after all? Wasn't I being far kinder about it? Because in L.A. I would be me, for I would have to be, for Mark could not act worth anything, and naturally that's funny as can be Barry Eysman 121 because he was fulfilling all these parts for me, in addition to all the other parts he was ad hoc already fulfilling for former lovers and friends no longer in the picture, but he could not act. On stage he was clumsy and stilted and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he was a goof walking, speaking, for even a moment, but when he was in "real life," and when he danced, on stage or off, he was always with clarity and sparkle and joyousness, the kind of joyousness that was in his soul even in the down periods during our time together, for he always believed that those warm brass carriage lamps that lit up the entrances of brownstone townhouses not far from us but miles away from us, would be the carriage lamps that would light us home from his first world premier, but since dancing is not the greatest calling card for movies these days, I knew I could tackle the acting, because I saw the depths in him that he did not, and perhaps that is my great shame, my only shame over all of this. All along, I knew Mark, the real one, was there too, begging to be let out. When I kissed him, when we embraced, when we held each other on our first cold winter night in our brass bed with the sagging mattress under our quilted blue and red and green covers, when we lay naked on top of each other when we were the ocean and sea fitting together so perfectly, it seemed we were meant to be the same road after all. Under the comforting moon seeing us home, I saw the depth behind the Daniel Green Eyes Seduction 101 and hoped they don't get to Seduction 102 till I get a look at the test, I saw beneath the Julian I am so proper and so world weary and you tire me with your talk of love and faith and charity when you have to be a much stronger man if you mean to hold me longer than you will be allowed, and beneath the Joel love and fun and giggles and arm noogies and seltzer bottles squirted at each other and hide the salami and who gets to hold onto your ding dong today teacher,? behind all of the facades, I saw vague and distant but somehow distinct still and all, Mark, what he was, the richness of him, the fullness of him, and tonight I think as I put a hand to his flat stomach and massage him gently so as not to wake him, were the others types,? were they little characters inside their tight black lines and never meant to get outside them., or did I just see them as that, character actors with no character but gimmicks and prizes and needs that were so longing they virtually hung off of their bodies like silly tassels on the huge breasts of blow up female sex dolls? Was Mark more than them? Or was I wrong about the whole thing? 122 Dancers in the Sky If Mark could incorporate them inside himself, as he undoubtedly did so many others for all his life probably, was it because he was more than them in total? Was it because he had actor inside him, the real kind, the empathic kind, who was kind to strangers and small dogs and smiled at little children and made them feel wanted and loved when no one else did? Mark once told me that there was a sentence he had heard on a TV show once that summed me up perfectly. It was that of two young men, an older brother and a younger one who was so lost and frightened and followed his brother around like a puppy: "You're just a little kid with a great big broken heart." Mark repeated that to me as we knelt on the bed as we held each other, and I put my face beside his o so warm, and we stayed like that for a time, silent and contemplative, and he was no one other than Mark. Mark who would go to L.A. tomorrow, who might not have known what I was doing all the time we knew each other, who might have intuited it, a secret even to himself, and as I thought these new things, how brave Mark was and how cramped I had made him, all of us who had stuck our dreams in the personas of those who were far less than he was, that we had pushed inside him and he had been gracious enough to let us, and how I was filled suddenly with a rush of love and sadness and need and want. Him. Mark. I would wait for him. I would stand at the airport tomorrow and I would say goodbye to him. And he would say it's only seven weeks, it's enough to find my dream, my golden ring on the merry go round, and I would believe him because this night I hereby give Mark to Mark and he will be the best damned actor there ever was. And me going away after watching the plane rise off, me lonely to my apartment for one. But lonely for a reason and that makes it a whole different kind of animal altogether. Gives it a purpose. A form. Makes it something I can live with. IT comic book script Panel 1 I visualized it as black and white. Rough hewed. The kitchen is late Autumn dark. We come in above kitchen table where we POV man: balding, soup spoon half way to mouth. Boy facing him, thin, facial striations. Childhood comes hard for him. Eating cheese sandwich, glasses of milk each. The light bulb in ceiling gives brownish glow. Their shoulders are hunched. It is a house of no heat. They wear jackets, thin ones, heavy worn shirts, pants, shoes. Gotten from Salvation Army. The boy wears a floppy cowboy hat, torn a bit, dark rain splotches on it, obviously it is a treasure of his. 2, BOY’S FACE IN MINIATURE AT START OF YELLOW RIBBON OF NARRATION. AROUND MINIATURE FACE IS DARKNESS. HE IS SCARED. HE IS BEING CALM BEST HE KNOWS HOW. HE IS TRYING TO WORK THIS OUT AS ARE WE.. Hi, I’m Tag. This was going to be an essay I was writing for school—but things kind of got out of hand and I didn’t quite get to finish.. See –well—this is me— 3, and 4. Close up of boy eating sandwich, trying to be cheerful. Plastic bags on window above sink, bags are blowing straight out. lamp post in back street corner white lights leaves wind scurrying n whistling wind to which house wood floor, wood frame echoes in screeches. Little used sink, rust spots, few glasses, a dish in sink, old food, and old paper sacks with trash left of sink with ancient spigot with icicle to sink. 5, As we c.u. on boy and man, the cameo of Tag in narration ribbon on top or bottom of panels looks at scenes and lost and sad— anime style. 6. We see uncle’s face. shriveled. frame is heavy. not meant to be emaciated,. in wheelchair. 7. As boy is talking, we see scenes tied to Tag's narration: “Now I have a friend that Uncle Max says is not real. But he is. We have fun together.” Tag sitting in bed talking sighing quietly to someone out of frame. 124 Dancers in the Sky As Tag tells us about what his uncle calls his imaginary friend, we see the advent of IT” 8. Tag sits on bed side, night, so happy looks at open closet door. Narration: “Like yes, that's it, like uncle Max says I avoid people, Science fiction says horrible things come from voids, But It was not horrible….” 9. c.u. to closet, dark as a million tarantulas crowded in and past them, coming stately out of a winter land—a friend made of the house shadows. Tag runs to it. Narration: It was October 30th. The birth of my friend. It played games with me for two weeks before it presented itself.” Panels like building blocks tumble into each other. Each one has a specific picture. 1. Uncle Max with hand on Tag’s shoulder. Compassion 2. Tag at school. Hallway. Terry Philbright says to Tag who is scared to death “You want a knuckle sandwich?” Terry, mean as his name is bland. It is dark, no one else around. All of this can be seen as outer space darkness. It is eating like acid into Tag’s world. 3. Tag sitting on floor of his room trying to study math with book and paper. It stands by him in cloak. As Tag looks up at him for help. 4. Kitchen table, night. Extra chair beside Tag. Uncle looks at empty chair and says “Quit it cold turkey Tag. You’ve got to have real friends or you’ll never make it in this world.” 5. Uncle Max, construction worker, on girder of building Narration: Uncle Max was a construction worker, big and tough till he fell. Now he’s in that chair. He depends on me. (Behind Tag is his uncle in a wheelchair.) 6. Close up of Tag, dark background. So worried. Narration: I love them both. What will I do? 7. Close up of Uncle Max’s face. “When other kids don’t know you, you don’t get to know yourself.“ Barry Eysman 125 10. Kitchen table. Uncle Max, Tag and It sitting in the chairs. Soup for all three. Max, momentarily shaking head at empty chair, then looks at Tag. Wistfully says as he takes Tag’s hand across table. “You don’t play hide and seek with the other kids. You don’t play statues.” 11. Max says “Tag. you’re— it.” 12. Close up Tag smiling sadly. 13. Close up It looking at Tag. 14. Close up Tag realizing. Sweat on face, eyes wide in terror. 15. Close up Max smiling eyes closed smiling dreamily in memory. 16. Close up It letting cowl fall. 17. Close up: hello Terry Philbright. 18. Mid shot we see table, monster, man and boy. It/Terry opens gigantic mouth, like a python devours Tag. 19. Pull back from table. Tag watching Uncle Max and Terry talking happily. Tag is in such pain. 20. Darkness covers panel except for Tag looking Narration: “Well, there you have it. Played for a fool. Friends? You can have ‘em ‘course I gotta try to find a new friend. And his name better be Tag, or I’m sunk.” 21. Tag in Its cowl walks dejectedly out of view. REUNION WITH A FRIEND WHO TOOK TO PHONING ME AND CHANTING THE OPENING LINES. A POTENTIAL COMIC BOOK OF IT (SEE PREVIOUS STORY) BREWED THIS UP I HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH IT.

THE SHOCKING DEATH OF HUCKLEBERRY HOUND

What do you want? WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHAT DO YOU WANT???? A curious curlicue of a voice, repeated everlasting, as a hymnody of very stupid rest stops, silly and colored, the puerile embarrassment of being walked in on, in sweaty summer, the beads on your hot face encircled by guggugly oh gosh wow bucked tooth cartoon horsefly in dim weekday afternoon muted vacation light in the dun colored place as enticing as if you were to open the stall and find a line of billy goats in front of a sinister apparatus that looks suspiciously like a still, and you are ten again as you look to their smarmy somehow human faces like Halloween masks and you swarm back at them because you are once more caught with your pants down, humiliated. It may make no sense, but that was how the vibrated hum of voice and underpinning made him feel and more, for it was the way he imagined a pinhead would talk, just his long ago memory of his hermit great aunt Gerty, about 800 as she lapsed into a coma and her voice slurped toothless over her beginning to fall big yellow corn cob pipe as her voice shrilled a top of the muddy midway kind of spreeee sound like summer in a slum of the old country dropsies, not this big old rusty dark farm house as the smell of her letting go her kidneys and not to be upstaged bowels, so off go the offal into close tight dead stale air. Why connect this with that repeating voice till the man up. Thinking, what do I want anyway? As nonsensical as being held at bay by Elmer Fudd and as terrifying, because he used to know this formerly sane person`, a friend whose hand had coaxed the future near, then gone from this place and the man. Who was now the hues of this dark bedroom at 2:00 AM, as well as the darker hues of his as of late cartoon mind, as he fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on finally. He lay there for awhile, his thoughts still muzzy. That was the first time and only time he had seen Barry Eysman 127 Aunt Gerty as she went into a coma and slid down her chair like a boneless snake, which was the neatest one woman magic show of all time. He was the hit of the fifth grade for a whole year with that one. And in the telling of it, he embroidered on it, and was now looking at both Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam as they pointed huge rifles, with big black openings at the business end, at his washed in sweat and grime face. They were tiny little cartoon characters standing on his bed, full color, fully animated. So, having witnessed Aunt Gerty’s dying, and having been in the summer rest stop bathroom with the goats and the still, he was ready for anything, so he pulled up his jeans now commensurate with his ten year old frame, zipped up, exited the stall, pushed past the cartoon goats with uncertain gats gory with very cartoon blood leaking from the deadly barrels and unlike himself ever in his life, he strolled with aplomb, “out my way, chums” to the still, poured liker in a rusted cartoon tin can, and drank it down like a professional. Then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as he started the free for ale burping discussion on what pinhead voices sounded like or could there be enough brain in those broken squeezed in cupolas to emit verbally at all? The cartoon characters were taken aback. Thus all of them including the boy got roaring drunk in the summery rest stop bathroom. The consensus was (hey, the boy asked, is this real liker or cartoon liker?) as he and they walked out into the sun. The still, being empty, the boy and the cartoon characters being full, decided yes, the midnight callers voice would sound just like a pinhead’s voice would sound if a pinhead’s voice could sound wood, with a soupcon of Aunt Gerty’s last verbal admission before she took to the sky. You know said Elmer, that’s bigotry. The boy said flibbertigibbet as he fell flat on his face on the concrete parking lot. And then the man was back in his bedroom sitting on the side of his bed, the phone to his ear. Out of which emitted the nattering, gnawing, chattering voice: What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? “I want you to bring my cartoon friends back. Their guns are on my bed. But my friends are gone. So you took yourself away and now you’ve returned to be my self-appointed savior. You sit there like a judge and I don’t trust the jury. So leave again and bring back my 128 Dancers in the Sky friends. If you could also throw in Foghorn Leghorn and Huckleberry Hound I’d appreciate it, cause it’s been a long time since I saw them.” So the sea washed over, flipping the man into the drink and the drink begin to sink as he saw himself and beside him, straw hat and all, Huckleberry, with chocolate frosting on his smiley friendly smiley smile in a green fried tomato voice "and a glub glub howdy do neighbor to you" as the black surrounded them and they fell down to the belly of the tarantula for far below--ker thump. He ran squish squish to Huck's side, started giving him artificial respiration, then of course realized it was sheer stupidity doing that to bring back to life the ultimate in artificiality really crunched the brain in the real nightmare of the thing. And he whirled around on the bed, too late, to see the multi- armed pinhead with all the guns trained on him, and the corpse of Huckleberry on the bed, and Yogi Bear’s wife, with whom Huckleberry had been having a illicit affair for 8 years. As the man, now cartoon, but let’s not tell him, saw Ms Bear’s pink parasol, a light bulb turned on over his head. Turned off, shattering into a million pieces. Hurting his head a lot. Regardless, he raced to the parasol. He ripped it out of Mrs. Bear’s paws, shouted at her, you strumpet. Thus he began to battle, parasol armed, the packing heat multi-armed pinhead. Who of course was Alice the Goon, Come on face it, you knew it was her. So Popeye had brought a boxed lunch to the island of the goons. He pulled off the tattooed anchor on his left bulging bicep, threw it at the man, knocking him into the sea—glub, glub, glub. Sinking him down to Davy Jones’ locker where Davy was singing, more than a little forlornly, “Hey Hey I’m a Monkee”. The man swam over to Davy and asked “Could I be a Monkee?” to which Davy responded “NO!! LOOK!” and pointed to the anchor through the man’s entire chest back to front. “You’re dead, old bean, he gave you, your one last chance, sink or swim,” saith the once-monkee—and swam off with the little fishies of the sea, as the big horsefly from the summerly rest room, which started this woebegone tale, swam up to him, buck teeth chomping, said in that niddling darning needle through the black bun voice, for all eternity perhaps..... What do you want? WHAT DO YOU WANT?????????? “OK. OK. OK. HERE’S WHAT I WANT” Barry Eysman 129 “Oh, ah, well, ok, ah, sure, I guess,” “I want to know was Paladin his first name or his last?” “OK. Mr. Smarty Pants. OK. For that, you get one more question also.’ “What was Coronet Blue?” “Paladin was either his first name or his last. He didn’t care. We all know that one. All those decades ago, man, what an empty life, and that Coronet Blue thing still bugs you doesn’t it. They never told you ‘cause they were pissed off at being cancelled. Here’s your green stamps. See you around Ace. You bring a man back to life, see what it gets you.” Suddenly, the man was playing shuffle board with the other old codgers aboard the Princess line. As he thought, hey thanks for saving me. Then remembered the water logged green stamps and stuck them in his pocket for later at the gift shop. He fell dead of a heart attack two seconds later, alone all his life.. A horsefly stopped a second over him. As before, then buzzed on. MADCAP COMEDY THAT ASKS THE QUESTION WHY DID THE WORLD GO TO HELL WHEN “PLAYBOY” STOPPED RUNNING “LITTLE ANNIE FANNY”? AND WHAT HAPPENED TO FAWN HALL AFTER THAT UGLY BUSINESS WITH OLLIE?

MANHATTAN ON A TOOTH ACHE

She was up late that frosty, winter filled night. She had a tooth ache that was killing her, so she decided to kill someone because why should the tooth have all the fun? It pulsated with pain and that tube of deadening crap was just that. Not that she had to have a pulsating tooth pain in order to go and kill someone, other pulsating body parts for pleasure could also induce her to dress in basic black, and kill, this grade A of highly hot pulchritude brand of beans and a nice nimble can of beans she was. Throughout: THROB. THROB As she panty hosed down there in her tin yellow-lighted bathroom, she remembered a great mystery novel with an oddly important title, THE RASP, which, needlessly, was played up as so much. She shrugged, looked in the mirror, saw her nipples jutting against the clingy black pull over, smiled, growled and clawed her image. In that novel the murder weapon could have been a 2 x 4. Who wanted to read a novel called TWO BY FOUR? So let’s hear it for the author of…..thunderous applause. Rasp though was what your throat got in winter which this was, right in the middle of, in fact, and there was a murder ploy a poppin’ and she better get to it. Hell. He didn’t even try to escape. He was one step up from a stew bum. Sleeping in the freight yard. Head cracked open in the freight yard. Just lying there bleeding all over the freight yard. Ball of yarn untwining in the freight ya—oh knock it off. So much for foreplay. Now the real stuff started. Where? The Hoodoo Lounge. Where else? So the Hoodoo Lounge was like all furnished in bear skin, from the same giant economy size bear, she thought she would put that in the mystery novel she would write—someday. Sounds kicky, no reason for the idea, the imagery, but by then you ain’t got them easing along, so they will roll with an image the origin of which makes no sense, and you can’t lean into the story and say tooth ache person who Barry Eysman 131 is one stupendous killer even though we’ve only what’s lying down at the freight yard, why do you think this skin had to come from only one gigantic bear? Hey. Catch up. Story going on over in this corner. Bar. Hoodoo music. Dark. Smells like booze. He, a mess, says he is from Brussels. So she said. Love your sprouts. Specially the one down there. At the same time, thinking, yeah right and Ann Coulter is an Earthling. Any way, he knew the Brussels thing was lame even as he said it, like the word just dripped letter by letter down his chin in embarrassment, like Santa on his sleigh/hey. The origin of that thought can be tracked down, it is Christmas. And this one featured Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, the “Must be Santa” song made her picture a MAD drawing of craggy Bob, head swirling in drunk, dressed like an elf, tied to a snow board and pushed down a huge tall cliff of snow at a million miles an hour, singing all the way/hey. The nameless woman adored it. “Well?” The man asked. “Hmmm?” “What’s your name?” He was thinning of hair, late middle age, drunk, wore a sloppy suit (did it make him look sloppy or did he make it? Bet they laugh at all those high powered board meetings, in all their Brussels chairs…) “Well?” She looked at him. Get crackin’ girl, haven’t been this many asides since ALFIE. “Are we gonna make it or not? If you got two bucks. I’ll give you a cigarette. Man be” belch “crazy to give one away, ever to my drunken brain beautiful nameless woman in dark outfit who is going to either” finger counting: ”A. Roll me. 4 Kill me, then roll me.. “T. Let me hop her—which leads to slub category--” belch, drink…… “Well…..?” He turned rainbow glow eyes to her. How nice. Why can’t I see rainbow colors when I am sober? When could an event of such important Americana ever have occurred? Though he could not think Americana which was more like paint squiggles. Nice match up. “Well, how about that, jump cut like a movie. And we’re in a cab nice and toasty. 132 Dancers in the Sky “Which order?” He cuddled up to her as she strong armed him away. “Surprise you.” She lit her own damn cigarette. “Lady. Butt it out.” Saith cabby. She smoked slowly, drew it in like Sunday mornings all over the world (rolling?) and let the smoke come lazing back out like a sunset over the Pacific. “Lady.” She looked at the cabbie who was getting red faced and beginning to gesticulate, two things you never want a cabbie to do, when driving said cab. So she said, “Ever heard of a cabbie named Checkers?” “Checkers de name o de company. Wait. Mr. Oh come on. Him?” “Daughter.” “God. God. Lady. I thought he was a legend. In my cab. Royalty. Ah..say…” “Prove it?” “If you don’t…doesn’t, I mean…” “Aphids have it over gladiolas any day of the week.” Calls came in. He ignored them. He adjusted his cabbie hat. Sat up straighter. Wished he had shaved closer. When would that have been? “Smoke ‘em if you gottem. Sorry ‘bout 9/11.” ”Don’t worry. S’ok. We killed more than enough innocent people to make up for it.” “I’m from Belgium. These days don’ mat…God sorry. Mr. Checker’s daughter. This id your night,” he said, turning off the now invectives screaming squawk box, and meter. “You and the mister got a New York holiday.” She had forgotten Brussels. Who was bubble snoring away. She stubbed out her smoke in the out of time ashtray of the elderly cab. Considered. Nodded. She said to the cabbie, “Drop Charlie Nobody at his home. Right up—there. Pull over.” “But. Mr. Checker’s daughter.” “Do it!” So after they stuffed Charlie in the metal green dumpster, and she moved beside the cabbie, he said his real name, tough for even him to pronounce. “Just call me Hercule,” as she smiled. She said get me to a dentist NOW and I’ll put out till next Christmas. He looked at the dash. 4:47 a.m. Barry Eysman 133 “Park Ave?” She said yes. Oh JESUS GOD yes. He burned rubber, as he stumblingly asked, “Your dad really, ah. Knew Ollie?” “KNEW him? Dad was the main go between. He was a family friend. He and Dad wiped out 20,000 junkies in one month. And Ollie and Fawn and I made some deliciously shocking movies..I was Little Annie Fanny. And Fawn was….”

So you get your basic fiction diet here—murder, sleaze, drinking, asides, humor, a gutsy thing to write about 9/11, satire, clichés, especially the cabbie, a grainy black and white beginning to a Technicolor ending, a nod to the greatest artistic triumph ever, and a shabby rip-off of Roman Holiday. Not a bad ride for 99 cents. Too bad you missed it. ON READING “THE MUSES ARE HEARD”

