The Weekly Meat

History of Blood

 

I

Once in a while a weak attempt
at romance you do not feel,
dinner out at a restaurant.
A stab in the dark.

 

II

The condoms are kept in her night table drawer
inside an old tin of Band-Aids. Her mock coyness makes
you laugh aloud as you reach past the clock,
past the lamp: “Are there any Band-Aids left?”

 

III

On your right hand is a scar where one night
you slammed it in the sweat of a wrestle, smack
against her hard stucco wall. It was dark
and you could not see the blood; you could not
feel, you did not feel a thing.

 

IV

One morning in your own bed you woke to the blood
she had leaked during sleep. You rolled
over and looked out the window, thought of rust-
brown watercolor stains left on pillowcases
from childhood bloody noses and pulled wisdom teeth.

You would not say a thing when she returned
from the bathroom and neither would she. You would hand
her her socks, her bra, and as she sat to dress, and
as she tried a smile you knew for certain
you would throw out the sheets rather than wash them.

 

V

Love is naked. It keeps no secrets, has no guilt, 
no shame. Sometimes it is fucking with all the lights
on. It is not pretty and it is when you
do not mind that bit of blood on the sheets.

You have not known love for a long time, you think,
if ever. Only its absence, your weak
needs and guilt; a dried history of fading
notches on strange bedposts.

 

 

First published, 1996, in Bread for This Hunger: A Crab Creek Review Poetry Anthology

3 AM

You come to slowly, in stages; the bladder waking before the mind is yet aware. An infant, wailing; and then it is clear you are meant to deal with the cause of the crying. You get up and pee, because even in your 40s, nothing can happen in the middle of the night until you do so.

The boy is now two months old. At his age, the line between sleep and non-sleep is whisper-thin. Each night, you live or die on the edge of that line.

Generally, you are good at this. Your wife is the provider, the feeder. When the boy is hungry, only she will suffice. But you. When the boy is tired and cranky, you are the baby whisperer.

His head fits perfectly into the crook of your elbow, and you know the precise pacing around the house to jiggle his head just enough to release the tension and relax his body. Unfortunately, it does nothing for your own, and your baby muscles are screaming from overwork, exhaustion. Your empty bladder now allows room for other things to begin happening in your large intestine, and the race against time quietly begins.

The boy's breathing becomes more regular, and you can feel him slowly giving in to sleep. You will him along the path. But certain things about children are inevitable, and tonight — as ever, it seems — the precise moment he has finally quieted down and reached that thin, critical line of sleep . . . is when the need to void your bowels switches over from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 1 and in need of immediate attention.

There is a baby rocker in the bathroom for just this sort of contingency. Still, you will be making a choice — the implications of which are entirely clear to you.

You set the boy in his chair, and yourself on the toilet simultaneously. The moment you do so, everything happens at once, and exactly as expected.

When an infant wakes and cries like this, it's not a matter of their rolling over and quickly returning to sleep. You start all the way back at the beginning — re-swaddling, shushing, the pacifier, the pacing.

You feel much better afterwards, but it will take another hour of cajoling until you are able to set him down in the bassinet and return to your now-cold side of the bed. Forty-five minutes into this process and as a fully-functioning adult, you will be forced to wonder if next time it may be easier, when all is said and done, to simply shit yourself.

After 9/11

Less than an hour after the plane hit the south tower, it collapsed on live TV, as millions of us watched, helpless, and perhaps unbelieving. It seemed absurd to me, but Tom Brokaw (or was it Peter Jennings we were watching in the cafeteria at work?) was saying things along the lines of "We're not sure what we're seeing here. There's a lot of smoke, but something appears to have just happened."

 

A few mornings later, there were still no civilian flights in the entire US, and I just happened to be standing atop a monument on a hill overlooking Boston when I heard two F15s fly overhead, and looked up in time to catch the fly-by as they passed on patrol.

 

Three nights later, a group of friends got together to belatedly celebrate the birthday of the one of us who had actually been flying that morning. His birthday had been — and always will be — the 11th. Only now that fact suddenly seemed unfortunate and unlucky, and we were keen to show him the love. We had a pot luck dinner and lit candles and talked. The Gurgling Cod outdid himself with an au gratin potatoes baked in a skillet lined with bacon. It was the pinnacle of comfort food; a pound-for-pound champion of bad cholesterol and good healing.

 

And a night after that, AKL and I saw Sonny Rollins play one of the best live shows I have ever seen.

 

Ten days later, AKL and I flew from Boston to LA for a friend's wedding. BOS > LAX was the route of two planes used in the attacks that day. Security at Logan was extreme. Tons of police, national guard, Army. Guys in jackboots with grenade launchers. God bless them, but I have no idea what purpose they thought the grenade launchers might serve in an area of so many civilians.

