Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1999 Making company of darkness Joshua Evan Borgmann Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Borgmann, Joshua Evan, "Making company of darkness " (1999). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 7097. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/7097 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Making company of darkness by Joshua Evan Borgmann . A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partialfulfillment of the requirements for the degreeof MASTER OFARTS Major: English (Creative Writing) Major Professor: Neal Bowers Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 1999 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the Master's thesis of Joshua Evan Borgmann has met the requirements ofIowa State University Major Professor For the Major Program For the Graduate College m TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INSALUBRIOUS BIFURCATIONS 1 Family Portrait at 23 2 Family 3 Family Spirit 4 Insalubrious Bifurcation ofthe Post-Nuclear Family Schema 5 Christmas Eves 6 Holiday Edge 7 Food, Football, Family 9 Wal-Mart Christian 11 Devil's Advocate 13 Religion in Ice 14 Deicide 15 Suicide Poem # 23 16 Suicide Poem # 24 17 23 to 2 18 Sadistic Auto-Masochistic Persecution 19 Random SelfIndulgent Shit 20 High School High Via the Lost Highway 23 Forgetting '87 24 Thirteen 25 Absence ofLight 26 Windows 27 The House 28 Old Woman 29 In the Night 30 Goathoms 31 H. BLACK IS THE ONLY COLOR IN THE WORLD 32 The Day I Saw the Ocean 33 This is Not a Poem 34 The Voice of a Hated Enemy Arises; The Author Attempts to Dei with an Overwhelming Inability to Forget the Summer of '95 35 Composition 37 The Author Attemptsto Convince You He's NOT Crazy (After Reading Bret Easton Ellis' AmericanPsycho ) 38 Obscenity Divine 40 Nightlife of the Absurd 42 The Devil's ViUanelle 43 Blackis the Only Color in the World 44 Poppy 45 Never Love, Forever Lust 47 Sweet Love 4g The BreakfastMeeting 49 I. INSALURBRIOUS BIFURCATIONS Family Portrait at 23 I was bom on November One, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four, bom into the city of Kearney, in the state of Nebraska, bom under the sign of Scorpio, on the chart of the Zodiac. In that land ofbarren waste, I was named Joshua Evan, the son of Richard, the son of Connie, ofthe family Selvage. I lived among my parentspast the birth of my sister, SeanMarie, butfollowing ourfinefamily tradition, Mommy was forced to fleethe law. I did not know my brothers Christianand Jasonor my sister Stephanie, bom and lost in the state ofVirginia; we could never meet. Abandoned by my father, I was taken by Great Aunt Betty, wife ofErnest ofthe family Borgmann, from the town ofShelton. The law strippedme of my name, proclaimed me JoshuaEvan Borgmann, son of Betty and Emest, yet I never lived under their roof. I was giveninto the careof Viola, mother ofBetty andgrandmother of Connie. Growing up, I never questioned family legitimacy, I never understoodthe questions of others,the looks of confusion. Mother, father, child, I had no such concepts. A mother was a distant thing. She was a paranoidcreature who gaveorders andspoke of shooting people. Father meant a drunken man who worked from two to ten everyday then fearfully signed away his check to Mother, expecting only beer in return. Love meant the old woman I called Grandma, nothing more; she supported me, read to me, helped me with homework, tucked me in at night. Now at 23,1 have found two mothers from two generations, but still it's that old woman, now approaching 90,1 go home to, she's the one I call when I want to hear a familiar voice. Family I remember my family. They were many: my great grandmother^ who grew old as I watched, those who forced her out of her home at 87, the son who served in the Navy, later displaying his moral depravity, stealing away his mother's savings and home and the daughter who wallowed in poverty, unable to produce a family ofher own. and my grandmother, a woman too concerned with herself for anyone else. I remember another generation, the generation ofmy mother and her sisters: the one who spent so many years of her life in prison, theft and fraud, against her own family, the one who taught me to tie my shoes, only to die in '85, illness ofthe blood or domestic abuse, the one who married and divorced Felis Cervantes and Myron Brown, now with the one they call Johnny Coins, and rny mother, the