O beamish brothers, come to stanzas of magic. Come to usurpation of the world seen as glass paperweight. This early morn of October and cold. Touch to Tangiers, and temperament, with feathers and ravens that kiss you on the mouth, their beaks in check, their tongue in cheek. Never more. And the freedom to take wing. To touch to Tuscany. To see the Mediterranean in the moment of ocean, and frolic with the fishies into the pound of wisdom. Broken open and find the need for other minds, far along the world from Alabama to Tangiers. There in smoky reliance and deeper dreams, making fog glow and Paris blue street nights supremely arch angel. This in tangent with the glow of friends round the world of orange bite and bright little pennants of clouds as the stuff of New York loneliness compiles with the bitter breakup of Brooklyn, when even stop lights stop you and ask, have you seen Garbo anytime? Or the breakdown of cars and the seasons that cling to you like turrets that never weathered anything but the barked streams of Algernon when you believed in such things. And eyes were new and "Other Voices/Other Rooms" were Joel with his girl and the mock of Gothic world; catch the center of the great eye turning round on Russia with the descending to it of "Porgy and Bess" and what they made out of that. Languages supreme and bright barging of Americans who bring their foolish big world with them, and always the canapés and lost loves and future times plastered in a fish market where the world would not laugh at past acclaim that never happened, and thus make fun of you for being a life guard who could not swim. There in the basking. Thus making the object of derision, as its desire to do so, littler and littler and then gone for good. There in the camp fires of Autumn, waiting just a bit more for the season of Spring which is best dreamt about and never returning to. Aunt Sook and the mind of kites and children and the need of the cruelty and the soft enduring philosophy. To conceal nothing more than a clotted Clutter nightmare that will not go away; that will have its own philosophy of mad blood letting, as difficult to look at as a Christmas Memory long ago, when a certain brain frozen cousin regaled a boy named Buddy and took our hearts with them. Barry Eysman 135 This then the dream catcher Frank Herbert spoke of. This the gentle world carved out of shooting rampaging lions, of looking at the world as a pendant, of secreting the hands round the image and thus catching star light or moon light or the sadness of the room over there cloaked in shadow and thus the tracery of a sight that allures the heart to its ventricles and places the unique world as one sees it, forever in the sight of eyes returned and returned some more. The overlays of fact more than fiction, of fiction more than fact. The escaping of a parrot from the cage of two respectable old women on the Orient Express in the resplendent dullness that Agatha Christie never wrote about, until the police find heroin smuggled in the parrot's bird cage, and the bird flying out the window at the cage's being vandalized by officious official hands, freed and away, my lost poem love, the old ladies not caring a whit about their arrest, but the parrot, oh please come back. And the old world and the old frozen wintry ice palace Moscow and antique shops that do not sell Russian antiques, but American fans and such. To the stillness of a beach, secret and pebbled mountains to run downward in all that long sky of blue, hear the touch of naked feet skittering the pebbles down to the beach and beyond, and fish markets and vegetable markets and the world at touch with the underground stream that says feel me here and touch me here and don't let me be alone for I am wise, the world says, and in wisdom comes the folly of presentment. And the wise eyes and skilled mind that says it so, with a wink of humor constant in the almost unbearable look at the world through the glorious terrifying human psyche. The price coming from the theatre troupe heading toward Moscow, lugs and dreams and booze and beauty and idiocy, the collect call of childhood to find the fairly fairy tales come true, this in the shell husk of Haiti where voodoo is coalesced, where there is that night in the soul that requires happiness and the dead walk the earth in half notes and beat time, and the world of the mountain is opened up onto at the top in the bleached shingled house, there amidst the ocean calling caves and the caves calling sky—see the blistering summers in, in Islands and in a train trip through Spain and the simple common humanity given an old man slowly dying. And the price of age and the price of not knowing it is never over and never begun, and the memories transcendent splendor, the carrying of snowballs of magic and finery and eyes once seen and never forgotten—this periwinkle world. This world of bright eye 136 Dancers in the Sky dazzlement of colors, and the lack of distinction of beauty that comes from poverty, from wealth, from islands that secrete Crete and in Crete the minotaurs lie down with the lambs, there of Terrified, Kansas and there of the world of sparkly words said in foreign tongues to the dinner rats that would come in the morning and find two worlds equally allured—the living mundane apartment and the world of alley ways and the betrayal of kindness in all the meanings of that phrase. Till one wearies and there is no magic left, for everything it seems is drearily explainable. "Make voyages, attempt them, there is nothing else." Tennessee Williams. Rush to the corners of the world like pockets in a pool table, finesse and smile at Tricking Bogie with the arm wrestling routine, all the ways to the nights where the painters presumed to catapult themselves into realms where boys dive in oceans for fish, and tumble clowns make their way in summer pains of Ischia, where there is the turnabout and there is camaraderie and then for no reason turned against you and you run because there is nothing more than the statue in N.O. where there are men who play long fingers the piano and reminisce of things and feelings you have never seen or felt, and have seen and felt vividly once you hear the music, and the music of the spheres are Bess you is my woman, and the need of common collective understanding as the Russian audience listens so carefully to the explanations of the next act, wanting to understand, and slate gray spies in the world of dour Gide and giddy Cocteau and the need of Pound to free and the need of old roués and once beauties now dowagers who come by to house stray dogs, to care for them more than any human has cared either for the down at the heels dowagers who never were, or the dogs, who find a little bit of happiness. God bless the little animals. They are such a comfort to the heart and soul. And to Brooklyn Heights where there is decimation and rebuilding, and reclaiming and redistricting that is never more than an ideas' width away from you, all the tolls and all the prices in the end being worth it, to reflect on the Seine, to meet actually to meet COLLETE, and to drown in the dreams of dark eyes on darker bus rides and the need of resiliency and the need to retain something more than the shade tree over Robert F. Kennedy's grave, that says peace, that says over, and the persistence of death chasing after you and the persistence of clocks the way they tick the same sounds all over the world, no matter the frame and style, the void catches us all in mid flight one way or another, this in coalescence of the village child who Barry Eysman 137 was bad and punished for it, the street thugs beating up a man in Moscow, and Capote pulled away from it by a friend, don't intervene, let it go, let it go, and the taxi drivers who cannot find their way in Brooklyn, and the old houses and the old sailors and the old men and women who squawk day and night of radios being thus turned too loudly for sleep and peace. All the fresh fruit from another world, eaten. All the lives drifted down into and seen with such precision and such dreamy fancy. The ragged clothes, the dirty dusty homes, the people living in the grub of life and knowing it and thus not knowing it, the difference in alliances, the way one kind of respectability can come topple when living in the wrong country which was once the right one, until the molders of "civilization" came to make their call and wipe out you while you still exist. All the books and all the words and all the smoky cafes and the bars and the drinks and the fears and the werewolf story and the needs for allusions and alliterations and the roof of night with stars that look different from the Athens of one's eyes to another's. Lunch retarded at sights seen and notations made without a tape recorder other than the one that flashes in what Harper Lee called the swimmy dreams in the head of the man who has in the space of a few hours taken me round the world, and in this world to see the fragility of being him and being them as much as being me as much as being you. All the needs that come to root in the simplicity, and all the roots of the dusky sundown roads walked down by the moralizing immoralist. Thus to an incident of faith and knowing that this is the right of humanity, the giggly joy of simply being, and a village tourist villa once for pre WW II Germans, now empty because of the slight discrepancy between one God's viewpoint, so they said, and another, empty of everything now but beauty, but the cock crows and the little immortal blessing of good for you Joe Vitale, don't let the world laugh at you, for you have made it into this wondrous bird flight in red and gold wings and stanzas book by one of our great authors, while the world that laughed at your past dreams now eat dust of forgotten and dead and gone without a trace. And standing on a terrace and seeing a world open to dizzying heights, to feel the air that is different in Spain of the terribly almost frightening clear air to see through to tomorrow and the door almost opened, and different in Venice, little museum of hide and seek wonder, and see the people clinging to their world and at ease in their 138 Dancers in the Sky world and at peace in their world and think back to the glories of "Sweet Thursday" by John Steinbeck in which a poor village throws a party for a shy scientist, all of them recanted from a war of as usual, madness, and a never known world of ties and black suits, all of them not giving a damn, but drink now and let the party begin, because here in Capote's world, people have festivals inside themselves and they burst over and bust open and they careen with opera glasses and wattled necks, as they tell their wise stories, drunk or sober, old or young, daft or sane, murderers or bandits, lonely or fooling themselves that they are not. And to endure the running of thugs after them The Rising of the Cobra, and safe at last on ships at sea and madmen who know where the wells of the world are dug and how to get into them and never be lost in antique nobility of jewels in Russian martyr homes hi ho again, all this vouchsafed, all of this in the freedom to wander, the different human joys and thoughts and dreams expressed in all these curious languages each to his own, sticking to you, and the rain and the snows and the mountains and the heart ache of bent backs and the beauty of the procurement of tin eyes to make real eyes see again, and tin hearts, with the right blessings of course, don't be ridiculous and leave that out, it would make it silly, to make hearts feel again and beat homeward again. Take the last glass and drink it to former miracles like Monroe and Brando and a certain tweed-clad woman who weighs of feathers and whose huge and manifold spirit and words live after she is gone. Here the dreams of New York, sweet lies of it, to a maid who wished to see it through Buddy's eyes, here the infinite wisdom of how everyone should, no matter how old they get, believe in haunted hotels and a ghost at least one please in one of its shattered Beaton photos captured forever in the bright sweet bird tiny miniature of the heart tossed into the sea in a bottle of desperation and there caught winter and snow and the summer ocean and on its way down, memories of blackberry pickings, and winter kids and skate rinks and lost in Moscow streets and circled by the skaters, round and round, in Brooklyn's broken hymn to the sweetness of a summer life— -- to the sweet tours of a messy soul, to the dreams and lies that are fact and truth, and nothing more than a hand of murder swift as lightning down on mid summer burn and scald Manhattan or the Clutter family killed in their midnight home and thus they too like Joe Vitale though for vastly different reasons become immortal while Barry Eysman 139 being butchered and their ghosts thereafter in the book or the Movie where Capote found horrors of echoes of echoes and the need of the past to take never care of itself, for it has its writers to do that for it, in remembered memories—there is a difference there. In places where running water houses are a luxury still and in American bullheadedness and blather and ox in a china shop mentalities that invade a country older than time, with bluster and checkbooks and wanting to know how hot the night life is here baby, and Japan and the foolishness of film people and the dignity of yet another country that has its own sensibilities that resists them successfully or not, at prideful rest with the human dignity and the rightness of being who one is and not having usurped that dignity and that humanity, by Americans who were always finding ways to get a TV in their rooms or to have in rice paper walled restaurants, what's' your spec-I-a-lity today? All the mock turtles and all the heat and all the snows and all the trips and forgetting that it is all made of ghosts now by a writer who is a ghost, as are many of those he writes about here, and all the words are old in the essays that are almost as old, but to think of it, to have known such places, to have filtered them through a mind that was precise and profound and delicate as the most treasured music boxes of ancient Russia, that did not play "Lara's Theme," and as precise and metronome perfect as the quiet bowing in the soul of a foundation of wisdom that manages to be a fountain of youth and one of the many reasons man worlds are built, to find the indefinable, to explain the inexplicable, to remember that in this fountain of white sunshine and bright huge light, a bird or two can still take a drink, and a writer can run after a raven named Lola who having landed on a truck bed and going away and away forgot or never knew she was a raven after all. And the book and the closure and the feeling this October early morning, to know, in spite of it all, because we will never get "Answered Prayers," as long as we hold together on this beautiful magical carpet known as our planet home Earth, there shall, in all that mink and ermine, and torn worn pants, and eyes in the face, lined with diffidence, and defrocked eyes and ceremonies that look mad to all who would look on from a far distance, until the shades are opened in their own hearts in the house at the top of the mountain, top of the world, and then they too shall see, and there will as long as morons allow it, never nevermore. All the snowballs glass dreams taken on trips to put in hotel rooms where ice machines crunch, down the hall, 140 Dancers in the Sky all the houses rented or stayed in alone with friends, are to Capote, as are our keepsakes, our heirlooms, what ever they are to us, in what ever shape and form they happen to be, and thus crowd out the lonelies in our lives with the sweet memories of yesterday, without which tomorrow could not be faced. To Truman Capote. It was a lovely, sometimes quite harrowing ride. From Alabama to chi-chi garden parties in Manhattan, to death in Kansas, to a boy named Buddy and his cousin Sook who flew kites one Christmas day, and who ran into my heart, along with their dog Queenie, and never ever left. You never missed a beat or a step or a sentence that was not worked on and polished to perfection. Your work is indeed, as you wished, like an orange. I JUST THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD STORY. ANYONE WITH AN OBJECTION CAN TRY “HOW LONG HAS THE TRAIN BEEN GONE” OR PEOPLE ALL AROUND YOU.

HEADING FOR ST. PAUL

Tim was running track in the chilly ice box days of St. Paul, MN., round the cinder path that was covered in mounds of pure deep blue snow that cushioned, so if he fell he could not hurt himself or cut his legs through his thick jeans, or his arms and chest through his cable knit sweater or through his warm cozy fleece jacket, as he pounded on into the snow, through the cold bite that he was a knife slicing into and beyond. The wind gale force on him, the ice air trying to blister his ears and the tip of his nose, none of which he felt, not the cold of ice burn, not the exhaustion of his body moving piston like and sure and swift and tall, with his eager hands gathering snow flakes, perfect and thick and white like feathers and tossing them back at themselves. The snow like a mantle of magic on his thick wiry black hair, tasting of his long eyelashes, covering him in safety and courage and valor there in the dark January night. With the moon full and the stars crystal bright. Energy becoming him and his passion was his victory and running was all the world throbbing around him, trees and empty grandstands wobbling by. He, pounding the world thudding inside him. Free, oh god, free. Not Tim in this little grimy grungy room on Mott Street, New York, N.Y. We've never been anywhere out of this city before. We're eager to leave. So Tim can be a hero. Not broken, bent, sitting on the edge of his too small bed from childhood, his hands on either side of him, fingers and thumbs digging into the ticking of the mattress, gripping the dirty sheet covering it, Tim lost and Tim ditched again, and me sitting beside him was like me sitting beside the saddest deepest well ever imagined. As I massaged his thin shoulders and felt his brittle shoulder blades and his bones melting in the heat of endless summer, in the heat of another rejection, in the stasis and blush of his shame and all calling into failure his motto, "Play it knowing you will lose, so when you do, it's not a shock, it doesn't hit at you, it knows you and lays in your stomach peacefully." And who needs a kid brother at a time like this? A narrow world with only a brownish orangey shadowy light shining up from the shadeless scarred old lamp 142 Dancers in the Sky on the floor at our feet, on the ugly green broken spine linoleum that had no broken spine any sadder than my brother's. Our little room, in our tenement, our parents dead, a tired beaten to the core social worker letting Tim, age 17, take care of me because it was easier to make paperwork on a dream, cut it as small as the heart is cut in a city, and take the pulse never of this tall boy who I adored, who I loved beyond all capacity to love, and for who, if I could, I would be a step ladder that he could climb rung by rung up to the top of our building, up to the roof and the top of the city, and he could look over and find heart's desire waiting for him, no longer this city with its constantly streaming thrumming noises and its gaudy half hearted painted cover up that is no more than a series of garbage can rattlings like a smeary clown face you put on for protection, all those people in all those rooms, in all those buildings close tightly by each other, packed together and strangers all. Without stars to see for the city blinds them out, the city does not need them for it has lights of its own it is jealous of, and that is enough. And night finds me sitting on the bed with Tim, and massaging his shoulders, and pretending I do not see him defeated, turned into himself, giving up on his dream without knowing it yet. All of this is memory, and the me of then did not know that dreams were easily given up on, that you could steal them from yourself with outside help, and not know it, like seeing a sad moment of a dog hit on the street by a car and maybe no one notices but a little kid who might have tears, the last ever to be shed, just for a moment glistening and then gone, and then the kid shrugs, turns, puts his hands obliviously in his jeans pockets, a fake whistling to his lips and he is going into the teaming crowds, thinking he has conquered, that he has won, but he has not won at all, but has instead lost everything of any value. Tim was not in snow at the moment, not in his mind, not in his hands that grasped the edge of the bed as though he wanted to instead grasp and bring to a standstill the city, grasp the crying babies and the smell of sweating cabbage that lingers in the hall ways from all the rooms with their thin doors and thinner walls, grasp the slaps and the curses and the angry shouts, and the city that went ceaselessly by, and tell them this is not the way it was meant to be. Tim, needing not the time to feel hunger or pain, just divorce himself from the whole lot of it, as we sit and Tim bows his head so low as I rub his neck. There must be kisses and lovemaking somewhere in some of these little Barry Eysman 143 rooms all round us, but kisses and love are silent and cannot be heard very well by unintentional, helpless not to, eavesdroppers. As he takes his left hand to his jaw, pushes his head left and right, making those cracked joint sounds that make me feel such strange horrible pain deep inside; he says it feels good, I should try it, but no thanks. The windows are open and the heat is frying, the city impinges, and the air is something it takes effort to breathe, as my hands work hard on the kinks in Tim's neck and shoulders, as I push the heels of my hands into his spine as he bends forward, or his body bends forward as if by itself needing the master's touch--and of course that would be me. The little fan at the end of his bed just blows hot air up at us, only half runs, is simply a joke. I look at his feet, small and narrow, heavily blue veined, with toes curled under a little, tuffs of black hair on each at the joints. Mine are far too long for a boy my age. Mine are also a bit fat looking. Okay, a lot fat looking. Our feet are almost stuck with sweat to the linoleum. You can hardly see any veins at all in mine. They lack the character that Tim's does, I think. Our BVDs are yellowed somewhat, for boys do not think of doing the washing often, so the wash line that depends from our window downward is a barren thing compared to the day time flags of clothes that stand rampart on the other lines that are made from a string spider and fashioned of bolts and ingots and steel girders that infect our dreams at night and make us squirm on our close together beds, as the world sings its song of hod carriers and dirty industrial nightmares, and for once or twice at a night time, I will wake up and hear Tim laughing. Not shy, not sad, not caustic, but happy and carefree and I know he is running track in St. Paul and I know the winter wind is running with him, fast and furious and all in a frenzy excited by the greatest track star in the known universe. All going by at a clip that says time is kinder, that says you have a motive inside you and it's not shameful and not secretive like my motive concerning Tim. Of the big ears and the nose a little too sharp and the mouth that doesn't smile well, for it's had little practice or reason to. Or his body that I see in swatches, when he changes clothes, when he gets in the tub, little moments my eyes tick to him when he does not know, as I glimpse him in stolen silhouette moments, between slats of sunlight through the opened metal blinds on a summer day, that make the white bars of brightness on the wall opposite seem like they are winter snow shine from another part of the world getting through, as though Tim's dream is right outside that window and there 144 Dancers in the Sky is more out there than a moment of pulsing longing or another boy turnaway because Tim didn't count and knew he didn't count but thought he did anyway and it's bitten into the heart of him so many times I can't begin to remember. Tim falls in love an awful lot. Others do not fall in love with him. It is his curse. Neither of us has ever seen the stars. Not really. In movies and TV shows and in pictures, yes, and we long to see them, we long to be on a long low wide field and to run through the grass that is winter frosty sheathed, we long to run, me beside him, round that track that he runs so fast, so fleet, that I can't keep up with him, so I fall behind, gasping for air that is so thin it seems to hold no oxygen at all, as I bend over, grasp my knees, and watch my brother rushing into the tomorrow that he has to find or it will be over with him for sure. We long for his St. Paul dream to be real. We saw a movie set there a year or so ago, about a track runner; it was winter in the film. Tim discussed it with me once or twice, how great it would be, and cold and all that space to move around in and not have to turn a corner every few feet, and I could see the unusual excitement in him, those eyes that never sparkled, then sparkled, his voice had true joy in it, the hands that suddenly eased and lost their grip on pain, but it was his dream and his alone, and he cordoned it off from me because of so many things, began to guard against it. He knew the territory in other words. Dreams getting hurt mainly, and never forgiving the dreamer. Those dreams never go away either. They stick around to punish you for screwing them up. And this one had to be his and his alone. Not real but real. Conceiving and giving birth some day, far away, hazy and vague and distant and precious beyond words, to a little notion that was better than all the so called big notions of all the big shots, all the so called important people that you could think of. But...how I wish his dream could be shared by me. Tim, who needs to have me do something kid like, who needs me to eat the runny eggs of a morning breakfast he has prepared on the one working eye of an ancient creaky cranky stove with almost all the enamel flaked off; Tim, sitting across from me at our tin card table with the morning hot and too brightly noisy that makes us both frail as house flies--"Come on, eat that stuff, or the welfare lady will for sure take us away from each other--" he warns, grumpily, which he knows panics us both, so I eat my eggs, spoon them really close to my mouth which I lower down to the plate like shushing them into a tunnel. Then to show him I've done what he asked, I would hold the plate up to him Barry Eysman 145 and all the runnies left would dribble on the table, and he would get mad and bug his eyes out at me, tell me to clean that stuff up, if the welfare lady sees that--yeah, yada yada and we're fussing at each other again, so I don't have to tell him the sadnesses, little, maybe, but not to me of my own life, like the only time I saw stars for real was when Kenny Buckport flattened me on the stair well one afternoon when school was letting out cause I dared say hello to Becky (who he thinks is his girlfriend but who is not). So four hours of practice to say hello to her and what does it get me?, a slap upside the head. Courage is its own reward. I know how Tim feels. He doesn't think I understand, but I do. So Tim and I, this deep late Saturday, nothing to do but sweat, night, July 15, to be exact, and the sheet is hot and we are sweating our usual summer sweat, so close together so far in distance, as I touch his shoulder next to me and I trace a finger grimy, with a ragged dirty nail (all my fingernails and toenails are like that, Tim's too, a boy forgets about those things too until it hurts because it's starting to be ingrown, or you half pull a finger nail off cause it hangs on something) down it just a bit, as he looks straight ahead, as he says, flat, listless, the fighter on the mat, no longer desirous in any way of getting up again, "Let me tell you one thing. Don't believe anybody. Don't believe anybody knows you're there for a second, cause if you start figuring you have a right to your piece of the planet too, they smell it; it's like blood to a shark, I mean no one, guys, girls, anything at all, don't give yourself away cause they'll drill ya and you'll know what I mean one of these days," as I rub the small of his back, putting all my puny power into it, feeling the bones and gristle of him, and thinking no, Tim, not one of these days, I know now, I know how it feels to be in the school library, and when no one's looking, who looks at me anyway?, to get one of those old story books from the shelves, the books scrawled on and dirty words and sex body parts drawn on them so crudely, and those dreamy paintings, not the stupid drawings made by idiot kids, remind me of things I never saw--princes and castles and elves, with all those gaudy words in big bright colors, those still, after being handled by a million tearabout kid hands, glossy covers, and you're in there somewhere, Tim, though I don't know why or who but you are, but, regardless, that's how it is for me. I think it would be nice to go get some ice cream, past the people on the stoop, trying to get some relief from the sweat box rooms, and the kids on the streets hanging round, trying to get away from 146 Dancers in the Sky everything and everyone any way they know how. And to go to Sturdy's on the corner and get some ice cream cause our throats are dry and sandy. And also because boys don't think a lot about eating and having food in the house and I know we gotta get some groceries so when the welfare lady comes back she won't depart us from ourselves, but Sturdy's seems a million years away, impossible to walk all that distance. Besides, the cold ice cream only lasts a moment or two down your throat and into your stomach, then you eat the rest, till it's too soon gone, and it's all a painful sweet memory, the worst kind of memory is the good kind. Best not to bother with it. Just get an ice cream headache 'cause I eat it too fast anyway. Can't help myself. It's all melting now, the world, like a painting held too near a roaring fire, the colors merging, turning watery, with all the heat roasting the night alive, with worse things promised tomorrow. It seems as though all the buildings should be sponges that soak up the man killing sun in the hot mercilessly blue stark summer sky, and tosses into the night remembrances of the sun that hates us and wants to do away with us, burn us to a cinder, the men in t shirts and dungarees, sweating on the afternoon fire escapes, reading papers, or all the women taking care of crying baby diaper changing on the ironing boards, nor all the TV set chatters all over the place, all of it discordant lines, like the clothing lines that criss cross our view of everything, outside the buildings like it's all a piece of cloth, the world and us and all the hard things that aren't hard at all, made tattered and washed out, carrion for the blue vultures in the sky of a summer day, when even the clouds look run down and timeworn, and day and night always the smell of garbage and your own and others' sour selves and other smells too rank to mention, where there is no snow growing, where there is no wind harvest. There is only yourself, marking time, staring at a school desk with all kinds of crap carved into it, or watching out for a gang coming down the street so you turn the corner if you're lucky enough to find a corner and run like hell. While in winter it's just black gray and the snow is sad and lost, knowing far too late that it shouldn't have fallen here, and it isn't pretty and it doesn't open any doorways to anything but curses that the steam radiators don't work worth an oink in this place and you huddle in cold coats and the thickest clothes you have and you drink hot terrible tasting coffee and you freeze instead of fry, two options, one or the other, take your pick. Barry Eysman 147 And the snow is going away from Tim, he doesn't know it, so I will be the snow for him, as our arms touch side to side, as I work on the slack small muscles of his left leg, his legs are pale as the rest of him, they are stick bird legs as are his arms equally as bony and weak, and he can't run, he gets out of breath quickly, for he has asthma that I have somehow so far escaped. But always, Tim and his inhaler, Tim and his stops for rest during the day and the night when often, he wakes up wheezing and coughing and gasping like he's dying, rushing up through the seas of sleep, as he reaches blindly for his inhaler and he's like an old man, and sometimes lying in my bed next to his, I think in the light of the dim orange bulb that sputters and clicks in feeble flickerings but does not go out for some odd reason and in the dim moonlight coming in the large window, I can see he has gray hair, I can see he has given up, gotten rid of the encumbrances, like he's that little kid crying for the hit dog and then giving up and crying no more, thinking he has beaten the system, not knowing that's when the system has beaten him. Giving up at seventeen is not right. Neither is giving up at 12. I wish to show him he can trust someone, but then I would be doing what they do to him, telling him he can trust me and just when he does, there goes the whole ball game, and it would be good to have the sound of a ball game on a radio somewhere around here, or three or four radios, it would be good to listen to the announcer getting excited at this home run or that base steal, it would be good to hear a crowd tinny and far away electronically cheering, so I could pretend they were cheering Tim as he ran faster than any of the greats you would care to name, and I think of telling Tim, let's get dressed and get some ice cream, and we could pretend we're eating next winter in Minnesota where we could dress bundled up on a dark drear January morning and race the low spinning black sky to school, followed by a bowl of steaming hot Cream of Wheat like on the TV commercials, International Falls, the coldest place in the country the ad says, and that would be pretty great. With maybe snow capped mountains in the distance and we are in the land of frozen grass and frozen ponds, to rush through, to skate on, to see what I think of as cold weather animals, like deer and the elk, blowing their billowy bellows breath white at us, animals which must be so huge and strong and majestic, like meeting God or something, and eating right out of our hands, before maybe eating our hands--that was a joke. I do have a sense of humor. Honest. To be in a 148 Dancers in the Sky world that has something growing out of it other than asphalt and poverty and getting whupped up side the head cause you got up the courage to speak to a girl who didn't even look at you, which is where courage takes you in this world, what you get for your manful efforts. Tim next to me, my sweaty hand on his soft calf muscle, then moving slowly seemingly without effort, though of course trembling all the way, terrified in other words, I didn't do it, Tim, honest, who did that, Tim?, let's go find him and beat the hell out of him, you hold him, I'll slug him— And he holds me tightly to him and he is like a hot electrical wire. There is suddenly something more to life than the bills past due, and the assistance program we're on, and some money every so often from an aunt in Duluth who we never see and who might not be an aunt at all but someone my mother knew once from girlhood or something and we will not go to see this aunt when we go to Minnesota that's for sure, because she makes us both angry with her drippy syrupy little letters in scrawled blue ink on pink paper, with perfume smells on it, always including little screw you homilies unmeant. Tim holds me round my waist, how excellent that feels, and puts his hands on my back and I feel the shudder of him, and I'm thinking fast, thinking electric, cover this, make it a joke, don't let him leave me too because of this, trying to tell him that I will check the bus schedules and find the best cheapest way to St. Paul, and maybe tomorrow or the day after, we'll go to the bus station and get on that Greyhound and get out of here for good and all...for Tim has been storing what money he can, dollar bills, quarters and dimes and nickels, in an old big Mason jar on the scarred kitchen counter that the ants troop back and forth on whenever they please (Tim always gives me a curfew on school nights--that's so embarrassing, like I'm a little kid or something, who made him the parent?) looking for this crumb or that to take with them on their way back into the walls or wherever they go. But I can't get the words to work. The words are in odd bulky shapes and won't fit through my mouth which seems to be broken and my heart is somewhere I can't find it and this bothers me 'cause I can't hear it beating at all, but I hear Tim's beating and that will be enough for a kid brother to subsist on for a long time I would think. And it is quiet, really and truly quiet, like all the mad sad screamy pandemonium has been politely turned off. Silent like the time I got decked by Buckport there in the stairwell, and was out like a light, (only this happening between Tim and me is a whole lot better Barry Eysman 149 feeling) seeing the stars in the swirly blackness, like someone hit a switch, and all the kids voices and hurtful laughter, the sounds of the street, the sounds of school and the sounds of the city and the whole world for that matter were just clicked off, and my ears weren't being beaten round by any of that. Just the softness of winter, just the silence of a cold night of frost, just the little blood beat in the back of my ears, and so beautiful, so perfectly beautifully bell shaped, the curve of no noise. What a rare thing. And it's not dirty or funny or goofy or wrong or stupid or anything. It just is itself. It just is everything. It covers over and makes my finger tips tingle. My scalp and my nerve endings all over feel so-- ALIVE. We are really like one person. It's like what it says in the Bible about that. And we're seeing not the dirty dingy room that is like a mirror of all the others in the city, that passes for what people call home. We're seeing the chalk snow falling down round us and the blackboard sky brittle and pure and filled with tomorrow going full throttle, and nothing wrong, they can't hurt you there or ever again. They can't make jokes or look at you oddly and go away without telling you why. They can like you one minute and all of a sudden the next they turn away, never heard of you, and you feel like a dog that's just been sideswiped by a car, while over there on a sidewalk somewhere, someone who tricked you once into thinking it mattered, but they're whistling now and forgetting you and both of you, going away going away. Tim and I press our hands together, flex our hands palms together, Right now, those map crooked curvy story book lines are the heavy veins in Tim's arms and hands I trace carefully, almost studiously, in our orangey brown shadowy hot room world, but it seems tonight, now, the shadows bunched in the upper corners of our room are not as malignant or as thick as they once were. I put my head again to Tim's chest, to snow banks of peace, we drift to sleep, and are curled together into each other, to stay like that until morning. He had no asthma attack that night. Now the consuming sun through our window and the noise of the city on full alert, woke us once more to reality. We hold for a time. We don't talk. We know so many things we didn't before it happened last night. We hold to those memories, please don't let them hurt us and make for another bite of soul to be lopped off. 150 Dancers in the Sky We hold to time. We'll get through this. We'll make it. As we pull away, my flesh stuck to his, adhering, like Scotch tape, then we are separated as our one body becomes two. How curious and empty and bereft, that feeling. But not for much longer. Not for long at all. Now that he knows his dream is mine too. And we can get off these mean streets, for both of us, me and him, I'm in the equation after all, and we both--key word--both-- have something to look forward to. And he will take me with him when he goes. It looks like I'm really that step ladder to the top of the world for him, after all. One that I shall climb with him and leave all this behind us. YES!!! QUITE SIMPLY, ME BEATING UP ON ME.