But the world was a new and scary place then and no one knew quite how to deal with it.

On the plane, I had an aisle seat, and — aside from takeoff and landing — I left my seatbelt unbuckled. If, I supposed, I saw anyone moving toward the cockpit or acting strange, they were going to be checked hard into the next row of seats as they tried to walk past me.

At LAX, when we landed, things looked no different from what I imagine they did on September 10th. The difference between the two airports could not have been any more staggering.

When we went back to LAX that Sunday for our return flight to Logan, there was an orthodox Jew across from us in the gate area — the beard, the robe, the tefillin, the whole works — quietly saying prayers and davening. I too prayed — a less observant Jew, but observant nonetheless — that he would not be on our flight. My reasoning was simple: If I was an Arab terrorist, what disguise would be better than that of an orthodox Jew?

 

Three and a half weeks later, AKL and I got married. It was the happiest day of my life.

I had smiled so many fake smiles for pictures to that point that I literally never knew I had dimples. But this was a day of genuine and unadulterated joy and beauty, friendship and love and wonder. And the photographs bore it out.

When we took the microphone to say a few words and thank our guests for coming such a long way and under such circumstances, I said something to the effect that "We need to keep doing what we do; keep having fun. Because we are all the foot soldiers of this new war, and to not continue living our lives as we otherwise would is to allow the idiots the win."

 

A few months later, I painted for the first time since the attacks. It helped. It looked like this:

All those windows.

 

And now.

Ten years later, as most of us are, I am still so moved by the events of that single day and its aftermath. I am tired of the anniversary programs and editions and the "What did it all mean?" And yet I feel compelled to write about it. To scare it up again, explore my own feelings, and slowly piece together the memories.

I scored a C+ grade in the whole Kübler-Ross thing, skipping the first stage of grief entirely. I've tried denial for many things in my life, but in this instance, with the news anchors fumbling, as the first tower collapsed, the impact was immediate for me. I understood full well exactly what I was seeing.

And that I was watching thousands die. And that it was the single worst thing I have ever seen.

Thank god I have seen no worse since.

Long Night on Ocracoke

Despite my history of playing hockey — during which I have been in my share of scrums — I have never actually punched another human being in the face. Nor have I (sans helmet and cage) ever been punched in the face.

One night about 15 years ago on Ocracoke Island, I was fairly certain this fact would change.

I was on the island with my friend Spider to visit a few friends who were living there — with a few of their friends (respectable, year-rounders, at that) — for the summer. It was July 4th weekend, and as it turned out, our hosts (the friends of our friends) had invited a gaggle of their own college buddies. So it came to pass that 8 to 10 of us would be bunked down on the first floor of this house.

I was in my mid-20s, and pretty well done with college-level partying, and sleeping on floors. The other houseguests, not so much. So, around 11 PM, while they were out at the bars getting hammered, Spider and I retreated back to the house with our friends to hang out. Afterward, we each laid claim to a couch and tried to get some sleep before the horde returned, loud and successfully liquored.

Sleeping was fitful that night, and I tried in vain to snooze through the sounds from the dining room of a head-to-head drinking game in which one of the women was putting a serious hurt on a loutish guy named Todd, while they each drank a shot of beer every minute for a full hour. As one might suspect, it was noisy, there was much trash talking, and Todd was slurringly drunk.

Eventually, things settled down, and I fell back to sleep.

A few hours later, in the still-dark morning and among the snoring masses, I awoke to hear from the other room a woman's urgent, pleading voice: "Todd, stop. Please... Todd."

Todd said nothing, but was clearly belligerent and insistent. And the woman's pleas continued, more strained: "Todd, you have to stop. Todd. Stop." Adrenaline surged, and I swung my legs off the couch to help. Spider, too, had woken up and was piecing together an ugly picture.

In addition to having never punched someone in the face, I have thankfully never seen, experienced, or been touched by rape of any kind. But what was going through my head — as I stood up and started into the other room — was that if this drunken idiot was in any way mistreating the woman (and it sure as hell sounded like he was), he was going to be the first guy I punched in the face. And very hard.

Let me be clear. I'm 5'6" when I'm not slouching, and if I boxed, I'd do so as a lightweight. I can be hot-headed, but I'm not an idiot, and I understand my limits. This guy Todd had a few inches and 30 pounds on me, but he was drunk, and I was going to beat his ass. Badly.

As I strode purposefully toward the other room, the woman shed more light on what was happening. "Todd," she said. "STOP." And then: "You're peeing in the refrigerator."

