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Alphabet of Love Serial
Lou Rowan
I
I’s bedroom
was down the hall from his mother’s; he slept with his younger sister, who was
behind a screen, a demarcation I honored carefully. I remembers the screen,
remembers the blackboard easel on which he taught himself to write. His teachers
were women; he longed to please them. He shaped letters with slavish perfection
at the blackboard, was thrilled to have a few square feet of the classroom in
his bedroom. The capital “I” was, Mrs. T said, like a spoon at the bottom, You
began, careful always to work one continuous stroke, by making a reverse small
“l” but you DIDN’T STOP you CONTINUED, “THAT’S RIGHT I DON’T STOP right through
the bottom of the spoon up about a quarter or third of the “l” and the PAUSE at
the tip of the crescent like the moon on its side, children, and now STRAIGHT
BACK ACROSS the board to the bottom of the l-loop, and look how well I is doing
it, I want you all to do it just like I.”
I’s sexual fantasies were purposeful. He brought girls from his
classroom to join girls from the neighborhood, mostly friends of his sister,
into his enlarged bed, and he taught them. Putting himself in authority, he
taught them how to pee properly, which generally required he demonstrate the
strength of his stream. His heart went out to the girls, the impulse to teach
them humming through him. He taught them to overcome the mistakes that came so
naturally to girls, putting their clothes on when they should be off, for
example, or paying attention to each others’ silliness when their whole beings
should be fastened on an I transfixed by his calling to teach them.
I remembers his mother singing in the kitchen, her voice so lovely
he thought she was the radio, and she chuckled when he told her that. He was
struggling in the patio with his assignment from his stepfather to tie a bowline
knot. He succeeded after weeks of tearful frustration when he found an
illustrated knot-book, and the little arrows in the diagram taught him the way
that in his stepfather’s fast-moving or even slow-moving hands eluded him.
He forgave ugly girls in his fantasies. A girl on his school bus
named Becky worked at the cannery. He brought her to bed and held her scaly
hands, forcing her to give them up to him, filling her with strength to
acknowledge them. Masterful, he disciplined his disgust for her fishy smell, her
rough flesh, her harsh name.
I remembers the hallway separating his bedroom from the living room
and the kitchen. He knows it led to his mother’s bedroom, but he cannot remember
her end of the hall, or the bedroom. He remembers noxious smells from his
mother’s bathroom, but not the bathroom.
I remembers dinner: the table set neatly, the butter-dish and the
huge beaded glass of whole milk flanking the silverware, the chafing-dishes of
vegetables, potatoes, pastas, boats of sauces, gravies all waiting, like I and
his sister, for the adults to arrive, and then seat themselves properly, lifting
the chairs carefully across the thick shag rug, so as not to jerk them, as I
had, into the table and spill the tall glasses.
If there was soup, the extra spoon to be dipped away from I’s body but
delicately tipped towards his lips, a little insuck of air to pull it in, but it
is not to be blown on. The salad-fork was smaller than the main-course fork, and
salad was easier to take in, required fewer corrections or directions from I’s
mother than soup, but it was boring compared to what he wanted: the meats she
served, especially hamburger tastefully enhanced with fragments of bread and
onion, ham sweetly glazed, roast beef in plate-size slices. The tiny salt-spoon
dropped the salt in clumps I tried furtively to spread across the juicy surface.
Artichokes were fun because of the melted butter and because you could use your
fingers, more fun than bread because the butter must be spread so thin you
couldn’t taste it, or because the butter-pat was unsalted.
I tended to lose concentration, and would be caught picking at his
vegetables, sawing them with his fork-tines, rather than taking the trouble to
pick up his properly-angled knife, or racing through the meat, only to become
“full” in the middle of the vegetables.
B was his sister’s friend, her father a doctor. B was a hero at this
table because she was of such exemplary politeness: she finished everything
served her (though she was small and thin unlike I and his sister), politely
accepting seconds, but even more because on two occasions she excused herself to
hasten to the bathroom through the kitchen to throw up. When I had boils, B’s
father lanced them, and told him how to bring their pus to the surface with hot
compresses. I can still find the scars on his legs, shoulders, and wrist from
the boils.
Seconds were a painful decision for I: balancing his shifting
perceptions of what his mother wanted against what was happening inside his
shirt trousers.