ANALYSIS WITH A LONG LENS

It's dark. Mid -summer night. The heat is stifling. This is a park on a summer night late in my hometown. I am here to nurse age and go home. I sit on a rusted park bench, once that bench was painted green, not green now, and canted to one side. You hurt them, you know. Even him. You bled their kindness and their generosity into your mouth like you were a vampire. You had to hate them and blame them because that meant, if you were honest with yourself, all those friends who you drove away back there all the sad lonely years could maybe have stayed with you a bit longer. You listened to your head and you sucked on effluvium and forgot the realness of their affection. If you had noticed, you would have had nothing in your life like pain, and pain Billy boy feels good, doesn't it? Raking yourself over the coals but at the same time, not knowing the piano keys were hit by your fingers, not theirs. They loved you. No. Listen. People did love you. Not him but why not? Because you had to pick up that book and buy it because you wanted him to see, and to run away. So here the alone birds sit and here the night is so horribly and non-traffic and non-cicada sounds quiet. There is some kind of aroma of electricity in the air. Maybe an electric chair for you to sit in, for it was unkind of them to not give you one. Wasn't it? If you blew one friendship, why not two, and then what hey the merry o why not four or more for me and my gal? And now at the end of things you know that it was so; you had to keep doing it because your soul would be one huge Munch scream if you tried to, not fake tried to, but actually tried to save one. Then you would have had to count off those innumerable losses. And that would crush you to death. Cause that would mean the most horrible thing in the world, you coward scared of everyone, you needn't have been alone; you needn't be alone; but for that to have happened, you would have had to lose them all back there, not on your terms, but theirs, and their terms were expressly this—be level with us, say what you mean, trust something and someone finally and at long last; but the long last got longer and longer, and you hid in millions of words you wrote that no one read, and you hid in other's words as well. And the thing of it was you let 152 Dancers in the Sky the petty stuff interfere, as they did not, as they kept their faith in you; for you to come around; you pretended you did; but it was mock pretend no matter how sometimes you really tried; but then you got scared and ran away in your head. For them to follow. But nobody can be expected to follow anyone there; but I loved them; yes, but you distracted them from their awareness of you because of the one simple jack sprat could eat no fat indisputable rule—you could not stand having lost him; and you made lonely after lonely to be with his company, which is insane then isn't it? They put you in yourself and said it's good enough for us, and you would wander about and say it's not good enough for me and they will like me better—predicated on what Billy boy? Predicated on what this one reminded you of, because he looked like someone in the past, because her voice was so similar to a film actress' voice, and it took years to remember the name of the actress, while in the process, the girl with the pretty voice and the kind eyes had given up and gone somewhere else forever. While you, you got to be a forlorn teenager forever, making up people, trying to pretend you knew what your scrambled brains and your plain face told you—the word Lenore— alone-and it figured in every story you wrote, and it figured in every book you chose to read and film to see, and what it another kind of word for alone? Then death is that word, but not for sympathy, you argue with the dark park voice and the park echoed for nothing else Billy boy, the suiciders have guts while you wanted one boy forever to say I love you, and you turned him away so you could be high school lonely the rest of the day that is your life. You don't speak plain, you speak in circles, you guess what someone wants to hear or doesn't care about hearing and you might just have lost the closest friend in that regard, in that-oh you hate this word don't you— category—and you have this vain sense of words you think are so important cause Rod Steiger said them or Ernest Borgenine a million years ago, and you are a kid watching lonely TV shows about lonely people, but you were to have friends and what in the world could you do with them when that would destroy your impression of yourself? And you had to categorize, you had to be the lone wolf, you had to be the silent man with the hidden horrors—whoop te do-you loved, so tell me Von Aschenbach, did you really love Tadzio or the death he pointed to the sky with his hand, and asked you to die of that damned cholera. Barry Eysman 153 So what is for now, for tonight? What is waiting back in that shabby TV 50's Playhouse 90 hotel room and what will you do? Call some friends? Whoops. Don't have any so why don't you lie in the hot room, adjust the tiny fan on your face and the open window and breathe the brick wall taste it lick it for like Marley, a cousin of yours I think, you built it brick by brick, as he built his lodestone chain link by massive link, and lie on the sodden bed, well, kind of fits since you never wanted to be anything else, so get off the bench now and walk the soggy soddy three blocks back to The Davy Crockett and pretend this is black and white and you are your father in 40's summer torn old clothes, go lie on the bed, in your shoddy smelly ribbed T-shirt and dirty white shorts, and do what you do best and that will be to weep because that's the only friend you haven't driven away, so just go ahead to it, walk to it, don't feel guilty, you aren't selfish, tears don't mend, they just are brushed or drop away; kind of the fun of being alone by not being alone; tears are condensation and once they're gone, no one can prove they were ever there; fits you to a T right Billy boy? Just like no one can prove you were really here, or even when you are occupying the space you are allowed at that precise second of being noticed—or more properly-not seen at all. You got your wish, b-b, you got the bulls eye this time-- tell me—was all this really worth it? What did you plan to accomplish can you even remember your own name or to what it is so forlornly attached? Wockawocka. MY THIRD VERSION OF THE STORY OVER THE YEARS.

GRAVE HILL

It was the last night of summer. It was the end of the world. The summer, however, did not know it. The heat on long night was intensely heavy. The four boys sat on the hill outside of town. Even in their place, they felt out of place, they felt out of place. Summer would hang round till October but tomorrow being first day of school, that ended the real thing. They talked desultorily of things of summer, the things that every summer, spider webbed them together, save for one. That one would link them tighter for the rest of their lives. And God, how they knew it. Their names were boy. Their town was small. This was before the Internet, and 3-D TV,. 3-D movies came to the theater, usually starring Richard Carlson against bug eyed monsters or gill-men.. Nobody thought swimming any thing more than summer in the bottle of possibility and cold water of blue. They saw in the darkness on this hill a distance perhaps further than they had seen before. There were certain rituals, summer rain and running in it. The total stupidity of running after bug killing spray trucks, regardless of Rachel Carson, who by then had died of cancer. Summer was the Poll Parrott comic books, not real ones, but free and the X-ray machine at the shoe store down town that people used to see how well the new shoes fit, but which children used to look at the bones of their feet, cool. Cool has been around a long time. So has stupidity. Many times they mean the same thing. Suddenly, someone said the words no one was supposed to say, to someone not there in an attempt at expiation. But he did it anyway to get the pressure off his chest, because he could not stand the silence of the thing one more second. Everyone stopped. Their words had not been words, but cricket sounds to make the air hotter so it would pressure memory out of their ears. So they could pretend being crickets in the darkness of the ground. The boys had become made of dark night, consumed by it this summer. It had started at about 2:30 P.M. July 10, and nobody slept the same again ever. Childhood would become memory of pretend reality, the worst of all possible worlds. One boy said, she called, his mom, wanted to know if I would like his Barry Eysman 155 bicycle, why me? This is called fear. Halts, awkward pauses, to be plagued with them all their days, Tomorrow, school, bone crushing boredom, could anything be more wished for? School would never end. They were safe there. That being an odd turn of opinion. OK, he drowned. His head hit rocks on the lake bottom, went down like a rock himself and he drowned. He ceased to breathe and would always be dead. We were on the other side of the lake, couldn't do anything. He followed us. Like always. Showing off. We didn’t do nothing. Harry idly slapped a mosquito that had been minutely severing blood from his left hand and had paid the price. They had closed their eyes, these boys. Time is for coming from, as someone said, lets runaway. Tommy scratched his cheek beside his pug nose. Another boy at a lady bug climbing up his calf. Without a word the boys got up, pulled up their bicycles and got on them. Just went their diverse ways to home. They did not like him, did not dislike him. Someone had to be blamed? Why not his stupid self? One boy, riding his way down the steepest hill, wished they had said an official ‘night, though they would see each other tomorrow. But tonight was difficult and deep and sweaty heavy. One boy remained on the hill, one boy always remained. As the boys got home to safety, their parents sighed on hearing them. In one house, a mother screamed because her son's left hand was gone, only a stump, gore, pulsing blood, as if amputated by a butcher. In another house, another mother screamed, because her son’s leg was hanging by a thread, covered in blood, pulled apart muscles with the flesh decayed already. The third boy you don’t want to know about. Outside of town, in the dark, a small boy rode his bicycle. He had a long way to go, and he thought he might enjoy it. Question: what’s cooler than just being a ghost? Answer: a ghost with imagination. NEVER BEFORE, NEVER SAW IT, THIS MAY BE WHY.

TINY TIM: STAVE THE NEXT

What to do? What to do? Mr. Scrooge, the nicest man in the world, has spent all that money on me. It’s Christmas. Every Christmas it’s up to me to sing a special song. They’ve always been sad before. But Mr. Scrooge made me well. I don’t limp, I don’t use a cane. The Cratchit family are the happiest family in Camden Town. I hear them now, getting the Christmas eve feast ready. Mr. Scrooge, on the way, with me in that blimey! Carriage, to London town to the finest doctors in the world, was somewhat odd. He kept giggling, as did the doctors at hospital. But they did a wizard job on me. Wait a mo, I got the song. (There is a knock on Tiny Tim’s door.) Yes, I’ll be out in a moment. I know Mr. Scrooge has knocked over—I mean bought out the toy store. And there is a turkey as big as me just waiting on the table. And that’s a big turkey ‘cause I’ve put on weight. I run and run a lot. But I eat a lot too. Got this growth scary worries me. Mum Cratchit says it’s just a big pimple on my nose. And after what I’ve been through, that’s nothing. Tiny Tim walked to the door of his room, pulled on his weskit. He opened the door, everybody applauded. It’s the loveliest night of the year. He walked straight and true to his chair at the table. Everybody was waiting for him. They sat down at the table. The Turkey was indeed gigantic. He coughed and began to sing the happiest song he ever knew. “Tiptoe to the window, by the window, that is where I’ll be. Tiptoe through the tulips…” In the most discordant, caterwauling voice. Horses died three miles distant. And somewhere in a town in Ohio, an old man on stage in a small theatre, looked at his audience and whispered right before the fatal heart attack, “God bless us all, especially you Miss Vickie,” as his small body with a withered leg, collapsed to the floor, as stagehands rushed to him, and the 9 people in the audience gasped and stood and gaped. Someone was heard to say, “He had that nice British tenor voice all along? Do tell.” One of those doctors in London town had such a wonderful device that made this story possible. And someday soon would weave Barry Eysman 157 a fairy tale of it to his little nephew Herbert George, in Seven Oaks, where years later there would live this miserable son of a…….well, getting ahead of ourselves. Any way, as the Cratchit family was lying on the floor, blood pouring out of their ears, faces scrunched in agony, as Tiny Tim kept on and on, till Scrooge, gnawing on a gigantic turkey leg, pulled out a gun and shot them into a hopefully more merciful life than here in the cold little room, for all window had crashed, and half way to Seven Oaks where years later one of the biggest toad stools…..well never mind. It was when Scrooge had learned of one of my competitor’s story that the 3 spirits of Christmas were made of drugs and a crude magic lantern show, that though I leave that to you to find or one S.K. that he went looking for revenge and found it. Consider this a long about way of Ebie’s saying, ”Go on pull thee little party cracker.” In other words, Humbug. TO JIM THOMPSON, ERSKINE CALDWELL AND CALDER WILLINGHAM