oldest, so much like me with imagination and dreams, a potential never realized, a family torn asunder. Then there was my generation: there was Terry, Aeblonde haired cousin ofmy youth, taken from his mother after so much abuse, Casey and Miles, I never really knew, I don't know what happened to them, do they know their mother is dead? Five cousins I knew: the one who suffered brain damage at 17, flung from the car, the one who ate a live toad for a dollar, now stalking the streets in Crip blue, the one they said was a little slow, ear infection, brick to the head, the one who spent years in counseling and foster homes, and the youngest so disrespectful ofhis elders, so opposed to his white heritage,so accepting of his Hispanic roots, knowing nothing ofeither. Ofthe three youngest ofbrothers and sisters I know so little, one died, hours old. The others I know nothing of, somewhere in VirginiaI guess. My brother Christian I know only from a singlephoto. They say a banker adopted him, thesister growing up 19miles away yetseemingly a world apart, three children by age 20 and then there was me, the first of my grandmother's line to graduate high school, the firstto go to college, first to commit this to paper. Family Spirit November 1 and my mother didn't call me. Instead, she called the Psychic Friends Hotline, Dionne Warwick and her supernatural spies. She didn't even have a creditcard but it was my birthday and she didn't call me. She had been speaking of ghosts, notjust Marie and her phantom cat but another, a child-like specter in black glaring from the couch. It was November and my mother was speaking of ghosts. She said spirits were part ofour family. They visited in the night, her grandfather, her uncle Porky (killed on the railroad), and after the cancer took her—Marie and her ever faithful cat. My mother said they were her family. My aunt visited me once in a dream, At least I think it was her; with time, memory goes blind but I recall she told me I was healing, my heart was not broken, I would not die from the pain, but she only came in my dreams. Awake, I've tried but I've never seen a ghost. Many late nights as my mom drove my dad home from work, I saw UFOs in the sky and once I thought I saw Bigfoot snooping through my bedroom window, but I've never seen a ghost. In December, my mother called speaking ofpsychic wars, reading Psalms with a glass ofwater on the nightstand to collect the demon child that hid beyond the bathroom light. It was December when my mother finally called. 5 Insalubrious Bifurcation of the Post-Nuclear Family Schema We exchange vows through a limited lexicon, stretch phrases out of amputated vocabularies with poorly constructed sjoitax. The morphemes of our discourse are anything but sublime equations of metaphysical philosophy that link us in linguistic intercourse; they are abstract geometeries, Non-Euclidean, multi-dimensional divisions which bifurcate my existence along lines ofmaternal duality. What sense we make literally we forsake figuratively in favor ofbland conformity to the American mythology offamily singularity: Son, mother, grandmother, father. For simplicity's sake say "You are my son" not "She is your moAer as ami." BiologyMdlegality provided definitions ofmy maternal situations ~ separated by more than semantic mileage— chasms linguistic tricks cannot transcend. It is physical law not theory or hypothesis. We can never coalesce. Christmas Eves Christmas Eves long ago, as bells and Santas drifted through my eyes, I waited for Mom and Dad to pull into Grandma Viola's drive, spending hours searching for the first sign ofheadlights down the alley. A boy couldn't swell much more than me as I imagined their arms loaded down with my Christmas joy. Each year something new and diferent, anew variation of my wish list letter to Santa. One year, it was Star Wars—complete with Hoth gear Luke Skywalker, Jabba the Hutt play-set and the true rare gem, a Droid Detention Center. Another year, Transformers ~ robots in disguise, a full array ofAutobots and Decepticons, with the massive aerial wizard Jetfire at the center. This year, Mother Betty placed me in front ofa video rack at Target and demanded I pick from it. I pointed out my favorites— Beavis and Butthead, Scream, Star Trek: First Contact andMen in Black. She threw Scream in the cart mumbling about how stupid it looked. Later, we walked into Hastings Books and Music hoping to find a musical component for my gift.