Streaks of Snow

The old man looked into a mirror and thought of years lost--

of the memories wrapped in chains

of a murmuring heart in a jail

The half way house was home

He pulled a donated cap over his eyes--

--the first time in thirty years

He put on a donated overcoat and fitted his hands in gloves--

--the first time in thirty years

The weatherman said tonight expect a Christmas snow

The parole officer wanted him back at 8.

Two hours for him to walk...and maybe sit on a park bench

Maybe for the first time in 30 years he could watch snow fall...

see it cover the hard city ground,

touch it softly on his shoulders,

feel it melt on his open tongue 

7:30pm and still no snow

His legs were tired 

He gave himself twenty minutes to walk back to the house

8pm and he was safe...

He closed the door and signed in,

and walked a flight of stairs to his room

He looked in the mirror, his cheeks were red...

with a quick wrist he removed his cap,

took off his coat

hung them neatly in the closet...they might inspect

He looked out his window and lifted his eyes...

for the first time in thirty years he saw streaks of snow and heard a female voice sing to him from far away

That was the story of his night...half a life and miles of distant snow

 

Raw Fish Like Boxing Gloves

Manny Weinberg was laid out like a knocked-out lightweight at his Madison Square Garden debut. The old unfulfilled fighter turned unfulfilled trainer clinched his chest on the ambulance gurney, as it rushed under the Brooklyn L train. 

 

But this was no French Connection. No Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle snaking his car in a crashing train pursuit of a pea coat dressed European, who exports white powder death through New World channels to make Old World criminals richer.

 

He thought of this movie as the ambulance's red lights reflected off the windows of  franchise coffee shops filled with gentrified young professionals who thought some how they could be Brooklyn without a Brooklyn  past. Without a Brooklynese old man teaching a young man how to throw a punch, or catch a threadbare baseball. How to survive on a street of tough boys who grew into tough men. Some became doctors, lawyers, captains of Wall Street, politicians--while others never left, never gave up throwing punches. Never stopped watching the prissy present eat up the past. Where the neighbourhood that was always home would soon be never more. When the last cannoli, last blintz, last beer and sausage, would be surrendered to a vegan butter cookie.

Manny grabbed his chest. His heart felt stuck, frozen, like it couldn't move the blood through his aged arteries. Word on the street was the One Lucky would be bought out and turned into a chocolate mousse cafe where baristas in made in China black aprons poured ironic cups of Cafe Americano. He'd heard the Carney Boxing Club would be converted into a California style Pilates studio with long fingered Shiatsu massages on the side.

 

"Pop, Pop, don't die on me," his newly connected Nova Scotia son Hickory begged of him as he rode in the ambulance. "We were going to be a father and son team after all these years. You were going to make me Champ."

 

The edges of CTE. The onset of senility. He still had patches of reality. The clarity of reflection.  "Ya, know," he said. "My heart, my chest, it don't hurt so much, no more. He shook his head a bit. "Maybe I don't got no heart attack. See's I was hungry last night and I dropped into the only place open. Some Japanese sushi place. What do I know what sushi is. So they's send my d'ese small plates with little pieces of raw fish on rice. They's look like little boxing gloves. And they's don't serve no beer in dese places. I know. I asked. Just little cups of green tea like your drinking out of a shot glass. So I's get the check, and it's $200. For what, little pieces of fish d'at they's don't even bother cooking. Da whole thing must a made me sick."

Hickory, begins to laugh. "Know what you mean, Pops. We're fried fish and beer kinda guys."

"Get me outta this place," Manny says to the driver. 

The driver shrugs. "Nah, we still got a check you out at the hospital. You sound a lot like my old man, though. A straight shooter. He died six months ago. Used to take me to the fights as a kid. Some fancy lady fashion designer from Los Angeles rents his apartment now. $3,000 a month, can you believe it? I see her sometimes at the sushi bar. Even though I'd a guessed she was a vegan."

The driver turned off the flashing lights. He ended the siren. The ambulance drove up to the hospital gates. 