THE WITCH

The triangular pile of snow on the fence post to the left of the gate looked like a witch's hat. The wind was searing and almost burning cold. It hurt the woman's ears. Cut into her face, her eyes. The sound was an echo of cotton round her. The snow fell heavily. In blue shadow drifts. And Aggie wished she was a witch, that she could put on that witch's hat; wished she had magical powers; wished that she was anything other than herself. Why had the snow made that formation on the post and why had Marcie come to stay with her? It seemed, the snow pile on the post, which she had put one frozen hand out to touch, then had drawn back, was also like the kind of snuffer to put out candles late at night before bedtime, in Gothic movies Aggie sometimes watched when there was nothing else to do and she decided to laugh dryly at a television bodice ripper; and bedtime reminded her of Marcie, as did almost anything these days. There was a short in Aggie, a lack of spark, this small boned woman with the thinning hair that was snow covered now. People believed that only men lost their hair as they aged. She had believed it too for a time. Until it had started happening to her. And then she noticed how many other women her age, and, shudder, younger than her, were also balding. Odd things, not noticed, were noticed by her now. And Marcie, 17, niece, come-home was why. It was three weeks before Christmas and the snow was sparkly and the air felt edge of the world. And Aggie, social worker, was such a hypocrite, as she moved her cold hands into the warm pockets of her fleece lined parka, as she huddled herself together, chin tucked down, and walked back to the small house, stepping through the thick snow, and on the flat stones in place of a sidewalk, that led to the rickety snow laden back porch steps, up to the screen door with patches of it pulled away and never repaired. She shoved open the always sticky kitchen door, and walked into the heat blast of the kitchen. The oven hot, and one eye of the stove on, made things toast warm that shriveled her and ate sand into her bones. She sighed, got her bearings, and looked at breakfast, from which she had taken a moment or two respite, to go outside, to clear Barry Eysman 159 her head, to get up the nerve. She shook the snow from her leather Oxfords. She felt blistered all over. She took off her parka, new because warm, modern because cold got to her so the last few years, shrugged it off, revealing her severe gray dress buttoned up to her neck, snow flakes melting on it and in the collar, chilling her neck, her hair pulled back into a sleek bun, her glasses cats' eye glasses circa 1960 or so. She put the parka neatly on the back of one of the two yellow ladder backed chairs at the kitchen table. She walked across the saggy yellow linoleum flooring that bunched in places. She broke some eggs, holding them over the grease coated skillet that was popping, as she dodged the spatters from long experience, and let the eggs sizzle for a time before turning them over. Marcie liked scrambled eggs, and she always did what Marcie wanted. But, no, that was not so. Why did Aggie think that? Pretending, did Aggie, that she did not notice that conical witches hat candle snuffer outer pile of snow on the fence post in the gray world of winter also looked like a young girl's breast, still small, still childish but with woman hood now inside it and working its construction and wiles and firming the nipple to bud and to tighten in sexual heat, hiding intently, sagaciously, slyly, naughtily, against bra, tender and dismaying, giving vent to whatever was the pain of adolescence and its unobtainable goal, which in the case of Marcie was, Aggie knew, a choice between three of four pimply faced voice cracking boys who were no great shakes at anything other than they seemed to like her, and Marcie was in love. But always in the wrong way. Always in a know it all way as though her aunt was too stupid to see. It hurt Aggie, this blatant obeying of her niece's, it would almost be a relief to find open defiance in her instead, she thought, as she stirred the eggs with the spatula; the dim yellow whispery morning light coming in slats through the blinds on the windows in back and to the side of the old white dented dangerous stove. Aggie sipped her coffee from the cup beside her on the speckled oil paper covered counter, as she conscientiously finished the eggs. She did love Marcie. As any aunt loved their niece. Especially when their niece had been through what Marcie had. Things that happen to girls in this world. No one would believe. Never though in Aggie's day, the days back when of P's and Q's and service with a smile only make sure its for business purposes only. Tight white collars were not bad things. 160 Dancers in the Sky Aggie dressed like an outcast from pain, as she always had, because her mother had been sensible too. Had warned her of boys, of men, of what sadnesses happen, and how it can turn you mean as a snake, and she did not want to see that happen to Aggie. And also because it proved she could be other than she was, but if she lost this identity, sleek in efficiency, bloodless in nature, sharp and sometimes bluntly rude always for the sake of her clients of course, then she lost any chance to try another identity, lost any chance to put this one off and slip into a new one. But she didn't want to change character. She wanted to be what she was. And if spinster was good enough, then she didn't have to worry too much about make up or making a good impression or waiting the night away for someone met at a bar or some such to be calling her on the phone. She had her duties at work. She did them well. She was admired there. There was no need of going outside the box. Anyway, she was who she was, and even if she could be someone else, who would call her? She would waste her life away still, hoping. And anything was better than that. Hope is a lie. Carrot on a stick. Hope is what kills. Not the lack of it. She ignored as much of it as she could, did it, thought of no one's body, no specific person at all, felt weary beyond expression and her face seemed tight, the skin more parchment drawn. She went and did the dishes or watched PBS for a while or one of those Lifetime movies she guiltily enjoyed. Culture and knowledge were everything for her. Guilt was what it was and she would not have it any other way. And then Marcie came to live with her. Marcie with the big suitcases, the little girl face, the woman's body, the too tight clothes, the fearful expression on her face that also bled a kind of giddy irrepressible happiness. And then the house was suddenly filled with an untenable thing with a name like "life." Like "freedom." Conjure words. Voodoo words. Incautious words. A small bright tight stretched to the breaking point dazzling colored red balloon, which was Marcie, she and it that Aggie was forced up against, but never would Aggie enter inside it. Not ever. For Aggie would have no part in that of course, but it was still around her; not that she had not allowed Marcie to bring her friends over, and she had quite a few, not that she had not disallowed her niece to lock her bedroom door or play some of her CDs as long as they were on low, and only after homework was finished, and she let her niece talk on the phone for one hour no more each night, before ten o'clock which was the girl's Barry Eysman 161 bedtime. And Aggie made sure her niece was in bed on the dot of it each night. Even on weekends. Marcie pretended to listen. The clothes that Aggie bought Marcie, no matter how loose fitting, still clung to Marcie's taut body which paid no attention to Aggie or to the preacher each Sunday morning, but paid attention only to itself, only to the fruit of itself, the burgeoning blossoming.. And the taut, strong, poking out breasts, and the legs that were longer and with more curves every single day or so it appeared, and which looked so sheer and so sexy even though the girl was never permitted to wear stockings. What has God wrought here? Aggie would wonder. Is it to test my sense of duty? Why put the girl through the torture of being a sex pot? Why, God? Marcie of the creamy dreamy face and the too red lips (naturally red, nature's own mistake, nature's own devising for the devouring of boys and men-- again, God, why punish her for Eve? Her. Me or Marcie? Aggie did not let her niece wear make up, especially not lipstick, and would have been appalled that Marcie and some of her girl friends who also were caught in webs of strictness would duck into a woods on the way to school and use confiscated cosmetics on their faces, especially on their lips, blue was the color favored by Sue Ann, but Marcie and the others stuck with red, bright hot burning red, all to break the rules. And for Marcie--to make her aunt less of a harridan. To somehow or other make Aggie care about her. Marcie's face seemed born with the right complexion that made make up ineffectual and a conceit. And Aggie hated conceits. It was all so terribly strained, especially this holiday season, the first one that Marcie and Aggie were to spend together, and the girl, obeying more suffocatingly, more honey sweet about it, so furious in her stilted obeying, desired to be let out of jail. She called her aunt, Aunt or Auntie, (saying the Aunt with first letter nuanced into a capital) and never used the woman's first name alone. Her aunt had no need to fear Marcie's becoming pregnant by boys. For boys did not interest Marcie at all. Instead she thought of girls, because that was what occupied her heart,, her needs. Still the thought came to her, that she, Aggie, did have feelings, no matter how hard she had worked to kill them, and somehow or other, this was Marcie's fault. As though Marcie had brought them with her that day when she came to live here. Had found them somewhere and knew they needed to be home. When the eggs and toast with butter and marmalade were ready, and Aggie had taken the browning steaming hot rolls out of the oven, 162 Dancers in the Sky she turned off the red burning eye and the oven, poured the orange juice, the coffee, only for herself, and arranged it all on the scarred scratched wooden kitchen table, and called Marcie in for breakfast. She hoped she didn't have to wake the girl up again. One time, when she had had to shake her from her dream, Marcie took such a long time to open her eyes, and she snuggled into herself kitten-like, full bodily, sensuously. The girl had bee unaware, of course, even when she pushed the cover down a bit past her breasts, and stroked her hair with her fingers on the pillow, from all of which Aggie had turned, and fled. She had not heard the girl laugh behind her as she had closed her niece's bedroom door. She had not. There was a curtain in the doorway of the shadowy hot small sparse kitchen, separating the kitchen from the living room. There had never been a door there, not in Aggie's life time or in her parents' either, for this house had originally been built for her parents when they had just gotten married. Aggie had grown up here. She had entered as into a nunnery here and she had grown, early on, contented with it. Content with never looking out windows. Ever. Or even considering that anyone was looking in. Aggie was looking in her direction, as Marcie came through the curtain, like a show girl through a stage curtain, expecting thunderous applause. Languorous. Sleep filled. A hand to her eyes, brushing the bruises of dreams away. She was wearing only a baby doll nightie with blue ruffles on the end that extended barely past her crotch. Where in god's name had she gotten such a thing? Aggie's brain exploded with fear and anger and irritation. She wanted to run out the back door, stumble down the tumble down steps, to the snow and the cold and the gray sky and out the fence and running through the field and never ever to stop. But she could only stand and watch. Her niece's hair was a lustrous auburn, and this morning it wreathed round her face and rested lightly on her shoulders, was not pinned up and back as Auntie had always insisted, no matter the occasion, no matter how Marcie chafed in the doing of what was wanted.. There was the distinct smell of perfume from her niece, a dizzy, noxious smell. Perfume of any kind not allowed in the house at all. Aggie's eyes were frozen on the girl. Magnetized. It was like an inner world that had made it out of that tight bright squeaky balloon of red that was Marcie, and now Aggie, who had held it in for so long, ignored it, thought of nothing else but it, was helpless to do anything to peer into its perimeters. As for Marcie: her eyes hopefully Barry Eysman 163 hauntingly half closed, as though she was seeing through cigarette smoke at nightclub, she felt she as though she was a pimply faced willful little six year old brat standing in naked shame in front of the silent lethal wrath of God. As though lightning would strike her dead any second. But she had made up her mind to go through with this, and go through with it, she would. Even if it killed her. Either one of them. Her aunt's eyes were treed like a frightened cat, on the rise and fall of the girl's breasts which were larger than Aggie had assumed, had imagined?, soft glowy pert teasing mounds of rounded flesh with heavy dark nipples that shown through the sheer bluey material of the nightie. The flesh of them shown through. The meat of them. Lot’s wife at Sodom. The girl appeared so much larger, so much more a woman, more- -there-- to her aunt, not the small girl she remembered even from yesterday. As it seemed being nearly naked unleashed a giant that had been hiding in the girl who Aggie thought had been diminutive, even with the breasts and legs. Had Aggie even seen her niece at all before? Marcie's legs, as she leaned on her left hip, and put one leg forward, and put her right hand above her to the joist of the doorway as though she were modeling herself on Gypsy Rose Lee, ( though how would Aggie know of her?, save for the movie?) lovely and tender and delicate and dimpled and molded in such outthrust sexuality and animalness and the altogether need that they be placed round a lover's neck, the dreadful thoughts--god, she was corrupting her aunt who had always been so sure she was there to protect her stupid giggly innocent niece, those legs that seemed as though they might have been formed by pink clouds on an especially creative sun drenched, sex drenched summer meadow of a day. Aggie felt these things as well as thought them. It seemed winter had come inside forever to stay. And she hated Marcie for that, absolutely riotously hated her for it, and for so much more she had not been aware of before. Aggie crashed into all of it. The emotions. The vice of it. Everything countered. Nothing had been held back from all those years, all the pains. The room around her seemed to have broken off into a sea of danger and fear cruel laughter and all the crumbling walls of the world came stumbling down on her, and the walls were all the chances wasted, (there had been no chances!) all the steps not taken, (she took only all the right ones, the approved ones) all the times she had turned her face away when there might have been a possibility of something 164 Dancers in the Sky more than she had, (there had been nothing to turn away from) for it was all a runaway life for Aggie, (the world ran, left me in its dust, but I maintained integrity) but for Marcie it was a life to stay and see and feel and kiss and enter and experience. It seemed Marcie was now fully locked into her role, her life, as a stripper, Marcie stood there brazenly, and almost unwillingly, as though her body had spurred her to this, without herself personally wanting to do it. And Marcie, trying to hide her fear of this woman, go through with it, Marcie's mind buzzed, go through with this and let nothing stop you, it's so important, your entire world, your entire life is riding on this. The girl's tongue snaked out of her mouth and somehow all of itself leered at the old woman. In another circumstance, though Aggie did not know what that circumstance might be, even when she could think back on this clearly, she would have told the girl to stop acting like a spoiled brat trying to be Marilyn Monroe and embarrassing herself and accomplishing nothing more than being an absolute fool who should be put in a mad house for the things she was now doing. She would have laughed at the girl for being such an infant. She would have shamed her mercilessly. It seemed Aggie had gone through her whole life for this moment, unknowing of course that she had been doing so. Now that it was here, now that she could prove her mettle, she could not. Not this, and not now. And in all of it, Marcie seemed still innocent, still seemed like the little girl Aggie had known from time to time over the years. That the girl was innocent made the girl more sexy, made her more desirable, made Aggie's gorge rise but that was not the only thing in her that rose, that tipped over, that stumbled falling down inside of her, and Aggie standing there like a fool in her sensible shoes, her dress plastered by perspiration, no, by sweat, her eyes staring like pain at its creator, at her naked niece, as though the girl had finally taken off the human part of herself and displayed her true alienness, though of course to Marcie it was just the other way around, The heat from the stove had made the kitchen a furnace. Big fat tendrils of overpowering throat drying heat that fogged the windows that froze on the outside. So Aggie, steeled her broken self, stuck in arctic waste that was melting into more arctic waste and ice and snow but of a different kind that Aggie could not tell the fabric, the feel, the temperature of, certainly not its name--and she walked steadily across the little distance that were huge galloping gulping lifetimes between Barry Eysman 165 old and young, new and mature, not knowing which was which. Going closer and closer to the girl's nakedness. Right there. Reach out and touch. As she began to get glimmers of what she was and what she believed and did not believe, and there was an illness in Aggie, that pressed the deeps of her, and that roared out of her eyes as tears, Aggie thought maybe they were in the form of blood jewels, and she forced her arthritic legs to circumnavigate even closer through this sexual spatial distance, as her niece stood brazenly naked and began, god, began to caress her legs, abdomen…… Aggie now stood inches from the girl, felt the heat of the girl, the sex of her, the musky smell, the perfume smell, and the old woman drew back her right arm, and flattened her hand and with all the strength in her slapped the girl, the 17 dammit to hell year old girl, across the face. Marcie, struck cheek turned bright fingers of indented red, took with only a small stagger the blow like a prize fighter, as though she had been expecting it, and the only surprise on her face was that it hadn't hurt like she would have imagined, looking at her aunt. Not closing her eyes. Winning. Inside, Marcie cheering, I win, I did it, god I did it! In a matter of seconds, so much was accomplished, and so much was built up and then destroyed. This aunt of hard bones and angular mind and objectives, this aunt who, before she moved to supervisory position, had had the job of talking to children who had been molested and who had had to penetrate into their shame and their sadness, their anger, with their silent and sullen broken words for what they did not understand, who depended on her and the psychologists as to what to do next, how to cope with the thing. Aggie had been so good at this. The kids loved her severity, loved the stern school mistress who would look after them, and if not feel for them, at least, express their outrage when they could not, that they dared not. This aunt whose job it was to turn over the information to the D.A. and to talk with the molester(s) if they would talk, and then to decide on whether or not to recommend prosecution. This aunt who had seen so much pain in all of this. Who had seen so much betrayal of trust and hope. Who had seen so many dreams shot through never to be recovered or stuck in the center of the throat, even relinquished again. Who had seen so much domination of children, not for their own good, but for the power and greed of those who held such truncheons over them. Who had seen children freeze up and hide behind shells even harder and more lethal than her own. It was coming 166 Dancers in the Sky back on her now. She felt it before the words Marcie was about to speak. She felt it with all those eyes that stared at her out of all those childish faces down through the decades, eyes that trusted Miss Aggie, not because she was a decent person, not because she was a humane person, but because she was akin to their abusers, with the power and the unspoken threats, with the guilt she put on them, which they were so used to, and she making the children again feel this step of the assembly line process was also their fault, that they were damned lucky to have Miss Aggie put up with them. And for this the children were required to give something to her--to show their thanks-- something the children were so familiar with, long before they sat before her desk, trembling. The thing they had to give her was, simply and distinctly, themselves. In totality. Forever more. Aggie, no, Auntie Aggie, her audience, her sole and complete audience, and what actor can exist at all without an audience? Never let them see you sweat. Aggie was watching Marcie sweat. And Marcie was powerless before this bent gnarled cranky tired silly old bird woman who seemed to swell more in her form and her visage in front of the healthy sexually charged girl whose body seemed to diminish, obeying. Her nipples softened. Her body seemed to dwindle and shrink. Her face lowered. The eyes demurred. The slap on the cheek seemed to hurt more, delayed reaction almost. Because this was such a real situation, because it had come from the fabric of something that neither of them understood, because it was filled with a broken back kind of desperation, of a pushing the basalt underground aside and sticking a head above surface, if such a thing could be accomplished in this house of heavy furniture, dim lighting, dark curtains, a funeral home kind of atmosphere, even to the overpowering smell of the flowers in the cut rate vases on the table in the living room beside the heavy dark patterned couch, the stodgy chairs, the dim lighting, the black dead airlessness of the place. It was a house of shadows. It was a house of little rooms of the mind that could never be gone into, and that was what made them important. It was a place of death and winter was the time of death that is so beautiful, and it was driving Marcie out of her ever loving mind. So on awakening that morning, she had taken off her pajamas, had put on the nightie that she had secretly bought a week before and smuggled into her room, hiding it behind some boxes in the closet, so hopefully Aggie would not run across it in her periodic searches of the girl's room for clandestine boys, drugs, and whatever else teenage girls Barry Eysman 167 were "into" these days. Her aunt was just so fuckin' quaint. Marcie had put on the nightie and had looked at herself in her compact mirror, for her aunt allowed no mirrors in her niece's room because that could lead to concern for the body, and Aggie knew how girls get lost in mirrors and never come out sometimes, which can only be a bad thing. So the girl had taken the small oval mirror and looked at small parts of her body's reflection, and pronounced it, with a great deal of unsureness, good, then had thrown back her shoulders, said to herself "this is it, kid," tossed back her long flowing hair, with a flip and a promise to herself, and had gone from her room to the living room to the kitchen. Feeling the cold of the living room, for her aunt was a penurious woman of course, and this included heating the house, or not heating it, rather, even in the coldest winter months. Marcie in the cold living room felt so wonderfully dirty, being virtually naked, and not in the bathroom or in her bedroom. At long last. Felt like she was a vixen on the cover of one of those old yellowed battered paperback books that she had found secreted in her aunt's closets and cedar chest, in those treasure hunts, when the woman was away at work or at the market; felt like one of those "strumpets" there on the covers of those old detective novels, big bulging bare breasted, curved these women were to almost cartoon proportions, with only a slip on to cover their privates, with a deadly whip or ominous gun somewhere close by, being tortured by a man or torturing a man, and being stared down at by all those unseen lusting male eyes all those decades. Except in Aggie' case, it would be those closeted muffled sick with fear and loathing lesbian eyes. There were a couple of lesbian novels too. Women writhing in angry fucking needful panting painted passion in a Nazi death camp or in a women's prison. Those were the novels most battered. Gee, wonder why that would be? Marcie had read some of those particular novels. Was it a joke? Were people once really that stupid and oppressed and just so out of it totally? She was tired of the cold bleak roll of thoughts and the words that came from it that had begun to affect her, even though she had lived here only nine months. She had found a certain kind of cardboard morality rhetoric in her speech patterns, as though her aunt had somehow contaminated her--some dirtiness coming through to what had not till now been dirty to Marcie--though she did what she pleased when she pleased--as long as she obeyed her aunt's rules at home, and she was careful everywhere else not to be found out--she had adapted 168 Dancers in the Sky that kind of hard boiled super moralistic deep shadowy eyed code of voice pattern and way of looking at everything as though it had just been created in front of her eyes by a spider of length and largeness and heavy fur. And that made the whole thing wrong headed. Seen from all the angles her aunt would see it. The lighting of it had become different, like some old black and white frayed at the edges movie, as though part of her were breaking off from herself And the whole damned thing was spooking her endlessly. Her aunt turned away from her niece sharply, walked to the sink, her back still turned to the girl, took off her cats' eye glasses and put a hand to her eyes and was statue still. She wanted the girl to think she was brought to tears. She had not been. It was all an act. Everything a game, a play. Innocence and sexual lust and propriety and decency and fucking your brains out. It was all the same thing. It was hollow and counted for nothing. And at that moment Marcie was as dead in the water, in her own way, as Aggie. And Marcie knew it. Marcie put her weight on both feet now, took her hands from her body, felt as though she was never going to get away from this woman, that it was a certain character her Aunt had put on her that she would shoulder and deny and fight against and club to almost death, but not total death, for it would come back swinging for sure and harder still this time and next, leaving her bloody. Until finally she would like that part of it the very best. Gravity had claimed her. She felt stupid standing here naked. She wanted to confess everything to her aunt. She wanted to tell her who had molested her, but that was ridiculous for no one had, except her aunt, and that made the need to tell her even stronger. Her aunt had never shouted at her. Had always spoken softly to her. Had never done violence to her. Except this slap across her niece's face. She had won by quietly humiliating her in public, by refusing to allow her to buy the kinds of clothes the other kids were wearing, making her dress modestly and ridiculously and the irritation and shame of that in front of the store clerks and customers and then having to wear the damned things to school, and not being able to hit the laughers because her aunt would be called to school for a meeting, and everything might be up then, and thinking somewhere later on, not distinctly or with any particular awareness, if I remain modest on the outside, if I become little Anne of Green Gables, then I can fake it. And that was what she realized it was. That and nothing more. It was to Aggie as well. And from that moment, Marcie was dead in the Barry Eysman 169 water. But Marcie might be able to handle it, might be able to make it work for her. She would cast it aside when she pleased. Besides it might be the only identity she would ever have. Without it, she might be nothing at all. And she had to be something. "Get dressed," her aunt said, strong unwavering voice, her back still turned to her niece, "the food's cold, you'll have to eat it like that." "Yes ma'am," her niece said, this time the obeisance was real, this time not exaggerated, just sick and heavy and dead inside. She covered her crotch with her hands, and reached down for her nightie, held it against her breasts and all but ran back, fled back to her room to change to her school dress which now was not despised, now was something to cling to, to hide away in, and dressed demurely. Everyone gets molested sometime. It's the socially approved kind that is among the most dreadful, that leaves the most scars. It burns deep. It feels good. Even when it's so terribly wrong. That's the definition, after all. Marcie then walked into the kitchen, totally empty. Her aunt, at the table, almost leered at her. The girl had never felt more naked. She realized, this is how her aunt did it. Then she sat down at the table and the breakfast began. As did the feast. I FINALLY FOUND THIS, MY MISSING CHILD. IT WAS MY FIRST STORY IN AN HONEST TO GOD BOOK—ALPHA OMEGA.

WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS

They are hollow, the streets. Tented in our hovels with windows that look out on sadness, our minds travel, and our times upended and filled with the quaintness of what we have become. She and I, and my brushing her golden hair as she lies on the sodden mattress, now that she is too weak to stop me, as we dream our tattered dreams, and her name is my love and her name is sanction. I use her to find her again. It is New Year’s Eve, 2040. It is mercilessly hot, but in my dream at least is Autumn come again. We thirst often. We eat seldom. We are products of ourselves, as the heat wrings out my shirt and my jeans, as we taste nothing that means anything to us, save for what she means to me. We have come to hunger in our own specific way. I have come into my own specific sin. We are alone in the city of dark and rubble. We won. The rest of the world was pounded, and then our enemies retaliated and/or capitulated, while we found our truest enemies in our own lack, thus the suicide and murder season came to stay. Somehow justified. Everything was justified. Times Square had no revelers. She had no love. I touched Autumn still in her hair; if seen in sunlight, you would have marveled at it. Cotton candy and sweet songs. My heart leapt when I saw her that day on campus of gold and brown and tendrils of cool coming air as I lost everything to her. And gave what she did not take. We no longer run. We became vagrants in a graveyard so long ago. We no longer smile. We are two beings left together. Only it is not as complete as the end run, the end game. And therein lies my sin. In a little while, 2041 will limp in. I have succeeded in killing her. The odyssey will not be in an ancient film. The odyssey is in the current murder. The final one, perhaps. Sometimes an animal will howl mournfully in the tin pan hollows and echoes of a city gone to a particular death that co-joins her own. She had stumbled at the Student Union building as I had followed her. I was so scared and afraid of speaking, but I rushed to her and Barry Eysman 171 helped her up, then gathered her books for her. Her elbow was bone. Her coat was plaid. Her face was child. Seasons of gold in her eyes. I thought of Saturday afternoon sunsets which had always seemed holy to me and sad beyond ken. She smiled. Oh how she smiled. The world was running to chaos. Madness had infested the land. We knew eternal night was due. She was fragile, small and delicate. High cheekbones. Her smile diffident and unsure. She had not known how beautiful, how perfect she was. I stammered. I had dared more than I ever had before in my life. Then, I turned away from her. I began that long walk into my past, which I had always held to with such unflinching fear and cowardice I considered, then, brave. She did then say, “wait” as though all Autumn foliage and Christmas coming was saying that to me. Something of peace and surcease. There was not Manhattan spread out before us. There were no countries destroying countries in the name of one insane god or another. Her eyes were wide and brown as well. Mine were sky blue, and I turned. We became friends. We became lovers. Caught in a bowl of university innocence. She and I both dressed for Fall, in brown. Simple magic. Everyday conjuring for many, but not for us here in our world, with our respective parents on ships counting the source of the universe and on a grand tour of it, as they begged their children to join them, but we, each in turn, said in our own way, this is our world and we wish to experience it. For we had not before, not really, not where it counted. Vermin ran the streets, big as tomcats sometimes. Bullets sprayed. Bombs deployed. But NYU, shielded by its impervious dome, protected, so we were told, persisted as we all here hid our eyes. As we tucked our hearts deeply in impossibility. We were safely cloistered. The bells still rang. Classes were still held. Frat brothers still drank and initiated. Lonely boys and girls still sat in their dorm rooms bravely or not so bravely facing the weekend alone again. And we fell in love, though the manner was prescribed in the antennae of the beasts that oversaw us and made us safe in our little universe bauble, for they alone had seen our fatalism as a race, and our foolish desire to complete what was started, which, though not especially for us, we believed so, for we knew they would not steer us wrong, for they were wise. We were willing, indeed, eager to be children forever for them. As two nights after our meeting on that Autumn epiphany of an 172 Dancers in the Sky afternoon, we touched hand to hand and lips to lips. We were in my dorm room. We were each the other. Autumn come to stay in our hearts that were so very young. Before marauders broke in. Before we were introduced to Manhattan murdered and what they were keeping from us those years. The highly personal slaughter began. And we ran for our lives. Not that in fact and detail, we were so very old in our room this last night of us, for we were indeed Bedouins and we had our tents of flesh and body, which were very little in themselves, as I stroke her hair, pretended I cannot see the strands dark and dusty and thinning out or myself no longer stocked with long thick brown shoulder length hair, but balding, I, no longer thin, but, as she, cadaverous. My beard is itchy, patchy with scraggles. I think it is gray. The things with antennae we had given our lives to had left without our knowing, thus thrusting us onto our own, so I held to that as a killer holds to the idea it is not he pulling the gun trigger, but someone else, or it’s only a shadow show. We never knew they had come. They just were in our minds one day. And one day they left. We woke up and knew they were gone. Thus was human kind always. The flaw that could never be fixed. Few tried. It was too advantageous for other humans this way. They let us pretend. They let us play grown up. Just like grown- ups played grown-ups and we were so stupid we fell for that. And if the beings had not allowed us to join the great suicide- murder games the others played with such enervated alliance that had to do with destruction in the name of placation and peace, I would not have left her. I would not have sneaked out like a thief one panic filled midnight, unstuck carefully from our adhering flesh, and gone to the window and hobbled, stomach sick with hunger, and heart sick with no more love, down the fire escape, then the alley, then gone. She remembers him and not me, as I find myself a stage actor bitten with the certain curiosity of wondering how the clocks inside me ticked, for we were clocks now. The things with antennae who gave us the directions symbolically and emotionally for what we and the other chosen, chosen at random I imagine, and no longer for what we had once thought was a purpose; and I ran away, because I loved her, for I always ran from what I loved, but this time, she loved me. Which made me run away all the more. Barry Eysman 173 But now we were on a strict time schedule. I couldn’t play my “find me game” this time. For we knew death. To know when time was up, when our own biological clocks, our hearts, our brains would stop and we would be over, whether or not we were among the last or the last or the remnants of far more, we were never to know. In a little while, it would be New Year’s Day, and we would die. It was endemic in us. After running from her, I tried running to her. As my own petty ghost of always inferiority and my shame chased me, slow to admit, realization, I wanted her to suffer as I had. The loves that I fell for, just to see them run away, or walk away rather, forgetting in seconds the me standing there watching them and clocking them in my memory, that and every second with them and without them forevermore. That was why I had learned to do it first. She had known seeing love walk away too. For she would not believe how desirable and complex and worlds of wonder she was. How her smile dimpled and her chin trembled and her hands so artistic and expressive, as she became my song. As others had been my song. I hid and she called out in total oppressive, too comprehending, silence, please wait. I ran past the melted buildings, the bare steel bones and skulls of Manhattan. I stopped winded, flesh burned, leaning on the crumpled framework of the New York Times building. What use had their lies been? I spent the night on the sidewalk, with my gun taken from a gun store, in front of Rolling Stone’s rubble of headquarters. My God, we were so young. Once. I thought of university and the mornings waking thinking of my golden haired girl, thinking all the old love ballads found in collectors' expensive I Pods, played so beautifully and hauntingly. I ran in the acid rain. I screamed at the city empty of everything but her and her and her and her. She pounded softly at my head. She begged with autumn tears big and lost and terrified to be let in again. I don’t think soldiers came home anymore for a long long time. Not maimed. Not corpses. I think they stayed where they were, but those of us here seemed not to question, or really even think about it very much, then not at all. Nothing made sense. People who could afford it, as usual, made their escape, to infect other planets with aborigine thoughts and the club for the wildebeest will be the sonata that man sings through all the galaxies he reaches and has, to the detriment of the planet, the ability and the desire to settle there. If there is a race to face man’s conquest and invasion, then 174 Dancers in the Sky all the better. Were there even the antennae things? Or were they our last shred of conscience holding a reunion for a little while, then forever bidding us goodbye. I ran to her. I ran and called to her. I felt I was in a sunken gray battle ship with the remnants of corpses round me and their definitive human smell of gone and rot. I ran to her for eons and endless stumbles and falls and scrapes and scalded bruises and cuts. All those dead buildings falling down like London Bridge toys. All the detritus in the streets. All the dead once alive unrecognizable things. I tried cross streets and main streets. Endless Sahara. Time out for passing out now and then. I ran to every derelict apartment building I could find. The ones which had always been transient- oriented, not the once posh town houses and apartment buildings on Fifth, but the place where loss sweated through the night, where bands of gangs once roamed, until they killed themselves and each other off. It was in the awful always stifling wet heat that maybe one of the antennae things took pity on me, or my being a coward, knowing exactly where she was—like still pretending I understood professors and their tests and that I agreed with their chockablock liberalism that said there is a way out of this, if we think it through, if we at least read writers’ warnings, then when it’s over, we can try again. So I wrote their philosophy back at them, but in my mind always she, always the parallelograms we made together in sleep, the metronome music of her heart against mine, my fear when her heart skipped a beat, my desire to break out of the bauble that covered the university and at the right times of year pumped in the seasons that were forever gone on the outside. And it was this cowardice that made me, a boy from Iowa, know where I had left her, know exactly where, but I pretended it was the one lone left antennae bearer who told me. How longing he must be for his planet stars far flung away. How we had betrayed him. It was two weeks later when I climbed the fire escape stairs and went through the window to the stale grimy room where death had cupped her in its long shadowy hand. She lay on the mattress, not moving. A shadow had enveloped her, as I walked sick with heat and lack of water and food as I enveloped her and prayed to a God who was not existent that she still lived. I felt a pulse faint in her pale left wrist. I had brought some sick tasting ale from a bar I had walked into through the crushed windows, past the skeletons still partly clothed, seated on dusty stools still Barry Eysman 175 insanely standing, the skeletons laying their upper torsos across the filthy spider infested counter of dust bottles. Thus victims in a war probably they lovingly proclaimed brought home finally to them, and dizzy with mind, I had found what I could to eat, a box of stale Saltines. Enough to keep us alive till we died. And too depleted that I was to even see the ridiculous humor in that. I said her name as I went to her, and apologized and kissed her sweaty face and held her body, so deeply wonderful and filled with ending, but I had to show her in my own selfish way that I had come back, that I could not be without her, and feeling so good, that this time, I had done the adult thing—how could she not but be happy to see me?—but when she looked up at me, her eyes gummed partly closed, then forced open, as she tried to scream, but only managed a rasp, “Charles, I want Charles” in her dry cotton mouth all filled with sands of we travelers who had stopped here last, for there was no where else left to stop. What she had been through. The fears. The nightmares. I couldn’t imagine. Could never make up for. The loss for her. The constant track record. The lack of even a pustule like me, all of this came through to me like a smashing missile through a paper thin façade of a Big Top Tent thought to be huge and impermeable for our love was as huge and impermeable. And now the clock in me says far too late to prove to her that I didn’t leave her. I must convince her before we die. I just have to. Selfish to the end. That, at the very end of everything—but she never knew who I was. I tried to talk best I could. Remind her. But I was some one who apparently she thought, best I could make out, had killed me. And she wanted to know, demanded to know, where the body was. She would try to scream, and fail again, when she had a sip of ale I forced on her, allowing her enough liquid to make words, painfully with clogged throat, at me. She was terrified of me. It got to the point I had to agree Charles was dead. She might have gone mad otherwise. What difference? Much. To me. Always to me. She looked at me with red rabbity frightened eyes that had vastly huge strength in them that cried without tears, and I heard the heartless loneliness of the empty city around us and I tried all I could to tell her..to tell her…. There was no sense to it really, but there was no sense to anything; to the mad morally twisted men and women who took us down to hell; to the religious war mongers who pushed Armageddon 176 Dancers in the Sky for their own so sure reasons, none of which had come to pass. Just the endless horror without redemption. And this-- once love leaves, it can’t come back, even if it tries so very hard. I felt like a child in first grade, begging the teacher to let me take the test over again, but the computer that played the teacher role dismissed me, as I thought my humanness superior, but now, holding my love, my golden haired darling, a few breaths before midnight and the dawn of ending, quite a mixed metaphor to go out on, she so weak, she can’t stop me, but there is still a shadow of a struggle, and she is held by nothing at all. And the clock in me and in her ticks the last of us away, for which I find a brief gratitude. I do not have to spend the rest of my life with my guilt. At letting her die alone. At letting her die defeated. In her mind, did she escape also? Is there a respite where it’s a cool Autumn campus with Halloween not too far ahead? A coffee shop right off campus where we can drink hot chocolate and laugh at the childish monster decorations, the lit pumpkins with grinning faces, the voices of all those young men and women, knowing, not knowing, the destruction of the world’s human life experiment had finally come to its ignominious end, with idiots still on screens telling us this is expected. That there is nothing to worry about. That things are well under control. While we ate sandwiches, listened to music, and I looked in her eyes and believed all the years we would have together and I remember I began to cry. She was puzzled at first. She touched my fingers, hesitantly. First time. In the café. She held my too large perspiring hand in her cool girl hand and then put her other there as well. I looked up at her. I was so embarrassed. She smiled and her crumply sad smile said, not to worry, I’ll lead the way. And thinking this memory, I felt her on the soggy mattress in our pest hole, how quaint we had made the future others in other centuries had dreamed up for us, as she died in my arms, and knew that she felt if anything at all she was dying unheld, and if there is one thing I know about irony, it never misses such a golden opportunity, so I know she felt indeed betrayed here forever more. And I wanted to weep, I gasped one final thought—was she one of the antennae things in human guise? Was my betrayal of her that galactic? That vast? How ultimate could then any betrayal have been, compared to mine? How had it been her? She, from another planet or star, with all that endless longing to go home, to sanity hopefully, and Barry Eysman 177 stranded here, as far from her place as it is possible, who had given me everything I was not brave enough, or was too selfish, to find on my own? And I, Charlie nobody, had run away from her. Then my heart gave out one, two, three more tries. And then the music human ended forever on Earth. MY FATHER

