Beneath Stars Long Extinct

Sergio’s Tribe

40 Sergio’s Tribe In every generation of my ancestors, there’s one. Among factory workers, middle-management buttkissers , rubes who switched oxen-ass from sun-up to barefoot, moonlit walks home, there was always one: jobless. When we’re nostalgic looking at their grim, sepia stares and third-rate oil portraits we may call them romantic. If feeling yet more generous, we might say that was Louie. He sketched Central Park. He was talented. In truth, I’m talking the dreamers—slackers who worked mostly in their minds. They shirked jobs, loved ones, while dreaming better things for the world. Sometimes they made lives around them richer: a few tunes banged on drunken pianos, a homemade valentine for a homely sweetheart, fresh flowers from a field brought to the table in the only vase. Their loved ones saw different. Louie was lazy. And a louse. Shiftless, a card-cheat with bad skin. These comments may survive in a letter or two, but his sketches remain, and thusly, Louie does moreso. Black sheep I take after. They’re best in their work, such as it is, and I’m thankful their labor, their paycheckless deviance from the norm. This one strums a ukulele through the thirties, that one bleeding bad watercolor mountains on cheap, brittle paper. And there’s Sergio, 41 whom I would’ve bought a drink or five. He loved—so postcards tell us—to fish. Not for money or the village families or even a meal of his own. He did it for the blood’s pulse in his arms as he threw the net. He did it to touch the writhe of life as he dragged it aboard, struggling, gasping, brilliant-shiny under the sun. ...