 

Then, out of  no where, a man in a pea coat crashes a French Citroen into the side of the ambulance...

 

 

Stolen Food

When a staircase is a fire escape 

  …spiraled, and black cast iron

When a tarred rooftop atop an old tenement is home

  …where two young poor lovers sit, eating stolen food from a take-out Chinese stand

They laugh, they forgot the chop sticks; they pull up fried rice and scrambled eggs with homeless fingers…their mouths feel a rush of  momentary satisfaction… a few seconds of denial of no place to go to…

Their lives like broken feet so they can’t run to a better place…

The rain comes before they can embrace for the night...

In the back of their minds maybe the police will come for the stolen food, or for the break-ins, the stolen goods; or for the hours they prostituted their big city lives to suburban men.

They speak sometimes of these things, like once when they hid atop a building and secretly watched TV through someone’s window…a 1950s musical with endless legs. They couldn’t hear the music. Only those legs…and spoke of hope that someday, someplace, they could sing and smile…and dance faraway through puddles of Hollywood rain…

The shower came harder… they ran down the fire escape with aching feet. They wished they could slide down a marble staircase…but that was for the movies…at least the rice was good, and it filled their stomachs for a short time

 

 

Passing

It was the last of three autumn trees

...rust and golden leaves rested upon frozen ground

 

I lifted my head and released a greyish breath

...my cloudy soul rose among barren branches

 

I felt a sadness...I thought of the passing of our mortal place and time

A second breeze cleared a path of  fallen leaves

 

As I walked along the icy ground I felt a peace at last

...all things pass, I realized...and that is the beauty of an aging place and time

Looking back I heard the humour of three autumn trees....like Three Laughing Monks

 

Closing Time

It was closing time at the One Lucky--A Saturday--

...melodies of memory always played past 3a.m.

 

'Beer Mugs' Moran cleaned the ashtrays, the bartender's apron covered in streaks of beer and ash. The last of two bar stool drunks competed over the same old songs.

 

The man in a worn blue overcoat drank the last of his beer and would always say--"Billy Joel's Piano Man, saddest song ever, my friend."

The man in the black overcoat drank the last of the tonic and gin and replied-- "No, Harry Chapin's Taxi, was much sadder. Two old lovers meeting in a taxi years later. He the driver. She the fare. They never lived their dreams." 

The man in the blue overcoat, shook his head: "Nope, still the Piano Man. Nothing sadder than a bar filled with loneliness." 

 

Beer Mugs Moran switched the lights on and off. The two men took the cue and shuffled out of the bar nearly falling over each other, like wavy glasses of beer.

 

No matter the season, no matter the summer month or winter storm, it always snowed at closing time. The snow always changing to rain as cold as a San Francisco night. In the cold rain the argument escalates as usual over the two old songs from when they were young.

 

The man in the black overcoat pushes his One Lucky friend to the sidewalk. He yells "Taxi". Sue the cab driver waits for his call and picks up her 3am Saturday fare. They drive off, leaving the other man behind. And the man in the black tells Sue again, drive around the block and we'll pick up my friend.

The taxi driver knows to drive slowly, to give time for the sidewalk man to stand up and wave for her as she rounds the corner in the rain. The taxi stops, he gets in the back seat.

"Take me home, " He said, his speech slurred but his line well practised like the actor he wanted to be.

 

The taxi drives only a hundred feet. The man in the blue overcoat, leaves and walks towards his old apartment, above a 7  Eleven.

 

Sue knows her lines: "Years ago, that store used to be a piano bar where he would play." She presses down on the gas and drives the last of her fare another hundred feet.

 

The fare was only $2.50. The man gives Sue a twenty, and tells her to keep the change. He leaves the taxi and holds up his drunken arms like wings on a plane, and one more time wishes he once could have touched the sky. 

 

Touchstones

F*ck Springsteen

F*ck the Beatles

F*ck Apple Records

...Screw Steve Jobs, too

 

Screw the cultural touchstones

The sixties icons...