My father was an illusion. My parents divorced when I was three. My first memory is of my grandmother teaching me "The Lord's Prayer" to recite to my parents on Christmas morning. I don't remember that morning or my recitation. I remember my grandmother, at night, in my grandparents' bedroom, in the dark, teaching me the prayer, in whispers. It was very cold those winter nights. My grandparents' bedroom did not have heat, except for the wall heater in the living room, for which they kept their door open. I don't know when came the divorce. Did they know they were divorcing, that Christmas morning? I met my father the first time when I was in fifth grade. He phoned one night while I was doing my homework. My grandmother answered the phone and talked for a while. Then, with some misgivings probably, she called me to the phone, and said it's your father. And he talked to me. Being a greedy child, I don't remember anything he said, other than he was sending me twenty-five dollars for my birthday. I thought it was king's ransom. I remember standing at the full-length living room mirror in front of which the big black telephone stood on a table. I remember looking at myself in the mirror as I talked to him. I tried to remember me then, and what else he said, at the time it was happening. I was feverish with the dream of being sent twenty-five dollars for my birthday. I slept poorly for a number of nights after. Being happy in that solemn big shadowy house with these solemn middle aged and old people was, for me, a novelty. I remember giggling, for the first time in my life. I just knew it would buy one great deal of comic books. The next day at school I told Mickey, who was someone I knew, but who did not know me, what my father was sending me. I was keeping secrets before I knew I had any secrets to keep. I told him at the lunch table. He did not believe me. He was nice about it. But he did not believe me. So every afternoon for a week or so before my birthday and after it, he and I would go to my house, to see if the money had arrived. We would then, after seeing it had not, sit in the yard swing, and I would lord the money over him, telling him how I already had it spent. I don't remember his reactions. I thought later, at least it got him to come to my house in the afternoon and be my friend. I was happy. Barry Eysman 179 I knew that tomorrow, it would arrive. It never did. I've never gotten over that. The embarrassment. And the betrayal. It was to set a pattern in my life. Mickey stopped coming to my house. I learned my first important lesson in how to live, what to expect, thanks to my father: People lie. And they leave you alone. And it doesn't bother them one goddam bit. Not all of them, thankfully. Not all. The next time I met my father was when I was fourteen or so. It was summer. I loved to stay in the attic, which at one time, served as my room, all day long, reading comic books and dreaming my dreams. There were old records up there that my mother and father had loved, she had told me once, one of the few times she ever mentioned him to me. They had especially liked Nat King Cole and the Mills Brothers and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. I played those records up there sometimes, and tried to imagine them at a ballroom dancing to them. I could not imagine her with a man at all. It did not concern me. There was no fan or AC up there. I hated the summer heat. But it was my private place, and I put up with the thick humidity and the sweat on my face and on my body. I liked to go in the closet in the attic. It was one of two. Each bordered the faded red love seat, one seat facing forward, the other facing backward, with a curved piece of wood on top of them, which fascinated me; for if the two people on that thing tried to kiss, it would seem they would break their necks; and the windows looking out on the street. There were old books in the closet I liked to go into. The other just held clothes. There were rafters depending out from the wood flooring, to cotton batting, where the trunks and the old books were. I liked imagining being brave enough to walk out onto the rafters. My mother, of course, forbid that because they were dangerous and I would fall through, which intrigued me, but I was not a brave child. We both, I think, wish I had been. In that closet, which was so hot, it was like a huge fist cupped around me, making it difficult to breathe, dark in there, where I found some old letters my illusion father had written to my mother when they had divorced or separated. He was living in Nashville. He begged to come home. This also sat a pattern for me. I wish to go home. He wrote, in handwriting I do not remember, then or now; for it did not concern me, that he was not drinking, that he was having dinner with the pastor of his church, that he had gotten a job there as a barber. He had been a barber at the shop where I got my haircuts. 180 Dancers in the Sky The barbers there had worked with him. I never mentioned him to them; for I did not know at the time this was so. I heard my grandmother some time or other say that when he called me that night, she thought he was drunk, and from the background noises, supposed that he was in a bar. I put the letters away and didn't think of them much. I just went to my world and masturbated. I was later told that he begged to see me and finally she let him. She told him to do this, and he did: to get a room at the hotel two blocks away from the barber shop, and she, at the appointed hour, would walk with me, a little boy, no idea how old, long before the offer of twenty five dollars for my birthday, back and forth in front of his window. She supposedly dressed me in my Sunday suit. I have no memory of this. I wonder how it made all three of us feel. Later on. Him especially. Out of a Jim Thompson novel? Dingy, dirty, smelly hot room, with broken bed frame, one straight back black chair. Wallpaper brown and fading and torn in places. All of shadows. He is beard stubbled, bare chested, wearing pleated pants that have not been washed much. There would be a bottle of raw whiskey on a table next to him. He slugs it down out of a water glass, for it makes him feel not like a drunk that way. He would be smoking and looking out the window, down at me. Oddly enough, this hurts me to think of him like this. The hurt will pass. No. It doesn't hurt me. I just wrote that so I would not feel like such a monster to myself. My mother had a few pictures of him. He had a widow's peak. She said he looked like the actor, Robert Taylor. I see no resemblance. I also remember enough to know I do not now look like him at all. I am glad. Long later, when I was an adult living sadly and far away from home, which was not my mother's home, one of the barbers he had worked with in my town called my mother at the hospital where she worked nights, and told her that Ted, my father, had come to see him and asked to see her. She fell apart. She knew he was drunk. He apparently wasn't. She thought he would come to kill her. He was not violent with her this night. She had protected me from him for all these years. She never, however, protected me from herself. She was good at falling apart. This too set a pattern for me for later in my life. She finally agreed to see him, but wanted someone with her when she talked to him in one of the empty offices. She asked a doctor to give her something to calm her down, which he did, but calming her down was virtually impossible. Barry Eysman 181 The barber and my illusion father showed up at the hospital, and she crying intensely, was held by the hand of a co-worker, as they and the barber and my illusion father went to the room to talk. She was of course, almost collapsing, and trembling and eye avoiding and crying why did you do this to me? Why? Why? She was drawn away from him, in her chair, pulling herself against the wall, getting ready when he was to hit her. She had wanted the police there, but had been talked out of it. My illusion father was in his eighties then, somewhat older than she. He had crippling arthritis. He had bummed around the country, had sent no alimony because he never really had any money. Had never re-married. No friends. No anyone. Had worked as a barber, never staying one place long.* (see addendum) And one day when the crippling arthritis had gotten too much for him, he had quit his job, and had thrown his barber clipper into the air in some town, which sounds fanciful, and had given up entirely. He wanted to see her before he died. She expected him to hit her. But he did not. The first thing she told him was, "Ted, Barry has long hair.." and then her usual routine. We must all get our priorities in order. What an opening line for her to say to a man she had not seen since I was three. No playwright could have come up with anything more laugh riotous. He asked to see me. He begged. She refused. She did not tell me. He asked to talk to me on the phone. She refused. She did not tell me this till months later when she slipped and mentioned that when Ted had been in town…. and then I knew. I wish I could have made my own decision about whether or not to talk to him on the phone. I have no idea what I would have decided. I am not the decider. She broke down. Again. When telling me. Like Lucy Ricardo in one of her gloopier predicaments which landed her face down and in a fight in a grape stomping vat in Italy, or who wound up with her body covered with pastry or pizza dough, always said, before crying funny, "I'm a mess…" And seeming then like she was about three and needed someone to hug her. Which always seemed to work. It never worked for my mother. I never saw or heard from him again. Until a few years ago, a friend of my mother's came into possession in a very convoluted way that doesn't matter here, a number of letters that my father wrote to my mother when he was stationed overseas. He was the camp barber and apparently never was in any danger, but he could not wait to get home. Among other places, he was 182 Dancers in the Sky stationed in Germany. He brought back souvenirs of course. I remember a beer stein with German writing on it, in the form of a very fat monk whose head was atop the opening and closing lid. He asked about my grandmother's garden, for he knew how she loved it so. He asked about my grandfather who at the time worked at the Blue Bell Laundry. He had so many dreams. Getting back to work. Maybe raising a family. Talking over old times when friends. He wrote of army life. He asked how my mother's dog, Pudgie was doing, and did he still have his cold? And did my grandmother still wake up at night, having been awoken by the dog's cold nose, so she could rub some Vicks' Salve on it? I, as a teenager, found a poem my mother had written, at about my age, about the death of her first dog. I had just lost my dog, Ricky. I cried when I read the poem. It was the only thing about her that made me cry. I cried for both dogs really. I did not cry at my mother's funeral. Wrong drugs from stupid psychiatrists had frozen my brain at that point and I was something of a zombie. The drugs were finally corrected. So, thanks to these healers of minds, I actually now need. I understand psychiatrists have the largest suicide rate in the country. I hope some of the ones I was helped by have since taken a dive out of a way up window. Saying goodbye to her, however I normally would have, this too I was not allowed. I looked through the letters, as I looked through them at my mother's friend's house, pretending to read them while she looked at me expectantly. I have no idea why or what reaction she expected of me. I bluffed and guessed as best I could. I did actually read some of them when I got home, though it was difficulty, for the ink had faded terribly. I owed it to my mother's friend to at least familiarize myself with them, for I had to tell her something, as this had meant a lot to her because she loved my mother very much I remembered she made this big song and dance of them, a secret until I saw her, and then handed the boxes of them to me like the Holy Grail. I was not interested. I put the boxes away somewhere. I have no memory of where I put them, and don't care. It's an odd thing. Not to care. I wish I had cultivated that in my character along the way. It would have made things lots easier. You never get over your childhood, Harlan Ellison has written, and if you are lucky, dispensation for the pain of it can come from the present and hopes for the future, and you can forget a bit, put it to rest, and come Barry Eysman 183 to the conclusion we are all making it up as we go along, and we all have secret hurts that, if known to someone else, could be eased. Could make things and people more understandable. That is what Harlan Ellison writes. It would be nice. But I don't really believe it. And I wonder if he does either. I lied. I really do care. It's half killed me to write this thing. • addendum: A few years ago, early on a Sunday morning, a woman phoned us from Holland. After some shouting back and forth we began to understand each other. That led us to discover Ted Eysman has remarried in Oklahoma, had step children and was buried at the VA cemetery. This had negated the tale he had told my mother of giving up barbering, and tossing the razor in the air—arthritis prevented any more barbering, bumming around the country and having no one. Was I just being conned again and by my own father? SOME WEREWOLVES AREN’T WORTH THE TIME OF DAY

BLUES FOR A WEREWOLF

Part One The Sacrifice D. thought winter snow would go on forever. He stood on the dock, next to the pack boat which was on choppy waves. It was long past midnight. The boy realized he had never been up this late in his 12 years of life. He stood quite still. The wind chill was ferocious, and he shivered, in spite of himself. He thought home had been a nice place, but he was going on supposition. He had a name, but they always just called him the boy or D. He huddled in his Navy pea coat. He tried to breathe normally. He thought he was to be alone for the rest of his life. He knew. He eventually would remember. He was going away from the island, which had been the only home that he had known, and he on this foggy late night that he was terribly afraid. Maxim, he thought, will be so terribly alone back there where it had happened. And the boy who was not deserving of a real name, remembering his dog, began to weep. Other people kept away from his dog, because they said that it was, in reality, a wolf. This is the great North country, and they believed in wolves as magic. The boy now had stopped weeping, his mouth was dry, so he took a gray tin of Sucrets from the left side pocket of his thick jeans, took out one of them, closed the tin, put the tin back in his pocket, unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. It gave him a sensation of a momentary high. He wished his dog here, because Maxim could not have helped it. He was a dog. None of his friends, he smiled, had believed. It was a dog. Whatever they thought, it was. Ask him to be quiet, to sleep on the boy's bed, Maxim would do s o, but you did not tell him to love the boy, for he did, with all of his heart, a fine large caring heart. There were no bullies in the boy’s life, but there were no friends either. The boy had thought he could not remember, but he had to remember, to get the bike there at the landing and ride it home, because he had, however momentarily, forgotten. His only friend, with Barry Eysman 185 his big silver coat, his penetrating deep ready gray eyes that seemed to have the depth of an ocean. He was from the impenetrable woods that surrounded the house, where it had happened. The boy and his dog had been the only survivors and a man, who seemed to have in memory a familiar face, had shot Maxim with a 22 point blank in the face, bringing death blood spewing as his dog fell over with an Almighty crashing sound. The boy put his hands to his eyes, lowered his head and shivered in the night cold. He had screamed when his dog died, the right front leg of the dog twitched and then the dog did not move again. The boy had screamed and had run to him on the hardwood floor of his parents house, his parents laying dead in the bedroom, their throats slashed out. It took a moment for the boy to feel the hands of the man who stood behind him.. D. had drifted, not knowing it till now, of his dog, with the heavy silver fur, and the long and scratchy wool tongue. That felt so good, when the boy came home from school, and Maxim had run to greet him and had put his front paws on the boy's chest, standing on two legs and pressing his head and his heat into the boy. Mother and dad had bled copiously and died very slowly. They had died in a great deal of pain. Maxim was backing away from the newly made corpses, great coagulated blood splatter everywhere. And this man, who now stood behind the boy had been the same man who stood behind the boy in his dead parents house, after shooting the only friend the boy ever had. The man and the boy stood there and were a tableau of non- moving silent life. That was more of a memory of life. The man whose hands were big and strong were gently massaging the pain out of the boy’s small birdlike shoulders of tentative bones. The boy smiled and a grimace came over him and he felt Maxim beside him. And he knew at that instant, his only friend is gone. And he wanted Maxim to return, at whatever cost. He heard the man's voice, somehow soothing over the wind and waves, all that howling around us, and we never know the center of it all is a beautiful, masculine, beast of the forest, the king of all he surveyed. And a king must have a Prince to one day take the king’s place. As somewhere, as if from a man waking up after a long sleep, the boy heard the voice of the man, who was kneeling down beside him, as he said to Daniel, Daniel freezing at that moment, he had a name and a good one too. 186 Dancers in the Sky “We have to let them think Maxim killed them. We have to stick to the story.” “You killed him,” the boy screamed in a huge wild roar. He took his fists and he slammed them into the man and pushed organs in the man's body around. He lunged at the dying man's neck, and tore it open for all the blood to come crashing out. The man with the glazed eyes looked directly into the boy as the boy who is Daniel, who was D. only in the skies of other people's minds, who saw a very peculiar boy of loneliness and sadness and despair and he wanted to help, as did the formerly living man now crumpled at his soiled boots, a blood handkerchief on the bow, of no use to anyone, a man dying like this, and it total, bewildered shock. His last thought, they were right. The boy looked up at the moon as some clouds scuttled away from it, his heavy yellow moon that made it feel so alive, the blood dripping now, from his little boy werewolf fangs as hair started to grow all over his body, just being a new stage of development for him. So after he had howled at the moon, he quite calmly, this newly minted werewolf, whom Maxim had found in the forests one snowy day and had brought him, this feral child to the werewolf couple the wolf lived with. The entire enclave here were werewolves, and they had one rule, above all else, we did not eat, we do not kill our own. The trouble with that one was that the boy just didn't give a damn in hell. Before he slipped back, just a bit longer. The chrysalis of innocence and sensitivity and shyness was burst through at this second. You don't want to know what happened next. Trust me, you just don't.

Part 2 Endless Snow I stood in the dark early morning, watching them, bloody, entangled in dead clothing, ripped to shreds, flesh torn from them. All mixed things meant to protect them from the night air, and the morning was dark in my heart as well. They were the last of my village, to have been alive, the finality of my community of werewolves. I watched their gore and the blood soaking the bodies and sheets, dripping down. They were warm, still, which made it even more hideous. Barry Eysman 187 I looked down at her especially, she was a former classmate of mine. Another interface with all the others I had killed in this night of blood, debauchery and loss of everything. That had resulted from one true cause, lust and lust is food. And revenge is food. I had no more, for the sake of it, only for mine designation of those involved in the murder of Maxim and that was in the complicity of everyone, for I am and forever will be, the true creature of the night. It had begun with the rendering of a painting drowned in Gore. For the sake of it. My real parents were two sleek graceful wolves of the great north woods, from whom I was orphaned and made into a feral child by hunters. The hunters were not from this island,. They killed to kill. They instead were savaged, sliced open and eaten, hot intestine cords first. It was my first man food. For a long time, it had been my last. Some intestines were saved for five of our community still in little girl shapes, who used them as a slimy jump rope. Why resist? I was always closer to Wolf than human, who was a non-existent as time went on, as time accelerated. My keepers, and Maxim and I only knew the secret. In the werewolf village, a dog was next to nothing. Even Maxim. They had no idea he was the ruler of the community, and indeed, of the island. It was easier for Maxim to keep an eye on the fomenters of trouble. Two of those fomenters were my father, who was really just my keeper, and a school girl, whom he had gotten in trouble. With time comes a denigration of blood with partial Wolf and partial human, and human wins out, sometimes. The humans are always the more barbarous. And yet he had raped the girl, who had been passing as part wolf. Maxim had seen a part of the rape, but had been too late to stop it. Because Maxim, who was always in wolf form, but had some trace of human in him, left it to me to decide. Maxim had a tender place in his heart for me. I was furious, but Maxim lay his left front paw on my shoulder and said, from his observations over the years, the girl was human, through and through. And my werewolf keeper was mostly Wolf. Then Maxim affixed me with those deep endless ocean eyes, and said gravelly, grave voice, which will it be? On the side of a totally human girl? Or my keeper who was more werewolf than I? Who with his wife had raised me from a pup and had done their best? In the ultimate, I let it go. Now I watched the baby and the schoolgirl whom I had tainted some how. I suddenly felt faint and collapsed to the floor of sawdust and board and ground beneath. Later, how ludicrous, I thought, for a werewolf to faint. I was less than a mile 188 Dancers in the Sky from where dead Maxim lay. The man back there who had gotten it wrong that drunken night with the equally drunken father of the raped girl, who was beaten by the father until she told, when they had come stumbling in the deep snow and cold and forbidding forest of the night into my house and shot Maxim, who tried to protect me, guilty “father” and my good “mother.” And thus opened up hell. Wolf with man inside. Man with wolf chained inside. Wolf with man chained inside him. Old and new. Superior and inferior lay at the base of it all. As it seems it always does. I am naked now. I am 12 remember. I had never seen a girl naked. I leaned over and took off her heavy flannel night gown and had a long intake of breath. She was so pink and bare. I pushed the dead baby to the floor, like an object, it was, that shriveled gray little thing so silent and still. I needed warm when in human form. I felt and lay my head on her breasts not to bud any further, as I put myself in her and--when I finished, I got up and wretched, vomited, not meaning to, on the baby thing, on the floor. I put the crude blanket on her. I could feel Maxim’s glaring eyes on me, as I dressed and left the death cabin. I was the dog this morning. I had disgraced Maxim. Regardless of her being human. I had degraded her and her baby. I went away. I knew I was no innocent. And that 12 years was a long time for a werewolf. The man on the pack boat was obviously not my first kill. It was morning again. Oh, how Maxim had worked, trying to keep us in wolf shape for ever. He had even bought magical potions from India, that might do the trick. But no good. Soon, there would be a boat from the mainland, with supplies. He had hidden his kill on the pack boat well. But, they would meet me here instead. I would go with them and find my growing up in new places. A city would probably be best. There would be more people meat, more density, and less chance of being caught. I looked over at the water, with the world of ocean and snow, pelting down on me, on it, on the world, and it seemed to me that there would always be endless snow.

Part 3 Ground to Run On They let him run in the russet fall afternoon. The air was tangible and tangy. The wind was cold. He shivered—deliciously. He was one Barry Eysman 189 with the brown and gold, the long low sky of freedom. His neurons in cold rebuke fired pistons and he exulted in his leg muscles, long and precise as he ran at a neat metonymic clip. The air braced him. It held him and pushed back, giving him a dignity he had not had in it seemed ages. He was not old anymore. Death was not breathing down his neck, as one Mr. Wells, writer, had so sagely once upon a time warned Mr. Welles, prankster, concerning a little hoax that most intentionally did not backfire. Whereas this scheme, this mechanism had indeed gone awry. He ran in the low long gray tattered cloud sky once rumored to be blue, but he knew it only as a rumor. And he moved, his heart pounded, the world he saw crashed and resurrected with every footfall. He was lean and he wore a jogging suit of red. His eyes were of blue luster and clear and precise and keen they were. A mechanism known as body, as man, as self and it had worked. That was the god awful cruel hoax of the thing. After all those years, he had in the dead of night, opened the door they had said was a painting of child scrawled Crayola yellow, too bright, too salient of summer days with sun beaming down in childhood land long time passing. The deep dish autumn sad shadows he drank like cool soda on a too hot day and he was cold in autumn and saw his breath as he skirted the hillocks of gray dead stubble and he was young, my God, and the forest was home and the trees were thick, protecting, soothingly as he ran paths between and around them, and it all felt so good because he was running from life dead, into life real and bursting with cornucopia, his body a furl of being self, never derivative, but every breath a fresco of rare divine, every off the ground creating stained glass windows, every touch he ground, smashing the windows like salt water taffy,. As his birdlike chest screamed in stoke fire fury; an ensemble of hate at the trick of the thing, the shabbiness that had obfuscated him so princely, that upon slow recognition had made majesty like that garish summer door of disorienting fat little kid hand cursing yellow gnat and fly filled itchy grass front yard, till one day when he, restless sick half sleep, without thinking, or awareness, lunged for that equally scrawled oversized door knob and found it all was drawn, with melted and broken and crooked lines, and at, the door, at a subtle dizzying angle on construction paper, the smell of it, the Crayola smell, dark night thick angry bars of lines, little rents torn by that ubiquitous child hand, was there only hand and no little child connected to it? 190 Dancers in the Sky But for all that, and this was the genius of the plan. For all that, the door opened and he fell into Autumn neatly as you please. And now on his run through this treeless vista in which he saw a wonderland of forest, he fell, crumpled like wet cardboard to the floor of the forest and the floor of the forest was flesh. His body filled and his fangs blood covered, and tongue thick and leathery and black, he half choking on the body he cradled to himself as he finished draining dry of blood, she being now pale, translucent, dead many nights as he finished had finished drinking her, and this was why werewolves drank their victim’s blood and ate their meat, as was also proceeding nicely. To fulfill physical needs, but also that need of the heart and emotions, for it would seem a vile, disgusting beastly act of pure savagery, but that was left to myth vampires. The sexuality, the movie sensuousness, for they had raided the Great North Woods, when he was a boy so young, as he witnessed such evil, sick steaming heaping pans of it till the things were routed. Ugly diseased stench filled things. But this, as he and she lay covered in her sticky sweet smell of blood, as he began to finish the meat of her left arm, was coupled couplet and rhyme. so why were American girls so skinny? As he fell back into Autumn majesty and he was up and running again in the Great North Woods on the ground known as flesh. Hello world, after too long a time, I’m breathing down your neck again. And he ROARED.