And at that, I turned around — the hero in me, admittedly, somewhat disappointed — walked back, and sat down on my couch. I looked over at Spider and said, "Fuck it, they're on their own." Then, I laid back down and closed my eyes.

::::::::::::::::::

When I woke for good later that morning, the hungover horde slept on. Spider and I went out for some breakfast, then packed our gear, and said goodbye to our friends upstairs. Then, we gingerly peeked inside the fridge. Todd had taken a substantial leak in the vegetable crisper.

We laughed, and shook our heads in pity and disbelief. And we left, more than a bit saddened by the fact that I had still never punched another person in the face.

For a moment there, I'd had the perfect candidate.

On Arizona

Sarah Palin posted this image back in March — during the same week in which she tweeted "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!' Pls see my Facebook page."

Let me be clear: I'm as much for the second amendment as I am for all the rest. But let's not leave any of it out:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

If we have no use for the first half of that sentence, it follows that we have no use for the second.

Waiting Room

This bit of real life has stuck with me for the past 15 years. I offer it up now, after the fact, to the gods of pain and love and friendship:

The walls of the waiting room at Brooklyn Hospital are pale aqua, the color of faded scrubs. I shift in the bad light and worry the piece of paper in my hand. I've been waiting an hour, and, for the moment, that's fine. What scares me is what comes after the waiting.

In my hand is a case number of a critical patient brought in last weekend without ID. His driver's license lay atop his open wallet, next to his glasses, on his desk back at his 5th floor walkup, from whose roof he quite purposefully jumped. Hospital records list him as "John Trauma 944."

His given name — which they did not know at the time — was Eric, and he was a friend.

I am here with Eric's ex-girlfriend A- to pick up his watch. His mother wants it back. It is an old Mickey Mouse watch she had bought for him twenty years ago when he was a boy. But now, I worry, it is shattered and sticky with the blood of her adult son. He died on New Year's Eve, and I imagine the blood of all that night's big-city traumas and picture myself sifting through the clothing of the dead, ripe with gore and mayhem. I see a room, full of stiff, stained clothing and personal items, a lost-and-found of everything that keeps me from applying to med school.

Across from me sits a lanky kid in handcuffs who seems much too comfortable in them, and the two cops watching him, far too comfortable with him. His hands are behind his back and he leans forward to stretch his back and rest his arms lower, until finally he slips his wrists under his butt and drapes them behind his knees. He rocks slowly back and forth, until it occurs to me that from this position he could easily lift his feet and step through the cuffs.

The apartment roof is about 90 feet high. Eric must have hit the ground so hard that the force of the impact blew off one of his shoes. They brought him into the hospital with one shoe on, a sad near-dead grown boy. A- found the other shoe days later, ten feet away from where he fell. Looking at the shoe, you could not see its former-owner's unhappiness, his struggle, his pain. It just looked like a shoe. We hung onto it for a few days, until it seemed silly to hold onto a single shoe. And then, without ceremony, we threw it out in a mesh trashcan on the street outside the book store. And that too seemed silly. Absurdity in death as in life.

I am between semesters, teaching, and volunteered to stay several days with A- because she is a close friend and I love her, and because she needs someone, and because now is not really the time for her new boyfriend K- to be that person. And so, the watch.

When finally they call my name it is without fanfare, and A- is outside, walking around the block. There is no rag and bone shop of clothing to sift through, nor bags of labeled possessions. I am called into an administrative office and handed the watch with a perfunctory "I'm sorry." That's all.

The watch is clean and undamaged, though stopped, which seems fitting. I am relieved, yet at the same time perversely disappointed that it's all so simple. Where is the pain, the illumination, the release in that?

I step gingerly from the office, slowly regain my stride, and walk down the hall to daylight, passing by the bored, handcuffed teen, mulling the passing of time, the lives and souls of strangers, the meaning of friendship, and what to say to a mother whose son has ended his own life.

Tournament of Human Vices - 2010 Bracket

Some very difficult first-round matchups this year.

Click the thumbnail for a full-size, printable bracket. Have at it, people!

Running

Call it a mid-life crisis, but recently I decided to take up running seriously for the first time in my life. I've run before, on and off, but never more than once or twice a week. Still, I like it when I do it, and I've toyed with the idea of someday actually training for something.

I live in Boston, so there is always, of course, a big hairy elephant in the room. But there is really no single thing I can think of that I would want to do for what, realistically, would be no less than four hours. And so, I've always thought more toward a nice half-marathon.

Well, two months ago, a friend called my bluff and gave me a choice of three local races in October. Fear of actually doing one of them has kept me running consistently ever since.