Dessert was sweet but often too complex, too adult. I’s ideal sweets
were brownies, which his mother made so rich you could stand the walnuts,
Hershey bars without nuts, or frozen Snickers bars. Eskimo pies were good until
I ate near the wood stick.
Stewed fruit was a frustrating dessert, warm but not sweet enough.
Apple and cherry pie were tart, but a la mode they were perfect: huge, and
satisfying to stupefaction. Dessert took less time than the early courses,
and while working at it I knew that, once he had carefully cleaned his plate,
done everything he possibly could within his skill-set to clear the table and
tidy up , he could sink into relative relaxation on the sofa before the TV, and
during commercials he would allowed into the icebox for more dessert, should he
rinse his dish properly, and he knew that his mother’s attention would be
directed towards the screen, not towards him and his sister. And maybe it would
be Red Skelton or Lucie, and he could giggle and laugh unchecked.
J
Athletics
were awkward, except tetherball. Tetherball was simple: you struck the ball
squarely with the inside of your fist; you hit it hard down, so that it would
rebound from its nadir at your feet and rise fast at and over your opponent. The
trajectory was like those rings around Saturn that were never level in the
photos in Life Magazine. Then you timed the ball’s return from over your
opponent’s head, stepping out of its way to slug it down again—maybe twice more
as the rope shortened. Now you could soften the angle and the blows as the rope
climbed the pole, until soon you were jumping to tap it as its radius decreased,
its speed increased, the opponent’s helplessness engulfing him or her. Three
easy things: slug it down, time its return for a follow-up slug, and tap it to
keep it spinning at an angle flatter to the ground.
J got them.
He rarely lost tetherball, and confirmed his talent 30 years later when he
played his then-therapist at a summer camp his children and the therapist’s
enjoyed at Woodstock, and his slugs and the therapist’s hapless responses were
predictable if disconcerting.
J’s mastery
extended partway into tennis: he could hit hard serves. He thought he was
hitting a hard topspin serve like his father’s, but a tennis lesson 40 years
later showed him he was hitting hard and flat. He could throw a baseball hard,
and skip rocks effectively. But 29 years after his intramural pitching career,
he tried to show his sons how to throw a curveball at their summer camp, tore
his rotator cuff or something else with a complex name in his shoulder, and has
been sore ever since. That tear reminded him that when he pitched his curveball
at his high school rival, it went in flat as a board, and his screwball failed
to move. So he wonders whether he really could bend the ball, or whether his
sinker and his screwball were fantasies, though he remembers an ump, his music
teacher, marveling over his curve’s drop.
He wrestled
in high school because it required so much effort, so much discipline. It is
unclear to this day whether he enjoyed wrestling, even though he turned around
his losing record big time as a senior and qualified for a tournament. His arms
were long, and he made up for his lack of strength and defined muscle with
strategy and leverage. His stamina was average. There’s a yearbook picture
of him in agony. He was in a stalemate with an opponent, trying to throw a
switch his opponent, visible only as hindquarters, is countering, and he is
grimacing as if someone were crucifying him or squeezing his testicles. He does
not remember feeling that bad.
Were his
expressions, like his curveball, exaggerations? Is there in athletics a proper
way to hold the face? What is the relation between exertion and mood? How do
one’s physical limitations define one’s moral and mortal limitations? Is there a
sport at which J could have excelled, had he found it and persisted in it? Would
he be a better or a happier man?
J began to jog
before he withdrew from mood-altering substances. He was a physical wreck from
age 20, when his using curtailed his exertions, until age 36, when he began to
read the literature of redemption by running, which he marked and inwardly
digested. He learned that healthy runners set themselves goals, and he set
himself the goal of running around the Frederick Law Olmstead park in his
borough. His early runs were out-and back along the flat segment of the 5-sided
park, his goal a traffic circle where gay men and pot smokers gathered. When his
flat segments numbered the equivalent of a run around the park he tried to, but
failed because it was a hot day and because the park’s other sides were hilly.
But he persisted, and he could do it soon, his first success being on a cool
day. And this he accomplished before he was clean, and he persisted with running
and using until he nearly died from the symptoms his use failed to address, and
until he sprained his left foot in a pothole. For the next 25 years he coped
with the consequences of the foot’s flatness, minor but debilitating damages to
his calves and hams. Consequences included acupuncture, excruciating massages,
frustratingly-gentle massages, a torn gastrocnemius, orthotics, quitting
jogging, starting jogging, giving up exercising if he couldn’t jog, changing to
rowing, resuming jogging , hurting his calf again, speculating on whether his
foot at widened with age so that his favorite running shoes were causing his
calf-problems, learning to stretch, resolving to relax, resolving to do
exercises squeezing towels with his toes to strengthen the arch underlying the
left side of his basic support and posture.