Part 4 End Game Tomorrow draped in today. You can't be melancholy, secret reader, because tomorrow they will find us. I whisper in my own sadness, I shan't I shan't. We have lived in this Mall, my whole life through. It's always so hot in here; it's like the cloister. I'm a monk. I have meaning, emotions and adults around me, who live in and of silence as verbiage; they scare me. They never turn the lights on; there's always only hollowness here. It's no seasons in here. And none has the same time, and here we who infringe the reference slowly on our own. We are alone in Mecca. We are small town. We are city. We are survivors and all ready dead and gone group, for we were hunters. We tracked them and were slaughtered and slaughtered by them everywhere. But we retain Barry Eysman 191 conscience and humanity; we cannot fight in such filthy ways as they did. Until we were small groups, and in smaller. Until they put us in here and unlocking key was always locking us in. Some of us came to display you, and I see you know, your glassine case protecting you large, a huge overwhelming in the center of the Mall court. We almost made it. But then it struck us in here in the Aleutian of fantasy and relativity coalescing in your favor. I want to tell them, in silence, they can be free. All we shaggy hunters after shaggy carcasses, and you, I choose to see as a mockup, a strategy that never happened. And we long ago, man was here, and you were madden. If you're gone, we have no reason to exist; and you did win, all the important things, on your side. And we lost, because sometime or other, you and we became aligned; we and you were made into a parlor game. Like whist or old maid or the minister had three cats. We worship you. As the anti-god. With you, we worship you. It did not happen overnight. Weavers crawled every decades precious generations, and we were woven into ourselves and the role nightmares began. We, woven into our security. We're the shoppers whenever closing time Christmas Eve night was. There is the cruelty, the mass extermination by the cowards, and our hugeness was overcome by the horror of how you did it; split into pieces, and you are giant, werewolf. You are giant dilemma of all of us. The 10 of us still here, who wore out with ourselves. The BB guns and diet soft drinks as we replay illusion and see your movies, where the nightmares are jokes. No one is more jokey than we. We don't worship words anymore, books terrorize us. Our dances with philosophy forever gone, forever. Not remembered, in his red eyes staring straight ahead at us, in his fur, moth eaten and old. We share nothing but the remainder table with the DVDs, the books and CDs, which someone back there might have liked; these things that are going to waste on us.. I stand in front of you tonight late darkness, relieved only by candle light. As often, I wonder, why we were so scared of you? I wonder how women got to be so brave to fight you and turned some of their men into cowardly warriors under the strong womanly direction. And how all of us virtually wiped the monsters off the map all over the world, till your trick, till the Halloweens of forever laughed at in one and won. The culture, some culture, bacteria maybe, why did we fight for your the first damned place? The effluvia got us, the graffiti overwhelmed us. 192 Dancers in the Sky They were Valkyrias and they made many men into Nordic Thors, Vikings, until the mockeries of the meta-stores and easier still to believe, the lies, the exploitation TV shows, the tabloids, the interviews, the rumors, half-truths, a society with amnesia every 30 seconds, the twisted words, the false picture, the comfort of stupidity, the ability to look straight down into hell and be convinced it's heaven, by the takers, the grifters, the money grabbers, THE LIARS who lie about what they said 15 seconds ago, and everybody lets them. That we were all illusion. The world's werewolves and the battling warriors; we were the Friday night fights; the TBS smack downs; we were TO CATCH A WEREWOLF; we were Fox news in depth with Michelle Malkin, sacred, secret werewolf herself, author of the classic bestseller KINYA BORNDS AND BRED SADDEM OBAMA AND HISZ ILLEGAL WEREWOLF IMMIGRANT ARMY. Though her picture shown incessantly on COUNTDOWN, secretly snapped, without her fake human face on, made it all so obvious, who was behind all of this, but the bile of talk radio and television show talkers made people see all of us as a sideshow by the real sideshow freaks, and we were targets of late-night show jokes. We fought and fought of blood and broke muscle and bone, till we couldn't take it any longer. They were ashamed, no. We were shamed. Which one of us, so long ago, put the werewolf giant to mock us in his glassine case. Our muscles became extra weight, our desires to win became pointless, stale memories of old memories and the world conquered everywhere by the werewolves. I don't think the thing in the case is real. I don't think we are on reality television, infrared cameras aimed at us. We are too boring, we only die a bit at a time. I sip my can of Coors and nod at the gigantic werewolf, in case my brain can conjure up the sting of this monster, who is alive and both of us come, and if, for any way possible, God, let him break forth; and we go into some kind of battle, let death come to us that way. Don't leave us here like stupid little children, who feel like our entire existence was just gross grist for that twisted pasty white doughy man things, and scary looking women, with scary brains, on blogs or television and radio, as we are still here, alone in the world. Everyone else dead or meat or entertainment or slavery or hunted down like animals for sport or field hands or architects or cooks or clothes makers or engineers or spacecraft builders or city builders; and Barry Eysman 193 none of them, not one, would ever think of trying to escape; their crude lives, their squalor; it is all they know and all they need to know; while we here waiting for the punch line, and I don't know about you, but it better be a damn good one. Someday, I expect to look in this case and find, Wile E. Coyote. OUTA LUCK, OUTA TIME BEEP BEEP THIS HAPPENED TO ME. THE SHAME OF IT IS THAT IT’S TRUE.

MY TRUE STORY

My back alley deception What’s wrong, momma ? Nothing. Now momma, I can tell. Well… Swiggin' the piccalilli juice again, momma? Oh, daughter, you are such a card. Oh momma, you something. Well. Well, you know on the internet.. You gone and met a beau ? oh momma. Momma, those people are larcenous. No, no, not that…. Then what? I, ah, showed him some of my….. Oh, no, mmm…… I didn't mean to. Oh Mama, no. Why couldn’t you just be a cheap floozy. He told me I was good at it. See, it was just a cheap pick up line. No, daughter, he said my writing was good. It was like blank verse. What’s blank verse? I don’ know, but I do good at it. He lied to you. No! You shamed us again, Mama. Don’t you remember the last time? How we had to move. All that talk. It’s not like that Fanny Hurst novel. It’s just like that Fanny Hurst novel, Mama. We should read that Fanny Hurst novel sometime. I never can think of the title. You tricked him Mama. You made a fool of him. Yes, I guess I did, at that. You— Barry Eysman 195 NO. YES, YOU— NO, DON’T SAY IT. Momma, you passed for—legit. Oh Mama, how could you? He said I was good, daughter. Ah ha! It made me feel like a somebody. Oh Mama, come here. You are a somebody. It’s ok. Cry it out. Rage to live. Tomorrow is another day. (together) “The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar….” TALES OF THE EVIL MONKEY

(SCRIPT FOUND FLOATING IN SPACE) last artifact of some place once called Earth Sorry about that, LEIBOWITZ MANY OF THESE PEOPLE ARE DEAD. Good. They were not dead when this takes place. Even if they had been dead then, neither living nor dead, none of them would have been caught dead in such an insane series,. Stephen King is a swell guy. Joe Hill is on my Twitter. So is Wil Wheaton. I am on top of him usually. Mark Lester does not appear herein. Tommy Tune, however, does. If you can spot him, write me and win big prizes. This started out to be TALES OF THE EVIL FROG. I had forgotten. I decided to stay with the evil monkey. I’m sorry, evil frog.

TONIGHT: Oiled and ready for action: (DRAMATIC STILLS OF CAST)

ARE:

PATTY DUKE ASTIN JOHN ASTIN RAYMOND MASSEY (GOODBYE, MR. MASSEY) VICTOR JORY BRUCE DERN who just wandered in for some fun. ROSIE GREER with RAY MILLAND’s head protruding from his neck. "Baby, you get in the weirdest….."

AND:

Barbra Streisand's honker on its way south for the winter. TONIGHT ON A VERY SPECIAL TALES OF THE EVIL MONKEY WITH YOUR HOST: Barry Eysman 197 SEBASTIAN CABOT "My God, poor Buffy...." "Sa, run-through?.." "What? Oh pardon me.....say...why are we talking in ellipses...... ? (CUT TO: ECLIPSE OF MOON) "No.....no....that's eclipse..... Well, we seem to have a stellar line-up for our outing….. Outing…sounds like we’re going on a gay picnic….. well, we, will be back after a word from…..oh god don’t make me say this…” “Say it, Sa……..” “ Don’t be disrespectful. Sounds like you are going to call me Sahib, but you break off in the middle to have an affair with Kitten Anderson, age 67 by now, then having a smoke at the Hot Sheets Drop Inn…..” “Course I respect you, Kitten. I bought you those snazzy penny loafers, didn’t I? See how they shine up? ….” “AH………????? HERA—A—FFFFF….” “Oh, sorry. Sa…Hi Betty….” “THAT IS THAT.” (THROWS SCRIPT TO FLOOR. STOMPS OFF) ‘”HEY, MR. FRENCH, TWO CREPE SUSSIES “ ”I’ll CREPE SUsie you……. mumble… mumble…..” “WHAT? CAN’T QUITE HEAR YOU……” “I said I wouLD CREPE SUSSIES YOU!!!!” “Cabot, you are nuts.” “I sir am a thespian.” “Well la-de-da.” ‘I shall have you know, I was the star of……” “Yeah, yeah, I know……‘ ‘CHECKMATE. And unlike PERRY MASON, our plots made sense, or as his counter part in the Bizarro World is known……” “merry pason…..” “ARE YOU MUMBLING? ARE YOU MOCKING ME?” ‘”ah..no, sa—not now, kitten—no….” “I can get you fired most handily. And it’s MR. CABOT TO YOU. And speaking of you, who the hell ARE you?” “I’m the new announcer, MR, CABOT TO YOU.” “Well. That’s more like it. Say, this evil monkey….. “ “Yes, MR. CABOT TO YOU?” 198 Dancers in the Sky “What the hell IS it? I mean we’ve been doing this series developed by Stephen King and Joe Hill—say, isn’t this the 60’? King is in high school and his son long time borning…’ (together: “…the answer, my friend, is bornin in the wind..”) “Anyway how can they—develop this?—like down at Conner’s Photo Shop…..” “We…..ah…..don’t ask questions like that MR. CABOT TO YOU. Isn’t healthy….’ ‘’Yes, well, we’d have ferreted it out on CHECKMATE.” “Say, MR. CABOT TO YOU, speaking of CHECKMATE— what ever happened to Anthony George?” “Well that was an ugly incident, people kept falling in those face creases of his....and one night, Doug McClure rented crease space for himself and Joan Crawford…… JOAN CRAWFORD WAS ALL WOMAN!!!!!! (Hard hitting blues trumpet lead) “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” “Oh, it’s in her contract….anyone in the galaxy says her name, that comes with it. Pepsi would go good right now. For some reason…..” “My word! If there were an evil monkey, he would have eaten us all by now.” “Mr. CABOT TO YOU, let’s do the commercial intro now.” “Well, if you insist. I guess I must. Guys? You know, my patent leather hair—oh how embarrassing—my patent leather hair has been difficult to comb all my life. But since I discovered Vitalis, every morning just—oh pray God Wilford Hyde-White doesn’t see this—I’m a little dab will do ya man. Why don’t you be one too? Gek.” “Great work, MR. CABOT TO YOU.” “It’s getting deucedly late, why don’t we have a brew…..” “Together?” “Why certainly together.” “Fine. Love to. Oh MR. CABOT TO YOU?” “Yes?” “My name is Chip.” “How awful for you, my boy.” “May I stop calling you MR. CABOT TO YOU?” “No. No, you may not.” Barry Eysman 199 (walk off sound stage, dark) VOICE OVER: Dad.. Yes, Joel? Joe Hill. Wanna make it on my own. Yeah. Right. Dad? Speak thus Cassius… WTF? (rim shot three four) Oh, a little play I’m working on,. A mere bauble. Yeah. But. Shouldn’t this be STEPHEN KING’S AND JOE HILL’S TALES OF THE EVIL MONKEY? It will be, son, without you. It creeps up on ‘em. You will be making it on your own, while pretty much everything will be...mine…mine..mine…. VOICE SQUINTS SINISTERLY CUT TO MOON Sally Struthers voice over: You going to eat that? WORLD SCREAMS IN UNISON: OH MY GOD..THE EVIL MONKEY IS— --INCREDIBLY HUGE—— --MAN, SHE REALLY CAN PACK IT AWAY— SHE’S GOING TO EAT THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE HERE IT COMES—– ALMIGHTY CRUNCH (This has been a Screen Gems /Universal Production) Hi, You know, sometimes, you have a dream or a brainstorm, horribly dramatic word, late at night, that you can’t remember the next day and you know it was just great. Well, in ways, this is kind of like that, keep that in mind about forgotten dreams, and don’t lose any sleep over it. Barry Oh, did you spot Mr. Tune? Or was it Meredith Baxter? Doesn’t Mark Lester now like a perpetually querulous burnt out cigarette, who wonders why people keep bothering him. As a child he was a cartoon. Hmmmmmm…… AND SOMEHOW WINTER

Has retuned and calls to us To believe in the here and Now

Good friend in cities and farmlands Mantled with snow mirrored With planets secretly our own Autumn has ushered in a new season Where love is so needed and Somehow so near.

The first snow gray skies Horizon pinpoints forever And school’s out Far or near. Whatever we believe We believe so intensely now.

Cold winds and hands holding Hands with sweet summers inside As snow makes glaciers and Ice out of yards And trees are dark and woods Behind our eyes It is best to fall in love this Time of time of year. For it is given more import More beauty

For in winter comes the Unicorn on snow hills in the distance In the golden eye of a unicorn Brave of grace of adventures And gala regal And he is dignity And dance Barry Eysman 201 As the snow falls And miracles which Would be you Come Tumbling after. And this an arm round Your shoulders To show you how Mightily you matter MAD KILLER ON THE LOOSE

They move fast, the little bastards, my targets in this small, green summery town where doors are locked and double locked now, where police guard at the schools cause kids are getting offed and in thus formerly nice, safe little berg of lassitude, suddenly up pops the devil, who says in shades of gaping red, hello mortality. I cut their throats, blow their heads off, pull out their tongues, make them eat them as they die. And they always say, this is not happening to me, I am a child. So I say exactly, for that and no other reason, you are a composite in the aggregate You, yourself? Who cares? They die knowing their death was caused by their proximity, age and the frail fabric they were made of. It had been an autumn of funerals. More tears fell this autumn than did the dead leaves. for burning, and that gave me a, pardon the pun, gag. I started burning some of the children, alive, dying, dead. What's worse for a parent of a missing child? Right. A child who is always missing, who they will spend their years trying to find--alive-- then after a while, when its destroyed them, when they are old and gray-- just find, regardless. Haggard, became the residents. The town felt for some reason, guilty beyond redemption. People didn't talk as freely. Suspicions grew like wildfire, and no child went to or from school alone. Parents stored coffins in the earth of their missing children in an almost shamanistic belief they would find their alive and sugar sweet Children Alive Alive O But Miss Mollie Malone never bought a single thread of what had been as their fearful imaginations conjured up only part of what I did. Eyes cast mouse shadows, car wrecks increased. Psychiatrists made out like bandits. Sales of guns and booze sky rocketed and emergency rooms and jails overflowed. TV was non stop us. As I cut the soft butter flesh of usually plink throat that seemed to push into my blade as if it could not wait, yes, the pulse beat in it said, as if those necks hungered for it, and the blood seeping out as if it were a comedian or a singer ready to perform, but the blood fell apart too Barry Eysman 203 soon, and every child would look at me and be sad they failed then, and then nerve twitch almost happily in expatiation. Course things end. The detectives rang our bell. A cinnamon toothpick was found at one of the burn sights. They asked to speak to dad, who bought lots of them at the neighborhood store. The trial was a bid deal. They wanted to take him apart.. I’m sad I can't kill anymore (why did I have to like those cinnamon toothpicks so much? Dad bought tons of those cinnamon tooth picks for me. ) Bu girls in school who never knew I existed, feel so sorry for me now, and give me nookie. And nookie’s cool. Or hot. AN IMMENSITY OF SNOW

There was an immensity of snow. The night was coming on fast. The shadows were long. There were places in my heart that hurt so beautifully. It is said that the sad memories are the sweetest and the most longed for; the ones that make a kind of smile in the soul, before you cry, or during, or after. It was Saturday night and I was 21; I had started my first job after university, and poorly suited for it, as poorly as I was suited for love. It had never come my way before, and I had been content with being alone, though now it had come my way and I had to hold my hands in my coat pockets for the cold was close to 20 degrees. I needed the winter this night. The snow was batting my glasses, so I had to wipe them off every so often in a no win proposition, walking by memory more than sight. Closing me in my little ice world. And if life were to have me in it much longer, I had to do the rites; I had to do what were symbols of my love. The quiet kind and the long kind. The one that says this will never stop hurting. This will haunt you and winnow you every minute the rest of your life. But one does not hold a quorum for when one can fall in love and when one can’t. It is not a business proposition. It was a small city in the South where I was, and I took long night walks in it, especially in the snow season, which was especially nostalgic and sweet. It was good to walk against the wind, the buffeting cold chill banes wind and to feel the North coming to meet me, as I had always run to meet it. Because a believer in miracles had not yet found a reason not to believe in them, and in my tallness and in the glaciers of ice that covered my lenses, seemingly, I would walk to the North Pole soon. I would find hands reaching for mine and I would be pulled into eternity and lips to kiss and heart not to be alone in my far too small bed in my far too small apartment. I was homesick and as I walked I played, like always, songs from movies, in my head, and I wondered what love would feel like if it could be taken without dreams, what would be the ostensible cure for something that was never to happen, but which had already happened. A certain longevity of spirit and hands as I realized I was holding out my left hand for my love, only a second or two must I have been, and only a little ways, but I remembered old stories and movies and Barry Eysman 205 books and thought if there were butterflies to land on my shoulder, I would not move, ever, in the summer sun. I would be a cocktail of summer spectral kaleidoscope, and never stir even a breath of air from the thrill of colors that would rush bright and summery and warm and hued with all the soothing voices and sounds and sights and quiet eyes that were my true love, into the center of me. The sidewalk was covered with snow which covered the ice mostly, though I had to be careful of slipping, and the snow was banked on the sides, which I walked in on purpose, pretending I was heading for something that was covered with brilliance and dazzled with fame, for I intended to be a writer in those days. I worked at a newspaper. I wrote a column in which I secreted my heart for someone to hear, but no one did, and tonight, on this winter’s walk as the snow made me stop and taste it and clean my lenses for the millionth time, to no avail, immediately clogged again, and as the wind blew me just a bit left and right, I loved life and I loved where I was, and though I hated my job and would not keep it but a few years, I loved it. Because I had seen the movies, you know, and I had heard the songs, and I thought love would come running into my arms, because I had always been by myself, and any moment now, that would always be past tense, waiting just for love to arrive, and it had, oh, it had. Time would be kind. I just knew it. The stores were still open and Christmas just up ahead, and there would be customers here and there parking cars, and rushing fast as they could to the stores, to get out of the weather, but there was only one walker in the night, and that man walking was me, head bent, shoulders hunched a little, not just a cold wind posture, but me all the time, walking, and I touched hands in my mind and I headed for the church where I was a member and I knew that there was no one there so safely and feeling comforted there for a half hour or so, I would enter the always opened doors, go to the wine red carpeting that led to the balcony, and thus sit there in the dim chandelier light. This was the central piece of the ritual. I would ask God to hear me. He never seemed to have heard me before, or he had and didn’t care. And I would hold tightly and try to imagine the world not a huge spinning ball going round on a charge of light and properties that no one understood, obeying laws that had no abject sense of proportion or time or duty, that could leave us at a moment’s notice and our world would go plummeting downward, endlessly downward, because there 206 Dancers in the Sky was no bottom to space, and the gravity would give us up surely then, and then, maybe then, everybody on earth would know what I was feeling right that moment and a long time to come. And we could all become clowns together. Funny, right? I tripped, stepping off the curb, in the dim street lights, trying to cross the street, but uncharacteristically of me, I unawares, held my arms outward at my sides and balanced myself fairly quickly, which stunned me a bit, for that was a new thing for me. I was a block from the church, and happily I did not have to pass those mean spirited Santa Clauses on every street corner, for having given money to one, and trying to explain the one on the next corner, that I already had given, and he tossing some angry words in my direction, as I tried to explain more but he turned his back on me, making me feel immensely guilty, and being reminded again how much I hated Santas and clowns. They always seemed evil and terrified me as a small child. But still and all, I thought, though I knew differently, life played fairly with us, and if a person were kind, then they would be kind to in return, but the love was teaching me differently, not that we weren’t kind to each other. We were. My God, we had so much fun together. We shared books. We watched movies. We talked and laughed and were happy. I cannot, though I’ve spent a lifetime trying to, say how truly happy we were and how glad to be in each other’s presence, and I loved and it turned out the one I loved was the butterfly on my shoulder. It was all so delicate and so precise and so evanescent and so perfect and so melancholy and so painful and so wondrous, like first Christmas you remember as a child, not the presents really, but just the joy of waking up on Christmas morning and being so terrifically glad to be alive—somehow knowing, even without looking out the window, that it’s coming a beautiful snow storm, and life is to be joyous, and always changed—there will be fantasies come true and magic will be yours forever, there will be kingdoms and castles, and tigers to golden glow you in the eyes and life will be a dazzlement—that’s the kind of thing I mean. And when I got to the First United Methodist Church, just a few blocks from my apartment, I counted the time left till I would take the bus home to my mother’s house and from there, would see my love. I walked up the terribly slippery iced snow steps, holding clumsily on the banister all the way, and then inside the churchy, the heat blasted me almost like a fist hit me, and in equatorial Africa, I took off my Barry Eysman 207 glasses, which fogged immediately, and I took my handkerchief out again and wiped them and looked all blurry smeared when I put them on again. I walked the wine red carpeting to the balcony steps, and sat on the middle one, like always, having no idea why that one, and I thought of my love and I thought of dreams and how I would like to live in them. I thought of movie endings like the one in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” where Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard rush into each other’s arms in the lovely Technicolor Manhattan canyons in the rain and it’s all wonderful and right and tender and they kiss as the Mancini music swells, as the rain dances happily, and Cat, which was the name of her cat, who almost ran away, is safe with them, and New York is a kaleidoscope of Autumn leaves forever and no one ever goes to bed alone or wakes up alone, as I had always done. I knew of course time was of the essence. I knew it would not last long, except for me, and I knew that I was a fool and very very stupid and how everything I did was so wrong. For instance. I was no newspaper man; I failed at math so badly from like fifth grade up that I was passed along by the teachers; and that some people are meant for love, or at the very least meant for being remembered at least a little, and wondered about, errantly, once or twice in a life time, whatever became of him? I knew all about reality, though I had hid from it successfully, for those who hide from reality are most well aware of what they are hiding from; the topography is very graphic and illuminated; and I never ran to the arms of love and love never ran to the arms of me. But we walked a nearby railroad track when I visited. Sometimes. We walked side by side, and I said I love you a million times in my head, and I sat now on the stairs; the quiet of the church, the quiet of the snow outside, making it all somber and sad, like I always was, except and especially when love was next to me, and it could have been a joke to others; it could have been another of my muck ups, and I knew it, so I cried for a time, silently as somber winter snow and church silence, and I took off my glasses, to get the tears off the lenses; my god, those glasses had really been through it tonight. And I sent one more useless prayer to any God extant. Knowing only silence would come down on my head. And I thought, if I could say I love you, and then turn around and run in embarrassment as fast as I could, and a voice behind me, whispery, like creek water running softly over rocks on a summer’s 208 Dancers in the Sky day, and the flutter of those wings of the butterfly sitting on my shoulder, would put a huge echo of my love’s voice in my ear, so the whole damned world could hear and be amazed, and the words would ring the Earth and the sun and moon and the stars too, and the voice would say Please, no, wait, come back. And I would. Oh God, I would. I would come running and stumbling and find arms waiting to surround me and I wouldn’t have to close my eyes anymore; that was one of the main things; I wouldn’t have to close my eyes anymore. And I put my head in the crook of my arm. I was perspiring terribly from the too much heat in the church, and I held myself like a steel rod. Tough. Strong. Invincible. I would not let this beat me. I had been like this all my life. I had had jokes played on me. I would walk away. I would walk away as I had been walked away from before, more than a few times. I would let my brain guide me. I held strong boned and steel eyes. For about 15 seconds. Then I became me again. And it was close to Christmas. And I was hopelessly and forever in love. Please don’t tell. My love would laugh at me. And I could not take that. I finally got up, walked down the stairs, and out the front door, buttoning my coat again, buffeted by the cold chaffing wind, glasses fogged and iced and snowed on, and the snow was a friend, as I took off my glasses, and walked carefully down the church steps, holding to the railing all the way, then put my glasses on again, and walked into the night. I believed in everything and everyone. I believed in happy endings. And, God help me, I still do. That’s a fool for you. WHAT MY BROKEN EYE SAW

