Deconstruction of the Blues

Stealing my Book

56 STEALING MY BOOK I handed it in in a down time empty glare writer’s block One of my advisors seemed to hate me He was dying of throat cancer I didn’t believe in chapters? he needled making an avant-garde statement? Which had never entered my head just following each organic sweep Did I enrage him because I was young had women had life? Years later I read him after he died a Hemingway epigone an obscure mediocre writer lionized at that state university Because I was a better writer than he or thought that I was? Or was it because I was grinding their academic gears? “This is my book, right?! I wrote it! Either it’s worth a master’s degree or not!” I couldn’t do what they wanted write a book with them all breathing on my back I couldn’t write anything at all 57 My novel had been my ark one of a series to sail me out of the deluge of my life to fame A book about my first love town Cambridge in the sixties how our veins our nerves had extruded themselves into colors how we had discovered with the help of various drugs the flatness of our gaze looked up into the awful paradisiac possibilities of space Conversion of Mickey my bourgeois alter ego Mario the clown who hung himself in his underwear strung out in jail on smack and love love Meg Ellen Liz the rainbow tearing of our flesh 58 That student loan was the only money I ever borrowed and I didn’t pay it back for seven years until I got a teaching job at that same state university I was sitting in a department office last day of my appointment when “Master’s Theses” file drawer label caught my eye Cannonfodder instructor last silent office hour with a bright larcenous idea It slid open like a drawer in a morgue My novel was in there cloth-bound corpse spiced for the afterlife It pulled open like an accordion pleated succession of times It opened up like a marsupial’s pouch sweet feet of my book sweet walking homunculus in starry mucosa 59 I see it all again or see it as I wrote it Mickey’s black sedan beneath a hazy Cambridge summer sky parked out front on Inman Street It was to carry him and as many as would fit to come along into his new nomadic life his marriage scarred and broken liquidating his landlord business his eight or ten wooden buildings scattered profitably around town Including this one 29 Inman where he’d slotted me rent free me and other friends a handful of runaway kids some loonies That summer was becalmed still muggy turning I wooed Liz in my room with suppers of shoplifted steaks my virgin girl my bighead baby girl and the kids began to paint Mickey’s chariot They painted it image on image dark and silvery light paints on black some reds and purples symbols words designs gay graffiti game impasto But these kids were on speed and they kept on painting strokes over strokes stymied mindscapes like ingrowing ganglia day after day animals moons flowers pudenda until the car began to strobe 60 to shimmer and shapechange unearthly self-canceling like a hole in the air I called my book The Buddha Truck to honor that sedan Cloth-bound it shines in my closet where it’s lain for fifteen years And now Now Now vanishing empire of that word I’m cannibalizing it to nourish the skinny birthing of these lines Another down time another block another ship out But this isn’t an ark two years in drydock curving out the world hull a page at a sitting It’s a sketch fragments and gleams about sailboat size ...