His career as a sports fan was more spotty: he loved a boxer in his
20’s and 30’s, a basketball team in his 30’s, a runner in his early forties, and
a tennis player in his late forties. He loved the name but could not remember
the looks or the form of one athlete from his 20’s: Peaches Bartkowitz. He hated
certain teams and athletic stars he felt cruel, arrogant, or more than normally
self-involved, and he suffered defeat and pessimism when their lesser-known
opponents succumbed to them. But over the last 40 years, he has probably spent
no more than 20 full days being a fan. As he contemplates himself, he feels he
can allow himself more time watching sports, and he believes that watching
sports will reduce his moral and cultural isolation from other Americans, and
might relax him, leading him to find his feelings.
K
He was a saint. He
died young, after a wasting illness, but he was not a virgin, and he was neither
isolated from mundane affairs nor overtly judgmental of them. His dreams brought
him sainthood, his bad dreams. His disciples were few in his lifetime, but they
preserved his sayings and his writings, and since his death between the world
wars they have swelled to the millions, perhaps outnumbering the victims of the
wars and of the ethnic cleansings attending the wars.
His disciples are a
hopeless lot, and humorless, which he, unlike many saints, never advocated. He
found the hopeless funny, leaving his disciples helplessly to repeat, “Parodox,
Parodox,” as they seek to grasp what they seek to affix to him as messages.
His bad dreams were
waking dreams, and when his disciples analyze them or him, both vanish like
mirages that pull you from the excruciating heat of your desert, and you know
that the pull is a lie, but the sun on your exposed skin and the sand scratching
your sweaty body (for you could not resist the temptations to lie, kneel, sit,
crawl) drive you towards what you know is emptiness but the squalid brightness
and beauty of your waking dream draws you to hope against hope.
His religion is a false,
because he never explicated it, never enumerated, summarized, never captured its
basics in parables or apothegms, nor did he organize or allow his followers to
organize its continuity on earth. The falsity of his religion frees his
disciples to worship him in ignorance of his work, to worship themselves for
worshiping him—for, many maintain, the nature of his religion is the nature of
the human in its sorry historical length and amplitude. There is a permission in
that analysis, and few lasting religion’s outside K’s are permissive. Many
maintain that his wide following represents the breakdown of traditional
disciplines that began with the renaissance, a breakdown that no religion save
his has sought to embody.
To find stern lessons in
an existence impervious to stern lessons is a paradox with which his most
exalted followers wrestle. These disciples, called Meta-K’s, add mere gruel to
the cannon accreting to his writings and his sayings—albeit their work is
widely-debated in secular academies.
It is the dream of many
of his followers to organize, to meet, but they do not know how to address, much
less recognize one another. His force on earth waxes as it is dispersed—unlike
most compounds.
He was born to the
persecuted tribe whose dispersals and aggregations are its history, and whose
prophets have been denied sainthood.
Mortifying the flesh and
its implicit or explicit feelings, transcending the limits of the flesh are
staples of religions. K’s religion is a total mortification of the human, which
paradoxically lends it its mysterious power to proselytize without organization,
its monadic essence communicating itself like an infection.
The experience of
unadulterated mortification requires a courage persistent disciples can
recognize in themselves and occasionally in each other, but which is difficult
to capture in ritual, ecstatic utterance, rhythmic sound, or iconography.
The power of the
powerless, the talent of the unacceptable, the beauty of the ungainly—it has
been said only your mother could love a religion like K’s, but we have no record
of his mother’s relations with K. We know that his father was an oppressive,
voracious, and inconsistent god, like Jaweh, that K found inspiration and
insight in the enthralling power of random oppressions. We know that his
disciples find themselves on a journey whose pleasures are more of the head than
the body, since mortification obliterates everything in us save a few
scamperings of consciousness, but we can see, if we can see them and hear
them, in these scamperings the fun K’s disciples’ solemnities negate, and a
paradox, perhaps not fleeting, we can entertain.
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