PORTALS: A LOVE STORY

The mountains back where she had been, to her, seemed hillocks now. The sky was as blue as she could stand it, and she could stand it enormously well. She had never been this tall before. Or the sky so low that it seemed friendly. She presented herself to the world and the world was kind to her. If anything could have been said by her before this, this fifteen year old girl would have said, concerning, the world and herself, that it had never seen her. She was coming back to the clearing and the day smelled pine and the day smelled cedar and she felt the cool morning breeze on her spring dress of green material and red flowers dim and dull and sweet and dusty as the passing finery, linen lace breeze, and she sang bell shaped sounding words, and she was immensely cheered, and her arms stretched out at her sides, and her hands drifted as though she was in a sea of rain water. She had never known the portal was there, though it had been on her mind for the last four years. She had disliked life so much, and sometimes she cried when she was alone and she stayed out of the sun and she listened to tunes in her room of dark at home. Because fallows had followed her and she tried to be brave, she really did, and when the bandages came off, she felt as though it would be a new world, as though gold coins had come through her hands. And she had been made a deal from pirates of old. She was needless to say a curious girl. She hid in movies of course. But her eye tricked her, and made her feel it was huge and gaping, when it looked like it always looked. Which was beautiful. Her father had said that to her often, quoting some story line or title, “..and your eyes be blue as the sea.” And he would pick her up, she was quite young then, and hold her and turn in circles, holding her up to the summer sun, and he would bring her face to his and kiss her closed eyes, each in turn and she would drape her arms around him and she was in her green and warm world so very happy. But Dad was no longer around and Mom refused to talk about him and then her eye and then the no cause and then the round of doctors and the expenses and the futility and all the problems. And she 210 Dancers in the Sky would try to dream of her father, who she remembered at least, had always given her sound as a dollar advice, and once she forced her dream to say with kindly words that didn’t mind if she were sad, that loved her more so then, “try it, you know how, it’s been long enough, just try.” And she woke and her heart was beating terribly fast, and she could see something with her eye with the defect in it that she had never seen before. It had to do with summer and it had to do with a piece of time. A piece of time that had or would happen later on in her life. And she smiled, for she had been one for smiling, till the eyes had taught her not to smile, but she did now, because it was endless as the world and it would go on forever and she felt light as a bird; she felt happy; and she didn’t care that her eye was inside wrong, while outside right, looks fine, interior a bloody mess, literally, and she got out of bed and sat on the side of it. She believed in the day and she believed in the circles dancing, pale and yellow in the center and thrumming and pulsating as they had done for the last four years, non stop, and she had put up with them, she had tried to live with them, and her mother said “you have to have everything perfect, dontcha?; you have to have it all just the way you want it, and until then, you will never be happy. Well, that ain’t the way it works in this old world of ours, Girl, I’m down in my back and in pain a lot; I still clean the house and work at a job. So get with it.” It was not true. She did not expect perfection. She just wanted at long last of endless eye bouts, these circle things to go away. She tried to will them away. She tried to stow them in her heart. She tried to accept them. She tried to deny them. She walked with eyes on whatever shadows she could find in the sun, and that helped a little, but she always had to walk with her head up, and not look down because she would see these furious little visible headaches on the pavement, so she fell down a lot and got called “The fall down girl” at school, and it hurt her. She had always tried to be nice to other people. Other kids had liked her. She looked no different from before the eye problems. But she acted like she was blind, they said. But they didn’t know how it was. But there she was, being selfish again. But that night, sitting on the side of the bed, she knew, and her father in her dream had been real; she had not put words into his mouth, no, not at all; what he said was what he meant, and if there was no Rumpelstilskin to climb up Rapunzel’s long long hair, then she, Celesta, could do it all on her Barry Eysman 211 own. Everybody would be proud of her—no, no one must know. No one would know where she had gone and whether or not she chose the right portal, or if she could go into all of them at once, since they were tied together in the center like a bunch of grapes. And she thought it would be tomorrow in there and it would be more than it would seem. She didn’t know what would happen to the her down here. Maybe she would go on, while the real part of her would be up there, on the top of a mountain, with sky and clouds you could count on, and someone who would put his hand in hers and tell her it was okay, tell her that time was the land and the land was eternity and come away with me and be my love. She smiled ashamed at herself. She was a silly girl. Given to such flights of fancy. She was a silly girl who had once laughed too much and too sweetly, and who now cried too much and too sweetly. It was wrong to be so small still, and so defenseless, in such a big bruising world, the kind of world her parents had tried to protect her from, but could not anymore; she was beginning to get that inkling. So, she was frightened to try it. Didn’t know how to try it. She wondered if it would be like she was beginning to imagine, but realized that she had imagined it all the time, from as far back as she went, even when she wasn’t imagining it, she was without knowing it, and she thought how would she do it, and her heart was scared and so was she, and she extended a hand to her bad eye and she put her palm over it, and she whispered, the barest of a whisper, even she could hardly hear it, and the words were hot against the brushing heel of her hand as her breath captured in her other hand next to her nose, “Please, kind sir, take me home. Let me see beauty again. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll do anything you say. But my friends have gone, it seems, and my father. My mother doesn’t like me one bit, and I honestly don’t know why. My grades are slipping. I can’t think of anything but my eye, and it’s wrong to dwell on it. I don’t like living in the city. I want you to help me pull myself up into my eye circles and follow them and enter them. I trust you. Please let me trust you.” And the vortex happened. And the tumbling. And the golden dim ride that turned into golden cities and golden horses and golden sun and tumbling from the sun the mountain that she was floating toward and love was there and love was true. And the dim golden circles were gone from her eye and she was in them instead, and the things she had been most frightened of, the things that had pulled her deeper and deeper into despair, turned into what was for her salvation. And the 212 Dancers in the Sky boy’s hand touched hers. And he was fine and fair. And he smiled shyly. And tried not to put a hand to his right eye, and she knew instantly, her heart sank, that he had the same problems she had had. And he had tried to be brave about it like her. They held each other and she realized she had not been held since her father had that one last time and it felt so good and warm and the boy felt so strong. And she knew he was holding back tears. That these things had hurt him and bedeviled him too, and she looked over his shoulder at the morning mists and the pine trees and the fir trees and the sky of china blue that she could look at without seeing her mad mean circles at all, and she wanted to stay in his arms, and she wanted to gaze at his beautiful face. And she knew that was selfish. And she knew. They spent the day while she was deciding. They walked the eternal endless summer tree roads of dust and they drank out of a bubbling spring and lay beside it and ate berries from a bush, and they lay companionably, and they lay with their hands intertwined and she was so happy as was he in his world that had been population one. Or almost happy. She saw the same grin on his face, meant, and then slightly with determination, and she thought she could make him happy and he would forget and how could there be this same defect in this beautiful eye that was as blue as the sea, in this beautiful land of joy and milk and honey. And she was selfish but she would give him anything, do anything he asked, if he would let her stay. And he was sad. As she reached over and touched his eye, and put her hands on the grass on both sides of him and she kissed his lips and he was fine tasting and he smiled and he closed his bad eye against the too bright sun and the too blue sky. And she, without thinking, she must not think, or she would never be this brave ever again, took his hand and she put it to his bad eye and she put her hand over it, and she prayed that the world in the pulsations in his eye be as beautiful as the world in those of her own eye, and then she prayed, just let him be with me, and I won’t care the season or the time or the circumstances, just let him be free of those things, as I was free of them and was dancing round and round in the sun before he came to me, and I was singing “Father, Father, look at, I can see the entirety of a new world, and it is so good and fine and every texture of bright sun and dark shadow and blue sky and blue stream and green shiny grass and boulders gray and water from the stream splashing on them. Barry Eysman 213 “And I can turn my head round and see my eyes gaze on everything unafraid after a moment, smooth and gliding, flowing vision, dancing slowly round and round and the world of my eyes does not fall down and I will never be “The Fall Down Girl” not ever again. It’s like being able to see again; really see again, I had forgotten what that was truly like; and no longer having to see like everything is in a narrow box and I must choose what to look at, weigh the cost, guess the effect, and hope for the best……to this boy, it was not beautiful. To him it was a prison. “Come with me,” she whispered and kissed his hand and hers on top of his over his eye. And she knew it would be all right. He would be with her. And as they began to move to the rim of his vortex of pulsations, she knew there was the ultimate topography they would always have, regardless of how his world in there was, the topography of each other, and trust, and sad word happy word real word still word easy word dream word home word tender word strong word goodbye to the old fakes that pretended that word back there, this much needed word repeated endlessly word and thinking it thus, both ascended, and Rapunzel pulled herself and him into it, and Rumpelstilskin was last seen on a bus roaring out of town, piqued as he could be. They had gotten away. On an even more beautiful Autumn day. INCIDENT AT MAYWOOD MOTEL (dedicated with deepest respect to Jim Thompson, writer)

Maywood Motel was the last place I expected to see, because it had been a long time, and I was being chased. Night was a tunnel of stars, and I was aching so. My left leg with the new hurt in it, in the night hot and measurable and still. As though a prank had gone wrong, or something feverish had entered an old scar. The old one I got when my old man beat me for being a boy, if nothing else. And then the drinking and then the movements and then the figuring things out for the first time, took its toll. And he thought these things as he moved in the old car to the Maywood Motel. Sign back there. Two miles to it, and now here he was at something strangely resembling the conclusion of everything. The pay off was due.. You kill in various ways, and you are killed in various ways. You search for power especially if you are a little man, someone no one has ever noticed before. As though you could not do anything to intercede for your dead wife who was a lost love of someone who came to your apartment one night, yours and hers, and blasted her away, and you lay there in fear and begged him—hey come on, not me too, not me too. In the noisy night grime and smell and feel of the sweaty, dark tenement room. With the traffic going by, unheeded. And the shouts and curses and slaps and noises of hate going on all around you. All those sick little worlds. And you knelt and wept and he let you live because that was the worst thing he could do to you. You smelled cordite and you smelled blood and the sick sweat of your own fear and cowardice, and that was the night, though it was a week later, after the police had cleared you, that you finally began to run. Running is a curious thing. It has a pattern, a meter, that is all its own. It does not master you or control you, but it serves you all too well. And sometimes a little man, like me, finds the road of night easier to stand, in reality rather than in dreams of always running. So what if I’m a pornographer working for one of the sleaze magazines? So what if I will do anything for a buck? I never abused the chances. I never took the chances. The cheese was not for me, and Linda was for me. Because she believed in me even though I cuffed her around from time to time, she always forgave me. No one else had ever forgiven Barry Eysman 215 me. No one else had ever hurt me like my old man did, which was worse than seeing Linda bleeding like a painted doll who had had too much red rouge on her face and now it was oozing out of that broken forever face that had been so beautiful. You put paranoia to work and you call it reality. I sat there in my old broken down Plymouth in the motel parking lot. The night horribly dark and still. No cars. No cicadas. The motel with its snake line of cabins, was ancient and smelled of the blood of dreams in me. Dreams that always tasted sour like rotgut, and the previous version. As though I could have actually broken through the words. I was the poet for that magazine, and people told me so, and I wrote things that I never thought I would ever write, because I had to do something with my words, and we would get letters to the editor saying I was the best writer there, and that was the shame of it, because I believed it, and prostituted any talent I ever had in order to be a part of word games and images that came from this far side of the moon as much as any of the other writers like me, there were no others like me, were concerned. I evinced emotion and poetry and style and grace and wit and taking an idea as cheesy as all get out and making something, if not beautiful, at least understandable, at least, if not me, somebody and they maybe felt better about themselves. Which was stupid thinking, as I got out of the car, and the night wings beat down on me and I thought of Linda and how I had betrayed her in story after story and dream after dream and how it was like a hologram that I always had to keep going over and over in my head as though there were drowsing creatures of blue bodies and hazel colored eyes that had thunder in their finger tips when they placed them together. And watched them roar. And I forgot Linda and I lived Linda and sometimes a man can get so down on the ropes that he, this someone else, will hire someone to kill his wife, this someone else’s wife, for him and he will pretend amnesia and sometimes believe it, because he, whoever that was, had to be a writer and if this was the best he could do, he was out of ideas. He had worked all the angles. A character I had created. Not me. He had tried to make human out of inhuman people, out of people diseased with this sickness that was forever making him an insomniac, making him scared from deeply inside, more and more. But he believed he was a someone of the lowest circle of hell. He believed he was putting poetry to such illnesses you find in dark alleys way after midnight, and somehow that made it OK. Midnight sadness that 216 Dancers in the Sky had started with love and words that meant something, and craftsmanship he was not ashamed of. But then the snakes came out in his head. A little at a time and I became another person, and I could read what I wrote and imagine it as something else. Something that told the truth about people and emotional freaks were not so, because I said so, and because I was the recipient of letters from said non emotional freaks who thanked me and it felt good and it was not a bad thing I did. But then I entered further. I low backed more. I came down the cast of crutches and fell lower and lower down the hill until I could not buy it anymore. Until I could not look at Linda anymore, for I had used her and used her and had taken her love and her heart and her understanding and made it all rankly sexual, and I thought I would get back on my game any time. I was just slumming a little. I was just down at a bottom field that was mine alone and no one else’s. My old man had—done things to me—and I never got over the fever of that. And Linda felt to me as though she had enough goodness to pull me out. To take me out of a world I had entered and was strangling to death in spider web cords. And if this was the essence of any type of redemption, I would take it because I was tired and I wanted to repeat her beauty in world after word and I could get on the surface again, and I could say this is me again, and not him, not the pornographer who dared subjects because of what his old man told him he was, but his old man was dead wrong. But I thought, he thought, splitting me in half, and I hit the bell on the desk in the manager’s office and pushed back the brim of my hat and leaned on the counter, and I had thought what if I take what my old man thought I was, and take it not through the lake fire, but make it worse even than he said, like he knew anything, like he had any room to talk, and I could make people I wrote about become real, become creatures on whom the sun shone, and the hearts deep in them were like all hearts, mangled and confused like all hearts. And I kidded myself about that. He kidded himself about that. And we both went down to depredation and juggling affronts to what he believed really, to words and crafting them, I forgot, used up, misspent, and then it was just whatever raw painful wounds I could pull out of my head. And then it was just sex I wrote and I had to make it worse and worse and I had to see Linda staring at me after reading the magazine. I had to see how she looked at me. No, at him. And her eyes were hurt, and her sadness came out so easily, and I tried to write manuscripts for real magazines, nice Barry Eysman 217 clean stories and never got anything but the rejection of them. And I was always fighting myself, prostituting my words and my worlds and not becoming what I wrote—but I, he, paid someone to kill his wife—so does that tell you how far I, he, had slipped.

And in time, he forgot the sex parts he wrote, and in time he believed himself a Hemingway or a Steinbeck, and as he entered the warped door of the manager’s office, and saw the sick fading green apple wall paper, torn, and the rosy broken light over the desk in the room that was empty of persons save for him, and the lights were sick and the lights were gray and there was the somehow expected glassine envelope, too big for its proportions, a stage prop, an artifice like most things and people, even Linda, had turned into in his life. And the envelope waited for him on the counter and he walked to it and was not surprised to find his name on it. He picked it up. Looked at the wild scrawl that was his name. And the address in the corner, my, face it, publisher. And the motel smelled of rank and grass, not the smokeable kind, and there was this center of snake in my stomach, the center of shame that I had been writing out as hard as possible the last seven years, the angers and the memories and the pains that an old man gives a kid because the old man is a coward and wanted his son to beat the game and be the game, and be the duck that was forever hunted, and I was sweating now, bullets. I wiped my face with my handkerchief. Things that turned my stomach I tried to write as a summer landscape. Sick stuff I tried to write as a cold wintry beautiful Christmas gift, and I was perfect example number one of how a writer, a person, can so very easily take the devil’s hand and down we go, though at least I build a temporary cast iron stomach because I was saving the under dogs of the world. And all the “Normal” people who secretly read this kind of stuff too. Who’s kidding who? After the kind sincerely meant letters to me about my work, came letters that scared me, that referred to certain things I had written, and that and I knew I hadn’t, but when I looked back at the stories in question, I had, god help me, I had, and the cast iron stomach was rotting away and I knew what I had turned into. From writing love letters to Linda to writing freak of the month stories and the guilt I felt about calling them such things too. Wasn’t I still on track? Wasn’t I still sure of what I was doing? Wasn’t I still coherent in my own way? Had I forgotten the plan? Creating characters who were so sick you would run past them on the street. 218 Dancers in the Sky This is what writers do. They explore the underbelly sometimes. A lot of times. They do not write about themselves, or not usually. They write about people they don’t like, a lot of the time, and they try to understand them. If one writes only about nice people and nice subjects and does it so blandly that it can’t offend anyone, who would read them? They would be broke in a week. Publishers would be non existent. You try to convince readers you know what and who you are writing about, from the inside out, when the truth is mostly you don’t. It’s a lot of guess work. It’s a lot of empathy most would never have. Like actors. They try to convince you they are the roles they are playing. If they only played ministers and do gooders, they would be out of work a lot. And what about getting a stick and probing that soft white underbelly of nice people and see what creepie crawlers come to the surface? They’ve little right to judge. And this had to be, because it is a writer’s job to understand people others don’t try to, black and white, never seeing the gray, the complexity, and the art of bringing a light and shine it on what and who most would ordinarily not look at or want to be around, because such people are too close to their own secret selves and oh god how they hate the reminding of that, but I hired a gunsel to kill my wife. And I picked up the envelope and I tore it open. There was my final check and I turned my eyes upward as someone behind the desk coughed. I had not seen my old man for a few lifetimes. I had always been a good boy. I had done nothing wrong. I had obeyed. I had been told what I was and I accepted it even though everything in me and outside of me that I touched and loved and cared for told me otherwise. But there he was, the devil. There he was the old man, hairy and smelling filthy, and old as hell now, old and wrinkled and tired and liver spotted on his bald head and his eyes weak and small and his body in torn ragged stained ribbed T shirt and his pants low over his beer belly. And he pointed his dirty index finger at the envelope in my hand that had begun to tremble. And he smiled and lit an old stogie. And breathed out, contemplatively, and smugly, like always, the smoke thick and acrid in the air and made me cough. I looked at the check again. Five thousand dollars, which was more than I made in a whole year and he smiled and his teeth were rotten and filled with black holes. The front teeth were missing. His face was wrinkled. From certain perspectives he was funny looking. From others he was Barry Eysman 219 the devil. The money was final pay. It was what made everything else fit. And he pulled out a gun and aimed it at me. Old gun from old times from an old man who had things on his mind and didn’t mind beating the hell out of me to clear said mind, and he said, “I got you where I want you, kiddo.” And then he said it again for good measure. And he pulled the trigger and I fell down and he came from behind the desk and he fired the gat at me until all the bullets were inside me. I never knew quite so much hellish hurt. It hurt more than not being able to give Linda the life she deserved. She was such a sweet kid and she was nice to me. Maybe the only person in the world who ever was so. I had a cause, and in this cause there was no passion, there was nothing but a colluding with the devil, and I had run all the roads, had driven all the highways till I had to come back here, till I had to come back home, knowing it and not at the same time, like I knew my editor was not my old man, and like I knew where the star I clung to was, and if I wipe filth into me I could wipe it out as well, because it was illusory. Because I had never drank or smoked or did gage or any of that, or go to strip clubs or cheat on my wife. They say the Marquis de Sade was a sadist only in his head. They say that he really saved criminals from the guillotine because he had such a kind heart. And I’m lying there with tomato soup gushing out of my body and I’m thinking of all the novelists who wrote about sex far more graphic than I did, and I think of all the names of those who delved into all kinds of ideas, even sicker than mine, because it was needful for a time in their lives to find the lowest rung and take an accurate picture of it and all the way straight down to hell that I was going, and time bleed green summer and my head fell into deepest cold numbed winter and there were fourth of July pinwheels in my eyes that did all kinds of crazy things— crazy perspectives, insane angles, deep in jungles, high on snow covered mountains and falling and falling and falling, and the man dropped his cigar on my chest and it burned me and did not hurt. And he said, “welcome to hell, buddy boy. How does it feel?” Then of course he laughed and then I died and closed my eyes and opened them again. And found my editor, my old man, standing above me, as he dropped a green eye shade down to me, and black bands to put round my arms, as the blood on my body became ink stains I later noticed, and the old man had a gray suit on like you would expect from so long ago, vastly further back than when I had 220 Dancers in the Sky been born. He had a lit cigar dangling out of his mouth, and there was the sounds that said newspaper office. Smells of ink. People discussing stories for the day’s bull dog edition. And I put on the black arm bands and took the visor from him. I was there sprawled on the floor. But everybody who walked past me or said hi to me, two did, carrying copy they were correcting, on the move, how did they know my name?, took this as normal. And I was young again and he helped me to my feet. I could start again. This time, get some of it right. Maybe he looked like someone I used to know. Maybe he was someone I used to know. But a kinder, if gruff newsman, version. I knew I could trust this man. It would be okay. The office smelled of work and industry and rightness and decency. Felt of words that mattered. That brought news and sunshine and light and openness to the community, not darkness and hiddenness and sleek fat things in the wall at night, rustling about, so you could not sleep—just picture what those wall dwellers looked like and what they would do to you when they finally gnawed through to you. Not like the magazine offices where I had worked. Of pain and shadows saddening everything. Of people barely scraping by with what they were paid. All that sick shame. All that embarrassment you could not take off at night when you went to bed. And the mice in your brain ate away at you. Clothes old and down at the heels. But people here dressed nicely. I touched to my chest. No pain. Ink stains there now. Just a few. Outside the windows which were not grimy, there was a small town street, and there were green flourishing trees and a blue sky with soft white clouds. And people going by on the sidewalk in such antique, strangely beautiful, clothing, saying hello when passing by someone or nodding a head or tipping a hat. Everything just tasted—fulfilled. I could not wait to get out there and run in it and be a part of it. You don’t question miracles. You accept them. And every night before bed you get down on your knees and say thank you for them and you never forget. Not ever. I was wearing spats I noticed and I had a press card in my fedora that I took off and looked at. And the colors of everything were easy and soft and good to the eyes, and the edges of things were not sharp like in real life, so you could not cut yourself on them, and the editor barked out, “let’s get rolling on this thing, Junior. Mayor’s at Town Hall, speaking. You can get there if you hurry. Just write down what Barry Eysman 221 he says. You can do that, can’t you?” I said yes sir of course sir. I tossed my visor onto MY desk, put on my hat. And I rushed down the stairs, legs powerful and not hurting and not limping as the left one had begun to do as of late, and I felt clean as I opened the back door of the newspaper office. It was spring. It smelled warm and kind and forgiving. It smelled second chance and I should stop and breathe every now and then. It felt good and looked good. The sun. The day about me. And I knew where the city hall was. Just a block away. I decided to walk it. And broke into a run. And as I did, I thought about Linda and I thought about the editor who had looked strangely familiar, then didn’t care about the editor looking familiar, only that this evening, how could I have forgotten?, in this small town of the twenties, I had a date with her and I didn’t have to justify anything and there was nothing I would not do to make her happy and I reached City Hall and went inside, right to the correct room, where the mayor was talking. I looked down at my shirt. No ink stains. I was presentable. I took off my hat and walked inside. A few people in the audience noticed me and slightly waved and I waved back. Then I took a seat. Pen and note pad ready as he began his speech and I thought one word before I began taking notes. And that one word was: salvation. JCO, GWB, EXTREME HORROR AND OTHER VIRTUAL BOOKSHELF BLOOD

SOURLAND

JOYCE CAROL OATES

The amputee seems to be the key to these stories which are beautifully sad and full of pain. The various missing parts of a body are death that won't stay dead. The scream of pain in a hospital, resulting in a beating for no particular reason other than it's Tuesday and it's 3:30, so why not? The haunting cover photograph and the Kindle building of the interior photograph is ghost like. The stories are about being torn. A child, a recent widow, a love of horror, all of us made of goodbyes. She reaches into your soul and makes you realize the delicate birth of fragility. Suddenly, in her words, you are carrying alone, or old, as if they are the result of a kind of pregnancy. In describing a woman's leg stumps, we see a beauty in the feel and the look close-up. And if everybody might as well be Daddy, and if a formerly deformed girl has a forever deformed mother, then we hide with the boy and never ever let anyone find us. Or we run through Sourland, and we are alone. And we cry. We finish the book and we know more about ourselves, than is comfortable. She gives us a sense of our destiny and what we've lost in our lives. And as she grounds us to dust, she shows us the miracle of strength. Read her. It takes courage. It's worth it. The poetry of our dark knights. The child is no child. The girl holding her mother together, a comforting dream of a father, as he draws his daughter as a sickly child, needful perceptions to forsake the cruelty.

