A Lesson
It was the summer that I had started
to redirect my efforts in life towards
the pursuit of the female gender. I was
with Mazeo and Cookie, down at the
trestle discussing girls out of our league
when Ace comes tearing up in a cloud
of dust and oil smoke on some kind of
road warrior Suzuki. It's mid July and
he's wearing a leather jacket and that
disastrous smile of his. Sure, we'd seen
many characters down at that trestle,
but Ace was the closest thing to the reaper
that any of us had ever seen.
Ace loved to talk about "his women".
Like Patty who liked it when he bit
her nipples or that one that once stuck
her finger in his ass. Most of those
stories
I have forgotten but, I think I will always
remember the day he told us the right way
to finger fuck, as we huddled around him
in awe.
The way he explained that it is not enough
to simply punch and pull in and out
with your finger, that you had to use
the tip of your finger to rub up in there.
Tickle is how I think he said it.
That, he said, gets them moving
around, ooooing and ahhhhing.
Then he took a drag of one of our cigarettes,
gave us one of those evil winks, and nodded
his head like he had it all figured out.
Things change, mostly in appearance
Suzy was just a speck of a girl,
clearly in the single digit percentile
for both height and weight.
She walked around the
Sanborn Middle School
in that little half cooked
body of hers stinking of warm
urine so bad it would knock off
your equilibrium.
She'd sit there, eyes like a rainy Monday,
swamped in a puddle of her own piss,
and take it all with some kind of unmeant
dignity.
Why do you piss your pants, Suzy, why?
someone would holler or
Suzy's mom belongs in a cage or
BUG! BUG! BUG!,
which is what her brother used to say
over and over as he crushed ants in their
driveway.
It never stopped, I mean, the girl lived in
the crosshairs.
And sure, I would like to pose noble and
say
I was the one that took a stance and held
the
hounds at bay, that if Suzy isn't dead or
institutionalized now it's cause of me. But,
that's
not really how it worked.
Anyway, one day Ms. McKinley tells the class
that
Suzy is gone. The degenerate pack of misfits,
that she called her family, was moving to
South Dakota or Nebraska or somewhere.
The shabby turquoise ranch with
black shudders and bedding sheet curtains
behind the Crysler dealership was empty
and someone would have to take Suzy's place.
The Visit
She's balled up in the fetal position
in the middle of my kitchen floor
sharing with me the car crash that
is her life. They keep giving her
The wrong meds, which is how we
get to a Monday afternoon of issue
that was intended to be a cup of coffee.
They say that she's manic. Me, I think
it might have something to do with
her sharing the better part of her adult
life with an insatiable appetite for vodka
and a husband having a fancy for beating
her with a garden hose. It's a pretty
subjective matter, which has nothing to do
with my staring down at her, unable to decide
if I should crouch down, caress her
shoulder and tell her everything will
work out or try to hoist her up
Into the chair so that she can, at least,
drink the coffee that I have made.
BUYING AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH, BROOKLYN
IN 1994
The 15 yr. old mouthy punks
stand on the corner,
smoking blunts,
gawking at pretty little
trash mouthed girls.
The guy at the car service says
he's a professional wrestler,
does this on the side.
Overstuffed rats scurry
through the labyrinth of
chest high garbage piles.
And there's the aftertaste
of the bus fumes and sirens,
garbage trucks and
the dense air of uneasiness.
And I think that there are
some serious problems here
and everywhere else for that matter.
But, right now I just want
an ice cream sandwich
Back to Index
Back to Poetry