I've built up to three to four days a week of increasing speed and distance. I was reasonably in shape to begin with — that is to say for a semi-athletic-yet-out-of-shape guy who, previously, had only been playing hockey once a week and running once every other week. OK, so now I'm actually in shape again. But 13.1 miles is nothing to sneeze at.

I've never really run more than 10k (6.2 miles) at a time. Also, even at 40, I'm not real patient. I'm not really willing to run a painfully slow pace that I can keep up all day. I tend to be more a charge-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory-and-see-how-long-I-can-maintain-it kind of guy.

Eight years ago, I ran a great 10k race. It was my first organized road race, with a decent-sized field. I went with my wife and mother-in-law, who were also running. But we got separated prior to the start, and what I didn't quite realize, as I jockeyed my way toward the front before the gun, was that — and this will be absurdly obvious to anyone who runs seriously — they stage folks beforehand according to their projected pace. Needless to say, I was about 30 feet behind the Kenyans with no hope in hell of running a mile pace even remotely within two to three minutes of theirs. Also needless to say, I started out blazingly fast, mostly in a desperate effort to not be trampled by the stampeding horde.

I ran my first mile in something crazy fast (for me) — 7:10, if I remember right — before settling into a more sustainable rhythm. But I was already doing the math in my head, and I knew I had a real chance of pretty much shattering the goal I had set for myself. And I did, winding up averaging 8:30 miles and finishing in 52:45.

It was a bit of a fluke, but a cool discovery in finding the edges of my limits, based on a beginner's mistake at the start, and race-day adrenaline.

But more than twice that distance? It's something that gives me pause. My goal would be to finish a half marathon, but it would also be to do so in two hours (a ~9:00/mile pace).

My lungs are in good shape; I've never smoked, and not much within reason gets my breathing too hard. But my legs are another story. I'm in hockey shape (I'd much rather skate the 13.1 miles), but I'm learning that running consistently is really demanding on the backs of your legs — the calves and hamstrings, and that if I don't in turn actually stretch my hamstrings after running, I'll feel it (the old hockey injury, that is) in my back.

Most normal people would go about this sudden-onset running thing by getting a physical, diligently researching training methods, and setting a schedule. I began, of course, by taking a hard look at my iPod, and deciding that I would need to spend some time scientifically crafting several training playlists. I chose songs with unchanging tempo and a steady backbeat that I could use as a kind of cadence. Next, I divided up those songs among playlists, based on the pace I wanted to run: slower 10-minute miles, 9-minute miles, and faster sub-9s. THEN, I researched training schedules.

Of course — truth be told, and despite the fact that my greatest distance running fears are of chafing and of shitting myself — I have spent far more time on the iPod playlists than I have reading up on the latest advice for novice runners.

But, hell, the title of this post is "Running," not "Training." Maybe that's me fooling myself; maybe I really haven't made up my mind yet about racing. As a mid-life crisis activity though, running is way cheaper, and so far, despite the chafing (I never really thought of male nipples much until a sweat-soaked shirt rubbed one of mine raw) has caused me less pain than any mid-life crisis hobby most guys would pursue.

And if it turns out to be a lifestyle choice based on a fear bigger than that of running a long race — that of growing old too quickly (OK, let's call a spade a spade: death) — then maybe that fear will keep me running for even longer than it would if I were training for the experience of a singular distance race.

In either case, wish me luck.

Truth and Courage

Back in elementary school, my friends and I all thought it tremendous fun to pick the winter sidewalks clear of ice for about a half a block, leaving the rest icy so we could dig out our old-school fixed-gear bikes and strap on our hockey helmets, then ride full bore down the clean sidewalks straight onto the end patches of blue ice — at which point we would jump on our brakes, recklessly sending our bodies wherever the bike happened to slide. And stopping wherever, and in whatever manner, they happened to stop.

Even then, I think we realized how slightly crazy and very stupid we were. Yet we were not the least bit frightened. Flecks of blood frozen into the ice only served to remind us how alive we were.

Blood was just part of the culture of youth. My younger brother once threw an instamatic camera at me, cutting open my forehead and ruining my white turtleneck. I took the blood-spattered shirt to school the next day for Show-and-Tell.

Back then, as ever, fear had more to do with the unknown than the known. Cemeteries were scary, haunted houses were not. Being stranded alone in the woods at night was scary, being stranded alone in the woods in the day was not. Losing teeth playing hockey was not scary, older girls were.

But then.