THE FAITH OF A WRITER "Write your heart out." Joyce Carol Oates

The sheer horror, beauty, sedition of the process of writing is given to us in FAITH OF A WRITER. An uncommonly kind companion with a ceaseless mirth and calmness for the jangle of the writer brain in descent through the jungle of words and advice and Barry Eysman 223 lectures and endless how to books, the process of JCO is continuing in a world of running., dreaming and looking out windows of glass and into windows of books which tell us of forbidden things, the tentacles of knowledge, rather than of wings. Use the subjects that interest you, do not be ashamed of them or yourself. Start by admitting you can understand yourself in the medium cool art of words, the kind that can be rearranged, that have a look and majesty of and in themselves, as John Updike, as a child, was so drawn to them.. For a writer of such fierce, bold insight, her warmth and courage to a young writer is startling and reassuring. For writers oftentimes "write for an audience who is not there." As we "wish to please someone who is not worth pleasing." Or "if you yearn for people who won't reciprocate your interest in them, you should know your yearning for them is probably the most valuable thing about them. So long as it is unrequited." Not bad for a writer whose first characters were conflicted chickens and cats. She writes of the ethereal beauty of writing as running, the movement, the flying memories of childhood running, away from bullies, and into imitating reality, seeing the unreality of adults, thus her process of filtering it through her imagination and gradually taking note of the falseness of people around her who ducked down deeply in life played head on played, thus need of writer to coolly write of life as an art form, hyper real and yet close to the written sources of it, though not surreal as children are fond. Such as Alice in Wonderland which she writes about with such affection.. If first, she was devoted to playing at being, for a reason, trying to figure it all out, others playing at hiding for nothing else, at fear for success, it is to the writer who is working to relieve the curse born under, the unworthiness we are always trying to find extreme unction for, who have to spend our days in whatever gesticulations can give us surcease, none can, who have to be that child at the mad tea party of insanity, and make sane observations of it on paper. And all the memories amidst the morbid fear of dying in the middle of a project and the fear of these dynamite eggs writers carry, so very important, to get down right., the guaranteed failures before and to come, how celebrated writers could use past missteps to create books like PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. For a writer to see inside his most painful darkest self and write it with unflinching honesty as did Wilde in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, in one succinct page, that would have killed every best-selling writer today en masse. 224 Dancers in the Sky WRITE YOUR HEART OUT. Scream it. Does not matter an infinitesimal damn what anyone else thinks of it. Jane Smiley writes of Oates, she often "seems to be working in private, cultivating the variety and complexity of her vision in service of more than a literary career." In her books, life is occurring as if us, but their sky is not colored quite as ours, her characters are like us, but yet. When did she decide to be a writer? Ask what her product is, or who JCO is and find delicious enigmas. To write, she says, is to be endlessly fascinated in who we are and why. The human equation is always reflecting us, as we try to decipher FINNEGAN'S WAKE, co-chase after the great white whale, read of a girl named Norma Jean, we see the magic of the transcendent and discover epiphanies anew as the most simple moment of life hits us with, yes, how can I develop that? How could I not have seen that before? And her headlong rush to pen and paper. As John Updike wrote in MORE MATTER, Gothic literature has "enriched Stephen King but has inspired Joyce Carol Oates" in her Gothic period. The girl who marveled as a child she went to the same poor school her mother did, and kindly remembers her teacher, and also why she " ran like a deer" and still is, be ready, she writes, prepare for life, especially one coupled with the curse of writing, it is brutal beyond explanation--just exaggerating yourself, climb down of your high horse, always scribble scrabbling and hiding behind books no one ever heard of, people gonna think you strange, where's all that gonna get you in life? Well, it got her to be Joyce Carol Oates. And she has been nice enough to come back and give strength, compassion to say how it is and help writers along. Write your heart out. Joyce Carol Oates, who still doesn't think she is prolific. God. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Paperback) And yet, I will read her from more of a distance, for as she feels a distance from her work, her JCO persona and her amusement at mistakenly being taken as what she writes in her stories and novels can't be blamed, but it allows us to know there needs be a certain studied reserve now. No public person owes us a thing, but their best in their work, though that they do not owe, and with ridiculous things by stupid writers who are lionized, I still say read Oates and Updike about whom she writes so warmly. She weeps as I have wept over her words. She is so fastidious in her writing and the constant trying to understand the soul, the personality, the rush of time and the awareness of why she is doing these things and answers that don't fit Barry Eysman 225 and the constant search for something always distant. But this part of the journal is now ours and it is ours to ask is DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL really herself laid bare, something that she will never do again, true? As is the stalker she mentions and the ones to follow, As is her own self in them. We now know, in her witheringly intelligent creative brain, it is not, as is not the Goth girl in another novel, meant as another joke, as people surmise, I think of the way Salinger, in a dedication to his young son, Matthew, calculatedly let the world know he had a son. Her journal is filled with her love for her husband and her writerly paintings of seasons, and lost past and refreshing humor and her bravery in exploring deepest recesses, a courage that is awe inspiring and the need even to risk death for writing. And yet, as now I read other writers from a more careful contemplation, because, and this does not matter except she, as she writes here, is a conduit, she may be having us on, which goes with her impishness, an odd and wonderful word to use about her. As she allows us to explore the labyrinth with her, I shall be more wary and in this I realize JCO has taught me yet another valuable lesson. I did not expect this review to end thanking her for what has shaken me a bit.

TICK TOCK James Patterson

Chapter 1 "Gettin' kinda late.",

Chapter 2 "Hey, cabbie, how much do you charge to go to Isola? Been fun, Jim."

Chapter. 3 "But it's wearing kind of thin and the prices are getting steep. Got some old friends there I want to meet again. "

Chapter 4. "Drive."

DECISION POINTS George Bush

0 OF 1 SAID THIS WAS HELPFUL. 226 Dancers in the Sky JUST HOW GULLIBLE ARE WE? (See above)

This is an idiot. There are articles on who wrote this. People at the publisher's, excerpts taken from Bush lap dog Bob Woodward. The clumsiest rewrite of history I’ve ever read. And the dumbest.

RUTHLESS

No jokes about Bentley Little's high horse intro, the bad formatting or jibes about indie publishing, I made it almost half way through. That quality professional writing may take off like crazy the rest of the way. I'm not going to try to review what I've read. I've read violent stories and novels for a long time, but this is as low as it gets. There are no plots. The writing means nothing. The thing is beneath contempt. It is disheartening. It's a dog fight, real and true. And if you like dog fights, flesh blood and gore inch by inch, this is for you.

DAVID SUSSKIND: A Televised Life

A book that is to treasure. The man responsible for some of television's and film gold. To read about the evolution of this intimate human drama that created dreams in black and white and constantly burgeoning. At a terrible cost that is that of a genius. And his children back there, lost, but coming to terms with human flaws. Which David Susskind tackled his own way. Forever East Side/West Side, with George C. Scott as Neil Brock who loomed out of my snowy Admiral TV screen and brought such drama, such reality in that brilliant series. New York and human pain and those wonderful large and small triumphs. Such a longing, that series. Elizabeth Wilson holding out a hand to an autistic girl in My Child on Monday Morning. And Susskind there for the movie of Requiem For a Heavyweight, championing a great drama. He moved through classics to experimental, from a game show to the sublime He And She. And all over the world. Also as a wonderful bonus, in depth discussions of The Defenders. This is a book to stand beside the biography of George C. Scott, Rage And Glory. Susskind was a world of imagination. And of course Open End on which Guy Woodhouse once appeared. It's painful to read of his last days. And for awhile the details of them seemed exploitative. But Susskind put us face to face with so much that is purely human. A raisin dropped in the sun. This book puts us up Barry Eysman 227 close to him. Such success and shining. It's a fine, literate, worth while book about people who dealt in words and concepts. And as much as I admire Gore Vidal, I think Susskind did remember things that happened day before yesterday. And for everybody who saw Open End and all his talk shows, with guests like that, I can not say how much I envy you. Thank you from a fan, late in the day.

MORE VINTAGE LOST HORROR

Course we are tricked into thinking an awful lot of research and digging went into finding this copious amount of horror short stories to fill over 300 pages. All public domain. These "lost" stories are: The Masque of the Red Death by a Mr. Poe, Diary of a Madman by Maupassant, H.G.Wells' The Magic Shop. all favorites down through time, hardly lost; in fact, we can't seem to avoid them in endless reprinting. Jack London's story, at least the title, escapes me for the moment. The vast majority of the book is filled with Stoker's Lair of the White Worm, not buried under a sphinx somewhere. There is a Reaper, one not familiar with--yet and Algernon Blackwood's The Wendingo, a novella. That's it. The price is ridiculously cheap. Not the point. Want a collection of great stories in horror and related fields? Try Peter Haining. As crafty and fun and full of joy in his editing, and real research and in offbeat and thrilling inclusions and observations and angles, as are we, his readers. Superb. None better.

FIRST BORN (Beau to Beau)

A tender, loving, brave story. A unicorn in the distance, wise and strong, a gift of love, too often fleeting and gone. From bigotry and horrible violence, this is a gift. A university romance. all the callow joy and sweet sexual surrender. Brothers close bond. And lovers erotic and noble. In the golden eye of a unicorn in the mist, then gone and no more. University romances are one of a kind. Mine was Joel and he loved unicorns. Thank you for a lovely graceful world.. DREAM ALONG

“God gave us imagination so we would not die of reality.” Ray Bradbury

It is a curious thing, this divide between fact and fiction for nothing is surely fact or fiction. There is no Sherlock Holmes of fact completely, in this world. Mr. Holmes and Mr. Watson loved dearly the fog and cold of their surroundings, for after all, someone had to tell the stories, devise them and get us to believe they are as close to real humans as fictional characters can be. And most assuredly, time cannot best them, and thus they are human immortal. The old gimmick of what a number of eyewitnesses saw which did not occur, though you would swear they did not—was the attorney at the beginning of a The Defenders episode bribed to throw a case? He was certainly oily enough as was the man to offer him the bribe. They joked about it enough, dancing round the center of the thing. The attorney is charged with taking the bribe, we certainly remember the man taking the envelope with the money from his overcoat and surreptitiously handing it cross the restaurant dining table. So when his trial progresses, we are driven slowly, skillfully nuts—did he or not? When Lawrence and Kenneth Preston disturb us with now you see it, and convince the jury to vote not guilty, well, come on, how about a flashback, so we can see the thing again. Nope, credits roll. We, however, don’t have to knock our heads against the wall till summer reruns. We can go back and look. No money changed hands. It stayed in the envelope during the entire time of tricky dialogue. A friend said recently, much of what he knows, he learned from movies. Of course, he is kidding, being very bright, literate, successful. But. Really, when Homer Simpson remembers the Fonz, Richie Cunningham and Al’s as true and real friends and places, which Marge reminds him was the TV series, “Happy Days,” he replies, yes they were happy days. Presidents know things that “In my heart, I know is not so,” or people crazy as a soup sandwich, on TV, can convince us so easily of things we know are not so. I lived through the Berlin wall coming down, and I know why. I saw books being written about that, simply Barry Eysman 229 not true, and other things as well. I see the same thing happening now. But I’ve my own way of looking at things. All of us do. It’s always a battle. We heard the current president say things in his campaign that he really didn’t say. We just had such hope he had. And that is us. I don’t know about you, but the price we pay for imagination, hope, and dreams, is sometimes awfully steep. And we should always take heed. Well, we’re human. Let us never be machines. For they will never know the joy of 221B Baker Street and the ultimate rational man, Sherlock Holmes, created totally out of imagination and dreams. I TRIED TO ESCAPE THIS WAY

SEEMS A LITTLE SEAM TO ME

It was different now. She had been chasing it, unknowingly, out of the corner of her eyes for some time. Always at night. Watching the Vid Screen. Or doing cross-sticks under the too bright lamplight. It was three month after the surgery on her left eye, the patch having been removed only recently. Delicate procedure. Extensive procedure. And it seemed as though it had gone well this time. She was still a bit shaken by everything. The explosion of fireworks in her suddenly carnival eye that terrifying night when she woke with the scent of singed hair for some reason no one could explain in her mouth and nose. She had called Service. Which had rushed her to Medivac where had begun what she referred to as the eye odyssey. She preferred not to think of any of this, and now a corner of darkness, a small wedge of it was in the left upper corner of her fragile delicate hurt eye. It did hurt some, as she got her cane, stood up from the sound chair, then leaned over turning off the sound of the movie that was encapsulated in her chair and filled her entire body with the soundtrack until her very bones felt bruised and unalone. The bruising of her bones by the sound that had become her when she listened to music or watched movies was small price to pay for being awash with sound that said she could hear, and that infirmity when she had the players on was happily washed away, even if the movie or music was grim. She pretended she did not see the little corner of darkness, like a tiny edge of a roof in the upper left corner of her eye—it was little price to pay for what had been wrong with it—all the nerves and the broken jelly and the lens replacements and the odd images in her eye all this time. Now there was simply seaweed black floaters in the other eye, of which nothing at all was ironically wrong. The new eye, the eye of tomorrow, that one was the bad eye now obversely the good one. She held to her cane tip, and went slowly to the kitchen area. Tildy, her cat, walked with her and purred against the old woman's anklets on this cold first wintry night of December. She cooed to the cat, a lovely gray Minx, and Tildy meowed back at her mistress, looking way up at the woman, hugely tall from the cat's perspective, though the woman was barely five ft. tall and refused Barry Eysman 231 to use the metric system even America had finally switched to some generations ago, bull headed country indeed. The old woman whose name was Sadie, or as the children used to refer to when she was one of them, Sad-y, for she was, though not really, but seemed to be sad much of the time. And finally she was indeed quite sad. She fixed a cup of Earl Gray—not that they still made that—it cost so much to buy good tea, but what allowances were given her were eaten up by her eye, which made her smile—her eye, a voracious living creature. She fixed the plain old cheap tea she pretended was Earl Gray tea, and sipped it, leaning by the dusty counter in this small aged little house where she had lived most of her lifetime. And she thought the light from the living room seemed—odd. Seemed coming for a different-slant. It had something to do, she thought, burning the tip of her tongue on the hot tea in the flowered teacup preserved from her grandmother's grandmother. The doctors had told her to think of the first new eye as it would eat up the previous real one, cell by cell, DNA strand by strand, melting it in effect, so the body would accept it as its own. The second artificial eye would do the same to the previous almost-real one. She was frail and was toddly sometimes and sometimes tiddly, she half giggled between her pale drawn little lips, and true the light would have to be adjusted to—the new eye was almost her very own, her doctors said, and she remembered vids of the ancient past in which a heavy set gray haired woman in a very baggy what they used to call print dress, pale white flowers on it, and the dress very dark and a little shiny from being worn a long number of years. The doctors had told her that was her eye vids memory, since her original eyes, the one she had been born with, was saying good bye to her as it was eaten, grotesque image, away. Because even poor people such as she in this country, since memories were getting shorter and shorter, school history classes getting slimmer and slimmer text books, for governments made sure that persons did not remember some certain things, of which she and no one else, even and especially the government, did not know, therefore there was a computer chip placed in the brain where memory used to be. The chip was concerned with domestic memories of the baby born, so they would remember their mothers and grand mothers and great grand mothers etc., only women of course, doing house hold chores and baking, when back long ago these things were actually done, and this was the price in addition to the georgies she could never 232 Dancers in the Sky afford enough of, the true price of having had her eye gone, then its replacement, and now its replacement. She was old, not of use to the State, and being a poor girl from a poor family, of no use at any but in the most unimportant of ways, therefore the luxury of memory was not needed. Never had been needed really. For the simple good heart of the State allowed her as it did everyone, no one really needed, since computers ran the entire world, so with her memory going, simple as it was and tedious sometimes watching some woman in her dim past running a hot triangle over a dress on a gray board while watching a tiny box on which dim images moved-oh you have to be kidding, she thought first on seeing that, thinking her chip was out of whack—and she could even feel the heat of summer there in that hot little green room of then, but all of it was going, saying goodbye, which she tried not to think of. For soon she could not think at all, and with no memory and no thoughts at all, whatever they might have been, she would become a thing, an object, she would still live but she would be less alive than she had ever been. For try as the scientists might, they had to incorporate memories of some sort into humans before the androids were totally perfected, because of the simple fact they were what most made us human. She finished the cuppa and started back to the living room, taking it slowly, in this model house that was in a huge steel barrel that covered half the country and prevented any citizen from seeing what the world outside had really turned to. Then Tildy jumped high. Higher than she had ever jumped before. And Tildy then vanished in the upper little roof ledge of the eye and the strangely swayed light from the lamp in the living room with its sterile though homey to the people here at least comfort. Soft cushions everywhere. For her breakable bones. Honey colored walls. Constant heat or coolness. Servers when she wanted the metallic things. So far she had refused. Lovely vid screens round the walls in soft glow. The sound chair. Now minus though one irreplaceable thing. Her beloved cat Tildy. As the cat vanished into something in the air, against the light that was like some of the sea turning round and swimming back on itself. The old woman who was losing even memory of her own face and being and name, screamed unintelligibly, her feet slipping and she tumbling and she remembered that heavy set woman, the tired woman, sitting in front of one of those—she could not think the word, but vaguely saw it, when there were such things, an even then old Singer sewing machine. The word Singer scripted in old yellow on the black Barry Eysman 233 thing the woman with ancient arthritic hands worked in the barely lit cold bedroom of her own aging small house and that was the last conscious thought she had because she was now finally at long last doubting everything she had been told and viewed her whole life, which caused the machine her to totally shut down, for that was the ultimate prime directive of her makers, and everyone's makers, never to doubt, especially never to doubt everything. She fell to the warm soft cushions and her eyes closed, and she was shut off. While, Tildy, real cat, had found with her own complex eyes never for a human or android of whatever caliber to duplicate, which was why they kept cats alive, to continue to observe them, what the dead woman thing had almost seen, metaphorically and a bit literally too. The little ledge in the edge of the eye that would be salvaged and used again was a seam a seamstress would have noticed immediately, against the light flowing a bit against itself, for the seam was between tonight and tomorrow, as a moment an instant the wise heads who had worked out absolutely everything had not noticed. And in this seam, this sewing machine pleat that made the cohesive tiny miniscule things that such giant brains had no need of, this little seam work, was a warm comfortable place and roomy and filled with happiness and contentment, as though a weary arthritic god chased down the gleaming halls of man's so smug inventiveness and perceptions, having withered the world landscape and billions of creature on it with their insane nuke battles, from little peanut minds, here was god's last hiding place, god at his singer machine singing still as Tildy purred when she felt a familiar anklet next to her cheek, so she rubbed her cheek on it and looked up at the now real, little young woman who looked very tall to the cat, thought the woman was barely five ft. It all depends on your perspective. ADDENDUM

It now, because of my brain abnormalities, takes me 4 hours to type a page and a half.I misspell every single word. I write mostly in the spell check box. Most of this is composed of random key strokes. From LIVES, A PORTFOLIO onward, my hands have gotten increasingly worse, as has my sense of balance. My foxy humor is here--in making for some pratfall giggles, as I merrily go to my imitation of a turnip. It was 3:30 in the morning. I was on day watch. I’m Friday. I carry a gun. Wanna see my gun? Like Rory Calhoun (MY GOD, THAT’S RORY CALHOUN? WHAT THE HELL’S HAPPENED TO HIM?) as farmer Vincent, I consider the karmic implications of, in my case, why turnips are always used in this comparison. Why not a banana? Or squash? Moments ago, in a tribute to The Three Stooges, Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe, with Shemp in a cameo role, in the kitchen, while shoving aside cups in order to make coffee, I spilled a cup on the floor. As I tried to throw it in the sink, in the nick of time, Nick lost. I put paper towels down for the spilled liquid. Taking the filter with used coffee grounds to the garbage can, I spilled them on the paper towels on the wet floor, remembering Burl Ives singing about that twisted, very stupid old lady who swallowed the fly, then swallowed half or three-quarters of the animal kingdom to rid herself of that fly; hey fool, don't go round with your mouth hanging open. (Why didn’t the rest run like hell? She fake a Tarzan yell to trick them? Were they all just standing there, waiting their turn? Where did they come from? Who was this old bat? Man, she must have been strong. She had to pick up a horse to stick in her mouth and swallow it. What was she? A python? How big was her stomach? Would they not break thru eventually? Were the animals suicidal? After the cow, it would seem, she would see this as hopeless and give up.) What was the coroner’s inquest? The aftermath? Nothing is better in the world than after math. In a few minutes, the results of that inquest. Did the song writer see this and not stop her? Was it Burl? Yo! Friday with the gun. Now I know why I’ve hated Burl Ives (What kind of name is Burl? Burley? Had a relative named Burley. Went flying off a truck bed. Didn't mean to. Killed him. Was kind of medium Burley.) Ives just stood there and watched the massacre and made it into a cute folk song of something so grotesque, it could be made as WALKABOUT 2. He was, all these Barry Eysman 235 years—AN ACCOMPLICE, as Bob Kesshan and I, both of us apparently picturing this literally, blanched, as Burl sang and played his guitar, blissfully on, on Captain Kangaroo, one green summer childhood morning in the long ago. Shouting praises to the Lord, I lost my sense of balance, which is my biggest trick (practice makes perfect, for I do it with dreamy élan or pretend to; see "Pirouette” as example). I grabbed the fridge handle. This caused the door to open, rather fast. Among the things that fell out were two turnips. Thus the turnip allusion. So, throwing in Rube Goldberg devices as well, I end this with a laugh. As I go falling away, I remember the words of Joyce Carol Oates, towering giant of literature and Bentley Little hopeful, whose philosophy of life fits so splendidly with mine… (Ask my friends. They know what I mean.) I now sip my battle won coffee. Too strong. I’ll live with it. Bye. “And he rode off into the West, and everything was OK.” Joe Lansdale THE DRIVE-IN (Which I raced into to keep from dying the second time that year, when I thought Julian was dead also. When, all the time, it turned out, I was the dead one.) Thanks to the old gang in Milwaukee and those zip gun daze of yore. Couldn’t have done it without you. JOYCE CAROL, Well, was it a real swan with Leo, or what? Couldn’t you have asked Annie or are you being so goddam maddeningly opaque again? THIS IS MY SEVENTH BOOK. THE OTHERS ARE :

CANDLES FOR NOVEMBER FIRST SNAP OF WINTER stories of dread ON MORNINGS OF JANUARY SNOW LIVES, a portfolio WHAT THEN OF HORROR? AN ICONIC LEAF stories of words (all are at Amazon and other on-line stores world-wide in trade paperback and also on Amazon Kindle.)

FOR JOEL

WE SHALL DANCE IN THE SKY YOU AND I