Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir

Part II

part II Two pugs on the undercard step through The ropes in satin robes, Pink Adidas with tassels, Winking at the women in the crowd. At instructions they stare down hard And refuse to touch their gloves, Trying to make everyone believe That this will be a serious dust-up. But when the bell rings they start Slapping like a couple of Barbie dolls. One throws a half-hearted hook, The other flicks out a jab, They bounce around for a while Then grab each other for a tango. The crowd gets tired of booing And half of them go out for a beer, But I’ve got no place to hide. A week after a cancer scare, A year from a detached retina, Asthmatic, overweight, trickling, Drooling, bent like a blighted elm In my pajamas and slippers, I have turned up my hearing aids to sit in Numbness without expectation before These televised Tuesday Night Fights. With a minute left in the fourth, Scuffling, they butt their heads By accident. In the midst of all the catcalls And hubbub suddenly they realize How much they hate each other. They start hammering and growling, Really dealing, whistling combinations, Hitting on the breaks and thumbing. At last one guy crosses a stiff jab With a roundhouse right and the other Loses his starch. The guy wades into The wounded one, pounding him Back and forth until he goes down, Bouncing his head hard on the canvas. The count begins but he is saved By the bell and his trainers haul Him to his stool as the lens zooms in. I come to the edge of my La-Z-Boy, Blinking and groaning from my incision, Eager for wise, insightful instruction. He gets a bucket of water in his face, A sniff on the salts while the cutman Tries to close his wounds with glue. His nose is broken, eyes are crossed, His lips bleed like two rare steaks. His cornermen take turns slapping his cheeks. “Suck it up!” they shout. “Suck it up!” —paul zimmer, Suck It Up 101 Our most ancient metaphor says that life is a journey. Memoir is travel writing, then, notes taken along the way, telling how things looked and what thoughts occurred. —patricia hampl, Memory and Imagination A friend of ours died yesterday after a yearlong bout with Stage 4 terminal brain cancer. Three weeks before she passed, she awoke with terrible pain and had to submit to a root canal. Iwilltellyousomethingaboutstories....Theyaren’tjustforentertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have . . . to fight off illness and death.You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.—Leslie Marmon Silko Entr’acte Inthefallof1987,adeerstruckmycar.Neversawthedeer.Itmayaswell have been a meteorite or a bullet. What I heard was the noise. Though the deer had been inside the car, I never saw it. My door was jammed, but I don’t remember crawling over the gear shift to exit on the passenger side. I do remember staring at my Bronco II, wondering why all the windows were gone and why the interior was gore. To stare at this, I’d had to thumb my eyeglasses clean. It looked as if there had been people in the car and that a bomb had gone off. But I’d been the sole passenger and in the one place inside the vehicle that’d been safe. Any passenger in any other seat would have been killed. As it was explained to me by someonewho’dseen,thedeerhadboundeddownfromthemesa,leaped over two cars driving side-by-side in the other direction, then dropped from the sky onto the post separating the front windshield and my driver’s door window. Halved, but held together by its spine, the deer then wheeled like a nunchuk into the left-side vista window, whirled 102 about within the car, breaking every window, slashing the headliner, then exiting through the smashed out right-side vista window. The deer had entered my car and then left it. By the time I got the car slowed and off the highway, I’d traveled blind 100 yards from the carcass. My windshield was the only glass intact, though it had spidered and folded in like a browned quilt. The halved, whirling deer had emptied its cavity inside the Bronco. I, the upholstery, and dash were covered. The tow truck agreed to drive me home, as it...