One summer during high school I traveled through the Rockies with my family. The day after we touched down in Denver, I went off hiking by myself near a family friend's place in Summit County. I climbed a mountain and came upon a series of waterfalls. I was able to maneuver behind one and take pictures out through the curtain of water. It was a beautiful place and a spiritual moment. And then in the time it took to blink, I took one bad step.

I fell and I slid. I turned on my side, dug hard into the wet rock, and still I slid, quickly approaching the next waterfall. The edge fell away sharply to more rock, and water. The fall was substantial and would take more than a second. I could feel the thud and crumple of such a landing. Time slowed down. I grabbed backward and looked forward, and my life did not flash before my eyes; rather, in that moment before certain crushing pain and possible death, I saw with supreme clarity the most probable outcome of the fall.

It was grim and filled with pain, traction, long hospital stays, and a wheelchair with a blow tube. It scared my 16-year-old brain possibly even more than death.

Instinctively, I dug sharply and continued to, until I found a hold the depth of a tack.

My legs dangled over the edge of the drop, and to this day I believe that God entered my fingertips for some fifteen seconds, until I had held and pulled myself to safety.

An hour or two later and altitudes lower, and when the blood was washed away, I sat and studied my fingertips. They were raw to the bone and the nails were completely gone. I cried for the first time in years, and for a full hour.

 

::::::::

 

I told this waterfall story in a college acting class during a "private moment" exercise designed to let us bear our souls — or, in a word, cry in front of our peers.

I learned that year that acting boils down to two things: truth and courage.

To be nakedly truthful; that is, to allow an audience to see the parts of your soul and yourself about which you are not proud. About which you are uncomfortable. When necessary, to give yourself over completely and allow yourself to dangle precipitously.

I got worked up, but I was not able to touch the memory closely enough, nor open up enough, to cry in that acting class. I was not that good of an actor. But the memory haunts me even now. And I write about it — as I have periodically — as a form of therapy, as a form of further discerning what happened and how it affects me still. I write as a form of truth-telling.

That day in Colorado, as I washed away the blood, and as I poured hydrogen peroxide over the left side of my body, I cried not because of the pain — which I understood — but because I knew for certain that no matter how I explained the incident to those I love, there would be no way they could understand precisely what I had gone through. They had not been there, and I did not have the capacity to make sense of what had happened nor allow myself to share it properly. And so no one could know exactly how close I had come.

Despite the solitary nature of this event, I also believe that had anyone been there, their screams would have broken my concentration for the slightest blink, and god would not have entered my fingertips, and I would have missed my hold and gone over the edge.

It mattered then, because high school was a difficult time for me, and I had felt a need for recklessness and rebellion as a way of dealing with teen angst and depression. And my near fall began a change in my thinking. It introduced reality and powerlessness into the life equation in a way far different from the fantastic teen glorification of suicide and the like. It made me realize too that there was much to the world that was much greater than I.

It matters now because I feel the need as a husband and a father to remember with unflagging precision how desperately I wanted to live at that moment — and how much more I still want to live.

Being Sick

I. For the second time in my life, I have handed over to a lab samples of my blood, urine, and yes, stool.

I returned home last weekend from far away, and it would seem that I did so with something in my small intestine. Not large intestine, mind you — not Maria, Full of Grace — but rather, something evil of a viral, bacterial, or parasitic origin. You don't need the details, but the upshot has not been anything approaching fun.

II. When we're sick, we tend to pine for chicken soup, and the creature comforts of our youth (The Rockford Files, cereal for dinner, say), when a day of missed classes was an adventure and the house ours for the taking. We allow self-indulgence, wallow a bit, try to catch up on sleep.

And then maybe we become worse off. A bad flu, say. We forego basic hygiene, don't check email, and begin to develop a vague sense of wanting our mom, though you know there's no adult equivalent of the comfort mom could provide when you were sick as a child, and you believed her when she said everything would be OK — because then it soon was.

But being really sick (malaria, Dengue fever, etc.) scares the crap out of you. It makes you feel helpless, and transports your emotional core back to past experiences of utter misery, childhood high-fever nightmares, and physical pain. For me, it means June 1990, and my summer of salmonella.

III. Any time food poisoning or local toddler-spread norovirus sets in for more than a day or two, I'm holed up again, alone in a dingy one-star hotel in the garment district of Paris. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches (days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like salmonella and far more like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. In many ways, it was the most frightening and defining period of my life.

IV. And so I sit in the hopefully brief misery of now, keeping my distance from the kids, while eating their applesauce and toast — my sick somewhere between worse off and salmonella — and starting to finally write a 20-year-old story, while in a petri dish of a Quest Diagnostics lab somewhere, my shit begins to tell this one.