Dylan,

Reed,

The Byrds' Brains

Claptons' rip-off blues

Hate Asbury

Summer of Stoned Love

The Diggers and Andy's Tomato Soup Whores

F*ck the seventies--

Iggy's Pop bottle

Punk's spiked hair

Seger's Main Street strippers

Burt Reynolds'  Smoking Bandits

Coppola and Scorcese's Godfather and Mean Streets

Halter tops and Platform heals

Alman's Bell Bottom Blues

 

F*ck the Eighties

Ronald's Ray Guns

Mullet hair rock Bands

Prince's Raspberry Berets

Motley Crew Cuts

Bleached teeth and bright Tees

Shopping malls and Japanese cars

Slasher movies on 16mm

 

F*ck 'em

Screw 'em

Torch the Touchstones

Live in an artless vacuum

Scrub away the past---

Sing! Sing! Sing! and Forget! Forget! Forget! 

 

 

Hickory McCracken Chronicles:

Round II

 It happens on a Brooklyn morning.

Early, before the bakers’ rise their sour dough breads. Before the cold gusts of wind die down. Before the cracked thin ice on New York sidewalks once paved by immigrant men melt under a new sun. It happens in a boxing club before the fighters arrive for their early training. Before the air fills with the smell of aspiration and sweat rolling off the dreams and shiny skin of the next Durans and Mayweathers. It is during this short hour of in between time when success and failure, young and old, light and darkness meet. It is the time when an old man struggles with his mind... he can’t remember where he placed the broom.

Manny Weinberg. Ole’ Pops they call him. Fought a thousand rounds. Trained a thousand fighters. For years now he’s run the Carney Boxing Club near the rolling and creaking L Train that goes one last stop to Coney Island. He’s always kept the club safe and clean from drugs and mobsters, and no good promoters in shiny suits who steal fighting lives with the false glitter of spoken contracts.

This morning he can’t remember where he put things at the club. The things he uses to clean up before the fighters arrive. His memory is dying in the last seconds of the last round against a fighter no one can defeat inside or outside the ring—time.

The CTE. The first stages of dementia. His mind moves from lucidness of a moment to nothingness of not knowing. Manny has seen enough lonely punch drunk fighters jab against imaginary demon shadows to realize that his memories are like the slow drops of water from a drying bottle.

He hears the rumble of the first L train of the morning. The sharp sound of the steel wheels hurt his head. He remembers now the broom is in the tall closet next to his office. He takes the broom and holds it tight and clinches the top of the handle against his chest.

Manny sweeps in short strokes along the floor and under the ring bringing along grit and dust. He feels in an odd way the rhythm of a fighter—a ghost fighter.

He thinks back to the swift days of his youth in the 1960s. When he went to Canada to fight against another swift fighter who had an Irish name and fists that could break down granite walls. Manny thinks he won the fight, or maybe he lost, or maybe he and the Irishman split the decision. His mind won’t decide.

Manny thinks of the girl he met in Canada. A young hippy with long straight hair and beautiful eyes and wanting lips. She with the beads and flowers in her hair. He with his boxing trunks and leather gloves. She the girl who believed in peace and the power of love, saw a sensitive heart inside the Brooklyn fighter. She believed she could tame him, free Manny Weinberg of Brooklyn boxing from his savage urban world and join her in a country commune.

They made love every night for a week. Manny had never been so close to being completely taken by the spirit and soul of a woman. But in the end the dance of the bloody canvas took him away from the girl he loved. He left her a good-bye note. She cried at the edge of a Canadian lake.

Last week Ole’ Pops got a letter. A letter only to be sent after the death of its author: Wanda McCracken. Manny Weinberg had a son. The boy conceived in a cabin along a Canadian lake. Wanda called the boy Hickory after the trees that swayed above their love making in the summer breeze. The boy didn’t know who his father was.

Manny checked the flights to Canada. Tomorrow….